#panama 2017

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

[fatehbaz]

imperialism and science reading list

edited: by popular demand, now with much longer list of books

Of course Katherine McKittrick and Kathryn Yusoff.

People like Achille Mbembe, Pratik Chakrabarti, Rohan Deb Roy, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, and Elizabeth Povinelli have written some “classics” and they track the history/historiography of US/European scientific institutions and their origins in extraction, plantations, race/slavery, etc.

Two articles I’d recommend as a summary/primer:

Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia. May 2016.

Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 2020.

Then probably:

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. “Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times.” Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

Sharae Deckard. “Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden.” 2010. (Chornological overview of development of knowledge/institutions in relationship with race, slavery, profit as European empires encountered new lands and peoples.)

Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. 2017, (Interesting case study. US corporations were building fruit plantations in Latin America and rubber plantations in West Africa during the 1920s. Medical doctors, researchers, and academics made a strong alliance these corporations to advance their careers and solidify their institutions. By 1914, the director of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine was also simultaneously the director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals of the United Fruit Company, which infamously and brutally occupied Central America. This same Harvard doctor was also a shareholder in rubber plantations, and had a close personal relationship with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which occupied West Africa.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.”  2008. (Case study of how British wealth and industrial development built on botany. Examines Joseph Banks; Kew Gardens; breadfruit; British fear of labor revolts; and the simultaneous colonizing of the Caribbean and the South Pacific.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” 2014. (Indigenous knowledge systems; “nuclear colonialism”; US empire in the Pacific; space/satellites; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords.” e-flux Journal #115, February 2021. (”Pest control”; termites; mosquitoes; fear of malaria and other diseases during German colonization of Africa and US occupations of Panama and the wider Caribbean; origins of some US institutions and the evolution of these institutions into colonial, nationalist, and then NGO forms over twentieth century.)

Some of the earlier generalist classic books that explicitly looked at science as a weapon of empires:

Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Delbourgo’s and Dew’s Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; the anthology Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World; Canzares-Esquerra’s Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

One of the quintessential case studies of science in the service of empire is the British pursuit of quinine and the inoculation of their soldiers and colonial administrators to safeguard against malaria in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia at the height of their power. But there are so many other exemplary cases: Britain trying to domesticate and transplant breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean to feed laborers to prevent slave uprisings during the age of the Haitian Revolution. British colonial administrators smuggling knowledge of tea cultivation out of China in order to set up tea plantations in Assam. Eugenics, race science, biological essentialism, etc. in the early twentieth century. With my interests, my little corner of exposure/experience has to do mostly with conceptions of space/place; interspecies/multispecies relationships; borderlands and frontiers; Caribbean; Latin America; islands. So, a lot of these recs are focused there. But someone else would have better recs, especially depending on your interests. For example, Chakrabarti writes about history of medicine/healthcare. Paravisini-Gebert about extinction and Caribbean relationship to animals/landscape. Deb Roy focuses on insects and colonial administration in South Asia. Some scholars focus on the historiography and chronological trajectory of “modernity” or “botany” or “universities/academia,”, while some focus on Early Modern Spain or Victorian Britain or twentieth-century United States by region. With so much to cover, that’s why I’d recommend the articles above, since they’re kinda like overviews.Generally I read more from articles, essays, and anthologies, rather than full-length books.

Some other nice articles:

(On my blog, I’ve got excerpts from all of these articles/essays, if you want to search for or read them.)

Katherine McKittrick. “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea.” Antipode. First published September 2021.

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” A chapter in: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 2004.

Kathleen Susan Murphy. “A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America.” 2019. And also: “The Slave Trade and Natural Science.” In: Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. 2016.

Timothy J. Yamamura. “Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell.” 2017.

Elizabeth Bentley. “Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870-1935).” 2021.

Pratik Chakrabarti. “Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past.” Past & Present 242:1. 2019.

Jonathan Saha. “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma.” BJHS Themes. British Society for the History of Science. 2017.

Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. 2017.

Dante Furioso: “Sanitary Imperialism.” Jeremy Lee Wolin: “The Finest Immigration Station in the World.” Serubiri Moses. “A Useful Landscape.” Andrew Herscher and Ana Maria Leon. “At the Border of Decolonization.” All from e-flux.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” 2019.

Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” The Historical Journal. 2 October 2019.  

Rohan Deb Roy. “Introduction: Nonhuman Empires.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (1). May 2015.

Lawrence H. Kessler. “Entomology and Empire: Settler Colonial Science  and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation.” Arcadia (Spring 2017).

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner. “Monster as Medium: Experiments in Perception in Early Modern Science and Film.” e-flux. March 2021.

Lesley Green. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” e-flux Journal Issue #65. May 2015.

Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia. Spring 2021. 

Anna Boswell. “Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum.” 2018. And; “Climates of Change: A Tuatara’s-Eye View.”2020. And: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State." 2017.

Katherine Arnold. “Hydnora Africana: The ‘Hieroglyphic Key’ to Plant Parasitism.” Journal of the History of Ideas - JHI Blog - Dispatches from the Archives. 21 July 2021.

Helen F. Wilson. “Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes.” Environment and Planning. July 2019.

Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson. “Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. August 2007.

Kirsten Greer. “Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Neactic region in  the temperate North Atlantic, 1838-1880s.” Geoforum Volume 65. October 2015. And: “Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 2013,

Marco Chivalan Carrillo and Silvia Posocco. “Against Extraction in Guatemala: Multispecies Strategies in Vampiric Times.” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. April 2020.

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

Paulo Tavares. “The Geological Imperative: On the Political Ecology of the Amazon’s Deep History.” Architecture in the Anthropocene. Edited by Etienne Turpin. 2013.

Kathryn Yusoff. “Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time.” Social Text. 2019. And: “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower.” Handbook on the Geographies of Power. 2018. And: “Climates of sight: Mistaken visbilities, mirages and ‘seeing beyond’ in Antarctica.” In: High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science. 2008. And:“Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” 2017. And: “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical.” 2017.

Mara Dicenta. “The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego.” Arcadia. Spring 2020.

