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drazavonia · 3 years ago

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What I got from the U.X. ending

Fate of Ephemer

Ephemer was devastated by the player's fall to darkness and betrayal.

Ephemer got into one of the last two pods alongside Skuld.

Ephemer's pod failed (?) He is left as the sole survivor in a destroyed Daybreak Town.

(Theory) Ephemer most likely read the Book of Prophecies and learned the truth about everything that was supposed to happen and everything that will happen in the future.

Using this knowledge and Foresight, similar to Aqua's restoration of Land of Departure, he reboots Daybreak Town into what appears to be a Goth-like Scala ad Caelum.

Being the first new keyblade master, Ephemer would possess the ability to transfer his heart to the body of another.

Fate of Brain/Luxu

Brain sends Ventus, Lauriam and Elrena to different Worldlines.

Attempting to figure out how to rescue his friends from the datascape, he is confronted by Luxu for the first time.

Luxu and Brain switched hearts or bodies.

Brain got in the pod to hopefully meet up with Ven, Lauriam and Elrena. Luxu somehow escapes the Calamity of Daybreak Town.

Luxu bestows the The Master's No Name keyblade onto Brain. Brain takes on Luxu's role and Luxu no longer possessing the means to escape, gets in the pod and arrives in Scala ad Caelum.

* I believe the scene with Luxu in the desert is the same cutscene from the beginning and end of Back Cover. When Chirithy is role calling the Foretellers, Luxu's scene is the first half of the Union-X counterpart. He's dragging the Box with his left hand, while holding the No Name keyblade backhand in his right hand.

After he stops, he glances down at the keyblade, places his hand over his heart and reiterates the famous KH quote, "May my heart be my guiding key."

The big difference here is that the Union-X counterpart shows us Luxu removing his hood and revealing his face which resembles that of Brain.

As for what this means, that's still difficult to tell. If this scene does predate the Keyblade War, that would mean that Luxu always had the face of brain. That would also mean Nomura had at least Luxu's Union-X fate planned out since Back Cover. The problem is that these scenes can still take place after the fall of Daybreak Town, implying Luxu took Brain's body or Brain took over Luxu's role.

I think the hearts of Brain and Luxu both reside inside of Brain's body that awoke in Scala ad Caelum.

I think Luxu bequeathed the No Name keyblade onto Brain. However because of this, I don't know how he could leave Daybreak Town on his own without using the Ark. Also, the Master tasked him with watching over the Keyblade, meaning he would have to be around the current wielder or at least in the same area. If this theory is true, then every criteria would be met.

Luxu and Brain share the same goal of rescuing the Dandelions and escaping Daybreak Town. Luxu bequeathed Brain. Just like Eraqus resided within Terra's heart by the end of BBS, I think Luxu will choose to reside within Brain's heart, as they take the pod to arrive in a future Scala ad Caelum. This way he can watch over Brain and his Keyblade, as well as recording relevant information with the Master's eye.

Also No Name ends up mounted on a crest in the present day Scala ad Caelum.

An important thing to note is that the Brain who wakes up in Scala and the Luxu with Brain's face both lack his signature hat. I think when Luxu and Brain did their body shenanigans, the hat was left behind in the ruined Daybreak Town, whether or not it was on purpose, I don't know. But if Brain got in the incomplete Ark, then his body would disintegrate. He would need someone with memories of him and a medium to recreate his body. I think Ephemer, upon waking up and rebooting Scala ad Caelum, found and kept Brain's hat as a keepsake. When Sigurd meets Brain he "returns" Brain's hat. Ephemer had the memories of Brain, and his hat acted as the medium to recreate Brain's body.

(An Alternative) Even if the Brain that wakes up in Scala was Luxu, the fact that No Name ends up mounted in one of the classrooms means that the wandering Brain eventually made it to Scala ad Caelum. Maybe with Brain's memories and Luxu's jacket, he was the reason that Luxu was recreated in Scala ad Caelum.

Fate of Skuld

After almost being killed by the Player, Ephemer carried Skuld (like a princess) to the Ark as they left Data-Daybreak Town together.

Skuld and Ephemer get in the last two pods after seeing their home on the edge of oblivion.

Ephemer's pod failed to leave, but Skuld successfully traveled to the future.

It wasn't shown, but we know from KH3 that Skuld arrived in Radiant Garden around the time Xehanort is taken in by Ansem the Wise.

She is (all but freaking confirmed at this point) the "Subject X" referred to in the Secret Reports.

However, eventually Ansem the Wise and Luxu released her from captivity.

Her fate afterwards is unknown.

Fate of Ventus, Lauriam & Elrena

Ventus, still harboring a "Darkness" inside of him, Lauriam and Elrena are all sent to the future as they are scattered across different worlds in different times.

Lauriam arrived in a field of flowers in what was most likely "Dwarf Woodland".

Elrena arrived on a craggy Cliffside during a thunderstorm in what looked to be Enchanted Dominion.

Ventus arrived in a desert area, that was the Keyblade Graveyard, but with no Keyblades in sight. He was being approached by what was most likely Xehanort.

Fate of Player

The player seemed to be possessed by the Darkness that resided within them and attacked Ephemer and Skuld.

As they were going to kill Skuld, Ephemer keybeams them into Unreality.

The Player tricked Darkness, locking themselves with the other four "Darknesses" in between Data-Daybreak Town and GSC. This way Darkness was confined and unable to spread it's essence throughout the game worlds.

The player is killed by the Darknesses, and instead of choosing to become a spirit with Chirithy, chooses to live "Another" life, being reincarnated as the main antagonist, Xehanort.

#kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 3 #kingdom hearts union x #ephemer khux #ephemer #brain khux #skuld khux #ventus #lauriam #marluxia #larxene #elrena #khux #xehanort #luxu #damo279 #sweet dreams union x #khux spoilers

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xthelastknownsurvivorx · 4 years ago

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The Love Languages of Firstprince

aka my TedTalk

for RWRB Romance Week - Day 2: Love Languages hosted by @rwrb-fests

The tl;dr, not necessarily in order

Alex: Physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation

Henry: physical touch, quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation

On firstprince, physical touch, and quality time

(more on individual comments later)

Their relationship (beyond friendship) started with a lot of time spent together for physical touch. While this might be partially due to an avoidance of commitment so it “didn't have to mean anything”, I still think this is worth noting. Also, they are obviously very compatible physically.

Alex and Henry put effort into planning their time together, partially due to necessity given their positions and for geographical logistics, but they also spend time together outside of the physical aspect. This time doesn't seem mostly driven by the need for them to put up appearances for friendship.

Their texts and emails also seem to be evidence of enjoying quality time. Although these aren't face-to-face, it involves a dedication of time and thought about the other, which is a good portion of what quality time is about. Nora says that Alex uses Henry's number to “long distance flirt with him all day, every day” and “in a noticeably worse mood if [Alex] goes a day without talking to [Henry]”.

Their emails are lengthier and are quite poetic. The bits from old love letters indicate a lot of effort since they have to find the perfect quotes from historical figures. Alex makes a list of things he loves about Henry, while Henry waxes poetry about Alex.

Alex

Physical Touch

Personally, I see Alex as mostly having physical touch as a love language with his romantic partner, with some exceptions. One being June as his sister. The other is Nora, though she's somewhat of an in between since the two of them dated briefly but she's mostly a best friend to Alex.

At New Year's, Alex and Nora dance together, putting hands on hips and grinding in a joking, platonic sort of way. Alex is also very comfortable guiding Henry's hips with his hands, when at this point he thinks of Henry as simply a friend.

Of course, there's also the kiss with Nora at midnight, which, while partially for the benefit of other people's intrigue, would likely not happen if Alex wasn't comfortable with/enjoyed physical touch.

