#not necessarily an invention of the author- but also that it's not a failing for the author to tap into the greater literary tradition;

[tonyglowheart]

See, I'm not necessarily saying that CN doesn't have options for more ways to say things- there are definitely more ways to say a certain thing, and you can also tap into different registers of language to impart different vibes to the text depending on level of formality or like use of classic language. It's more that Chinese seems to have a much larger pool and variety of idioms and "stock phrases" outside of just historical or poetic allusions, which are also not necessarily the classic set of chengyu (like the ones that come with stories) either. English has some, of course, but CN just feels like it has more of them that people can - and do - tap into.

reading more cnovels has me realizing just how... referential? referential- a language Chinese is. Like, you read one novel and you're like, oh cool turn of phrase. But then you read the next novel and there it is again lmao. And another. and another. And then you're like, oh, no, the language is just like that, ig, and it's not restricted only to chengyu in the strictest sense, those are just the more "obvious" examples of that

[kachuusha]

the intimacy and complexity of "devote your heart" in 132

the devote your heart in 132 is usually taken purely at face value but I don't think it was meant to be just a literal sacrifice your life in the same manner as give up your dreams and die was? I understand it is easy to draw parallels with that scene but I think the circumstances leading up to hanji's departure weren't exactly like erwin's hence I believe the essence devote your heart and give up your dreams and die aren't exactly alike.

a detail that is often overlooked in ch132 was that levi wasn't exactly giving hanji an order the same way he did for erwin in ch80.

give up your dreams and die was as direct as it can get. this happened because erwin expressed his desire on fulfilling his lifelong dream to see the basement but at the same time he didn't want to fail their comrades who sacrificed their life. to relieve erwin of his conflict, levi took it upon himself to make the decision for him. levi made the choice and he gave the order.

but can we say the same thing with hanji in ch 132? when levi called out to hanji as they made their way towards the rumbling, they never let levi say a word but rather asserted their decision. yes I do believe levi wanted to stop them, you can see it in the way he strongly reacted to hanji talking about their comrades watching them (we all know what followed the last time this happened)

basically,"let me go will you" was hanji begging levi to not get in their way because they've made up their mind. they've declared to convinction to the 104th already and even named armin as the new commander. levi isn't giving the order this time around because hanji had already decided.

and this is the very first instance levi says "devote your heart". to offer up your heart would literally mean sacrifice your life but was it supposed to be taken in its most literal sense? because if so, why couldn't levi have said it to erwin as well when he ordered him to sacrifice his life? why did levi go out of his way to modify the salute form in hanji's case?

there wasn't an outright explanation from the author why levi had not once uttered this phrase but if you think about it, it kind of makes sense why he wouldn't. he isn't exactly the most expressive with words. rather than talking he'd show it in his actions. the apprehension may have also come from the fact that it felt like something the military would indoctrinate in its recruits. it is painting a glorious cause to give up your life to fight for the greater good but does everyone in the military live up to this principle? levi knows exactly how corrupt some of the higher-ups are. there hasn't been a motivator that encouraged levi to say it until ch132 where hanji zoe was the trigger.

you understand.

going back to the forest in ch115, hanji expresses their thoughts to a presumably sleeping levi. how it feels like it was finally their turn as sannes had put it once and also them expressing their desire to just stay in that forest together with levi. levi later on alludes to hanji's confession and said "I know you, you cannot stay out of the action"

it was like hanji was trying to remind levi of that moment. don't try to stop me now, you know me too well.

devote your heart was the most fitting response levi could give, but not in a sense that he was simply telling hanji to die for the cause. rather than an order, it was more along the lines of levi saying "devote our hearts right? that's how we've been living our lives, to live up to this cause" because for hanji, the words devote your heart was a way of life. their research, inventions, and motivations, it was all for the sake of a better future. all this time, they've been devoting their life for humanity. this is what I meant on the phrase not necessarily having to be taken too literally. rather than levi simply telling hanji to die as others love to put it, I believe it was the moment where it made sense to levi that hanji was the truest embodiment of it. the very same person who welcomed him and his found family into the scouts with a genuine heart.

just to add, during acwnr there was a scene right after meeting hanji where isabel remarked that she doesn't understand all this talk about dedicating their hearts and levi just mulls over the question. I don't know but maybe levi already felt some sort of connection or that hanji's passion had sparked something within him.

about levi changing the form, it wasn't a standard salute where levi strikes his fist over his own chest. they essentially did the salute together, I reiterate once more because it wasn't primarily an order for hanji to die. it was levi trying to convey that he gets them and that their hearts resonate and beat over the same thing.

and this is where the love vs. duty aspect of levihan enters the discussion. romance and levihan seems to have become a complicated topic among the fandom over the recent years, but I think there are enough evidence to back up the romantic nature/implications of their bond.

it doesn't take a genius to realize how "let's live together" is synonymous to a marriage proposal in many cultures and various works of literature. plus the fact that hanji said it right after levi almost died in their arms just puts things into perspective. and it's not like we can easily dismiss it as a heat of the moment thing because hanji affirmed they seriously considered it in ch27:

the way it was worded too? them thinking of throwing it all away and we all know except who.

what's even more interesting about this is the emphasis on jean's surprised expression and how the chapter began with jean's dream sequence of retiring for the corps and having a family of his own.

now onto one of the most popular arguments against levihan: levi rejected hanji

but did he really? I don't think it went that way. levi knew hanji all too well. he knew that abandoning and forsaking their principles for especially for the sake of personal desires would drive them into guilt for the rest of their life. also the first thing levi says when he fully became conscious was that hanji is already fixing a cart so they could pull him. if I was in levi's position, that's a clear indication to realize that hanji has decided not to stay in the forest anymore.

personally I think if there is anyone who might've felt rejected, it would be levi. he fixated on hanji's proposal but upon gaining full consciousness he finds out hanji had already essentially chosen duty over love. so to me his remarks actually felt more like him coming into terms regarding hanji's choice? I can't say the same for the order of events in the anime but in the manga, it seems like levi had fully drifted into sleep right after ifkk and there was a gap until eren summoned them into the paths. so in theory, hanji had time to process their thoughts further while levi was left fixated on hanji's confession.

now onto the other hint of romance was levi's implied confession in the form of unrquited love for titans. I'm not qualified to expound on this topic as I do not speak japanese so I will just put a link to the explanation. but the gist of it was that there was a nuance on how it was worded in the original japanese text that implies "your love for titans is unrequited but not with me"

my theory is that levi is still somewhat stuck in that moment in the forest and is probably alluding to hanji's confession by responding with his own. but why is it so late you ask? reminder that this was the only scene after the forest where they got a chance to be alone. but hanji's answer to him felt like they were trying to remind levi they've left the forest and that they're soldiers with duties and responsibilities to their comrades.

and finally, it leads us to the culminating moment. devote you heart. yes I've discussed this previously but I haven't gone in detail about the romantic aspect I'm pertaining to yet.

I theorize that hanji made a choice between love and duty back in the forest. so when levi seemingly attempts to stop hanji, they reminded him again of the path they've set on back in the forest. they cannot run away and levi knows this. he has echoed hanji thoughts that day. (the I know you line)

levi was powerless in this situation, there's nothing else he could do but accept hanji's terms. as heartbreaking as it is, he does understand. just as how his first meeting with hanji sparks something bright in him, their departure seemingly had taken away the life in his eye. it was now devoid of light.

it's devote your heart because it was the embodiment of hanji's way of life, how hanji had put duty and the sake of humanity first over their own personal wishes (hence I also see it as a choice between love and duty).

something that also catches your attention would be how the modified salute appears to have created an imagery of levi giving his heart to hanji. personally, I think his left fist representing his own heart touches hanji's. I view it levi devoting his heart to hanji figuratively. perhaps to insinuate that their hearts are one in duty and love or him imparting his heart to them. that he does understand what they must sacrifice for their devoting their hearts for the sake of mankind's safety and their comrades who had given their lives.

the moment levi strikes their fist upon hanji's chest to salute, hanji seemed surprised. it felt like it was an oh moment for them and I believe it was because hanji knew what levi was trying to convey.

they had to give up love, as first and foremost, they are two soldiers bound to their oath because of their own morality and principles.

so that's it, that's my take on the devote your heart in 132. there are still several things I haven't expounded on as much as I like such as the romantic aspect of levihan as seen in 115/126/132/139 and the plane but there is always a next time.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 9 - Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson

Okay, after roughly a decade of nagging and peer pressure from a friend who adores the series (and has the terrible curse of often recommending stuff I end up loving in the least appealing-to-me ways possible), I finally broke and agreed to read some Malazan. But a ten-book series of thousand page tomes was still too much, so, the prequels trilogy! Or the first volume of it, anyway.

So, this was a, as they say, real fantasy chonker. Nine hundred pages, like literally over a dozen POVs, unexplained but extremely detailed magic systems and worldbuilding and so. Many. Proper. Nouns. Being a prequel, it’s also literally set before humans existed, as far as I can tell – the main caste is all what were described to me as the setting’s elves (well, the overwhelmingly majority of them, anyway). Also, 900 pages long. Which is just too long for a single book, I think.

Anyways, given all that, surprisingly readable? Not necessarily objectively – it was absolutely a slog at times – but compared to what you might expect from a story that expects you to pick up the meaning and significance of every bit of jargon by use and context and will loop back to any given POV every hundred pages or so, if you’re lucky. You could fit the number of names I remember on one hand, but the book does a good job of giving you enough context and providing enough little reminders that I could remember who any given POV/what any given plot thread was within a paragraph or two of being dumped back into it, anyway. (Except Ursander’s captains. Like, I know they got characterizations but relying on social rank and narrative role to tell people apart really failed on the five different ones running around doing genocide or atrocity to start a civil war).

Plot wise it’s an awkward but interesting halfway point between brutal gritty realpolitik and mythic epic fantasy? Like, the better part of the plot in concerned with aristocratic decadence and Machiavellian scheming and a seemingly inevitable slide toward civil war and all that, but also the only reason any of that could happen is because the guy who could probably fight every army involved singlehandedly was out of town that month trying to do some father-son bonding/accidentally sponsoring a demigod who invented blood magic and human sacrifice to complete his commission of a present for his girlfriend. Or the careful diplomacy around noble hostage-taking being almost derailed because there are three kids who are just actually immortal demons and decided to kill everyone in the castle and go on a trip. The two tones interact in interesting ways at points, and lead to some real tonal dissonance at others.