And then here are some books:

Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Cameron B. Strang); Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Londa Schiebinger, 2004);

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Helen Tilley, 2011); Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Jonathan Saha); Fluid Geographies: Water, Science and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (K. Maria D. Lane, 2024);  Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Edited by del Pilar Blanco and Page, 2020)

Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (Kirsten A. Greer); The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Hawthorne and Lewis, 2022); Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (Britt Rusert, 2017)

The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge (Arndt Brendecke, 2016); In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1960 (Alice Conklin, 2013); Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Andrew Stuhl)

Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Paul Winther); Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Sadiah Qureshi, 2011); Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart)

Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Aro Velmet, 2022); Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2014); Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884-1905 (Matthew Unangst, 2022);

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (Bernhard Gissibl, 2019); Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Edited by Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall, 2019)

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022); Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Allison Bigelow, 2020); The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca J.H. Woods); American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Megan Raby, 2017); Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism (Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, 2023); Unnsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (James Sweet, 2011); A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Anya Zilberstein, 2016); Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, 2019); Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970 (Edited by Anderson, Rozwadowski, et al, 2016)

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania (Maile Arvin); Overcoming Niagara: Canals, Commerce, and Tourism in the Niagara-Great Lakes Borderland Region, 1792-1837 (Janet Dorothy Larkin, 2018); A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (Michael A. Verney, 2022)

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Daniela Cleichmar, 2012); Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Arnab Dey, 2022); Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Edited by Crawford and Gabriel, 2019)

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Hi’ilei Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, 2022); In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokkohama (Eric Tagliacozzo); Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Urmi Engineer Willoughby, 2017); Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region (Edited by Hirsch, et al, 2022); Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910 (Sarah E.M. Grossman, 2018)

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski); Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Lenny A. Urena Valerio); Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Adam Sills, 2021)

Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Alan Mikhail, 2017); Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Jim Endersby); Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Edited by Edwin Martini, 2015)

Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Multiple authors, 2007); Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Peter Redfield); Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Andrew Togert, 2015); Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism (Hannah Holleman, 2016); Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (Katja Grotzner Neves, 2019)

Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Anna K. Sagal, 2022); The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harriet Ritvo); Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (Michitake Aso); A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Kathryn Yusoff, 2018); Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Jessica Barnes, 2023); No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Keith Pluymers); Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1768-1941 (Lynn Hollen Lees, 2017); Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (Douglas C. Harris, 2001); Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep Time (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy)

Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Joyce Chaplin, 2001); Mapping the Amazon: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Jeremy Zallen); Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Erik Linstrum, 2016); Lakes and Empires in Macedonian History: Contesting the Water (James Pettifer and Mirancda Vickers, 2021); Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti); Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (David Fedman)

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Julie Cruikshank); The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem (Kristin A. Wintersteen, 2021); The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Ralph O’Connor); An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Benjamin Kingsbury, 2018); Geographies of City Science: Urban Life and Origin Debates in Late Victorian Dublin (Tanya O’Sullivan, 2019)

American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (John Krige, 2006); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Ann Laura Stoler, 2002); Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (Faisal H. Husain, 2021)

The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930 (Gilberto Hochman, 2016); The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (James Hevia); Japan’s Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Annika A. Culver, 2022)

Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation (Jose E. Martinez, 2021); Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Jessica Bissette Perea, 2021); Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (Mashid Mayar); Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Andrew Zimmerman, 2001)

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Multiple authors, 2016); The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Katherine Johnston, 2022); Seeking the American Tropics: South Florida’s Early Naturalists (James A. Kushlan, 2020)

The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Laurence Monnais); Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (Linda J. Seligmann, 2023) ; Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world (Edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard, 2017); Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (Heather Ann Swanson, 2022); Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Mark Bassin, 2000); The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (Erin Drew, 2022)

Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures (Anita Mannur, 2022); On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, 1830-1890 (Philip Gooding, 2022); All Things Harmless, Useful, and Ornamental: Environmental Transformation Through Species Acclimitization, from Colonial Australia to the World (Pete Minard, 2019)

Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Setller Colonialism (Jarrod Hore, 2022); Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (Meng Zhang, 2021); The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (David A. Chang);

Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (Christine Keiner); Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (Mauro Jose Caraccioli); Two Years below the Horn: Operation Tabarin, Field Science, and Antarctic Sovereignty, 1944-1946 (Andrew Taylor, 2017); Mapping Water in Dominica: Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism (Mark W. Hauser, 2021)

To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Jason Smith, 2018); Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (Ian Matthew Miller, 2020); Breeds of Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Sandra Swart and Greg Bankoff, 2007)

Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Lachlan Fleetwood, 2022); Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (John Ryan Fisher, 2017); Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (Timothy P. Barnard, 2019)

An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation (Micha Rahder, 2020); Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Debjani Bhattacharyya, 2018);  Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (Kristen Hussey, 2021)

Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka); Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Ann Elias, 2019); Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (Angela Thompsell, 2015)

[critter-of-the-day]

Alright, let’s go for another novel species (though the paper describing them is almost 7 years old now, so not really). Here is Freeman’s Dog-faced Bat (Cynomops freemani). They are from the lowlands of the Pacific Coast in Panama [1].

Now originally they were first captured over a decade ago in 2012. They tend to fly very high, so it can be difficult to capture them in the nets usually used to trap bats, but not only did the original research group manage it, but a second did too in 2017 [2]. They can also be found to shelter in abandoned houses [1].

They’re insectivorous, meaning they feed on insects, which can be seen through their echolocation calls which are long and shallow. They do have different types of calls and the ability to modulate them as well. They are also rather small, being only about the length of a thumb [1].

They weren’t named after the person who discovered them, but rather a different bat scientist: Patricia Freeman. She spent decades studying free-tailed bats, which Freeman’s Dog-faced Bat is a species of, so this was considered a way of honouring her work. In response to finding out about this, Freeman said “It’s wicked cool, right?” [2].

Sources: [1] [2] [Image]

[hit-song-showdown]

Year-End Poll #68: 2017

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Ed Sheeran, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, Bruno Mars, Kendrick Lamar, The Chainsmokers, Migos, The Chainsmokers, Sam Hunt, Imagine Dragons, Post Malone. End description]

More information about this blog here

It's easier more than ever to see the effects of streaming on the pop charts. As electropop and club music become a distant memory, the pop music of the late 2010's works better with individual listening. As mentioned before, streaming works better for album listening, much more than the iTunes era which encouraged the purchasing of individual songs (which was great for singles artists, but not necessarily for albums). Some artists were able to hack this system. For example, Drake's Views (featured on the previous poll) was notable for having 20 songs on its tracklist -- which is a lot for a pop release. Unlike the iTunes era or even the CD era before, longer albums with shorter songs flourish more in the streaming landscape.

Streaming also helped to continue blurring the line between genres and audiences. Without going too much into it (because this is a topic I could ramble on about endlessly), genres were not handed down to us from Mount Olympus or something. Genre is a tool of marketing, and the lines drawn between them can have a variety of cultural, racial, economic, gender, religious, and other variables between them. These lines were more prominent in previous years before streaming made it easier to access just about every kind of music at once. This is when we start to see the rise of a concept known as the "monogenre". In order to cater to as wide an audience as possible, everything starts to sound like everything. A little rock, a little indie, a little trap, a little tropical house, a little festival EDM. There were also those who criticized the streaming era in how it promotes a more "passive" listening style, since playlists and algorithms could continue playing ad infinitum without the listener needing to seek out new music themselves. While I certainly see the evidence of that on the charts, I don't think this tells the complete story.