Alex also describes being pleased with Henry's physical presence next to him at New Year's

Furthermore, at the lake house, Alex comes to the revelation of why he seems to love the physical intimacy with Henry, that love is what “makes the filthy things so good”

There's also plenty of fluffy goodness from the lake house with casual touches, quick pecks, sweet embraces, and the like

I'm also reminded of how Alex notes that with his limbs tangled with Henry's, “nowhere left untouched [i]t's the best Alex has slept in years”

Lastly, Alex seems to be a very attentive partner during sex. After his first attempt at a blowjob, his inner thoughts are about his previous experiences eating girls out because he's surprised that Henry kisses him so eagerly afterward. There are plenty of men who would not be willing to return the favor of oral sex for their female partner, yet it seems that Alex is/was very, very willing, which makes me think that he is the type to show he cares by making sure sex is good for both him and his partner.

This is actually further supported by something Alex observes the first time he and Henry go beyond just blowjobs : “Somehow it still amazes him that all of this seems to be as unbelievably, singularly good for Henry as it is for him.” Alex's reaction includes a pleased and proud smile about it.

Of course, in regards to the two points above, it should be the norm to ensure one's partner is equally satisfied, but this doesn't always play out. In my opinion, Alex seems to go above and beyond in this respect.

Words of Affirmation

I will begin this with a caveat that both Henry and Alex tend to like feeling affirmed in some capacity but they have a tendency to avoid verbalizing things for the fear of making it too real. Again, I'm not sure if this would have been different had they begun dating in a more typical way, but it's worth noting.

The biggest thing that stands out to me that points to words of affirmation being one of Alex's love languages is the quote: “He just… Well, he gets told he's great a lot. He just doesn't often get told he's good enough.”

Overall, although Alex presents himself as being confident and self-assured most of the time, he often is plagued with doubts and fears about not measuring up, so he sometimes needs affirmations that he is, in fact, good enough.

Alex also tends to counter Henry's self doubts by telling him that he's brave, strong, good as he is, etc that Alex has noticed earlier on.

One big thing is the list that Alex sends Henry: An Incomplete List: Things I Love About HRH Prince Henry of Wales

Almost forgot this one, but when Alex is stressing and having a hard time, he mentions thinking of the things Henry emailed him

Henry

Physical touch

Although Henry often seems to feel trapped by the decorum he must adhere to, the times of physical intimacy when he's with Alex seem to let Henry be just another 20-something guy. He's more confident and sure in these moments, which while likely related to trauma related to his sexuality from his family, seems important and relevant

Henry also seems to be very attentive to his partner's needs. For example, after karaoke, he says to Alex, “All that earlier and you haven't gotten off yet tonight, have you? … Well that just shall not do.” So, like Alex, Henry seems to show his care through making sure his partner is satisfied.

Quality Time

I personally imagine Henry and Bea spend a lot of time in the music room together, playing their instruments

Henry seems very hurt by the way that his mom withdrew after his father's death. I'd argue this is due to Henry having quality time as a love language because while they do spend time together and “[s]he still listens, and she tries, and she wants us to be happy. But I don't know if she has it in her anymore to be a part of someone else's happiness.”

Acts of Service

This ties in with quality time, but Henry tends to be the one between him and Alex to plan interesting and more elaborate dates. For example, the time in Paris when Henry leaves directions to a Parisian cheese shop, especially since Alex had asked his advice about wine and cheeses.

I’m not sure how supported this is by the book, but I also just get the sense that Henry is very much the type who would do things for his significant other to lighten the burden(s) on their shoulders

Lastly, Henry is very invested in philanthropy. Obviously philanthropy is common for royals and rich people, but Henry seems to really put his heart into it. He and Pez have been doing work for a long time, and Henry's even using his inheritance to fund the projects.

Words of Affirmation

I think that words of affirmation are important to Henry, but not the most important of his love languages. Hearing Alex believes in him helps, and he offers similar support for Alex, but this doesn't seem to be the primary method of showing love for Henry.

However, Henry does express himself through writing a lot. I'm not sure if this counts under words of affirmation, although some of it does, but this is the big point under this category

And that concludes my long-winded rant on the topic that I definitely didn't do instead of being productive haha what are you talking about

Thanks for reading~

#rwrbromanceweek #rwrb #red white and royal blue #henry fox mountchristen windsor #alex claremont diaz #rwrb headcanon

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thanatophobia-thoughts · 4 years ago

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“Anyone else remember those so-called science documentaries we had to watch in school that were really just Creationist propaganda? Just me?”

Okay…let’s talk Surviving Death on Netflix. The tl;dr: this series is afterlife propaganda wrapped up in bad science, with no opposing opinions presented at all. It made me think of those terrible films I had to watch in various science classes about the beginnings of life and whatnot.

This is going to be a long one, so I’m putting it under a cut.

The first episode was the one I had the most hope for. It discusses Near Death Experiences, and introduces various people who have had them, and then some scientists and doctors who have dealt with these people, this phenomena, or looked into it. This is, unfortunately, where it goes wrong – it brings in no dissenting voices. Every sceptic is a former sceptic. They lay out their reasons for why, of course, but there’s something about it that feels incomplete.

It tries to offer up some compelling evidence, of course. It indicates what people share in common – a warm, bright light, a feeling of being loved, and the sense of time distorting – feeling eternity in a second. These are shared across the board.

Then they bring up how some patients can indicate what was happening in the room when they would have had no brain activity. Such as what words were said, what actions were taken, things they couldn’t have known due to the lack of consciousness. Is that compelling? In some respects, yes. It’s a wonder how they knew this, and it’s unclear what anyone would get by falsifying this, as I doubt most end up doing TV interviews and getting paid for it – not to mention what the doctors and others who confirm their stories, get for this.

Do I have an answer for that? No, not at all.

It could be fraud.

It could yet be some aspect of a dying body that we don’t understand, and I am inclined towards that. That leaves open room for, yes, an aspect of a soul, consciousness, or something other. It also leaves room for a hyperawareness in the last moments.

However, how quickly they seem to think the brain stops having activity does give me pause. We know plenty about the brain, and brain activity is measured, but we also know cells and processes don’t stop all at once. I’m not convinced that the Warm Light, Time Distortion, Loving Feeling aren’t caused by this process. In fact, I’m fairly certain they are, because DMT is released as you die – the very same thing that is released when you dream.

Here is just one article on it, which admittedly has a low amount of participants:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01424/full

I cannot explain how patients know about things happening around them, so that I will accept right now as something of a mystery until we understand it better. That’s what science is about: understanding things.

The next two episodes are about mediums, which, I’ll say it: they’re con-artists. I have been to enough Spirit-Mind-Body fairs (and still enjoy going to them for reasons outside of Mediums), have gotten enough readings, and watched my mom test enough people, to be fairly certain of this.

Mediums claim they can access the deceased person and provide messages to them, from the living, thus confirming an afterlife experience. Cold readers use obvious tricks: Use common names or no names, use things like ‘father figure’ or ‘masculine energy’ coming through, consider the age of the person you’re speaking with (when I was in my early teens and 20s, they always wanted to talk about my romantic life because young girls are always thinking about that, right?), and then they can usually draw the person they’re speaking with into giving them enough information that it seems like they know what they are saying.

There are also hot readings, where the medium has time to gather information on the person beforehand and can thus make it seem like they know a lot.

The show also did a séance with a “physical medium” – but the séance itself can’t be recorded, because of course, the ectoplasm that the medium would produce to create the physical sensations is sensitive to light. And did we mention the medium is in total darkness, and put away in a cabinet – tied to the chair, mind – but in a cabinet, out of sight, for the duration of the séance? Yeah, that’s not fishy at all. (And later they show her doing a non-physical mediumship and she’s not convincing, it’s very cold reading scenario).