There is some thematic purpose to that, I think – there’s absolutely a recurring motif of people with power and influence refusing to use it, and ostensible subordinates acting in their name running around and making everything worse in ways they did not understand or approve of while they sat around. From one lens the whole book is one long warning about the horror of delegated authority. Or even broader than that – the distance between someone’s reputation or how they’re regarded, what they think their reputation is, and who they actually are comes up a lot. So much angst and miscommunication.

Beyond that, the best way to describe the plot is ‘three different standard epic fantasy pseudo-chosen one plots happening independently and possibly mutually exclusively, and also a bunch of different views of a pretty fucked society sliding into complete bloody anarchy and religious genocide.’

Character-wise – well, the downside of having so many POVs is that even when there is enough wordcount to actually give several of them real depth and development, it’s incredibly easy to miss it. So it’s utterly possible that there was tons of subtle and nuanced character work I totally failed to notice, but as far as my actual reading experience went most of the arcs were fairly broad and obvious, and focused on the really larger than life operatic characters. (Though as far as somewhat generic fantasy stories go, Korya and Haut are the best and I won’t be accepting disagreement on this.)

Like I’m fairly sure every big fantasy chonker in existence, the book’s ever so slightly Weird about sex. Also one rather extreme (and plot-critical) bit of on-screen sexual violence, though that’s thankfully not the bit the book’s weird about.

The setting was interesting, though buried under so much jargon and proper nouns that it took a fair bit of page count before you begin to understand absolutely any of it. Still, the sea of chaos and the savanna of razor-sharp grass were both really vividly described, even if there’s no chance in hell that I could tell you what their names were.

I really did enjoy the book, on the whole, but it was also kind of an exhausting read? The whole book’s got the whole pseudo-archaic tone and vocabulary you expect from map fantasy, which did help sell it but also do make reading it a bit more of a slog.

Overall, I mean, does ‘extra-worldbuilding heavy prequel set in the lost mythic age of an already famously and world-building heavy fantasy world’ appeal to you? Because if so this book absolutely lives up to expectations. But I’m not going to read anything over 500 pages for a solid bit now, I think.

[jurakan]

Can you elaborate more on the beginning of genesis? I always took it literally because I assumed it was a sin not to, and now I’m wondering what the other school of thought is. Thank you

As with any issue of the Bible, the answer is "There are a lot of answers that everyone disagrees on," but I'm going to try to explain my point of view as best as I can, and I appreciate that you came to my inbox in good faith to ask.

[I'm going to put a disclaimer/label here that I am Catholic and my answers reflect that mindset of theology; I don't know your denomination so I can't speak to what they say about it. Also I am not a theologist! So don't take this as Gospel.]

But basically... no, it's not a sin. If it is, it's certainly not mortal, as Saint Augustine of Hippo (who is a Doctor of the Church) argued against a literal interpretation of the Creation account in Genesis, if for the logical reason of "How does one measure days before God invented daylight?" Plenty of Church Fathers worked under the assumption that they were not six literal days of Creation, so it's not precisely a new point of view. (That's a link to Catholic Answers, which can be hit or miss sometimes, but I've taken a look at that article, which has actual quotes from Church Fathers so I'll go with it, and others I link to here.)

Let's start with this: the Bible is not a book.

[someone in the back raising a Bible in protest]

Okay, yes, the form you generally see it in is a physical book, but the Bible itself is not a book. It's a collection of books, all included in the canon because we believe they're divinely inspired (and the Church Fathers who worked out the canon had divine guidance to work that out). They don't all have the same format, author, or genre. That's kind of a 'duh', I get it--we don't read Psalms the way we read Kings or Matthew or Revelation. But it's important to remember when looking at Genesis.

The beginning Genesis is a Creation myth, passed through oral tradition until someone wrote it down.

[I don't say 'myth' to say something isn't true! C.S. Lewis referred to the Christ story as a myth!]

And this myth tells us quite a lot! Unlike the Enuma Elish, roughly a contemporary Creation story, I think, in Genesis the world wasn't founded by a group of gods, formed from the body of a defeated chaos monster. No, an uncontested King of the Universe declared that something should be, and it was. Right away we're told that God is all-powerful, without equal or context, and made everything out of nothing.

That's pretty incredible! Especially in comparison to many of the religions surrounding the Israelite people of the time!!

Were Adam and Eve real people? Uh... more complicated. Catholicism leans towards 'yes', though as pointed out in yet another Catholic Answers article, citing Pope Pius XII and the Catechism, we believe in Adam and Eve. But the article itself notes that while it should be taken with a lot of weight and not tossed aside lightly, Pius XII's statement is not taken as infallible.

In short, I think I mostly come down on the 'broad strokes' side of things. Re-reminder that I am not a theologist, but my thoughts come down like this: that somewhere in the deep past, we had predecessors that correspond to Adam and Eve (whether or not they were actually named that), who messed up and disobeyed God. Said disobedience was an explicit choice, made with the desire to be like God, after being tempted by the Devil (who himself was motivated by envy, as Wisdom 2:24 tells us). This caused the Fall, and Original Sin. It is because of humanity's own failings that we live in an imperfect world.

The message we should get from Genesis is not necessarily "Here is a literal accounting of events," but instead "Here is the gist of what happened, hitting the important points, told in a way that reveals deeper truths: God's role in the cosmos, how sin entered the world, our relationship with the Devil, and what is to come from it."

Again, Catholic Answers can go either way (one day I'll explain why I think that), but this article is mostly a good summary of the idea. Taking Genesis's first few chapters literally seems to me an unwise idea, especially considering.... well, everything we know in modern science about the history of life and the age of the planet Earth.

[geyfrog]

Also thing internet users online are doing that irritates me: many realise, correctly, that standards of politeness are kind of arbitrary, often result in people doing things nobody cares about or desires because "it's the polite way", and allow authority figures to essentially arbitrarily punish people, especially children, autistic people, and people from different cultures with different standards of politeness, for failing to meet these standards. They understand, correctly, that doing something "socially wrong" is not necessarily doing something "morally wrong". It doesn't directly harm anybody to put your elbows on the table, or to speak with the wrong tone by accident. It's not going to kill somebody. It just might make somebody feel offended, and make them not want to speak with you. They're not wrong to be offended. You're not wrong to offend them. You know how it goes!

However! These users also are members of a culture and have non-harmful but impolite things they're offended when somebody does. And because they've already rejected "failing to meet social standards is morally wrong", often their response to being offended in this way is to instead justify why these things are not just socially wrong per their own standards, but objectively morally wrong. They reject the idea when it is imposed on them, and must invent harms being done to justify enforcing it on other people. This is worse.

Some times it feels like users online determine morality by memorising a list of which things are Good and which are Bad and sorting them into appropriate categories. If you see a Bad thing, you are obligated to go to the user committing this act and say "actually, this thing is Bad", and sometimes recite a memorised explanation as to why it is Bad. This is unpleasant!

[castielcommunism]

if you took supernatural far too seriously I think it would be fun to track where Cas places Dean in his political (“religious”) beliefs. because Cas seems to rebel more than the average angel, and his reasons for doing so seem to be similar each time (he disagrees with Heaven’s projects on earth and generally questions their authority/legitimacy) BUT he fails at it a lot. this is largely due to the fact that angel rebellions seem to happen to individual angels, so Cas is alone when he does this, and also because of Naomi he’s not able to learn from his mistakes and is basically re-realising the flaws of Heaven for the first time each time he rebels. He’s not allowed to ever grow intellectually once that rebellion process is initiated.

but then Cas successfully rebels and massively disrupts the order of Heaven, and the difference this time around is Dean. It’s also the presence of the apocalypse, which is actually the primary reason Cas’s rebellion worked, but I think initially Cas attributes the difference to Dean because of the growing fondness he carries for him. And Cas seems to internalise a lot of Dean’s philosophies about life early on, so as Cas’s beliefs are allowed to mature on their own without interference from Naomi, those beliefs are necessarily wrapped up with Dean. and I like the idea of Cas not realising he’s in love with Dean for a while. He just thinks Dean is this super special important guy who was instrumental in Cas’s rebellion and therefore he carries a lot of affection for him. Once Cas realises he’s in love with Dean I think he can begin to untangle Dean as a central figure in his rebellion and realise like oh yeah lol I just love this guy he’s not like my new god or whatever.

Which I think also leads to a lot of the messy political stuff in s6. Cas is essentially trying to invent a new way of ordering the universe and rebuild Heaven from the ground up. He’s dealing with conducting a civil war, directing it towards an ideological endgoal that he still hasn’t figured out the details of because no angel has ever been allowed to think of any kind of order outside the status quo of Heaven before, AND the guy he rebelled for is a human man he’s secretly in love with but doesn’t realise it yet.

Anyway this post is rambly and unfocused but I have a hard time squaring the circle of like, Dean is obviously important in Cas’s decision to rebel but he’s not THE reason. And I think the best way to synthesise that is for Cas to initially misjudge how important Dean was in the rebellion process because he didn’t realise he just loves Dean and thinks his obsession with this guy has to do with the fact that he was a major catalyst for Cas’s rebellion. Dean isn’t so much an influence on Cas’s politics as he is a big reason why Cas has been able to build his own set of political beliefs in the first place. Like Cas would have still rebelled had Dean not been present, but I think it takes him a while to realise that

[aboutanancientenquiry]

The Egyptians and the dead: the wooden simulacres of the dead presented in the Egyptian banquets as described by Herodotus and the custom of keeping the mummies in the houses

 I reproduce here several paragraphs of the very interesting text of Pr. Barbara Borg “The Dead as a Guest at Table? Continuity and Change in the Egyptian Cult of the Dead”, in M. L. Bierbrier (ed.), Portraits and Masks. Burial customs in Roman Egypt. Colloquium London 13.-14.7.1995 (London 1997), p. 26-32

“In his epic poem Punica (13.475) Silius Italicus describes the visit of Scipio Africanus to the underworld. There Scipio meets the ghost of Appius Claudius, who was fatally wounded near Capua. Appius laments that he could not find peace because his friends had failed to cremate and bury his body. Scipio wishes to do him this favour but claims that he does not know according to which rites it should be done, so he lists a number of different practices: 'All over the world the practice is different in this matter , and unlikeness of opinion produces variou s ways of burying the dead and disposing of their ashes. In the land of Spain, we are told (it is an ancient custom) the bodies of the dead are devoured by loathly vultures. When a king dies in Hyrcania, it is the rule to let dogs have access to the corpse. The Egyptians enclose their dead, standing in an upright position, in a coffin of stone, and worship it; and they admit a bloodless spectre to their banquets.' 1 The text goes on like this but we will stop here because our interest today is directed at the Egyptian practice.