As a less cynical counter-argument, streaming has made it easier for listeners to find music that otherwise wouldn't have been marketed to them. I believe that this could be one of the factors behind reggaeton finding a growing audience among English speakers. Obviously reggaeton did not originate this year. The roots of the genre can be traced back to the 1980's in Panama where it would later grow an even larger audience in Puerto Rico. The genre would grow in popularity in the States as well, especially in the early 2000's. But if you weren't paying attention to Spanish language music (and you didn't grow up in the Southwest), it was easy for mainstream audiences to miss it. Reggaeton includes influences from dancehall and hip-hop, so it makes sense that the genre would find a mainstream English-speaking audience when those two genres were also shaping pop music. Because Despacito wasn't just big for a reggaeton song. It wasn't even big for a Latin pop song. Despacito led to Daddy Yankee becoming the sixth most listened-to artist on Spotify in 2017, and led to an influx of Latin and reggaeton artists who were able to cross over without English language remixes. Billboard magazine has an article here about the "Despacito Effect".

[mariacallous]

At 3 o’clock on a Monday afternoon in October, 2017, a car driven by Daphne Caruana Galizia – Malta’s most famous and influential journalist, and my mother – exploded. She had barely made it out of the lane leading to our house in Bidnija, a lonely hamlet in northwest Malta, when a bomb detonated from under her seat. She was 53 years old.

Everybody read Daphne. She was the first woman in the country to write a political column, and the first person to sign their own name to one. Over 30 years, she investigated presidents, prime ministers and opposition leaders. In a country of around half a million people, her personal blog received as many visits a day, and more than a million during election campaigns – a greater number than the combined circulation of Malta’s daily newspapers.

And for her efforts to expose corruption, she became increasingly demonized and isolated. My two brothers and I grew up thinking it was normal for her to be sued and slandered, to have police officers stationed at the gates of her garden haven of olive and citrus trees, either to guard her or to arrest her. It became part of our daily routine to watch her check the underside of her car for explosives before taking us to school.

The first attempt on her life happened when I was a teenager. I was out with friends and came home at 2:30 in the morning to find the house on fire with her inside it. At school the following Monday, I was told that it was irresponsible of my mother to have let me stay out so late. I remember thinking: There’s a problem in Malta, and it isn’t my mother.

As the Maltese officials she wrote about went from taking bribes from drug traffickers in old Malta to soliciting them from oligarchs in our rapidly globalizing country, my mother graduated from reporting on low-level graft to covering corruption on an international scale. The sums multiplied into the hundreds of millions, with the criminal networks stretching from Panama to post-Soviet states – and under the strain of these illicit inflows, Malta fell apart. Its rickety institutions, never properly reformed since decolonization from the United Kingdom in 1964, nor since its accession to the European Union in 2004, left my mother completely vulnerable in a culture of virtually unchallenged impunity.

At the time of her murder, she was in the midst of reporting on how Malta’s energy minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff had opened shell companies, registered in Panama, within days of their party’s election in 2013. After her death, a group of journalists, working under the banner of the Daphne Project, pursued her work, reporting that the shell companies were set to receive €150,000 a month through a corrupt energy deal between Malta’s government, Azerbaijan and a Maltese businessman. Six years after her death, however, there have been no convictions of any of the people my mother exposed; most haven’t even been prosecuted. The institutions that were meant to enforce the law in Malta have been systematically underresourced, cowed and subjected to political interference.

In the face of international pressure, enough police work was done to arrest four men in connection with carrying out her assassination. All have since confessed; three are serving time and one was pardoned in exchange for giving evidence. Yet it has taken years of campaigning by my family, activists and ordinary civilians outraged by her death to get Malta to mount its first public inquiry, which concluded that the state was responsible for her death. As of this writing, another four men, including the Maltese businessman, are awaiting trial for her murder – but no one has been prosecuted over the corrupt energy deal, nor over any of my mother’s other major stories.

My mother’s assassination wasn’t just a tragedy for my family; it was also a bellwether. After her death, I became a journalist in Britain, a place that has long prided itself on its democratic, rules-based order. But from the vantage point of my own reporting, which mainly focuses on fraud and political corruption, I can see that there’s a problem that goes well beyond Malta. Boris Johnson – with his cronyism and patronage, with his polarizing effect on the electorate, with his moneyed politics and hollowing out of Britain’s ancient institutions, and with his officials’ treatment of journalists – was just one example pointing to a worrying picture for democracies everywhere.

The malfeasance in tiny Malta, which my mother devoted her life to bringing to light – and which ultimately killed her – reflects emerging rot in Western democracies. When a country’s institutions are deprived of their independence or starved of resources, and when the journalists who expose corruption are harassed, intimidated and abused, that country’s democracy will vanish. In Malta, six years ago, it took the car bombing of the country’s most famous journalist in broad daylight to start to turn the tide. I hope it will not take more death to awaken everyone else to this growing threat around the world.

[saydams]

from the article:

"The state agency is giving the public six days to digest the park plans before it hosts simultaneous, apparently in-person-only meetings across the state. All meetings are scheduled for 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday. Agendas obtained by the Tampa Bay Times from the parks Tallahassee office are scarce in detail, but show there will be a brief presentation followed by a public comment period."

[...]

Eric Draper, who served as the director of Florida’s state parks between 2017 and 2021, said it appears the state’s environmental agency is skirting the legal process and the parks system’s own internal operations manual for updating park management plans.