Her Physical Mediumship was also questionable. She reached out to one of the people, Aman, and said there was someone on the other side for him that she couldn’t understand – she used the Hindi word for ‘Son’, beta. Aman then spoke to his father in Hindi, but RIGHT AFTER THIS, the medium suddenly knew exactly what his father was saying and gave the message without attempting to say it phonetically to the son. And the son believed this.

Also note, this man was signed up to take classes and such with her. She had time to research him and why he was there, so it is probable she looked up that one word to make a connection.

It also shows a medium speaking with a mother who lost her daughter – and of course, the message is to be expected for a grieving mother – “don’t blame yourself” “you couldn’t have done anything”. No details about how they died are offered, although they seem to know she “has an object” on her that’s important.

The following episode is then about signs, and how the dead communicate with the living – like sending a cardinal to them, leaving behind particular coins, having butterflies in weird locations, and things like that.

Basically, coincidences.

Of course, they all say you don’t know the difference until you experience it yourself. Here’s the thing: I have.

My cat passed away in in 2016, in the fall. A little after her death, there was a dead dove right besides the driver’s side door of my car. I had a pet dove once upon a time. This very cat got to the dove, in her locked cage, and killed her. There was a part of me that desperately wanted to believe, and clung to that feeling for a bit, but I know, the likelihood is it was an odd coincidence, a poor bird that hit the side of the garage my car is parked by, and slid down it to that position.

Signs are only just that – coincidences.

The next episode continues into the theme of paranormal investigators. It shows a duo going into the Morris-Jumel mansion, setting up recording devices, white noise makers, and motion sensors, and trying to communicate with the dead. They use the white noise makers because APPARENTLY the dead need background noise to be heard.

They APPARENTLY reach Aaron Burr. They only get his name, and then his footsteps. I’ll be honest – I didn’t hear ‘Aaron Burr’ at all in the recording, I think they just wanted it to be Aaron Burr. I’m also not convinced cat toy motion detectors are the best route. Those things light up for, literally, no reason.

It then goes into discussion of a polaroid camera, that took photos of light, that then became words and messages – which of course they can no longer replicate because the particular film doesn’t exist any longer. I don’t know enough about photography or photomanipulation, but my mother loves this stuff, and I know there are ways even polaroids can be manipulated to come out certain ways, so no, I’m not buying that, either.

The last thing it touches on are apparitions, like when you go out to look for someone, or think of someone, and at that same time they’d just killed themselves. That intuition that none of us really have a way to describe. It could be mere coincidence, though I imagine anyone with a mother who had that maternal instinct suspects it’s something more. I don’t have an answer for it, though, beyond mere coincidence. I am not convinced it happens often enough to be something supernatural.

Finally, we get to the last episode, which talks about reincarnation.

It looks mostly at children who believe they are reincarnated people, such as Marty Martyn in one case, and in “pre-internet” ages, or before they could reasonably know this information.

Their answers are compared and contrasted with the reality of those they believe they were reincarnated from, but in all the cases looked at, they begin to forget this other life’s existence around the age of 7. Some things stick, but not much.

This is another of those things I don’t have a good answer for – it’d be terrible to say it’s fraud on the parents’ part, coaching their kid on these things. It’s also hard to figure how the children, or even the parents, knew some of these things that line up fairly well.

I have my curiosities about Organ Memory. There is the possibility that if enough of the same material came together to form someone, theoretically, it could provide specific memories, but I doubt this entirely.

Some of it could be that the child was, somehow, exposed to a lot of this. Perhaps there was a documentary left on about the subject that they claim as their other life, perhaps they really are that good at googling at a young age – I’m still better than my parents at this, after all.

This is what the show fails to present, however: opposing views. It leads you in one direction, and even directly INSULTS those who don’t buy into this view. Do I know enough to answer these questions? No, I don’t. I’m able to say that.

I can suspect things like fraud or access to information. I can suspect coincidence, or even information we don’t yet have. I can hope there will be another series that focuses on the non-believer’s side, so that we get a fuller story.

Why do I think it’s important?

Because some of these quotes came from the series:

“For the believer, no proof is necessary. For the sceptic, no proof is possible.” (Attributed to someone else, but used as “proof”).

“I wanted to believe so I believed.” – a father grieving his daughter

“Sometimes we may not be able to say something here, but we’ll be able to say it somewhere else.” – a near death experience between a son and a father.

I find these quotes to be damaging. The last one in particular, because it tries to say it’s okay not to make these connections in life, it’s okay to wait until the next one. Please. Please don’t do this. Don’t believe this – and even if you do, don’t live like that. It’s not fair to those around you. It’s not fair to yourself.

The one who wanted to believe, well…that says it all, doesn’t it? He was looking for this, for comfort, and now he tries to see it. He’s living for a lie, and working his life around that. He has spent MONEY on learning how to contact the dead, on contacting the dead, and he lives his life around looking for particular signs. He has been scammed.

The first one is honestly just nonsense, though I can see why it gets to going around, especially in this time of COVID-19. It is hard to convince some people of things, and they will cling to their beliefs no matter what. I am not without bias – you can see I’m arguing this even with these so-called proofs presented to me, that there is no afterlife.

That said, that quote is just one of giving up.

They also do not say ALL about subjects, such as Franek Kluski, who supposedly made ectoplasmic wax hands, in environments where he could have easily hidden the wax hands already made, and where he’d been caught in a lie that involved “wax buttocks” when he was asked to have an ectoplasm face created (his own butt was burned), and who may have confessed to the fraud (this seems to be debated).

Overall, the Netflix series has an agenda, which is inherent in the title: it is here to convince you there is an afterlife. However, it’s science is questionable, and I think it could have done better by including actual opposition, not “former sceptics”.

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sengenweek · 5 years ago

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SenGen Week: Day 07

Day 07: January 04

Senkuu's birthday / free choice (Nightshade)

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Title: Murky Bedsheets.

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A/N: Chronologically speaking you can place this before 'In Sickness And Health'.

-'-

The second time Gen celebrated Senkuu's birthday, his gift wasn't so flamboyant. This time around, the magician had surprised the scientist caught up in his little lab doing whatever science related stuff he was busy with this time around. Gen surrounded the scientist's neck and shoulders with his arms and blew into his ear. Earning him a jump from Senkuu.

"Dammit mentalist, you startled me" he complained.

"Hehe. Sorry. But it is pretty late, Senkuu-chan you should go to bed"

"Can't. I wanna finish this before tomorrow" Senkuu argues.

"It will still be here tomorrow, I assure you no one will touch it"

"Yes. And it will still be incomplete tomorrow"

Gen sighed, the scientist could be so stubborn some times. Yet he smiled to himself, he was good at getting Senkuu to do what he wanted.

"Fine. If you wanna have it that way. And here I wanted to relieve you from your stress~" he says, putting a hand to his chest, as if he'd been wounded.

The scientist turns to look at him –hand still on chest, and pouting lips– with escepticism, he knew the mentalist wanted to get something from him, he just didn't know what. But then again, Gen did help him relax in past occasions, so he supposed that adding one more wouldn't hurt much.

"Okay. I'll stop for tonight" he sighs.

"Good~!" the other beamed.

Gen pulled him up and took him to their shared hut –the observatory–. The first thing the scientist noticed were the many flowers laying around in the floor, in their bed. He turns to look at Gen, the smile on his face is mischievous and he can already imagine what will come next –what the blue eyed man wanted–. Gen's fingers trace the scars on his face –slow, gentle–, he pulls him for a kiss, one and then many, many kisses that steal his breath away –gloss his eyes–, and then Gen pulls him down into their bed. The mentalist's back hits the mattress first, then the scientist's palms feel the rough fabric beneath them, crushing some of the scattered nightshades –their murky perfume staining the sheets–.