We find confirmation for this in Lucian' s De luctu (21): ' Up t o that point, the wailing , the same stupid custom prevails everywhere ; but in what follows , the burial, they have apportioned out among themselves , nation by nation, the different modes.The Greek burns, the Persian buries, the Indian encases in glass, the Scythian eats, the Egyptian salts. And the latter — I have seen whereof I speak — after drying the dead man makes him his guest at table!' 2

These reports by two authors of the first and second centuries AD strike a modern reader as being fairly strange. One would expect them to have instantaneously provoked scientific curiosity. Surprisingly, this is not the case, and these passages have aroused little or no interest. It is, however, not the place here to examine the reasons for this awkward silence within the academic community. 3

First of all, one should notice that there can be little doubt as to the veracity of these statements. Teles, Diodorus, Cicero and Sextus Empiricus confirm that the Egyptians kept the mummies of their relatives at home. 4 To be sure, some of the texts show great similarity and therefore may depend on each other or on still another common source. 5 But at least two authors knew Egypt personally. Diodorus visited Alexandria during the180th Olympiad (60—56 BC) — moreover , R. Merkelbach recently confirmed the general reliability of paragraphs I 91-9 3 by comparing Diodorus' description of the judgement-ceremonial with evidence from the papyri 6 - while Lucian spent  several years in Egypt, where he held a high position in the office of the prefect of Egypt. For the most intriguing part in the passage quoted above, the participation of mummies at banquets, he even stresses his testimony as an eyewitness.

In some of the texts the Egyptians and their strange habits clearly function as 'the other ' of Greeks or Romans. 7 Nevertheless, this does not necessarily indicate that the habits used in this way were simply invented for the purpose. In the case of Egypt, particularly, there existed enough bizarre practices to serve these needs, and this applies not only to mummification itself. Animal worship, for example, proved to be a major argument in the mostly unfavourable conceptions of Egypt, as propagated by non-Egyptian authors. However, it was also an actual and widespread practice in Graeco-Roman Egyptian popular religion. 8

We find further evidence in Christian texts which relate that even the Coptic Christians used to keep the preserved and adorned bodies of venerated persons, predominantly martyrs, above ground. According to Athanasius this custom drove St Anthony into the desert to await his death in solitude. 9 It was this custom again (and not mummification itself) that provoked the censure of bishops and other higher clergy — an idle censure, as it turned out, as is shown not least by the display and worship of relics up to the present day. It can hardly be imagined that the Copts 'invented' the habit themselves, but it is plausible to presume that they adopted it from their pagan predecessors. 10

Support for our hypothesis can be found in the mummies themselves: Flinders Petrie reports that several of the mummies he excavated at Hawara 'had been much injured by exposure during a long period before burial'. The 'mummies had often been knocked about, the stucco chipped off.' They were 'dirtied, fly-marked, caked with dust which was bound on by rain'.  In the footcases of the mummies 'the wrapping h ad been used by children, who scribbled caricatures upon it.' Petrie already connected his observations with the tradition that the dead were kept in the houses of their relatives and also assumed a domestic cult for them. 11

The passage in Herodotus which Petrie and others succeeding him drew upon cannot, however, serve as proof. Herodotus reports (2.78) that at banquets people in Egypt used to show around a well-made and nicely painted νεκρόν ξύλινον to remind the participants of the transitoriness of life and to encourage them to enjoy the advantages of the present.There are two main reasons why this cannot possibly have anything to do with the custom we are considering here. First of all, it appears highly unlikely that νεκρόν ξύλινον could ever be translated as mummy. The expression must refer to some sort of wooden figure of a dead person or even of death itself - one to two ells long, according to Herodotus. It may well be a wooden skeleton, as is indicated by banquet equipment with representations of skeletons.12 Secondly, the sense of the procedure described by Herodotus is contrary to the whole meaning connected with a mummy, especially one of a relative.13 The mummy was a symbol of and guarantor not for death but for life, even though for an other worldly one .”

“What, then, was the origin of that custom? Neither in Greek nor in Roman religion is there any indication of a domestic cult of the dead. Likewise, in pharaonic Egypt the dead were not kept in the house of the relatives but, after embalming, were accompanied in a ceremonial procession to the tomb, where they were buried and received sacrifices. Later on they were commemorated on various days. The family offered sacrifices at the tomb and apparently also invited guests to a solemn banquet that took place in special rooms of the temple. 31 

However, for some time now, an increasing number of references have indicated that there already existed in pharaonic times a cult for the deceased in the house of the relatives...”

“In conclusion, then, there are several clear indications of a domestic ancestral cult already in place in pharaonic Egypt, a cult that could be celebrated even in front of images of the deceased! 36 Such cults seem to have been the exception rather than the rule, and up to now there is no chronological series into the Greek and Roman periods. There may be two main reasons for this. First, excavations of living quarters that could provide further data are still rather scarce and, secondly, we face a problem of visibility — or lack of attention to less clearly visible material. Ancestral cult was mainly part of the popular religion, the beliefs among the middle and lower classes,37 whereas the material evidence that usually catches the attention of archaeologists and Egyptologists gives information only about the uppermost class and its ideology. One reason for the fact that most of the evidence for ancestral cult comes from Dei r el-Medina may be the very ability of the craftsmen living there to manifest their beliefs in a more 'visible' form. Thus, in spite of the lack of contemporary evidence , the later custom of keeping the mummies of the deceased in the house can only be derived from the Egyptian ancestral cult.”

“The significance of the step from venerating the dead in the presence of substitutes like stelae or busts, or from the depiction of banquets for the dead, to the factual, physical attendance of the deceased in the form of his mummy, cannot be overestimated, and it would be most interesting to know when it was made and under what circumstances. It was no later than the third century BC, as we know from Teles, but it may have been even earlier. Once the practice was introduced, the new form of the portrait mummy must have fulfilled the requirements of the cult as wel l as the demand for representation particularly well.’

[Conclusion] “Whatever the religious beliefs and social implications in connection with the display and veneration of portrait mummies may have been precisely, the fact that mummies were kept in the house for some time, and most probably received some sort of cult there, helps to explain the discrepancy between the character of the mummies — costly but weakened in their magic powers by their new worldly shape — and their careless, sometimes even rude burial without any grave markers. The Egyptian ancestral cult rarely goes back more than one or two generations , as is shown not least by the inscriptions on th e akh-iker stelae.47 This leads to the assumption that the portrait mummies were kept in the house for approximately the same time. After the immediate relatives had died themselves, and after interest in the more distant ancestors had faded, the mummies may have been handed over to the temple in charge. As is shown by the different contexts , the kind of burial they were given depended on many factors that can only be identified on the basis of new evidence and extensive research. 48 In the case of the careless burials mentioned above, a proper family tomb was obviously not available. Perhaps the relatives were not interested any more in an expensive burial and entrusted the mummies of their ancestors to the priests or servants of the temple who, away from the control of the family, cared as little for the burial as they often did before for the treatment of the bodies during embalming.49″

Source on the net with the communication in its entirety https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/407/1/Borg_The_Dead_as_a_Guest_at_Table_1997.pdf

Barbara Elisabeth Borg FSA (born 26 December 1960) is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Exeter.[1] She is known in particular for her work on Roman tombs, the language of classical art, and geoarchaeology. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Borg

Herodotus’ passage on the wooden simulacres of the dead used in Egyptian banquets is as follows (2.78, ancient Greek original and its translation by A. D. Godley):

Ἐν δὲ τῇσι συνουσίῃσι τοῖσι εὐδαίμοσι αὐτῶν, ἐπεὰν ἀπὸ δείπνου γένωνται, περιφέρει ἀνὴρ νεκρὸν ἐν σορῷ ξύλινον πεποιημένον, μεμιμημένον ἐς τὰ μάλιστα καὶ γραφῇ καὶ ἔργῳ, μέγαθος ὅσον τε πηχυαῖον​ ἢ δίπηχυν, δεικνὺς δὲ ἑκάστῳ τῶν συμποτέων λέγει " Ἐς τοῦτον ὀρέων πῖνέ τε καὶ τέρπευ· ἔσεαι γὰρ ἀποθανὼν τοιοῦτος." ταῦτα μὲν παρὰ τὰ συμπόσια ποιεῦσι.

After rich men's repasts, a man carries around an image in a coffin, painted and carved in exact imitation of a corpse two or four feet long. This he shows to each of the company, saying “While you drink and enjoy, look on this; for to this state you must come when you die.” Such is the custom at their symposia.

I think that Pr. Borg is totally right that Herodotus writes that wooden simulacres of the dead were presented in the Egyptian banquets of his era, not the mummies themselves. On the other hand, perhaps Herodotus’ text shows that the tradition of painting veristic individualized portraits of the dead has also Egyptian roots and it was not just an imitation of a Roman custom, as it seems that Pr. Borg claims elsewhere in her text. I say this because the simulacres described by Herodotus may be understood as representations of a corpse in general, but nothing excludes that they were imitations of relatives of the persons who offered the banquets. Moreover, perhaps the presentation of wooden simulacres of the dead in the banquets of upper class Egyptians of the fifth century BCE should be seen as a step toward the generalization of the domestic ancestral cult, which was for a long time, as Pr. Borg says, part of the popular religion of the lower and middle classes of the Egyptian population, with eventual form of this domestic ancestral cult, again as Pr. Borg says, the keeping of the mummies in the Egyptian houses.

[onewomancitadel]

Just wanted to say that you rule. I found out about you recently and have really been enjoying going through your stories. The memes and analyses on this page have been great too. Didn't ship Knightfall before (and frankly considered it a crackship for the longest time as is my smooth brained nature), but the romance and redemption going hand in hand does actually just Make Sense. Hope you had a good day, and failing that, a peaceful one.

Aw this was wonderful to open my inbox to see, thank you so much! <3

Thank you for this lovely ask, it's very kind of you to say so. I love finding a new fic author who scratches the itch and has a whole archive to read lol, my wish is to be that for other people. I'm interested if people find my fic interesting as well as my writings on Tumblr, because I'm sure it must seem like I'm neglecting my writing if I'm posting on Tumblr. XD

What are you reading now if you don't mind me asking?

Didn't ship Knightfall before (and frankly considered it a crackship for the longest time as is my smooth brained nature)

Oh yeah, we have had the crackship vs. rarepair debate before (and somewhere back September last year I responded to an ask by redhoodhungergames about Knightfall as a rarepair but I can't find it), and the linguistic evolution of conflating rarepair with crackship meanwhile crackships nevertheless take on fandom precedence due to panfandom baggage (e.g. searching to insert the same archetypes irrespective of canon context and pairing them together even if wholesale inventing most of the characterisation).