“This appears to be something that has been planned in secret, and it doesn’t appear to have involved the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are volunteers in the parks, the citizen support organizations, or the many people who have been involved in helping to create and develop Florida’s award-winning park system,” Draper said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times. /end excerpt

if you are in florida, the comment period is apparently this tuesday, August 27 2024 from 3-4pm, in person

locations for the in-person meetings are below the cut, and in the full article

Hillsborough River State Park, Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library, 2902 W. Bearss Ave., Tampa, Community Room D

Honeymoon Island State Park, The District, 11141 U.S. 19 N., Suite 204, Clearwater

Oleta River State Park, Florida International University, Biscayne Bay campus, Kovens Conference Center, Room 114, 3000 NE 151 St. North, Miami

Jonathan Dickinson State Park, The Flagler of Stuart, 201 SW Flagler Ave., River Room, Stuart

Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park, Downtown Event Center, 416 NE First St., Fort Lauderdale, Lecture Hall, Building C, second floor (enter at Main Entrance B — clearly marked on the outside of the building)

Anastasia State Park, First Coast Technical College, The Character Counts Conference Center, Building C, 2980 Collins Ave., St. Augustine

Camp Helen State Park, Lyndell Conference Center, 423 Lyndell Lane, Panama City Beach

Topsail Hill Preserve State Park and Grayton Beach State Park, The Lakehouse at the Watercolor Inn, 238 Watercolor Blvd. W., Santa Rosa Beach

[afvenvs3000f24]

Unit 3 Blog Post: Privilege and its Role Within Nature Interpretation

Privilege, in terms of my working definition of it, is an advantage or immunity that can be exclusive to groups or individuals depending on the degree of it. Sometimes, privilege isn't simply assigned to individuals or groups due to physicality; it can also pertain to the state of mind and even decisions (regardless of whether made before or after your birth). Privilege can be pictured as an umbrella given to everyone at birth, but the type of umbrella and its quality depends on physical and mental factors such as your race, health/body functions and mental health. Additionally, the condition of everyone's umbrella depends on your parents and the decisions they made until you were born. Eventually, it will also depend on your own choices in life. An umbrella works well for this hypothetical example because, like privilege, an umbrella is a tool in life that can help and protect you. In this case, it can protect people from getting wet and possibly sick or even help avoid skin damage from the sun on warmer days. Another great use of one's umbrella is to share it and help those who unfortunately were not handed the same cards in life.

Focusing more on nature interpretation, before beginning this course, if you had asked me if I thought privilege played a role in nature interpretation, I wouldn't have given it too much thought and said no. But after reading the blogs and textbook chapters from the past weeks, as well as the unit lessons we've done so far, I've had a more open mind in seeing all the different perspectives of nature interpretation and how each person experiences it. After analyzing my past experiences with nature, recalling my visits to other countries and cities, plus thinking about my education and the extensive knowledge I've gained, all confirmed for me that privilege does play a great role in nature interpretation. As I was reflecting on many blogs from the first unit, many people (including me) mentioned that their families or parents were the ones who offered them a sense of place within nature. Having a close, healthy relationship with those they love and being able to take time off of work and afford to go on many nature trips to share their love for nature through knowledge and guidance is a privilege.

An image I took while on my vacation in Panama, on our way to a boat tour.

Additionally, while I was in Panama this summer visiting family, one of the first things I noticed while travelling around in different neighbourhoods with varying socioeconomic backgrounds, was the difference between available, well-kept green areas. In Costa Del Este (a neighbourhood in Panama City) where my uncle and cousins live, there are large green areas, each having a different specific use for soccer, football, track, biking, hiking, and large parks with beautiful fountains; most of it felt familiar and reminded me of home and the trails I had been on before to some extent. However, this was not the case when we drove by poorer neighbourhoods; many more small houses were occupying the area, and I saw little to no green areas or parks. Even when visiting the local markets in these neighbourhoods, I noticed a lot of litter and thrown garbage down the road in the trees and flowing down rivers; my dad had even spotted a floating fridge getting carried away by the current. This particular visit stuck with me and made me question the injustice of it all leading me to do some research on Panama's state of poverty and education in which I found out that its education is ranked 83 of 144 of the world's worst (Reilly, 2017). Even though there isn't a specific correct way to interpret nature, I strongly believe that it is a privilege in our society to receive enough education and guidance (regardless of whether from an institution or a reputable person) to be able to interpret nature from an outlook of respect and admiration; rather than not thinking twice about how one's trash affects the world.

Once arriving back in Canada, I really took in how privileged I am to live in an area and country with so much greenery and public spaces to be with nature. It also made me realize what a luxury it is to have free time to spend in nature and learn from it rather than having to use that time to work to provide for your family and yourself.

Source:

Reilly, J. (2020, July 17). Rich country, poor people: Life on the rural Panamanian coast - ICWA. Institute of Current World Affairs. https://www.icwa.org/rich-country-poor-people-panama/

[cchickki]

OC Dani infodump

Long time coming for my friends in the Uncharted Discord, sorry it took forever

under the cut because there's a lot lol

"disclaimer" below:

okay first Dani is from my uncharted fanfiction series. originally started in 2016 my first story finished in 2017 where i had planned to make a sequel but didn't start it until this year. the original story and the sequel follow the events of Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy, the AU follows uncharted 4 during the prison in Panama but doesn't follow the same timeline.

go to resources:

the original story from fanfiction.net: (x)

part ii of the original story: (x)

new au: (x)

more about Dani including fanart drawn by other artists: (x)

photograph inspirations I used for Dani: (x)

me and a friend of mine back when uncharted 4 first came out helped me create Dani. note: we were two very mentally ill girlies, so a lot of the themes can get very heavy. a lot of trauma so trigger warning!

okay now onto Dani:

name: Danielle "Dani" Adler (married last name)

age: in the original story she's a couple years younger than Rafe, so in her early 30s. in the AU she is the same age as him, so born in the 1970s. (Rafe is estimated to be 35-38 in during the events of Uncharted 4)

ethnicity: Peruvian (mother's side) / Italian-American (father's side)

birthplace: around/outside of Pisac, Peru

zodiac (sun): Pisces

eye color: brown

hair color: dark brown/black

*Her parents met while her father was in Peru investigating the Inca ruins. Her father is how you'd describe Sully or Nate in the same profession.*

more random facts about Dani:

Dani is a martial artist practitioner of soo bahk do (she's a skilled fighter)

Not a good climber

Spanish is her first language, but she speaks multiple languages

She’s left handed

Missing her left ring and middle finger (original story)

Area of study: Ancient East Asian/Buddhist Art - also Inca Empire

how she got involved with the adlers

Dani's father, while decent at his job of artifact collecting, often had issues with biting off more than he could chew. coupled with gambling problems and double-crossing, he would find himself in hot water more than once. He was recruited by the Adlers for his expertise when Dani was a baby. The Adlers became his main clients, but he would borrow a lot from them, so a debt had to be settled.

My old friend and I are huge fans of Titanic, so picture Cal and Rose for this next part. Took heavy inspiration from their relationship in the movie without even realizing it at first lol.

Dani isn't given much choice and has to wed Rafe. Their marriage is more of a "business transaction" how I would describe it. Although they grew up together and do genuinely get along, there isn't exactly romantic feelings there.