"You need to relax more, Senkuu-chan"

"And would you help me out with that?" he teases.

"Happily~!"

The white-green haired man smiles, his nimble fingers working to get Gen's clothes off of him, taking his time undoing every layer, nibbling on the now exposed skin, marking with purple-red drawings the ivory canvas presented to him. The monocromatic bangs stick to Gen's forehead. The mentalist flips them over, so he contemplates Senkuu from above. With a swift motion of his hand, the belt on Senkuu's robe comes undone, the teen exposed.

"Soo~ convenient"

"More than the nine infernal layers you wear" he recriminates.

Gen laughs, a clear cristaline sound echoing on his ears. They kiss, they touch, Gen's fingers go south, where Senkuu's blood is pilling up, and he strokes, gentle, slow. Senkuu moans to the ministrations given to him, and decides not to get behind, his own fingers grapping around Gen's length teasing and pumping until the grasp the mentalist has on him falters. He pulls him for another kiss, sloppier than before –hungrier–. They're nearing their end, quick shallow breaths escape their mouths, their tongues mumble each other's names. And it hits them, Senkuu first, followed by Gen who trembles as if an earthquake took place inside of him, a silent gasp trying to form on his throat.

When Senkuu stops seeing white spots of light in his retine he flips them over once more, spreading open Gen's legs, he positions himself, and thrusts in. Gen moans pained and aroused, he's used to the scientist's antics, one orgasm before trying to ride him into a second. Which he promptly does, going in, and out at a steady pace, hitting his prostate on occasion, making his already weak legs tremble. It feels like paradise. And then they come undone in gasping breaths and skin pearled with beads of sweat, one more time. They relieve on their post-orgasm high before accommodating properly in bed. Gen's head resting over Senkuu's beating heart.

"Happy birthday, Senkuu-chan~!" the mentalist sings.

"You know mentalist, I owe you two birthday gifts already. You're gonna leave me indebted for life if you keep this up" he jokes.

"Sounds nice, don't you think?"

"It does. Thank you, for your help relaxing me. I appreciate it"

Gen hums in response, sleep tugging at his eyelids. Senkuu fixes the stray bicolored bangs, putting the larger portion –the white one– behind Gen's ear.

"Hey, mentalist" he calls. "Marry me".

"Yes~!" he purrs content.

The perfumed air is stagnant in Senkuu's lungs, the many black nightshades surrounding them only bring back to his brain the image of the man in his arms. He loves it.

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A/N: Finishing notes for this small series of works. They aren't that important, you can skip this ridiculous long foot note if you want –boy, I could just turn it into an epilogue chapter–.

01. Festivals and Foxes: If we talk cotton candy, man, ya gotta think in a festival, a carnival, whatever, but you think of orange and red, the noise, the people, and the greasy food being sold out. Even the manga made that connection, so I used that idea and added some supernatural stuff because of the kemonomimi bit. Gen being a fox deity is inspired from 'ZenTan Week' by hana-kitzu, which is a 'Kimetsu no Yaiba' fic. I took notice, especifically of chapter six, where the author depicts Aganuma Zen'itsu as a nine tailed fox. It seemed funny to me how something written for the week dedicated to another ship made it's way into this one.

02. Unfulfilled Reality: Since I already made notes on that chapter, I will only say the following: This was actually, the chapter I dreaded most to write, since the beginning I had no idea where to go from the prompt given, but once I remembered Farscape, everything started to fall into place, and I think this became my favorite contribution for the SenGen Week.

03. Aftertaste: When I read the word 'Cola', all that came to my head was my dad's voice saying: "It's not the original flavor". For you to understand this, I will elaborate, you see my father is a Coca-Cola fan, and I once bought a bottle that didn't taste the same as usual –it was likely a very old batch–, and he nags me to this day about it, so every time I give him a bottle of Cola he sighes after tasting it and says: "THIS, is the original flavor". So I thought, 'Senkuu Cola' is a very rough version of nowadays 'Cola', there is bound to be a difference in the flavor, so I came up with the idea of the 'aftertaste' that might be left in the mouth, and then I used the same idea for the lasting flavor of Gen and Senkuu's first kiss. Oh, and let us not forget the fight between Pepsi and Coca-Cola back in the 80's.

04. Colorfools: This title, and the overall idea, is really inspired by a fanfic called 'Colorfool' by PoetDameron. It's a 'That 70's Show' fic, that pairs up Eric Forman and Buddy Morgan as soulmates.

05. Grin and Kiss and Fangs and Blood: This was meant to be a separated multi-chapter fic all on it's own, but in the end I realized I could just fit the general idea in the prompt given, so I made it work, somehow. The idea itself came from a set of images, which depicted Senkuu as a vampire who had bitten Gen. Now, I didn't make Senkuu the vampire because the magician aesthetic seemed to work better for that trope, rather than the mad scientist one I associate with Senkuu.

06. In Sickness And Health: I wanted to make a sappier version of a chapter I wrote for my series of 'Gintama' drabbles –While We Are Together–, the chapter in question is called 'Rainy Days Are Meant To Be Spent Outside Getting Soaked To The Bone', and it ends with comedy, for this SenGen work in particular I wanted the ending to be more tender, but I couldn't grasp the ability to make it happen, so I left a sloppy end.

07. Murky Bedsheets: I have never, not once in my whole life, come across a Black Nightshade (Solanum nigrum), much less smelt one. I had to investigate about it's scent, a difficult feat since many confuse it with Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna) known also as just Belladonna, and this plant seems to have a bitter smell. It was finally on a botanical book –Natural Arrangemeng Of British Plants– I found that the smell of Solanum Nigrum was mentioned, and I quote textually, what it said especifically about this kind of Solaneae:

'Solanum nigrum. Black nightshade. Stem angular; leaves ovate, toothed, angular, bald; berries black.

Solanum vulgare, Raii Syn. 265,4; Park. 346.

Solanum hortense, Ger. em. 339, l.

Solanum nigrum, Lin. S. P. 266.

Solanum humile, Salisb. Prod. 134.

Garden nightshade. Morell. Petty morell.

Dunghills and gardens; annual; June to September. Root much branched; stem spreading; leaves petioled; flowers smell like musk.—Leaves applied externally abate inflammation; internally, 1 or 2 grs. infused in boiling water, and taken at bedtime, occasions a copious per spiration, are diuretic, and generally purge the next day'.

Flowers smell like musk. There you have it. I just went with this bit of information and took it from there.

Thanks for reading this small series. And the foot note, if you got this far, writing is tough folks, it requires lots of investigation for just one tiny little detail that gets forgotten in the midst of the story. Oh, and inspiration likes to leave you stranded on the middle of the road and you have to walk all the way to the end. It's a miracle I finished something with such a defined time frame.

Anyways, thank you, good bye, and farewell.

-'-

A/N: Also on:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13464121/7/SenGen-Week-2019-2020

#day seven #bday #free #sengenweek #sengen week #sengen #submission

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bleepbloo · 5 years ago

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Season Episodes of Second Citadel (Part 2)

Continuation of Part 1 [here]

Recommend reading that first otherwise this will not make ANY SENSE.

Same warnings of Part 1 still apply, as do the conditions and such. Extremely speculative, and published (1/1/2020)

Note: Purely personal feelings- this second half of the season is going to be SUPER ROUGH.