I think it's necessary to distinguish crackship from rarepair (and identify where crackships become popular, which gives them a guise of canonical legitimacy... lol) because I think both terms are descriptive and useful, and they really change the way you perceive a ship and a fandom and the way you treat other fans. As I mentioned in that ask I can't find to redhoodhungergames, Knightfall is actually very archetypically straightforward, it's just a bit opaque because the traditional enemies-to-lovers dynamic a lot of feminine fandom is into (which often involves a redemption arc, not an ambiguously villainous love interest in the sense of say, a femme fatale) doesn't map itself onto a female villainess and a male hero.

What I think is particularly interesting is that Knightfall in canon and conceived-of canon hits a lot of Romance-romance story beats, with the romance carrying narrative stakes. Whatever one might say about R/WBY romances, they are clearly pulling their thematic weight, which is the stuff I like. Romance needs the same sort of consideration as any other relationship or character development and that's why tying it to the plot and tying it to something as on-paper directly about character transformation as a redemption arc is incredibly organic. From a technical viewpoint it's actually clever but straightforward.

Where I think some of miscommunication might come from, say, the masculine end of the fandom - and I am generalising here, so please forgive me, and I am going off what I've gleaned over the years from The Subreddit (I shan't speak the name) and anons I get, as well as, er, narrative analysis at large from male fans - is that Romance-romance is not the same as a female love interest as boon for the male character. Now, say what you will about that, but I won't make any value judgements; rather, I would want to make a distinction between that (only boon for the hero in whatever fashion) and Romance-romance - romance tied to narrative stakes, character and plot, theme - which carries greater structural demands and greater emotional demands. There is also the Romance genre of literature, which itself does have its own conventions but not necessarily the selfsame ones we're looking at here (though they do crossover) where romance is beholden to something greater in the narrative as opposed to its own ends.

I do want to establish that I am not wholly opposed to the idea of narrative boon and sometimes there is a bit of baby-and-bathwater moment with these kinds of things; the problem (to me) often comes from the female love interest being little more than a cardboard cutout, which is also a problem of just bad storytelling lol. I think that Romance-romance still does serve that purpose of narrative boon, it's just two-way, and especially for R/WBY where Jaune and Cinder are both perspective characters.

The common refrain I have encountered is that 'It's too complicated,' or, 'The R/WBY writers aren't that smart,' or that whatever else I'm identifying is a waste of time. Of course, it's not too complicated: it's actually incredibly straightforward, and is actually a great way to realise character, plot, and theme, and also tie character arcs together in a sensible way. What I bemoan is the idea that basic narrative tools are complicated. The next is that I think they have sufficiently demonstrated to have ideas and that is interesting to me. I also think that the show uses basic tools of storytelling in a successful way. I also think that some of the criticism I've seen is not necessarily criticism I actually agree with because to come to some of those conclusions you need to ignore basic narrative tools and invent your own canon. So it goes.

But if I'm told that a love story is at the centre of the show and is a major reveal for how the heroes need to handle the threat in the story, I am going to be looking for love stories. Lol. That's why I talk a lot about ships I don't even ship and try to identify them (and also to demonstrate that this type of thing doesn't involve ship goggles, or at least, it doesn't have to, and in fact my enthusiasm for Knightfall comes from what I perceive to be true). Also because I think figuring out what they're doing is interesting. Also also because I've seen so many Ruby/Oscar shippers get a bad rap for shipping the most... non-controversial ship ever. Come on. There's not even any murder.

but the romance and redemption going hand in hand does actually just Make Sense.

I just typed all of that out before I reread the rest of your sentence. Anyway. Nodding and agreeing with each other. You get it lol

I think it also makes sense because we've had so many pairs of two for redemption arcs (including one... kind of romantic on Ilia's side, and for the conceivable Emerald/Mercury... WELL) and so I would want to know what major relationship Emerald/Mercury should also be foreshadowing because they're secondary characters who accidentally main cast (or, rather, cast upgrade comes with the redemption. Lol). I would also want to know what canon relationship might look the most like a 'solved' Ozlem. But yes, the pairs of two is rather suspicious. I don't know. I sort of expected at some point I would come to a position of doubt or the canon evidence would become increasingly less in favour of Knightfall (let's say, the apparent overtures might be identifiable, but when you get into the nitty gritty, and see that x or y doesn't line up, so on) but it seems not, which means my emotional investment only continues to build. Lol

I apologise for dragging you down with me lolololol. It's a bit of fun. Thanks again for your ask, it really brightened my day.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job.  That he’s actually quite nice.  That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.

I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book.  (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.)  But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way--I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil.  And I think that matters to the story as a whole.

A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer.  It’s to make people sin.  And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.

Take the cell phone network thing, for instance.  This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling: 

What could he tell them?  That twenty thousand people got bloody furious?  That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city?  And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people?  In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.  For the rest of the day.  The pass-along effects were incalculable.  Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin.  He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day.  Which, okay, it’s just a bad day--but bad days are exhausting.  Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse.  Bad days matter.

Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite.  Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered.  But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic--you know what, yes.  I do call that successful evil.

It’s subtle, is the thing.  That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it.  Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it.  It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them.  It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will.  Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close.  We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’  He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves.  He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice.  Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.

You see it again in the paintball match.  "They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.”  In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil--the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field.  Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder.  Sure, nobody died--where would be the fun in a pile of corpses?  But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.

Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action.  He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other.  He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs--no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.

I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can.  I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else.  And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.

There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been.  Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing.  Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.

That’s a compelling story.  There’s a reason we keep telling it.  The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once--yeah.  There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone.  But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.

I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world.  Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations.  Somebody who enjoys it, even.  Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given.  He’s thrived.  He is, legitimately, a bad person.

And he tries to save the world anyway.

He loves Aziraphale.  He helps save the entire world.  Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself.  He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite.  He cares.

It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t.  It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway.  It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants.  It’s about free will.  However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing.  You can still love.  You can still be loved in return.

And I think that matters.

[gildedmuse]

Question, which ship do you personally find the most cannon, ZoLu, ZoSan or ZoLaw? To expand on the question which ship for you has the most potential to possibly become cannon, I personally love all the ships, but I was wondering your thoughts on it? Ps reallyyyy love your AO3 works especially the ZoLaw! And the headcanon about them being trained by Rayleigh in the Modern AU!!!

Short Answer:

Zoro x Luffy is obviously the ship that makes the most sense and has the most examples you can point to in the canon while saying, "see that, that is love."

Long Answer No One Cares About:

This question awoke something dark inside of me, and I apologize for the overly long answer.

So, here's the thing: I don't really like 99% of "crack" ships which I would personally define as characters who have never met, whose personalities clash with one another's, and who share no common traits or grounds on which they might potentially relate to one another. Pretty much, if you have to invent a secret, noncanon background that totally changes a character's personality so that they can hook up with another character, I'm probably not going to ship it. Though, hey, if that's your thing you fly that flag high and proud. Shippers should support other shippers, regardless of cargo.

Buuuut.... At the same time, I also do not give a fuck about my ships being canon. Not only because, hey, it's my imagination and I'll do what I want with it, thank you very much, but also being a canon ship doesn't mean shit. Just because a creator decided two characters should hook up doesn't mean that it's logical or sound or feasible or healthy or somehow more "correct" than other pairings. In fact, what it usually means is that one character is a man, the other is a woman, and they are both attractive. Which, you know, is a pretty bullshit reason to start a relationship. If you've ever gone out with someone solely because they're attractive and the opposite gender of yourself than either:

Congratulations on what I hope was some truly amazing sex

So sorry about that awkward sexual encounter

You likely have first hand experience on how unstable and unsustainable such relationships can be.

So being a canon ship does not necessarily give you a pass in my books. For starters, most of my ship's be gay as fuck, and as someone who grow up without a lot of gay representation in media, I have learned not to expect anything despite how OBVIOUSLY DEEPLY CONNECTED characters might be.

[Side Note: And, yes, it's mostly male characters, because throughout the history of entertainment culture the vast majority was created by people men who had total faith in their ability to write realistic female characters despite all evidence pointing to the fact that they never once talked to an actual real life woman. I mean, how hard could it be? All women have basically the same personalty traits (boobs) and everyone knows female are monolithic group whose sole purpose in life is finding the most protagonistic male out there and immediately become his love interest. Which is why I just don't even bother with folks who look down on fans of slash/yaoi/gay ass ships because in a frankly sad amount of media, these pairings often make more practical sense as well as being more appealing to those of us who want romantic relationships based on personality, shared interests, or just between two well developed characters rather than one fully realized character and one cardboard cut out of Generic Attractive Female Person.]

When female characters are written as stereotypes whose defining characteristics is "she's a girl!" then of course the male characters with fully realized personalities and complex characterization will appeal to most people, including those of us who prefers their romantic pairings to have an actual foundation outside of "penis + vagina = love" it makes sense to ship the male characters who we get to see build a relationship, share common interests/traits/goals, and just generally ) So I have accepted that canon couples often mean nothing, because when it comes to romance so many creators are stuck in some heteronormative mindset where they totally forget all the work they've done building the character and defining their personality and sticking them with the first person they meet that has tits.

Basically, I am an English major whose end game is to be a college professor. And I am all about Death Of The Author, but also Show Me Your Workings. I don't need a relationship to be canon, what I need is for there to be a reason behind it. Preferably one that is deeper than "Tarzan love Jane because man loves woman" or "but they're both so pretty!!!!"

Taking all that into account, Zoro and Luffy were my first ship for a reason. There are so many little moments between the two you can point at as proof of their devotion and love (romantic or platonic, however you prefer to see it) for one another. I don't just mean the way Zoro took all Luffy's pain. I'm talking about how Luffy will always say things like, "I hope Zoro and the others are okay" or "When we get there I want to have huge feast with Zoro and the others". How often do you designate one of your friends over all the rest, naming them apart from the group? Personally, I either name everyone or no one, the exception being if one of them is someone I'm dating and therefore actually in a separate category from my other friends.

It's the way Zoro has all this nonverbal dialogue with Luffy which allows him to implicitly trust in whatever mad scheme Luffy has cooked up. When more rational people (Nami and Usopp) object out if, you know, sanity, Zoro can always tell when Luffy's plans are just silly gun, when he's throwing out his first thought just to say something, and when he's statement is made with full, unyielding conviction. And Zoro believes in Luffy enough that, when his captain has that level of assuredness, Zoro has no reason to doubt in him. Zoro is a man of actions - while oaths and promises are important, they only meant anything if you always follow through with actions. Luffy never fails to turn his promises into deeds, and so in a way they speak the same language. They understand one another on a deeper level.