In the main/original story they have two children.

Holden Adler (son, deceased)

Vera Adler (daughter)

What drove the final wedge in their marriage was the death of Holden. To put it briefly from one of the chapters in the story: He died tragically in an accident under Rafe's care. Dani fled hiding and becoming estranged. To protect her daughter her cousin Sophie has custody.

Their relationship in the AU will be a bit different.

Dani's personality:

indecisive

emotional

"unreliable narrator"

book smart

Those are the main words that come to mind while describing Dani. Obviously traumatized from different events in her life, she often has issues with regulating her emotions and cries easily. Most of her life has been out of her control so she often listens to others when they tell her to do something (within reason) and can be easily persuaded and can flip-flop.

She keeps peoples at arms length at first, but once she befriends them and builds a relationship she tends to give them the benefit of the doubt. Very empathic, she can feel when the tone and mood shifts without anything being spoken.

Since Dani was pretty much groomed into the thief/artifact seeker lifestyle, she specializes in that, specifically in ancient East Asian arts and history. She would go on "jobs" because she either had to pay off her father's debts or because the Adlers wanted their hands on something.

Her focus can also wane due to her traits of suicidal ideation and fear from scary loan sharks (amongst other things). Because of this she can be both physically and emotionally absent as a parent, especially after the death of Holden it was extremely difficult for her to cope.

In the original story and the sequel, Dani narrates the story from her point of view and leaves a lot about her past, her motives, and even keeps certain things like her children a secret from the reader and the characters in the story. That's why I labeled her as an unreliable narrator.

She’s currently living with her cousin and daughter in the Philippines, making being an active parent her main priority.

Dani's relationship with Sam:

Working on doing a more in-depth analysis of their relationship with the new AU.

Sam and Dani get along well from the start. Both emotional, they sometimes clash, but there's no denying their attraction to each other. Dani loves how he was able to find freedom in his life, and how passionate he is about Henry Avery (for example), and that he actually likes what he's doing, it's not a forced chore or just a job to him. Sam likes to flirt with Dani a lot, and she doesn't know how to really respond to it.

Unsure how to label their relationship, they kind of have a friends with benefits thing going on? Dani's convinced she has real feelings for him, but her lack of experience with actual healthy relationships might have her perspective warped.

in conclusion

Dani is a complex and deeply flawed character who experienced a lot of trauma, and doesn't often regulate her emotions in the healthiest ways. She is going through a lot of growth and is coming back mentally stronger than ever, the first step was finally cutting off her parents and making peace with Rafe (kinda) before his death (in the first story). In my original efforts to keep her as authentic/real as possible, and to prevent her from being a "Mary Sue" (super outdated term now that I don't agree with) I might have went a little too hard on displaying her weaknesses in an attempt to keep her more grounded. I had a lot of feedback from the community at the time that seemed in favor of this, so I kept going. I'm going to be taking a slightly different approach in the AU, but I'm going to keep her mostly the same.

I don't know what to say, I love flawed characters and Dani is my broken baby.

[rafefar]

Panama City, Florida

Nov 2017

[foxes-that-run]

Taylor wearing a Gucci Lion ring 12 April 2021

Taylor wore Gucci Lion Ring with a green stone to Zoe kravitz birthday 1 December 2021:

This throw back photo was shared 1 December 2023. There is a guest with a face mask on the background. In 2022 Zoe was was a YSL party and 2020 she shared a photo alone.

4 days after wearing the Gucci lion ring Taylor recorded your loosing me. The post with that date was shared the day before this throwback. She has returned from visiting Joe in Panama for 4 days on the 22nd November.

Taylor wore other pieces of the Gucci series in the LAWYMMD video in 2017 before Harry got his lion rings in August 2018. However by 2021 he wore it constantly and was the face of Gucci

[kaijuboarcreations]

Into the Andersonverse: A full timeline of events for the confirmed continuity of Gerry Anderson Supermarionation shows (Fireball XL5 to Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons)

(Disclaimer*: i actually opted to follow Thunderbirds are Go canon for ages *don't ask me why it's a process plus the actual ages and birth order for the boys is heavily debated in both the og series and are go so don't at me* Also yes I took a few creative liberties to fill in some blanks they are marked by ** so you know what isn't canon, and yes it doesn't always make sense *aka how Venus is a war orphan if the war ended before she was born* but you can't blame me for that, that's just how it was written)

Anyways yall better love me for this it took me three days to make

1988: Sally "Grandma" Tracy is born (maiden name unknown)

2012: Professor Mathew Matic is born in Britain -Aloysius "Nosey" Parker is born - Jeff Tracy is born in Kansas to Grant and Sally Tracy**

2015: Commander Sam Shore (real name Samuel Arthur)is born in Kansas

2017: Charles Grey (Colonel White) is born in England

2028: European Atomic War and Mass Riots in France

2029: Conrad Turner (Captain Black) is born in Manchester, England

2030: Steve Zodiac is born on Mars -Sam Shore leaves home to join the navy

2031: Edward Wilkie (Dr Fawn) is born in Yalumba, Australia

2033: Professor Matic graduates with 22 degrees in astrophysics, robotic, and astronomy, and becomes a navigator for Zero-X interplanetary missions -Sam Shore is given command of a World Security Service submarine -Bradley Holden (Captain Gray) is born in Chicago

2034: Sam Shore befriends Admiral Jack Denver -Patrick Donaghue (Captain Magenta) is born in Dublin Bay, Ireland -The European Atomic War ends (the war left Venus and Conrad Turner orphaned)

2035: Venus is born in Paris -George Lee "Phones" Sheridan is born in South Carolina -Adam Svenson (Captain Blue) is born in Boston -Richard Fraiser (Captain Ochre) is born in Detroit

2036: Paul Metcalfe (Captain Scarlet) is born in Hampshire, England

2037: Jeff Tracy becomes a Colonel for the US Air Force and later transfers to the Space Agency -Patrick Donaghue and his parents immigrate to the US, living in poverty in Manhattan

2038: Troy Tempest is born in New York City -Jeff Tracy marries Lucielle** -Charles Grey graduates from the University of East Angila -Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward is born to Sir Hugh and Lady Amelia**

2040: War damage fixed -Sam Shore marries Elaine MacDonald -Scott Tracy is born**

-"Brains" is born -The Southeast Asia revolts -Juliette Pontoin (Destiny Angel) is born in Paris

2041: Atlanta Shore is born from Elaine and Sam in California -Seymour Griffiths (Lieutenant Green) is born in Trinidad