(Happy new year)

~~~

5 - The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance

The Hanged Man: A statement

Positive: Martyrdom, release, sacrifice

Negative: Needless sacrifice, fear of sacrifice, stalling

Death: Death

Positive: End of cycle, beginnings, Change, Metamorphosis

Negative: Fear of Change, holding on, Stagnation, Decay

Temperance: Pacing

Positive: Middle Path, Patience, finding meaning

Negative: Extremes, Excess, Lack of Balance

Welp.

I’ve said this before, in Part 1, but the Death card is in extreme reference to Olala, and well.

This is going to be an Olala and The Kite focus/centric episode.

This is going to be the episode that we find out what the Kite is going to use her for- or otherwise deliver her to whoever has use for her- and finish whatever is going on with Olala in regards to the death card.

Someone is going to die this episode, I can say that much with confidence and dread.

However, that isn’t to say they’ll stay dead.

6 - The Devil, The Tower, the Star

The Devil: The Darker Inside

Positive: Addiction, Materialism, Playfulness

Negative: Freedom, Release, Restoring Control

The Tower: The Inevitable

Positive: Sudden Upheaval, broken pride, disaster

Negative: disaster avoided, delayed disaster, fear of suffering

The Star: The Important Things

Positive: Hope, Faith, Rejuvenation

Negative: Discouragement, insecurity, Faithlessness

Everyone.

This episode’s going to be a ****ing doozy.

Out of all the Arcana, the Tower- across ALL decks - is THE most significant card. It is saying that- no matter what you do, no matter how you prepare, no matter anything else - it is the will of the arcana that what comes will come.

Yeah, it’s worse/more symbolically important than death.

So it’s at this point that our protagonists will face an upheaval not known before in Second Citadel history.

All the personal drama will probably come up at this point - Literally everything - and will hit a breaking point, because, well, the inevitable is coming. This is literally the worst possible time for drama to happen, so of course, in an attempt to retain some form of control, they’re going to take the most likely person to blame and put everything on them, regardless of whether or not they’re at fault.

This is the episode where people have to figure out their shit, and figure out what’s important to them, and I think that it may end up resulting in Sir Caroline considering quitting her Captainship/knighthood. She loves Quanyii, who’s a witch, and like. If something happens to make her realize, no, she actually loves her wife more than her job, I have no doubts in my mind Caroline will leave.

So yeah, this episode will be intense, grab tissues and hydrate.

7 - The Moon, The Sun, Judgement

The Moon: The Unconscious Mind

Positive: Unconscious, illusions, intuition

Negative: Confusion, fear, Misinterpretation

The Sun: The Conscious Mind

Positive: Joy, Celebration, Success, Positiveness

Negative: Sadness, depression, negativity

Judgement: The Choice

Positive: Reflection, Reckoning, Awakening

Negative: Lack of self awareness, doubt, self-loathing

Basically, what happened last episode, happened.

Especially considering the significance of the Sun and Moon in Second Citadel Meta - what with the Moon being more a symbol of things hiding in the dark and still being able to exist, but also a denial of what you really want, but the Sun being known in your entirety, without hiding (which can be pretty terrifying) and should you be unable to handle what you want, can kill you. (Remember the Moonlit hermit? Remember Ernmark making references to how Arum parallels the Moonlit hermit?)

It will be at this point that people will be forced to chose what path to take, what they need to do to be happy

I think here, Marc is going to have to make a decision whether he actually wants to be a knight. I mean, look at what’s going on with Olala; he’s trying to protect her, when his knighthood dictates he should kill her for being...not human.

I mean, it’s the same decision Damien, Angelo, and Caroline have to make for themselves as well, whether they want to continue to be knights, and I bet it will happen this episode.

So like. We’ll see.

8 - The World; Notably the only exception to the Trio Clusters

World: The End

Positive: Completion, Harmony, Fulfillment

Negative: Incompletion, No Closure

Now, this is the end- at least, it should be.

I have no doubt that there’ll be a fourth season of the second citadel, you can quote me on this- there’s too much world for it to go ignored or to end this quickly.

No, see, I think one of two things is going to happen:

Either 1) the East comes into prominence somehow- because of timing or what have you, and there’s going to be conflict about a new society that more or less sprung out of the ground

or 2) The Saints will come back to the world, to try and reunite with their missing sibling.

Either way, it should be interesting, and exciting!

Other things to note for the season:

I think Dampierre will get revealed to be something more than a horse this season, since Marc’s already made a reference in Episode 1 about how Dampierre’s losing their hair and that’s usually a sign of sickness in horses.

I think the Kite will be someone significant to Sir Absolom, and will not excuse but explain some of Absolom’s behavior towards magic and monsters (and Marc).

Finally, this season will be the determining factor as to which brother the Penumbra will set Angelo up with. Because I’ve seen people in the discord and tumblr shipping Angelo/Marc as a romantic pairing, and Angelo/Talfyrn as a queerplatonic pairing, so I’m sure if nothing else, this will be the season which tells us which pairing the penumbra will try and set up. (I’m rooting for Angelo/Talfyrn, personally, but I know it’ll be cute either way, because Angelo is cute.)

Anyway, we’ll see come this year what happens! Take care y’all!

#second citadel #bleepbloo theories #second citadel meta #second citadel spoilers

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douxreviews · 6 years ago

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American Gods - ‘Treasure of the Sun’ Review

"That’s what the world does. It changes."

I wasn't ready for that.

Should have been. But wasn't.

Let's not dance around the issue in any way and get the sort-of-spoiler out in the open right up front. Last chance to turn away.

So, Mad Sweeney appears to die at the end of this week's episode.

This shouldn't really count as a spoiler, as the episode itself did everything it could possibly do to make us all aware that it was going to happen. They laid the funeral atmosphere on this one with a trowel. The presence of banshees that only Sweeney could hear was just the cherry on top of the great big farewell sundae.

Last season they devoted the entire penultimate episode to telling us the story of Essie MacGowan, which tangentially also told us the story of Mad Sweeney. As a mystical being, Sweeney's background was left very much vague there, and he was really only seen through the frame of reference that Essie saw him through. And it was one of the best episodes of anything, ever, so if you haven't watched it lately you should totally go do that as soon as you finish reading this review. This approach worked very well for Sweeney, since being unsure about his backstory and all the contradictory possible pasts that he possesses are kind of the point of the character.

He's a very quantum god, only being able to be seen through a vague mist of probabilities and attitude.

This week promised in advance to finally fill in the backstory of Mad Sweeney, and I confess that I was a little disappointed that they were going there, since any concrete backstory that we get will never be as good as the possible stories we have in our heads. Imagine, then, my surprise when they doubled down on the whole 'contradictory pasts' thing and made that the whole point of the character.

We've had unreliable narrators before. Here we get what might be described as an unreliable protagonist. Any of the stories we're told about him may or may not be true. Even he, we're told many times over the course of the episode, doesn't really remember.

So we're told about a Sweeney that had sex with a girl who predicted that Laura Moon would one day be his downfall. And of a Sweeney who was a king, and abandoned his allies on the battlefield after being cursed by a bishop and was destined to die from a spear. And a Sweeney from even earlier who was a god king, destined to kill his grandfather in one of those 'you brought about the future you were trying to prevent from happening' kind of stories. Except the grandfather might have been Wednesday. Possibly.

Sweeney is full to the brim of contradictory pasts, and they're all presented to us as true. The little narrative games of inserting the wrong character's voice in the flashback voiceover, or having the wrong voice come from the wrong mouth as the story is being told just underscore this fluidity. What we do seem to know for sure is that he's in Mr. Wednesday's debt for some reason, possibly connected with having fled that battlefield. Odin is a war god. Did fleeing the battlefield cause the debt directly, or was there more to it than that? Somehow tied up with this, Wednesday owes Sweeney a battle, which would make sense if the initial sin was skipping out on the other battle. How that squares with the earlier god king or the later prophesy and boobies story I couldn't begin to say.

It's a rare trick, appearing to devote an entire episode to a character's backstory, only to leave the viewer feeling like they know less afterwards than they did before.

The season's recurring theme of how gods change and evolve to survive over time continues this week. Bilquis is now apparently an evangelical preacher, focusing primarily on the erotic poetry portions of the Bible, of which there are a surprising number, actually. I still can't figure out what she needs from Ruby Goodchild, but I don't think they intend us to understand that part yet. I think it's deliberate that the episode shows all of the changes that Sweeney goes through being done to him by outside forces, such as Mother Church rebranding him as small.