And again, it's small things. The way Luffy can get even post-time skip Zoro to smile, or how Luffy will offer to share his lunch with Zoro, the way at the coliseum in Dressrosa, Zoro gets upset about Luffy not informing him there was a fight and Luffy actually apologizing. They have all these little moments to show how deeply connected they are, how much they understand one another, and more importantly how much faith they have in one another so even when one of them might not fully understand the other's reasoning, they never fail to support one another or know the other will pull through.

In my opinion, that is the bases of a strong relationship. That support and understanding; the sense that even if one of them may fail (and almost get chopped in half as a result) or fuck up (see Luffy. Just... Luffy) that it doesn't lessen the other one's believe in them. If anything, they know these set backs mean the other will fight twice as hard to come back even stronger.

I could literally list a thousand moments when they have each other's backs, when the whole crew doubts one of the except for the other, when they offer support even if it's unpopular or seems crazy. And yet they still have little fights, they aren't "made for one another" the way shallow love interests often are, but when it comes to the important moments they trust one another implicitly and show unwavering acceptance without the other having to validate or explain their reasoning. Luffy trusts Zoro with the crew's life, the most important thing in Luffy's world, and Zoro... Well in many ways Luffy has become the most important thing in his world. You see it the moment Zoro kowtows in front of Mihawk - the man Zoro has sworn to defeat and who is at the center of Zoro's life goal - all because Luffy needs him to be stronger; for the crew, to achieve Luffy's dream.

Mihawk even thinks to himaelf, who is the man you are willing to set aside your pride for, because he knows men like Zoro and the only reason they would ask such a favour from a rival is out of loyalty to someone.

So, yeah, not that it matters, but I'm terms of canon, Mihawk basically says, "this kid is in love, only someone in love would be so willing to set aside their dreams and goals for those of someone else."

[lilmissbacon]

Adding Characters to the Big Four (RotBTD)

I've already made a post about just "How the Big Four Work so well (discussion)" which talks about their personalities are and what their stories have in common, as well as what criteria they follow.

So if you want to understand exactly what I'm talking about I'd recommend you read this first:

Now I'm gonna go into what characters would fit and why. So if you want to add other movies to this world, I would recommend Moana, Epic, The Croods or maybe even Hotel Transylvania and here's why:

Moana – Begins with narration but ends with a song. Although it's a song that sums up what Moana had learned and what her people have now become. So it is, its own form of narration. She also goes through the journey of finding herself by becoming a wayfinder like her ancestors.

Moana definitely adds to the groups resources with being friends with the ocean, knowing about the realm of monsters and being friends with Maui & Te Fiti. She would definitely get along great with the big four friend dynamic in many ways.

Hiccup: through their ability to lead and quick thinking. They also both understand what it's like to grow up on an island with their fathers being the leader who expects certain things from them.

Rapunzel: because they understand going against a parent's wishes and working to make their dreams/wishes come true. They also have the same type of bubbly personality and would converse well.

Jack: they both understand what if feels like to be chosen for something they feel they're not ready for and what it feels like to be an outsider from the people around them.

Merida: their tough and somewhat playful nature as well as their diplomacy skills match each other so well. They'd definitely be the closest of the group because of their strong personalities.

Out of a friend group consisting of: the girly-girl, a troublemaker a nerd and a tomboy, she fits into the literary dynamic through being the 'athlete.' In battle, consisting of: a leader/strategist, a healer, a sniper(bow and arrow) and a speed fighter, Moana fits in as the 'close combatant' in battle.

The magic also can still follow the guidelines of rotg. They speak about Gods but what if there really aren't any? The only 'God' we see is Te Fiti, who is the bringer of life. Or in other words; Mother Nature. The God that had raised Maui could've actually been the man in the moon and that would be how Maui was given magic and doesn't age. He goes around, calling himself a demigod but in reality, he's a spirit. And of course he's able to be seen since everyone on Motunui believes in the demi/gods.

Seasonally, Moana would most obviously be put in summer. But there are a lot of people who feel that adding more characters to the big four kind of breaks the seasonal aspect and that's fine.

But here me out.

The seasons effect the land on earth but if Moana is a spirit of the ocean, then she's effecting the rest of the earth's surface. The ocean doesn't necessarily have seasons so you don't need to apply one to her in order for her to add to the group. BOOM! Loophole!

I believe she's the BEST additional choice out of them all. Plus she'd definitely be chosen to become a guardian because *cough cough* SHE SAVED THE WORLD FROM DECAY.

Eep – A lot of applications for Moana fit for Eep too. She has narration at the beginning and end of her film. She'd fit in literarily as the 'athlete' and battle-wise as 'close constant/brawler.'

She also kind of has an arc of finding herself by leaving her cave days behind and following the light with her family. And being that she's from the caveman days –a time even before Moana– she could definitely add to the group with her survival skills.

Eep's dynamic with the others would be:

Hiccup: he understands overly strong women and would be able to keep up with her. She also has an innocent side to her and would be enthralled with his inventions. She'd just sit there and watch him work 😆

Rapunzel: being that Eep is getting a new friend in Dawn (who reminds me of Rapunzel) in "The Croods 2," I would imagine Rapunzel would also be intrigued with Eep's scars/adventures and Eep would be more than happy to boast.

Merida: their roughness and competitive nature would make them the best frienemies. They'd be closer than ever but do nothing but wrestle and compete.

Jack: like how Eep would boast with Rapunzel, Jack would boast with Eep. She would be in love with Jack's magic and he'd be more than happy to show off.

There really isn't a magical aspect to compare with rotg so the world can still fit into the dynamic here.

Eep is witty, optimistic, energetic, speaks without thinking and fails to plan ahead a lot. Therefore, as a seasonal spirit, Eep would bring spring.

MK – Begins with narration but doesn't really have any at the end. She can add to the groups resources by knowing about the leafmen and the whole mini society, of course.

The magic also stays in line with rotg and it probably helps that the creator of Epic was also the author of the Guardians of Childhood books that inspired rotg. The moon is what blooms the pod, so it's possibly the man in the moon passing his magic into the pod so it gives the next queen her powers.

In the literary dynamic, MK would be the 'city girl' friend-wise and the 'reanforcement' fight-wise. Getting along with the rest would be:

Hiccup: she would be a sense of familiarity with MK's dad being a scientist and Nod's sarcastic nature. Hiccup would also be very intrigued to learn more about the Moonhaven kingdom.

Merida: their stubbornness and being able to understand having a parent that doesn't listen.

Rapunzel: their (new) love for nature and exploring. As well as being able to understand the pain of losing a loved one.

Jack: understanding the feeling of being invisible to the people around you. MK definitely felt this way after her mom died and when her dad wasn't listening. She mentioned how she felt alone to Ronan when he brought up the "many leaves, one tree," line.

I believe she could've been chosen to become a guardian because she did save an entire society and forest. Seasonally, I believe MK would be made into a fall spirit. There are certain places that relate to or even represent the seasons. When you think of Fall, you think of trees. Spring relates to a field/garden, summer relates to a beach and winter relates to just about everything being in snow, but usually frozen bodies of water. She's also very dependable, willing to work, disagreeable and easily irritated. All traits that relate to Autumn.

Mavis – Probably the least workable candidate. There really isn't any narration in this movie and she also doesn't really "find herself" either so her movie criteria don't really work here.

But her character criteria still does. The magic still fits because we know that spirits are created by the man in the moon. If we go by the GoC books, the mim is alien magic. But who's to say that earth didn't have its own magic in the form of monsters (which can also fit for the realm of monsters from Moana.) So the magical dynamic still works.

She could also add to the group by knowing about monsters as well as being a vampire herself. She could turn into a bat or travel as smoke to sneak around places to find information if need be.

She'd fit in literarily as the 'gothic (not so much as personality but by style)' friend-wise and the 'sneak attacker' fight-wise. Getting along with the rest would be:

Jack: there are many takes on the Jack Frost myth and in a few of those takes, he's a monster. The reason for this could be because Jack has come across Hotel Transylvania and the monsters could see him (not being human and all) and he befriended Mavis, knowing she was lonely. They have the same type of fun personality and are both great with balancing tricks. I can imagine Jack getting Mavis into trouble through pranking the hotel guests.

Rapunzel: they'd both be able to understand being locked up in some way by a parent and wanting to travel the world. They both also have naiveties about the real world and would be learning things for the first time together.

Merida: through their daily activities and love for food. I could imagine them trying each other's scream-cheese and haggis😂 I'd also imagine Merida being the one to help Mavis socially catch up.

Hiccup: much like Eep, she'd be incredibly intrigued by Hiccups inventions. I think she'd even try anything to assist him while he's testing certain things. I can imagine him also being the one to help Mavis socially catch up as well.

She's very curious, friendly, energetic and tender-hearted as well as undecided and talkative. So seasonally, she too, would go to spring. She unfortunately can't go into sunlight but there are plants that actually do better in darkness. That would be where she specializes.

I hope you all like this. I hope you find this whole thing very interesting and informational. If you have any other characters you think could add to the big four, I'd love to hear it.

[rocknrollarticles]

The Artwoods Story

The Artwoods’ 100 Oxford Street is a UK compilation album released in 1983 that features a four-page booklet (pictured above) that tells the band’s story, written by guitarist Derek Griffiths.

Since there's a limit on the number of photos that can be added to one post, I'll be reblogging this a couple times until I have all the info up. To see this post with all the info added in reblogs, click here.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy Derek’s words as much as I do!

Transcript under the cut (main text + Record Mirror article from page three's rightmost side)

“  It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Artwoods came into being because everything just seemed to evolve naturally. The one date however that does stick in my mind is the 1st October 1964 which is the date I turned professional, thus depriving the accountancy profession of a valuable addition to its ranks! But seriously, one must go back to previous events in order to trace the history of the group.

I first met Jon Lord at a party in West Hampstead when he was a drama student at The Central School of Speech & Drama. He was introduced to me by Don Wilson whose claim to fame was his membership of the famous skiffle group Dickie Bishop & His Sidekicks. They had had a hit years previously with "No Other Baby But You", and Don now ran a band on a semi-pro basis called Red Bludd's Bluesicians in which I played guitar. Well, I say we were called this, but only when we were fortunate enough to cop an R&B gig. We used to play The Flamingo Allnighter and lots of U.S. air bases. The rest of the time we played weddings and tennis club dances as The Don Wilson Quartet! Jon Lord was brought in on piano and was a very valuable addition especially as he could get his hands around a little jazz and all the old standards. Jon used to ring me at work and interrupt my vouching of sales ledger invoices in order to discuss the coming weekends gigs. We would bubble with excitement at the approach of an R&B gig as we really hated all the weddings and barmitzvahs.