2042: John Tracy is born** -The Iceland Dispute -The Panama-Ithsmus rebellion begins -Karen Wainwright (Symphony Angel) is born in Cedar Rapids -Chan Kwan (Harmony Angel) is born in Tokyo

2043: The Panama-Ithsmus rebellion ends -Magnolia Jones (Melody Angel) is born in Atlanta -Dianne Simms (Rhapsody Angel) is born in London

2044: Virgil Tracy is born**

2045: Professor Matic takes the role as a professor for Universe University -Conrad Turner joins the British Air Force

2046: Marina is born -Gordon Tracy is born** -Charles Grey moves up to the rank of 'Captain' -The British Civil War begins (during which Conrad Turner is badly wounded)

2047: Steve Zodiac joints WSP Academy -Tanusha "Kayo" Kyrano/Tintin Kyrano is born** -Britain joins the World Government -Charles Grey becomes Admiral while commanding the World Navy Destroyer fleet -Conrad Turner joins the World Air Force

2048: Charles Grey joins the Universal Secret Service and marries his field partner Elizabeth Sonmers -Edward Wilkie starts medical school in Brisbane

2049: the British sector of the USS is reorganized by Charles Grey

2050: Professor Matic designs and builds the world's first Nutomic Hyperdrive Motor and is given an honorary position as Major while heading the XL project -Alan Tracy is born** -Charles Grey is promoted to the head of the USS British sector

2051: Steve Zodiac becomes an astronaut and sub-lieutenant at Space City -Prototypes of the XL project are debuted including XL1 Alpha -Adam Svenson receives a full ride scholarship to Harvard University at age 16

2052: the Anti-Bereznik Riots (of which Patrick Donaghue was involved where he was later arrested and imprisoned for 90 days)

2053: Steve Zodiac befriends space explorer Jim Ireland who sets off on a 10 year voyage -Seymour Griffiths loses his parents in an air disaster

2054: Richard Fraiser joins the World Government Police Corps after being rejected from university and the Air Force -Bradley Holden graduates from the World Navy Academy in San Diego immediately enlisting in the World Navy submarine service

2055: Steve is promoted to captain and is assigned to co-pilot Fireball XL5 -Conrad Turner joins the World Space Patrol and mans Fireball XL3 -Adam Svenson joins the World Aeronautic Society as a test pilot -Patrick Donaghue finishes his studies and graduates from Yale University with degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and technology and he takes a job as a computer programmer for a firm in Brooklyn but soon quit for a life of crime -Edward Wilkie graduates from Brisbane with degrees in medicine and biology and joins the Australian sector of the World Medical Organization as assistant medical controler. Later that same year he is promoted to health controller of the Scandinavian sector.

2056: Venus joins the World Space Patrol -Colonel Grange suffers a mental breakdown while piloting Fireball XL5 leaving Steve to bring them to safety -Marina's mother dies -Troy Tempest joins the World Navy Academy in San Diego -Lucielle Tracy passes away

2057: All Fireball XL ships are outfitted with the Nutomic Hyperdrive Motor -Paul Metcalfe graduates from Winchester University with degrees in History, Technology, and Mathematics -Adam Svenson is promoted to active field agent for WAS -Patrick Donaghue becomes a kingpin for organized crime in New York due to his leadership over several gangs and hacking abilities -Edward Wilkie revolutionizes the WMO's medical technology through robots which places him in the position of Administrator for Advancements in Medicine and Medical Science -Juliette Pontoin attends University in Rome

2058: Elaine Shore suffers a heart attack and passes away -Phones takes on work as a mercenary -Karen Wainwright attends Yale University at age 16

-Lady Penelope becomes chief operative of the Federal Agents Beareu where she meets Jeff Tracy (wait...... F.A.B..... so that's what that stands for....)

2059: Paul Metcalf begins study at West Point Military University in New York -Richard Fraiser transfers to Chicago and takes on one of the toughest crime syndicates in the country

2060: An attack on his vessel causes Sam Shore to lose use of his legs. He and Atlanta move to Marineville to command the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (which is newly established)

-Gordon Tracy interns with WASP** -Troy Tempest is captured on a failed mission and is rescued by Phones who he convinces to join the navy -Troy Tempest arrives at WASP Marineville -Juliette Pontoin joins the World Army Air Force and is transferred to the Intelligence Corps where she hones her skills as a pilot, leads the Woman's Fighter Squadron

2061: Magnolia Jones joins the World Army Airforce at age 18

-Gordon Tracy suffers an accident while working with a high speed hydrofoil**

2062: the start of the events of Fireball XL5 -Jeff Tracy establishes International Rescue -Seymour Griffiths graduates University in Kingston Jamaica with degrees in telecommunications, technology, and music and joins WASP as a junior hydrophone operator (his brothers followed but were killed in an accident which Seymour transferred as a telecommunications operator at Marineville) -Bradley Holden joins WASP as the Lieutenant commander security chief and takes the role of piloting Stingray in her prototype years -Karen Wainwright becomes a full fledged field agent for Universal Secret Service after several years of training -Magnolia Jones becomes lost while taking the XKF 115 aircraft on a test flight and loses contact with control -Chan Kwan graduates University and is determined to fly solo around the world

2063: Venus earns a degree in Space Psychology -Steve Zodiac is awarded Astronaut of the Year -Paul Metcalfe graduates from West Point and joins the World Air Force -Juliette Pontoin leaves WAAF to start her own pilot contracting firm -Magnolia Jones returns after being lost for almost a year after rebuilding her craft from the wreckage. She shortly leaves to focus on flying and setting up a freelance air taxi service -Dianne Simms meets Lady Penelope and is offered a position in the FAB to train as an agent

2064: Bradley Holden receives a severe back injury taking him out of the line to duty and landing him a desk job at Marineville -Troy Tempest becomes captain of Stingray and takes on Phones as his co-pilot -Chan Kwan attempts her voyage around the world but stops to answer a distress call to rescue a group of men from a burning tanker ship in the Pacific. Six months later she tries again and succeeds