The cleverest move of the week, however, goes to the choice to begin the episode with Sweeney's body under the bridge. That, if you haven't read it, is how Sweeney dies in the book, and it's much less dramatic than what we get here. Changing the narrative so that Shadow is an active participant in Sweeney's death is a much richer story. In the book he basically dies from a tragic case of the plot not requiring him anymore. By starting the episode with the fakeout of him not being dead under the bridge, they're preparing the viewer for his eventual death at the end. Hell, they might as well have put a 'Sweeney Death Countdown Clock' in the bottom corner of the screen.

Farewell, Mad Sweeney. You were arguably the character that benefited most from the book-to-screen translation. I don't expect that we've really seen the last of you. For one thing, it would be just perverse if there was never some sort of resolution with your relationship with Laura after the way things ended last week. For another, even in the book you stopped back by to attend your own wake. I didn't entirely understand what was going on in that section of the book, to be honest.

Wednesday made a point of telling us that every death brought about by the spear was a tribute to him, which means Shadow just made a tribute to Odin of Sweeney's death. That has to be important, right?

Quotes:

Sweeney: "Oh, I can smell the whiskey on your breathe already, Ben Franklin."

Laura: "You know that I can literally rip peoples' limbs off, right?"

Kali: "Goddamn Voudon. Always so dramatic."

Wednesday: "Oh, I know that smell. That smells like a hot bottle of whiskey and sex in an alleyway. With a top note of failure. Eau du F**kup."

Eorann: "Remember, the boundaries of your father’s mind have grown thin since he left us."

Sweeney: "You’ve got 80 years on your dial, You’re going to give 'em up for somebody who’s gonna live forever?" Salim: "That’s how love works."

Wednesday: "F**k the fairies." Sweeney: (To Salim) "You gonna let him talk about us like that?"

Been meaning to mention - I really love Wednesday's vest

Bits and Pieces:

-- Do people really bring food to funeral parlors? I know that they do to the grieving, but I've never heard of them bringing it directly to the funeral home. Maybe it's a southern thing.

-- Ibis mentions that Jaquel will come when Wednesday calls him to war. Does that mean that Chris Obi has just been busy with Star Trek: Discovery and we'll have him back later when he has the time? I hope so.

-- The discussion of Sweeney being a troll or a leprechaun nicely set up the theme of incompatible but equally valid pasts.

-- How has it not come up at all for Shadow that Sweeney caused the car accident that killed Laura? Laura found out about that in last season's finale.

-- Sweeney's final act, other than flipping the bird, was to send Wednesday's spear to 'the hoard,' the realm where all the treasure is that he and Laura took a shortcut through a few episodes back. That was clever. Can't wait to see how Wednesday responds to that one.

-- I feel like it's still OK to 'ship Sweeney and Laura, since she's also dead. Just let me have this one.

-- Pablo Schreiber had a lot of scenes to film in the woods while wearing very little clothing. That just had to be unbearably uncomfortable. I mean, just the bug bites alone...

-- Speaking of Pablo, it was announced shortly before this episode that he'd been cast as the Master Chief in the Halo series. That wasn't a good omen for Sweeney, no Neil Gaiman pun intended.

-- The Jinn mentioned other Ifrits in Chicago, answering my longstanding question about whether Ifrit was his name or his species. I guess we're back to calling him the Jinn. They should really give him a name.

-- Sweeney, despite his best efforts to resist the urge, was really going out of his way to be kind to Salim.

-- I've never considered the erotic subtext of the eucharist before, but what with Bilquis deep diving into the whole 'take my flesh deep into your mouth' aspect of it I'll probably never be able to look at the pope without blushing again.

-- The treasure of the sun was both the coins in the hoard and the love Sweeney and his wife shared, as highlighted by her yellow wedding dress. She'd lost that dress by the time Sweeney had gone mad.

It's hard to make Ricky Whittle look small...

This episode had a lot to really dig into, but it felt a little incomplete to me in a way that "Prayer for Mad Sweeney" didn't. On the tiniest level it feels like an exercise in setting pieces up for the finale rather than a story in its own.

Three out of four tubs of potato salad.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

#American Gods #Shadow Moon #Mr Wednesday #Laura Moon #Mad Sweeney #American Gods Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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redantsunderneath · 8 years ago

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Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run (an autobiography)

This is going to be more exorcism than exegesis – this book is odd, and I can’t stop thinking about why. The review line here is that this recent Springsteen autobiography is worthwhile enough if you are somewhere north of a casual Springsteen fan but if you are looking for a single Springsteen historical document, you’d be better served with the Dave Marsh biographies. Superfans will of course love it, the curious will find it entertaining if they wind up with a copy, and the odd people like me who are obsessives without being real superfans will, well, find it peculiar but involving.

Bona fides: I’m an obsessive in that I’ve listened to every Springsteen song, legally released or leaked, up to 2006-ish, have read many of related books, filtered through ephemera, had the concert experience numerous times at different stages of his carrier, and have intermittent year long bouts of compulsively listening/getting moved/thinking about the whole Springsteen enchilada. What really attracted me to him as an artist was that, unlike chameleons such as (Bruce fan) Bowie who committed to one thing at a time, he seemed to carry a bunch of different influences simultaneously, the skills of which he was proficient in, and would combine and project them - the arena rawker, the street party leader, the acoustic poet, the rock and roll revivalist, the RnB review, the storyteller, the piano balladeer - often capturing several in the space of a song. He also had such great phenomenological and artist-as-story interest: I had seen this with Elvis, but this was more complicated and comprised the sum of on stage relationships, story content, song preoccupations, personal life leaks, and attitude towards fans coalescing into a legend of an avatar of the American working class and underclass, coming in with a bunch of buddies who together were a family, to redeem something in the American spirit, all on the shoulders of some incredible will and discipline.

So why am I exiled like Moses, able to see the super fan promised land but never enter? First (and this is not restricted to Springsteen) I find the fan ethos offputting. It combines a deification I loathe with a fake chumminess that makes me nauseated. More importantly, though, I really don’t like much he has produced since Tunnel of Love marked his most significant career transition. I note only one great song (“Terry’s Song”) written since the Chimes of Freedom EP which marked the end of the ToL tour, his first marriage, and the initial E Street Band run. This includes a take it or leave it attitude towards current concerts on my part (the spark isn’t there for me) and wariness about where the Springsteen “story” has gone. One of the greatest things about him early on was the mastery of basically every corner of rock and roll, and his attempt to incorporate new elements and stay fresh are kind of embarrassing (I like Rage Against the Machine too, but the weak link there is Tom Morello’s guitar, and Springsteen hired him to “rejuvenate his sound”. Ugh).

So, why is it weird? I don’t read many autobiographies (only one I can remember finishing is No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish) so maybe it’s par for the course, but this isn’t a sculpted recounting of history but a chain of 80 or so “stories” like extended versions of the ones he would tell on stage, and are concerned more with internal rhythm than an external sense of pace or continuity. There is a lot of backtracking where the reader needs to “match” events. This story approach extends to frequent use of his stage voice(s), where he will go into revival preacher or beat poet mode, do stream of consciousness riffs, and recount back and forth embellished dialogue (without quotes, but with interjections like ‘Marone!’) like he is arguing with himself. The good news is you can truly hear his voice in the semi-poetic prose. The bad news is it doesn’t flow well, leaves strange things out, cuts back and forth, and the story seems incomplete.

The best thing about the book is an authentic third angle on the Springsteen legend that I legit had never heard before. The Springsteen myth is heavily curated by the Boss himself and has always painted a picture, as I noted above, of a rock’n’roll family bringing a fun redemption to the world. This had to be resolved with journalistic and tabloid information that challenged the story, but there was always a fan synthesis that incorporated the info and left the godhead intact. My memory of rec.arts.music.springsteen (one such recounting was called “a good man,” gagh!) is that Juliana Philips was seen as “a mistake of exposure to big success” and “a vain actress,” and he soon realized that what he needed was a good Jersey girl (which resolves how the marriage never fit fan image of him and sands the edges off of the inconvenient timing of the affair). Springsteen’s recounting of this is a good example of the value of his non-filtered point of view. He goes out of his way to demonstrate the small town authenticity of Phillips and describe her as wonderful and loving. The problem was that he was impossible to get along with for anyone after a couple of years and his mishandling of the separation (not wanting the press to know while he began another relationship and got caught) is the biggest regret of his life (because of how it impacted his then-wife).