Around this time Don made a very important policy decision and we suddenly became the proud owners of a Lowrey Holiday organ for Jon to play. Shortly after this Don contrived to drive the band-wagon into the back of a lorry on the North Circular, doing himself considerable mischief in the process. This brought about the unfortunate end of Don's career with us, but not before he had masterminded an important merger of two local bands.

For some time we had been aware, and not a little envious, of The Art Wood Combo led by none other than Art Wood himself. His band underwent a split at that time and Red Bludd's Bluesicians, alias The Don Wilson Quartet, were neatly grafted on. We really felt we were moving into the big league by doing this as Art not only had more work than us but, wait for it, used to sing with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated with Charlie Watts on drums and Cyril Davies on harmonica! The next problem was a replacement for Don, and this was solved by stealing the bass player from another local group The Roadrunners, a good looking cove who went by the name of Malcolm Pool. The offer and acceptance of the gig were transacted in a pub car park somewhere in West Drayton staring into the murky waters of the Grand Union Canal clutching pints of local bitter (Fullers?). (Authors note: drugs had not been invented at this stage, as far as most groups were concerned, apart from the odd pill to keep one awake on an all nighter!)

~

The next personnel change took place some time in 1964 and this involved the retirement of drummer Reg Dunnage, who did not want to turn pro. Auditions were held in London and lots of drummers attended. However it was more or less a foregone conclusion that Keef Hartley would get the job. You see we'd already decided that what The Artwoods needed above all else was a Liverpool drummer! Unfortunately none came to the audition, but Keef hailed from Preston which was near enough for us. Keef had previously played with Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, replacing Ringo Starr in the process (heady stuff this), and Freddy Starr & The Midnighters. Both were such influential bands of their time that these credentials combined with Keef's quasi Liverpool accent (at least to our ears) provided him with a faultless pedigree.

~

So that was it, the line-up that would take us through to 1967 when Colin Martin eventually replaced Keef Hartley on drums.

For a while we worked as The Art Wood Combo but then decided it was hipper to drop the Combo and become The Artwoods.

The period when The Artwoods were operating was one of musical change when groups went from recording and performing other writers' material to writing their own. In fact the last year of the group's existence was 1967 which heralded the arrival of "Hendrix", "Flower-Power". "Festivals" and experimental use of mind expanding drugs! 1966/67 were particularly exciting years to be based in London and every night would be spent in one of the many clubs which had recently sprung up. The Ad Lib, The Scotch of St. James, The Cromwellian, Blaises and of course The Speakeasy to mention a few. Many of these we played in and the trick was to be well known enough not to have to pay the entrance fee on nights off. Any night you could be sure to meet your mates "down The Speak" and it became the unofficial market place for rock musicians.

It was also the days before huge amounts of equipment took over. Equipment meant road-crew and trucks and in turn financial hardship. This simple equation has been the downfall of many bands over the years. We used to travel in a 15 cwt van together with all the gear-no roadies, just us. It's amusing to recall but after recording the TV show "Ready, Steady, Go" (in Kingsway in those days?) one would be besieged by autograph hunters on the way to the van with the gear. Even really 'big groups of the day like The Zombies would hump their own equipment and apologetically place an amp on the ground in order to sign an autograph! Because it was financially viable to travel to small clubs in this way, we would often average 6 or 7 nights a week, every week, on the road. A bad month would probably mean less than twenty gigs. This meant we were living, sleeping and eating in close, and I mean close, proximity. You really found out who your friends were.

The subject of equipment is an interesting one as it really distinguishes the bands then from those of today. The average pub band of today would carry more equipment than we did. As I've already mentioned we were quick to realise that we could elevate ourselves musically by investing in a proper electric organ as opposed to a Vox Continental or Farfisa that many groups used. Consequently the group purchased a Lowrey Holiday and we thought this alone would provide us with the Booker T and Jimmy Smith sound.

What we failed to realize was that we also needed a Leslie cabinet with a special built-in rotor to get that "wobbly" sound. Our friend and mentor Graham Bond, the legendary organist/saxophonist, was quick to point out the error of our ways one night when we were gigging at Klooks Kleek in West Hampstead. We groaned inwardly when we discovered the extra cost and humping involved, but it had to be bought. We were fortunate very early on to score a deal with Selmers, who provided us with free amps and P.A., but we had to make the trek to Theobalds Road once a week to get it all serviced as they were not as reliable in those days. I used a Selmer Zodiac 50 watt amp and Malcolm had Goliath bass cabinets with a stereo amp.

The P.A. comprised two 4 x 12 cabinets and a 100 watt amp! When we toured Poland we played in vast auditoria and linked our system with the Vox system being used on tour by Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas. This meant we were pumping out no more than 300 watts which is laughable by today's standards. Although it would never have compared in quality, I can remember standing at the back of extremely large halls and being able to hear clearly all the words Billy J sang. One day in 1963 Alexis Korner sent me off foraging in and around Charing Cross Road for a new guitar, with instructions to mention his name whereupon I would receive a discount of 10%. Previously I played a Burns Trisonic (collectors will appreciate this model did not have "Wild Dog" treble) but fancied owning a Gibson ES335 as favoured by many blues players. Sure enough one was hanging invitingly in the window of Lew Davis's shop.

I ended up paying £135 and still use it regularly today although its value has multiplied five fold. Malcolm came with me that day and bought an Epiphone bass, the same colour and shape as my guitar. For years we looked like matching book-ends on either end of the group! Keef started off using a Rodgers drum kit, but somewhere along the line changed to, I think, Ludwig. There was no out-front mixing as is common today, just the P.A. amp on stage with the vocalist. Primitive I know, but everything revolved around bands being able to travel economically with their gear and perform at small clubs anywhere in Britain. The college circuit was much sought after and provided the icing on the cake while package tours were not necessarily well paid. We did our first with P. J. Proby and got £25 per night (for the lot of us) and we had to pay for our own accommodation!

~

I have already mentioned "Ready, Steady, Go" a show on which we appeared on more than one occasion. The original format called for groups to mime to their records but after a time it was decided that it would become "live" and that the show would be re-titled "Ready Steady Goes Live". We were proud to be picked for the first "live" show and learnt the news via a telephone call to our agent in London from a phone box high in the Pennines. We managed a drunken war-dance of celebration round the phone box believing that this meant we'd really cracked it. As I remember the first show we did featured Tom Jones (complete with lucky rabbits foot) miming to "It's Not Unusual", The Kinks, Donovan and Adam Faith's Roulettes playing live (without Adam). We were promoting our first single "Sweet Mary" and I would put the date at around late 1964.

~

Our first recording deal was with a subsidiary of Southern Music Publishing called Iver Productions and I reckon that would have been mid 1964. Southern had a four track studio in the basement of their offices in Denmark Street ("The Street") and getting the gear downstairs, especially the organ, was "murder". Our first producer was Terry Kennedy and we recorded several tracks with him. Without going too deeply into all the details of recording techniques of the period, one tended to compensate for the lack of tracking facilities available, by attempting to duplicate the live excitement. In many ways it was a frustrating experience particularly for ambitious guitar-players. I was a Steve Cropper freak and I knew as a musician that a lot of his sound on record resulted from him working his amplifier hard in the studio— thus the speaker would emit the sound he was used to on stage. In Britain however, engineers would say "You don't need to play loud man, we can turn you up on the desk". The result was a weedy, thin guitar sound. From way back I'd been experimenting with "feed back" on stage and I really had to dig my heels in about the guitar sound in the studio. Once when I turned my amp up to give it a bit of "wellie" on a solo the engineer bounded out of the control room screaming that the level would bust his microphones!

~

Sometime during the career of The Artwoods it was decided that we should graduate to a better studio. This was arranged by Mike Vernon who also became our producer. Our records had all been released through the Decca Record Co. and Mike was a staff producer with them. Mike w also an authority on "The Blues" and the relationship led to our only single chart record "I Take What I Want" a cover of a Sam & Dave U.S. R&B hit. Mike was also producing John Mayall at the time and it seemed only natural that Mike and The Artwoods should team up. From this point on we recorded at the Decca studio in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, but I can't honestly say it did any more for us than our previous efforts in the Southern Music basement, although we could now indulge ourselves in the comparative luxury of the eight track studio. Later on, towards the end of the groups life we were signed by Jack Baverstock at Philips Records who was looking for a group to cash in on the thirties-style gangster craze which had been triggered off by the film "Bonnie & Clyde". As a result we changed our name to "St. Valentines Day Massacre" and released a single of the old Bing Crosby hit "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" It was an ill- fated venture, which I would prefer not to dwell on, virtually signalling the end of the band apart from a few heavy-hearted gigs with a changed line-up.

~

Before that though, there were many great times to remember, and a fair number of gigs that were memorable in one way or another.

One of our favourite gigs was Eel Pie Island which we regularly played once a month; in fact we held the attendance record there for a while until the ageing blues artist Jesse Fuller took it from us. Eel Pie Island is literally an island in the middle of the River Thames at Twickenham and there's never been a gig like it since. It was an Edwardian ballroom originally I believe, that achieved notoriety in the 50's with the Trad Jazz boom. At that time, an overloaded chain ferry was used to convey the crowd across the river, but during the 60's a small bridge was in existence although it was only wide enough to take the promoter Art Chisnall's mini van. He had to make three separate trips across with the gear strapped to the roof and hanging out the back doors.

The audiences were exceptional for those times and I don't know where they all came from... very much like art students and very much more like the 70's than 60's. Long hair predominated and this was before 'hippies' had officially been invented! If you can imagine a ramshackle wooden ballroom, bursting at the seams, condensation pouring from the walls, the audience on each others shoulders leaping up and down, the sprung dance floor bending alarmingly in the middle, in the summer couples strolling outside and lounging on the river bank ... all this and not a disc jockey in sight! One other bonus was that it was a “free” house and therefore sold many different types of beer— we always favoured Newcastle Brown. Back on the 'mainland' afterwards it was always riotous packing the gear into the truck. I don't know how he managed it but one night Malcolm drove our truck over the support band's guitar which happened to be lying about, thus breaking the neck. I'll never forget the shocked look on that poor guitarist's face as Malcolm smoothly slipped the van into gear, apologised and drove off in that order!