2065: the events of Thunderbirds begins -the Spectrum Organization is established and Charles Grey turns down the position of Supreme Commander of the USS to take on his role as "Colonel White" for Spectrum under the Spectrum Selection Committee -Seymour Griffiths joins Spectrum under the codename "Lieutenant Green" -Conrad Turner joins Spectrum under the codename "Captain Black" and quickly climbs the ranks as Spectrum's top agent -Paul Metcalfe joins Spectrum under the code name "Captain Scarlet" (thanks to recommendation from Conrad) -Adam Svenson joins Spectrum under the code name "Captain Blue" -Patrick Donaghue is pardoned for his crimes and is offered a position as an agent of Spectrum under the code name "Captain Magenta" -Dr Edward Wilkie is approached by Spectrum to become the Supreme Medical Commander of Cloudbase and given the codename "Doctor Fawn" -Juliette Pontoin is approached to join Spectrum's squadron of fighter pilots and is given the codename "Destiny Angel" -Magnolia Jones is selected by Spectrum as a fighter pilot and is given the codename "Melody Angel" -Lady Penelope quits her role in the FAB to focus on her work with International Rescue. The FAB dissolves soon after. -Dianne Simms is forced to leave the FAB and becomes a chief security officer for the Euro-Charter Airline company -Chan Kwan's father dies and she takes over the family air taxi company 2066: Richard Fraiser fakes assassination and joins Spectrum under the code name "Captain Ochre" -Bradley Holden clears a health check under Spectrum and is recruited as an agent under the codename "Captain Gray"

-Karen Wainwright quits her work with the USS to become a pilot full time. Shortly after she passes her exam to join Spectrum and joins the Angel squadron under the codename "Symphony Angel" -Dianne Simms is approached by Spectrum to join the Angel squadron and is given the codename "Rhapsody Angel"

-Chan Kwan is approached by the Spectrum Selection Committee to become an Angel pilot, in which she is accepted and given the codename "Harmony Angel"

2068: the events of Thunderbirds end and the events of Captain Scarlet begin (the Mysterons declare war on Earth after the Zero X Mars expedition comes across their settlement and attacks)

[radley-writes]

That's wild that your book was written in 2016?! I didnt even think about that

Indeed! I started writing Strictly No Heroics in 2016, after the Panama Papers came out (remember those? They, and the public response, was - as readers may be able to tell - a pretty big inspiration for the story). Iirc, I didn't finish until early 2017.

Strictly No Heroics was the second novel I ever wrote (third, if we count the 200K atrocity I pumped out at 14). Still, it had big Baby's First Novel vibes - there is so much that I would do differently if I started from scratch today! I tried to cram in every plotline under the sun, and as a result, it took an agonising amount of editing and rewriting, with the help of Betas, my agent, and my editor, to polish up to a publishable state.

The resulting product, I have been reliably assured,is a fast-paced non-stop adrenaline-fuelled dash of a book. I kinda love that! Blame the ADHD.

But that's why some of the setting and the queer culture may feel a little dated - it's very much 'set' in the mid-late 2010s!

Oh, and btw, you should all buy it xoxoxoxo

:BUY MY BOOK HERE!:

UK version here!

[aiveecastillo]

Miss Universe Winners (2010-2022)

2000: India; Lara Dutta

2001: Puerto Rico; Denise Quiñones

2002: Russia; Oxana Fedorova (DT)

------: Panama; Justine Pasek

2003: Dominican Republic; Amelia Vega

2004: Australia; Jennifer Hawkins

2005: Canada; Natalie Glebova

2006: Puerto Rico; Zuleyka Rivera

2007: Japan; Riyo Mori

2008: Venezuela; Dayana Mendoza

2009: Venezuela; Stefania Fernandez

2010: Mexico; Ximena Navarrete

2011: Angola; Leila Lopes

2012: USA; Olivia Culpo

2013: Venezuela; Gabriela Isler

2014: Colombia: Paulina Vega

2015: Colombia; Ariadna Gutierrez

2016: France; Iris Mittenaere

2017: South Africa; Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters

2018: Australia; Catriona Gray

2019: South Africa; Zozibini Tunzi

2020: Mexico; Andrea Meza

2021: India; Harnaaz Sandhu

2022: USA; R'Bonney Gabriel

[mariacallous]

(JTA) — Over 20 Jewish groups from the United States and Spanish-speaking countries are calling on Spain’s linguistic authority to drop two antisemitic definitions from its official dictionary.

The 300-year-old Madrid-based Academy, or RAE, oversees the evolution of Spanish through its Dictionary of the Spanish Language. In the entry for the word “Jew,” the fifth definition listed translates to a “greedy or usurious” person.

The entry for the word “judiada” — which notes that the term “originated with antisemitic intent” — has two definitions: first, “a dirty trick or an action that is detrimental to someone,” and second, “a crowd or group of Jews.”

“The definitions of the word judío and judiada in no way reflect the true meaning of these terms,” reads a letter sent to the RAE this week that is signed by groups ranging from Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities to the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “These descriptions are the product of a medieval and renaissance terminology of rejection, envy and hatred directed at the Jews who, because of their work, had the highest incomes – which was one of the factors that led to their expulsion from Spain by the Catholic monarchs.”

Spanish lawyer Borja Luján Lago is leading the groups’ request. He was contacted by the Jewish community of Panama after he successfully asked the RAE in February to modify the entry of the word “lawyer,” which included the definitions “talkative” and “chatty.”

The RAE confirmed to the Spanish news agency EFE that the claim was received and that “it will be processed following the usual channels.”

“We can presume that those terms as crystallized in the Dictionary are a sign of an antisemitic prejudice still prior to the Edict of Expulsion of 1492 that has been maintained throughout the centuries,” Ariel Gelblung, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for Latin America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He was referring to the Inquisition, which expelled all Jews from Spain or forced those who remained to convert to Catholicism.

The RAE’s dictionary modifies definitions each year. In 2017, it added the words “kosher” and “hummus.”

In 2019, the RAE helped open an academy in Israel dedicated to the study and preservation of Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish — a language that developed and morphed as Jews left Spain for other nearby countries following the Inquisition.

[felipeandletizia]

Felipe and Letizia retrospective: January 13th

2005: Annual reception offered to Diplomatic Corps accredited in Spain

2008: Visited Panama

2009: Meeting of the Board of the Foundation San Millán de la Cogolla

2010: Visited Murcia

2011: Delivery of the distinctions “City of Science and Innovation” & Lunch offered to the president of Hungary Pál Schmitt

2012: Working meeting on the Plan of Action of the Spanish Association Against Cancer for 2012

2013: Funeral of Sergeant David Fernandez Ureña, pertaining to the Spanish contingent of ISAF, deceased in Afganistan

2014: Audiences at la Zarzuela

2017: Audiences at la Zarzuela

2020: Oath of the ministers of the new Government at la Zarzuela & Traveled to Muscat, Oman, to offer his condolences upon the passing of the Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said

2021: Opening of the 11th Spanish Investors Day

2022: Received credentials from new ambassadors

2023: Audience with Cándido Conde-Pumpido Tourón, President of the Constitutional Court & Delivered the Iberdola Scholarships

F&L Through the Years: 1113/??