This approach reveals him as a hard guy to know. He describes himself as a narcissist and self-hater (cue Venn diagram of the overlap of narcissism and self-doubt being Art), and he tells story after story of the men in his life where he lengthily but gently drags them through the mud, then says “but we would die for each other and I love him.” These stories come off as whatever happens to passive aggressiveness after expensive therapy (and this book is therapy-speak rich), and often serves to make him look worse than outside data does (the Mike Appel story especially where Springsteen was utterly in the right and was maliciously kept from recording for several years, but here Springsteen does everything to make excuses for him, gives him a butload of credit, and still manages to come off a little petty, i.e. these stories tend to backfire). He spends a lot of time recounting how he told the bandmembers that they just had to understand that he needed all the control and that he had all the power, so they needed to suck it up.

The upbringing stuff is probably the best material and the most untrod ground. His family history is pretty compelling and I finally understand how his religious and ethnic background shaped his personality. The sex stuff makes him look idiosyncratic and selfish: a monk sometimes, do anything that moves one year, but usually a serial monogamist with uncondoned cheating. He comes off like a terrible boyfriend and worse husband (lots of lost weekend stuff), but this doesn’t really capture how odd the sex stuff is as much as that one passage about he and his dad went to Tijuana and he came back with the crabs. He mentions prostitutes more times than he mentions groupies.

He picks several concerts to elevate to most important status that are not big ones in Springsteeen lore, but have some kind of multicultural underpinning. To at least some extent, this is to craft a version of a guy who is in touch with human experience. He spends so much time on post Katrina, 9-11, and his hurt at the cops rejecting him after what he thought was the evenhanded “American Skin (41 Shots)” (the fact that he was surprised surprises me). His talk about race and Clarence Clemons is fascinating – their relationship was molded on stage because he thought it was an important one to America both as an example and as an aesthetic statement. They only knew each other in this context and rarely ever saw each other outside of stage and studio. So their friendship, such as it was, was a Springsteen story performed into existence. He is very conscious of (and calculated about) his cultural legacy.

So much is left out, yet there are a lot of stories that are barely OK, but seem there specifically to mark time so that it’s not Born in the USA cut-to everybody starts dying (thinking of the horse riding stuff as an example). His discussion of his depression is very valuable, but asynchronously told and thus hard to follow. The book is full of “aw shucks” enthusiasm, idiom, and showmanship, but is somehow unexpectedly unguarded about the inner workings of his mind. He comes off as someone driven and not comfortable in his own skin unless he is accomplishing something, but in a human, actually painful way, that I have only ever seen divulged by a celebrity once before (David Foster Wallace). I had an idea of Springsteen as reasonably well adjusted, but after this if he commits suicide I would not be surprised.

In the end, the book crystalizes in a new set for meanings of that old story of him ripping down the posters saying “the future of rock and roll” at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, 1975 – Springsteen is a control freak, most of all about what people think of him, crippled by self-doubt, with the constant need do something, anything, to reassert mastery over his art, his message, and his mind. That this is at odds with the book’s willingness to go deep and spill stuff he would usually keep close and it is this tension (along with its storyteller-quilted nature) gives it its strange charge. In the end, there is a grandiose humility that keeps it together and I’m glad I read it.

#springsteen

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marymosley · 5 years ago

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No, Trump Did Not Commit Criminal Witness Retaliation

I recently wrote a Washington Post column explaining that, while I viewed the moves by President Donald Trump against impeachment witnesses was wrong, it was not criminal as claimed by legal analysts like CNN’s Elie Honig. Yesterday, Honig responded by arguing in a column that he and “other former prosecutors” are quite confident that the action clearly constituted the crime of witness retaliation. While Honig does not actually explain how the President’s conduct specifically violated the stated elements in the federal code, even a cursory consideration of the elements of the crime belie his assertion. Trump’s actions with regard to Vineland and Sondland would not constitute criminal witness retaliation.

For the last three years, we have had a series of crimes declared as “clearly established” by former prosecutors based on alleged Russian collusion, Ukrainian collusion, and other controversies. Indeed, Honig most recently, insisted in the Ukrainian controversy that the crimes of bribery and extortion were clear as crime and impeachable offenses. In my recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding President Trump’s impeachment, I opposed the position of my fellow witnesses that the definition of actual crimes is immaterial to their use as the basis for impeachment — and I specifically opposed impeachment articles based on bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations or obstruction of justice. The committee ultimately rejected those articles and adopted the only two articles I felt could be legitimately advanced: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress. Chairman Jerrold Nadler even ended the hearing by quoting my position on abuse of power. Our only disagreement was that I opposed impeachment on this record as incomplete and insufficient for submission to the Senate.

Honig ‘s claim of criminal witness retaliation fares no better than his earlier assertions of established criminal conduct. He is simply wrong that these actions could be maintained as criminal acts. As I stated in my column, this does not mean that the actions are not objectionable even reprehensible, but they are not criminal. I was highly critical of the move as unnecessary and presumptively retaliatory. I was particularly harsh in my statements about the brother of Vindman being moved as akin to a medieval blood punishment. The fact that this looks like retaliation however does not mean that it meets the test for specific crime of witness retaliation.

Crimes have elements and those elements are essential unless, it seems, the accused is Donald Trump. CNN has particularly been a font of claimed clear criminal acts by Trump, a place with viewers can be assured that the evidence is clear and the crimes established.

Now let’s look at this crime. First and foremost, Honig notes that either obstruction or tampering “arguably could apply” also as criminal charges. I addresses these crimes in my column but it is important to note the clear disconnect in this logic. Honig is saying that the moving of a witness like Vindman can be obstruction or tampering “after” the trial is over and he has given his testimony. There is no obstruction of a past trial, particularly one where the defendant was acquitted. It is not unclear how Honig believes that a later transfer tampers with testimony that has already been given in a case that is closed.

Now let’s specifically deal with Honig’s insistence that this is clearly witness retaliation. In the 1980s, Congress strengthened protections for witnesses with new provision on 18 U.S.C § 1512 which augments the federal witness tampering law under 18 U.S.C. § 1503, which broadened the definition of witness tampering. The structure of 18 U.S.C. § 1513 is similar to that of 18 U.S.C. § 1512 but is viewed as broadening its application. However, it still has criminal elements and those elements undermine credible suggestions that this falls within the statutory definitions for this crime.

On the elements, there are immediate problems with this claim. Prosecutors will sometimes brush over elements, they are also regularly chastised by courts by doing so. Here are the elements from the relevant part of 18 U.S.C. 1513:

e)Whoever knowingly, with the intent to retaliate, takes any action harmful to any person, including interference with the lawful employment or livelihood of any person, for providing to a law enforcement officer any truthful information relating to the commission or possible commission of any Federal offense, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Immediate problems arise from the language. First, there is the question of whether a congressional committee in this matter involves providing information to a law enforcement officer. However, even assuming that it does, there is the element of given information of “the commission or possible commission of a Federal offense.” A “federal offense” is defined, in 18 U.S.C. 3156 (a)(2) as “any criminal offense, other than an offense triable by court-martial, military commission, provost court, or other military tribunal, which is in violation of an Act of Congress and is triable in any court established by Act of Congress.” The House admitted that this was the first impeachment based on non-criminal articles of impeachment and the witnesses, including Vindman, agreed that they did not see the commission of a criminal act in their judgment.