~

No trip up north was complete without stopping at the famed Blue Boar on the M1 for a "grease-up" on the way home. I do not refer to truck lubrication but to a particular rock'n'roll delicacy known as “full-house”. This comprised double egg, sausage, chips, beans, tomatoes, fried slice, tea, and (if you were man enough) toast. It was considered a Herculean task to break successfully the 10 bob' (50p) barrier-all served on wobbly cardboard plates that doubled as items to sign autographs on for the self service waitresses.

Waitress: What band are you?

Me: You won't have heard of us.

Waitress: Oh go on, tell us.

Me: OK. The Artwoods.

Waitress: Never 'eard of you!

It was everybody’s dream to walk into the Blue Boar just as their hit of the moment was playing on the Juke Box.

~

One time we were chosen to represent the twentieth century at the centenary celebrations of the State of Monte Carlo— a most lavish affair which the aristocracy and dignatories of Europe attended. Princess Grace and Prince Ranier were the hosts and people like Gina Lollobrigida and the like were there. The ball was held in the famous Casino at Monte Carlo and we stayed in an opulent hotel called The Hermitage, I think. All I can remember is that we all had single rooms (a rare luxury) which were massive, and you could have pitched a tent under one of the bath towels, they were so big. After this we jetted off up to Paris where we played next door to the Moulin Rouge at a club called The Locomotive.

Whilst we were there we were taken out by our friend Mae Mercer, the American lady blues singer who we backed in England. She lived in Paris and took us out to Memphis Slim's club where we all set about drinking like it was going out of style. At the end there was an embarrassing scene concerning the bill with the result that Mae ended up in tears. Whilst we were bumbling about in an alcoholic stupor, an upright looking gentleman put his arm round Mae to comfort her and a wallet appeared magically from his inside pocket. Without further ado the bill was despatched and we later learned that our anonymous benefactor was none other than Peter O'Toole who was busy in the street outside filming 'Night Of The Generals' and was an old buddy of Mae's.

~

One Boxing Day we loaded up with turkey sandwiches and Xmas pudding and headed off for a gig down in Devon or Cornwall somewhere. We arrived to find the club closed and boarded up, and as usual we were broke. Naturally we were livid, checked into an hotel and located the promoter who lived with his mum. Next morning we drove round to where he lived and burst our way past his confused mum. We found him in his bedroom nervously cowering against some fruit machines which he collected. He had no money so we forced him to empty his damned machines with the result that we drove back to London with 50 quids' worth of 'tanners' (approx 22p for the younger reader!)

Whilst on the subject of disasters I suppose I am duty bound to mention Denmark. The first time we went there we caught the ferry to the continent, drove up through Germany, then caught another ferry to Denmark. There was no promoter to meet us when we arrived so all we could do was drive to Copenhagen and check in at the Grand Hotel. It cost us an arm and a leg but at least we got a good nights sleep after being awake for nearly two days travelling. The next day we made a few phone calls and finally tracked down the promoter. He said: "Didn't you get my telegram cancelling the tour?" We politely said no we hadn't and what did he intend doing with us? He checked us into another hotel (cheaper of course) and set about booking us at places that were similar to English coffee bars and youth clubs. We made enough to survive on and paved the way to more successful tours of that country. In fact by now we had Colin Martin on drums and were pursuing a much more adventurous musical policy and writing our own material. It was just right for Denmark who had taken Hendrix to their hearts to name but one, and we subsequently became quite big there in 1967.

The Artwoods achieved modest success-a minor hit single in "I Take What I Want", but we worked constantly, travelled abroad, had fantastic fun and made a living doing so. We had seven single releases, one album, and one EP, and we broadcast both on radio and TV many times. We did stage tours such as the P. J. Proby tour and covered most aspects of "show-biz" apart from actually making a movie. It was the era when bands still had to prove themselves as a live act before being offered a recording contract. now frequently happens of course that an act can become huge record sellers without so much as venturing to do a live gig.

~

So what happened to everyone? Well Art returned to his former occupation as a commercial artist and finds some time to fit in free-lance work between accompanying brother Ron Wood on raving excursions between Rolling Stones gigs. Malcolm moved into the same field as Art and they now work in the same building. Both of them gig occasionally on a semi-pro basis although Malcolm spent some time playing with Jon Hiseman's Colosseum and Don Partridge in the early 70's. Jon Lord became famous with Deep Purple and Whitesnake as did Keef Hartley with John Mayall and various bands of his own. Colin Martin is now a BBC Radio producer of repute. I played in various bands such as Lucas and The Mike Cotton Sound, Colin Blunstone's band, Dog Soldier (with Keef again), before I somehow drifted into studio and theatre work. Recently I formed an R'n'B band called the G.B. Blues Company, and it's great to be back on the road again.   ”

Derek Griffiths.

Clipping from Record Mirror on June 5, 1965, by Norman Jopling.

“We aim to excite!” … say the Art Woods

Just for the record, the Art Woods aren't a part of Epping Forest. In fact they're a group of five interesting young men, named after the group's leader Art Wood. They also happen to be one of the most realistic groups on the scene.

For a start, they are the awkward position of having a large following, a club residency but no hit record. Secondly. they don't mind pandering to commercial tastes, even though they have been hailed as one of the most authentic R & B groups in the land.

NO PULL

“But authentic R&B just isn't pulling the crowds any more,” says Art. “The audiences want to be excited, not to be lectured on what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. Although there was a time when you could spend half an hour on one number with long solos by everybody, it didn't last long. And although there are some clubs like that still, most of them want something fresh and new.

“And we try to cater for them. We like authentic R&B, but we also like playing everything and anything else. So far, our two discs haven't meant a light. Of course we'd love a hit. But we're lucky enough to make a good living without one.”

DISCS

The Art Woods latest disc is "Oh My Love" and the one before that “Sweet Mary”. Of them Little Walter has said that he couldn't believe any white group could sing and play the blues like they do.

Line-up of the group is Art Wood, leader. vocalist and harmonica. Derek Griffiths, lead guitar, Jon Lord, organ and piano. Malcolm Pool— base guitar, and Keef Hartley on drums. The boys use a specially adapted Lowrie organ, and get a sound that's really different.

But even if the boys sometimes become depressed about no hits records, they should remember groups like Cliff Bennett, the Barron-Knights, the Rockin' Berries and the Yardbirds, and how long THEY waited before they had a hit!

N.J.

[theartwcoin]

What Is Crypto Currency And How Does It Work?

We all have heard about or at least know someone who used/uses crypto currency, but what exactly is it? So, crypto currency is basically an internet-based medium of exchange /virtual currency which use cryptography to conduct secure and verified transactions for its users. All crypto currencies were developed and necessarily work through block chain technology. The block chain technology assures that all crypto currencies are limited entries in a database that efficiently records transactions between two parties efficiently and in a permanent way. It does not exist physically and isn’t issued by any centralized authority as opposed to central banking systems and or digital currency. Apart from it being a transparent and secure way to carry out financial transactions, another feature that attracts its users towards it is that crypto currencies can be traded between two parties directly via the use of public or private keys, and thus, users can avoid the steep fees charged by most traditional financial institutions.

An interesting fact about crypto currencies is that they emerged as a side product of another invention.

Bitcoin is the most popular and widely used crypto currency of all time, founded by its anonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto and was introduced to the world for usage in 2009. According to him, he never intended to invent a currency in the first place. He had intended to develop a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” to prevent the problems of double-spending. The most important feature of his invention was that it was a decentralized server and this was the first time someone had successfully made it a non-trust-based system after many failed attempts in the past and this decision became the birth of crypto currency. In a decentralized network such as bitcoin, every single participant needs to do his job, made possible with the help of block chain technology.

The working of it is very simple yet very complex in nature. Here, every transaction contains the wallet addresses of both parties also known as their public keys and the number of coins transferred

Every transaction is broadcasted in the network, but first, it has to be confirmed, meaning, it first has to be signed by the sender by his private key. All of this work is hassle-free, and is just basic cryptography. In this network, only miners can confirm transactions by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Then after they have stamped the transactions as legit, they broadcast it in the network, and after it has been approved by every other miner, it gets added to the database to securely now become a part of the block chain. This is basic p2p technology. Strong cryptography ensures the consensus-keeping process is carried out in a secured way.

Crypto currency is sound money that is secure from political influence and money that promises to preserve and increase its value over time. Not only is it useful for purchasing goods online, securely but also an investor's dream come true in many cases. For example, BTC was valued at around $800 in January 2017 but as of now, it is valued at around $13500, which shows the huge amount of potential it holds for an investor. Earlier it used to be a tough job to find a merchant, seller who accepts crypto currencies as a payment method, but that has changed drastically over the years. Now owners can use it to pay for hotels, flights, jewelry, and even college tuition fees. Another usage of bitcoins would be mining them. Miners are the most important part of this network, and much like trading, mining is an investment. Miners essentially provide a bookkeeping service for their respective communities. If someone is willing to invest in good quality mining hardware, it can be quite profitable and it is very possible to make a fortune out of it. This, of course, comes at the price of incurring huge electricity bills and the investment of a good lump sum in mining hardware.

Today there are a number of cryptocurrencies available to the daily man other than Bitcoin. Etherum, Ripple, Bitcoin, Dash are some widely used examples. Although the legality of various crypto currencies vary from state to state and from nation to nation, it is undoubtedly one of the most popular, secure, and fruitful investment opportunity available globally, along with the various other business opportunities that it opens up for its users. This ever-growing and ever-evolving network created to facilitate commerce has been a huge success globally and still has a huge amount of untapped potential waiting to be discovered.

About ARTW

The ARTW is a blockchain based Art verification and art trading platform. We are building an Art ecosystem which will enable all the stakeholders of the industry – Artists, collectors, art enthusiasts, art exhibitors & galleries and institutional buyers to buy/sell genuine, verified artwork from our trading platform. Moreover, ARTW Token is the inherent part of our art ecosystem. It is a utility token based on binance smart chain BEP 20 standard. Our tokens can be used to purchase Artworks from the participating galleries and our own ART marketplace.

To know more about ARTW visit theartwcoin.com

Original Source: https://bit.ly/3vEhTat

[hunkpurveyor]

Just finished Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein yes its really all three s’s i double checked which turned out to be an interesting and very readable novel that maybe reaches a little beyond its own scope sometimes. Winterson is deeply interested in ideas about transhumanism, artificial intelligence and the future of our relationships with bodies - so much so that at times the novel becomes little more than a vehicle for these conversations to play out. But I found the conceptual level intriguing enough to pull me through the portions where the facade of novel wore thin.