[brookston]

Holidays 12.20

Holidays

Abolition Day (Réunion)

Big Chungus Day

Bo Aung Kyaw Day (Burma)

Captain America Day

Cathode-Ray Tube Day

Day of National Mourning (Panama)

Dot Your I's Day

Dot Your I's With Smiley's Day

Fête des Cafres (Abolition of Slavery Day; Réunion, French Guiana)

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover Day

Fur-Day

Games Day

Go Caroling Day

Halcyon Days of Calm Seas begin

International Human Solidarity Day (UN)

Invocation of Molag Bal (Elder Scrolls)

Katharina von Bora Day

Kitzmas

Louisiana Purchase Day

Make An Ornament Day

Mudd Day

National Gregory Day

National Steven Day

Patient Empathy Day

Poet Laureate Day

Resilience Night

Ring of Troth Day

Sacagawea Day

SARE Day (Macau)

Security Agency Worker’s Day (Russia)

Shovel Day (French Republic)

Space Force Day

Stolen Day

Tammasmass E'en (Orkney Islands)

Try to Remember Where You Hid the Christmas Gifts Day

World Day of Skepticism

World Kajalism Day

Wrinkled Shirt Day

Yuletide Lad #9 arrives (Bjugnakraekir or Sausage Pilferer; Iceland)

Food & Drink Celebrations

BPT Remembrance Day (Before Pop Tarts)

National Parsley Day

National Sangria Day

Pop Tart Day

3rd Wednesday in December

National Early Signing Day (NCAA Football) [3rd Wednesday]

Independence Days

Camboriu (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Campinia (Declared; 2000) [unrecognized]

Lycem (Declared; 2012) [unrecognized]

Macau (Macau Special Administrative Region established, 1999)

St. John (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Feast Days

Cheech & Chong Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Dominic of Silos (Christian; Saint)

Guyton Morveau (Positivist; Saint)

Hogswatchnight (in Discworld) [December 32]

Mōdraniht (Mother’s Night; Anglo-Saxon Pagans)

Mother Night (Beginning of Yuletide; Celtic, Pagan) [Begins at Sunset]

Not Frank Zappas Birthday (Pastafarian)

O Clavis David (4th O Antiphon or Great Advent Antiphon; Christian) [O Key of David; 4 of 7]

Paul of Latrus (Christian; Saint)

Philogonius (Christian; Saint)

Pieter De Hooch (Artology)

Pongol of the Sun (Hindu)

The Refined Young Cannonballs (Muppetism)

Saturnalia Day 4: Unbound (Pagan)

Swashbuckling Day (Pastafarian)

Ursicinus of Saint-Ursanne (Christian; Saint)

Katharina von Bora (Lutheran)

Yaldā (Iran; eve of the birth of Mithra) [Day before Winter Solstice]

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Fortunate Day (Pagan) [50 of 53]

Lucky Day (Philippines) [69 of 71]

Shakku (赤口 Japan) [Bad luck all day, except at noon.]

Premieres

All That Jazz (Film; 1979)

Aquamania (Disney Cartoon; 1961)

Born on the Fourth of July (Film; 1989)

Cat Feud (WB MM Cartoon; 1958)

Cats (Film; 2019)

The Color Purple (Film; 1985)

Concert for Bangladesh (Live Album; 1971)

Double Dribble (Disney Cartoon; 1946)

Dreamgirls (Broadway Musical; 1981)

Everybody Plays the Fool, recorded by The Main Ingredient (Song; 1971)

Father of the Bride (Film; 1991)

Flaming Star (Film; 1960) [Elvis Presley #6]

Gangs of New York (Film; 2002)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Film; 2011)

The Godfather Part II (Film; 1974)

The Greatest Showman (Film; 2017)

Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Fairy Tale Collection; 1812)

Hare Lift (WB LT Cartoon; 1952)

The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit (Film; 1968)

Hot Rocks 1964-1971, by The Rolling Stones (Compilation Album; 1971)

Island at the Top if the World (Film; 1974)

It’s a Wonderful Life (Film; 1946)

Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott (Novel; 1819)

JFK (Film; 1991)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Film; 2017)

Lover Come Back (Film; 1961)

The Man with the Golden Gun (US Film; 1974) [James Bond #9]

My Fellow Americans (Film; 1996)

Name That Tune (Radio Series; 1952)

Out of Africa (Film; 1985)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians (TV Series; 2023)

Persuasion, by Jane Austen (Novel; 1817) [#6]

Rocky’s Dilemma or A Squirrel in a Stew (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 7; 1959)

Rosamunde, by Helmina von Chézy with incidental music by Franz Schubert (Play; 1823)

The Sand Pebbles (Film; 1966)

Scream (Film; 1996)

Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker (Film; 2019)

The Submarine Squirrel or 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 8; 1959)

They Were Expendable (Film; 1945)

Two Weeks Notice (Film; 2002)

Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (Disney Cartoon; 1968)

Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too! (Disney Cartoon; 1974)

The Witcher (TV Series; 2019)

Today’s Name Days

Eike, Holger, Julius, Regina (Austria)

Ignat (Bulgaria)

Eugen, Julije, Makarije, Slobodan, Zefirin (Croatia)

Dagmar (Czech Republic)

Abraham (Denmark)

Pärja, Pärje (Estonia)

Benjamin, Kerkko (Finland)

Isaac, Jacob, Théophile (France)

Eike, Holger, Julius (Germany)

Ignatios (Greece)

Teofil (Hungary)

Liberato, Macario (Italy)

Abrams, Argods, Arta, Minjona (Latvia)

Daugardas, Gražvilė, Teofilis (Lithuania)

Abraham, Amund (Norway)

Amon, Bogumiła, Dominik, Liberat, Teofil (Poland)

Ignatie (Romania)

Dagmara (Slovakia)

Domingo, Eugenio, Teófilo (Spain)

Israel, Moses (Sweden)

Ammon, Roxana, Roxanne, Roxie (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 354 of 2024; 11 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 3 of week 51 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 23 of 28]

Chinese: Month 12 (Jia-Zi), Day 8 (Ren-Zi)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 8 Teveth 5784

Islamic: 7 Jumada II 1445

J Cal: 24 Zima; Threesday [24 of 30]

Julian: 7 December 2023

Moon: 61%: Waxing Gibbous

Positivist: 18 Bichat (13th Month) [Guyton Morveau]

Runic Half Month: Jara (Year) [Day 10 of 15]

Season: Autumn (Day 89 of 89)

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 29 of 30)