First things first, the question of trans representation in this book is not one I feel fully qualified to answer. I’ve seen a review arguing that it presents an idealised/sanitised version of some physical aspects of FTM transition. The trans character Ry feels fully realised to me, with nuanced ideas about their own gender but trans issues are not really primary here, which is not necessarily bad. Being trans can and should be a fact about a character rather than their entire identity. However there is a lot of thematic meat to work with when thinking about trans bodies and Frankenstein’s monster and while Winterson does do some interesting work with this, I feel like she is often distracted with other ideas to the detriment of that exploration. My main caveat is that this book does come with a major content warning for sexual assault in a scene that frankly felt unnecessary to me - it serves to illuminate a crisis about self-creation but I just don’t think it was a crucial part of Ry’s arc. The scene is very ugly to read and if you are sensitive to that content I would advise you to steer clear. Ry is also misgendered and deadnamed at various points by another character though the context is not particularly malignant.

What I think is most interesting about Frankissstein is its metafictional layering. Winterson has two primary narratives occurring - the life of Mary Shelley and her modern analogue, a trans doctor named Ry Shelley. The characters of Mary’s life (Percy Shelley, Lord Byron etc.) are all echoed into the present, including Victor Frankenstein himself as Ry’s lover, a “Dr. Stein” who dreams of transcending the body entirely and uploading his mind into a computer.

But these comparisons are complicated by Winterson’s choice to blur and move characters together across the centuries. Percy Shelley is portrayed as both lover and monster, and to Ry Dr. Stein is part Percy, part Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley herself plays the part of creator to her Dr. Frankenstein - he the creation and creator of monsters. We can look at Ry similarly - they are positioned as self-created, altering their body in transition they are both creation and creator, monster and doctor.

The book is constantly pushing at ideas of “reality,” and this reaches its apotheosis when Victor Frankenstein intrudes in the life of his author, complaining of being rendered flesh and blood - embodied and dysphoric - another twist in the knotted question of what makes up a human. This is a man made of text, a pattern brought forth into the world, the magical opposite of the modern Stein’s dream. Reality is emergent, Winterson says, it is a consensus reached, an invention. At one point while reading I wondered if she was trying to create a kind of “transfiction” with this movement between realities, the mutability of the real, but on reflection I don’t think such a descriptor is earned or accurate.

It’s all a little complicated - partly because the book is rich with meaning and has depths worth plumbing and partly because the structure does not entirely cohere around the narrative. The book bills itself as a love story, and I think it very much wants to be primarily about that, though romance often ends up feeling tangential to the novel’s dense conceptual discourse. What the characters keep coming back to is “the human dream.” Which is perhaps about love, but I think it will mean very different things to different readers. For me it felt like a yearning for a certain type of immortality, an escape from death & the grief that is always entwined with living and dying.

The metafictional structure creates a complex blurring of monster and doctor, of body and mind, creator and creation. More than once, a character remarks, “I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.” That superposition is where the crux of the novel lies for me - the characters are both creator and creation, echoed and reflected and reborn in new bodies and new forms. The character of Percy Shelley describes it when hearing of a protest of labourers at Manchester,

We are many, he said. Many Shelleys, many Marys. Many stand behind us tonight in spirit, and we shall do the same when we are done here. The body that must fail and fall is not the end of the human dream.

Winterson undercuts this idealism to an extent, exploring the all-too-recurrent misogyny of male idealists, but that was still the compelling idea within the text for me. It is the collective will of the downtrodden rising up, the multiplicity of being of the common man, of the human living within and through the cause. The reflection shows a new face, the echo resolves into one.

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

If Rowan really is dead, the chances of Rakepick being redeemed are gonna be even slimmer. Well, the audience forgiving and liking her is gonna be even less likely anyway. I know I won’t buy the double agent bullshit either way

That’s exactly the question I’ve been thinking about - is Jam City interested in redeeming Rakepick, and if so, what are they going to do about the Rowan issue? 

Because if they’re really dead, Rakepick’s irredeemable. Period. It’s going to be hard enough to redeem her after the Portrait Vault, because torturing Merula was clearly real. But this? No way. If she really killed Rowan, then the only thing that awaits her is either an Azkaban cell, or a shallow grave. But I just get the sense that they’re playing the Snape game with Rakepick, and are eventually going to reveal her as a double agent. Which, as with Snape, won’t necessarily make her a good person. It might not even make her a person on our side. I just can’t believe she’s serving the Cabal. When has Rakepick ever given any indication that she’s the sort of person who would bow to authority like that? It just seems so out-of-character for her even if she is evil. Jacob’s journal told us that she was afraid of R. We found a note from them, threatening her. In Year 4, the Red Cloak’s warning to “stay away” from Rakepick and the Vaults conflicts with the idea that it was really Rakepick who imperius’d Ben. After all, she wanted MC to keep pursuing the Vaults, and told them to do so even if it meant disobeying Dumbledore. 

No, there has to be something else going on here. Which could mean that Rowan is still alive somehow, if the developers want there to be any hope of Rakepick and MC working together again before this is all over. I can’t get over how she all but warned Ben that she was firing a killing curse. “Take this lesson to your grave!” Is a pretty great line, sure. But Rakepick is too smart to give her opponent a warning just for the sake of a one-liner. What if that line was some kind of signal to Rowan? So they would know to rush out? What if Rakepick found them before the Forest incident and explained everything? I’m inclined to believe that she was under immense pressure from the Cabal to kill one of MC’s friends, since she failed to do so in the Portrait Vault. Which could very well have been intentional - she went from announcing her intent to kill everyone, to just stalling by torturing Merula, which also gave MC an opening to strike back. Again, she’s way too smart to have choked that hard. The Cabal might have wanted her to prove her loyalty and made it clear that “You better return with blood on your hands this time.” So, what to do? Fake a student’s death. Find a student tremendously loyal to MC, but still easy enough to intimidate....who better than Rowan? It could have also just been pure chance, since Rowan was following MC. 

Then there’s the issue of not actually killing Rowan. While I can one-hundred percent believe Rowan would gladly give up their life for MC, bless them, the goal for Rakepick would be that no one would die - otherwise she could just kill one of the kids outright. Like, even if Rakepick isn’t above killing children, I also think that she’s on Dumbledore’s payroll. For all of his faults, I don’t believe Dumbledore would still work with Rakepick if she had killed one of his students. So, how did she fake it? Well...there was a pause when she cast the killing curse. She said the incantation, did an odd motion with her hand, and then fired a jet of green light. Could have just been dueling choreography, sure. It definitely looks like she cast the killing curse. It was obviously supposed to. But suppose she said the incantation for the killing curse, and then cast a different spell non-verbally? A spell that would mimic Avada Kedavra, right down to having green light and inducing a death-like state in the target? Think of Juliet Capulet from Romeo and Juliet and how Romeo thought Juliet was dead because she took that death simulation potion. Rakepick could have put Rowan in a similar state. Which means they’re either relatively safe in a coma right now, or else she’s since recovered them and woken them from the death simulation, and simply keeping them hidden until it’s safe to reveal that they’re alive. 

As to what spell Rakepick might have used? Well, it would definitely be an original one, that the developers themselves invented, rather than anything from the books. But there’s a precedent for that, and it comes from Rakepick herself. Remember when she broke MC’s wand? She is thus far the only character we’ve ever seen to break a dueling opponent’s wand with a curse. Even though, you would think that if such a spell existed, people would use it all the time. I believe Rakepick either learned it from the Cabal, or invented it herself. Spell invention is difficult as all hell, but entirely possible. Both Snape and Badeea have done it. If Rakepick did invent the wand-breaking curse, it would explain why only she seems to know how to use it, and perhaps it could explain the death-simulation spell. Suppose Rakepick invented that too. 

Of course, all of this is speculation. The game itself has not suggested that any of this will necessarily be true. As much as I miss Rowan, I can admit that they’re probably gone for good and even commend the writers for having the guts to go through with it. Still...I’ve said again and again, and I’m not the only one - Rakepick’s actions post-portrait vault just do not line up with her words. The only way to explain her behavior other than just poor writing, is that she still has an agenda we don’t know about. I’m not saying she’ll wind up being some great hero, but everything about her betrayal is inconsistent. She has no real reason to lie anymore, but so many of her choices make it clear that she’s still lying. For someone who keeps insisting that she wants to kill MC, Rakepick has ignored multiple chances to do so. There has to be something more we don't know.

[anettrolikova]

- The core feature of early democracies was that rulers relied on their people to provide information about production and to aid with governance, whether it be raising revenues or engaging in external defense. They did this in the form of councils and assemblies and by delegating authority. It resembled an online platform where those at the center are always dependent on outside developers for content. - The other core feature of early democracies was the threat of exit: Instead of voting at the ballot box, people could vote with their feet. - Council and assembly governance has been prevalent in so many societies that it appears early democracy was something that came naturally to humans — it wasn’t just the Greeks who invented it. Europeans saw this when they began to conquer other peoples on other continents, even if they often failed to appreciate the importance of what they witnessed. - If we want to understand what is happening on the internet today, then it makes sense to focus on early democracy — as well as early autocracy — rather than modern democracy, where popular participation in governance occurs more or less only at the ballot box. Modern democracy is a system where those who govern are elected by universal suffrage. But modern does not necessarily mean better. -  Maintainers of open-source software projects struggle to onboard partners and successors. It seems like more regimented forms of democracy could come in handy. -  Community moderators feel pressure to behave well because their members could fairly easily leave the community and form a new one. Maintainers of open-source software projects can drive away talented contributors if they behave badly. -  People with power online have reputations to protect, and they can face a barrage of public shaming if they’re not careful. -  Would people really feel they held power if all they could do was vote for members of a governing board every few years? Perhaps making the internet more democratic can be better done by starting with the practices of early democracy and working from there toward possibilities that modern democracy hasn’t tried yet. -  “We may see the internet retrace offline history’s steps toward a reinvention of modern democracy.” -  Thus, proposals for more active antitrust enforcement of online platforms resonate back through the centuries; similar limits on concentration could apply to communities within platforms as well. -  “Democracy can mean many things and be practiced in many ways. As premodern societies attest, it does not always mean elections.” -  Making public investments in free, open-source software, as European governments are increasingly doing also creates a kind of “public option” that offers exit alternatives and sets common standards for private platforms. -  Also important for evolving platforms’ democracy is enabling new forms of counterpower. This can include building associations among groups of users, such as sellers on Amazon and drivers on Uber, or trusts that hold the data of social media users, so that ordinary people can use collective leverage to make their voices heard. -  If online governance is to evolve out of its current crises, toward something that is more rather than less democratic, we will need to approach the task with some humility. Rather than imagining that our admins and moderators and super-CEOs have this mostly figured out, we need to recognize where we are, historically speaking. In the language of the techies, online governance is early-stage.