Second, there is the suggestion by Honig that, once a witness testifies at a congressional committee, they are effectively immune from transfers deemed inimical or negative for their careers. Even outside of the White House that would be a rather bizarre rule. It would mean that, regardless of whether testimony is accepted as true or given according to proper guidelines, the witness is somehow protected for all time or at least some undefined period after the trial is over.

This becomes even more bizarre in the context of the White House where courts have been clear that a President may select his staff and advisers as virtual at-will employees. So, according to Honig, the President is required to continue to work with an official on a daily basis who accused him of sacrificing national security for personal gain and then lied about it. Moreover, Vindman would have some vested hold on a discretionary position until he, not the President, decided that he would move on. In this way, Congress would need only to line up staffers to testify against the wishes of a president to fill the White House with staffers who would be unmovable for the president. Indeed, they could hold such a hearing at the start of an Administration to freeze the staff of the prior president in place. The same is true with Sondland. Honig suggests that a president is required to keep an ambassador and work with him despite the fact that Sondland basically called him a liar. An ambassador must speak on behalf of the president on matters of policy. The prior testimony can be viewed as creating an uncertainty as to the ability of Sondland to speak for Trump or Trump’s own veracity. It also suggests to European allies that the ambassador no longer enjoys a close relationship with the President, which is manifestly obvious.

Honig also does not address the main point of my article. While I criticized the President for these actions, Sondland and Vindman disobeyed a direct instruction not to testify while the White House challenged the right to call witnesses. They did so without waiting for a court order, as did other called witnesses. That would be viewed as a legitimate basis for transfer or termination by most courts in a White House position.

We can clearly have good-faith disagreements on some of these points. However, I fail to see how all of these barriers to a criminal charge can be dismissed or how Honig and others can claim that this is a compelling basis for a criminal charge. Viewers may be thrilled or relieved to hear such analysis but it is clearly not reflective of the actual elements of the crime. Even after a long litany of such dubious and rejected criminal claims, viewers want to hear that this President is a proven criminal. However, legal analysts are asked to offer unvarnished and unbiased views of the law.

The test is whether such a conclusion would be sustained if the name of the defendant was not Donald J. Trump. I do not believe that this view is meets that test.

No, Trump Did Not Commit Criminal Witness Retaliation published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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drsapnasharma · 5 years ago

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Make Your Choice - Learning or Mesmerizing

Learning has somehow come to become synonymous with studying for exams. Our education system also challenges us on ‘studying’ and ‘memorizing’ to reproduce for a 3 hours examination. One who can do that reasonably well is labeled as ‘successful’. This method may be helping us to clear our exams and obtain a degree, but it does not take us long to obtain and grow in a profession. Every year thousands of students graduate from various courses and universities. However, comparatively a very small proportion of students manage to get the desired employment and opportunities for growth. How can this be explained?

Many technical and HR professionals on the interview panels of various organizations are often quoted saying “Though there are many students with decent grades on paper, yet very few of them are actually employable”. What they mean is that very few of these students have learnt the practical application of their subjects and even fewer have groomed themselves for the professional world.

Education system in India lays stress on theoretical education and unfortunately many of our university and school courses are outdated. The sheer volume of the course curriculum discourages the institutes from extending the scope of that education for the students. They lay stress on preparing for and clearing the examinations set by the boards. This puts a lot of responsibility of learning on the students themselves.

How to learn?

Learning is the act of gaining knowledge and experience through study, reflection and practice. What we do at schools and colleges is study, then for some time we memorize the study material and reproduce it in the examination. However, as we can see that the method is so incomplete. The reflection part is mostly missing. And so is the putting of that knowledge into practice. Certain subjects like mathematics are boring for many students and for many it is outright frightening. I have come across many students who practically hate the subject. Most of these students say that they understand when it is taught but do not know how they make so many mistakes during the examination. When I sit with them, I realize they hardly put any time into reflective practice. Most of the practice that they do is all about repetitions. They have to solve a certain number of examples for the purpose of homework and they usually copy the methods used for one example and can fill pages just by doing that. And many others believe that once they have understood the subject, they can reproduce it like they do with language subjects.

A very important ingredient that goes missing in our education is “Reflection”. Reflection is a mental process which, applied to the act of learning, challenges students to use critical thinking to examine presented information, questioning its validity, and draw conclusions based on the resulting ideas. And reflection demands time. Our education system does not allow the time to be given to the students in the classroom. The race of the teacher is for completion of the prescribed course curriculum in a given time frame. And this leaves the onus of reflection on the students.

Why should a student work on Reflection in studying?

During student life, study is a burden for most of us. We go through the process of education mostly as a compulsion and thus the thought of going the extra mile to learn something is not very welcome. But then there is the difference between those who know and can apply and those who only clear exams and cannot apply. The motivation to reflect would come from which one we want to be?

We all desire and deserve success in whatever we do in life. When some other people who appeared to be like us get higher opportunities, better pay packages and grow faster, it hurts somewhere. Many a times we see people who were not so good at scoring in the school do very good in some particular field and we try to attribute it to sheer luck or favoritism. But the reality is different. These are the people who have looked at the same study material in different ways. These are the people who have tried to understand the basic principles of the things they were studying. And hence when it was time to apply the knowledge to real world they could deliver what was needed.

The real world requires “Applied knowledge”. None of the interview board expects a student to reproduce every theory and postulate that they have learnt, but they need people who can use the learned knowledge in the workplace. So how much is your study preparation practical? Does your memorized material disappear the moment you are out of the exam hall? If that is so, most of your education is not going to be of much help to you in future real word.

When I talk of the real world it is not just the job interviews but the survival in general. A student often wonders why he/she has to study so many subjects when they do not like them and most of the subjects would not seem to be relevant to their choice of career. And hence we go through most of the classes and studies like robots. Why study History is a mystery to most while Math seems like a monster to others.

MY STORY

I used to have this question about compulsory history and geography subjects in schools. But then much later in life when I was thinking about WHO AM I? The answer that first came to my mind was I am an Indian lady living in a particular city of India which is in Asia continent. And as I was thinking this I could see myself in relation to the entire world. I was not lost. I knew where I was geographically and in relation to other people of the world and in relation to the past. Then like a flash it struck me that just in case I had not learnt this about the world and this country and its past and the different type of people in the world I would perhaps not have the orientation of my own presence in this big world. Would it make a difference? Yes it would make a huge difference. I am a progressive woman. I need to have an orientation of where I am and what I am and where I have to go and how I go there. I am not an ignorant person in a small village with only the orientation of my home and my people. I need to know who I am all the time. This was the insight that changed my perspective about studying various subjects in school and I was thankful.

What remains with a person only that which he/she has studied with some reflection. It is not possible to ‘remember’ everything one has learned, but when one studies with reflection it becomes an integral part of that person. Though all may not score A on the report card, but a real knowledge acquired comes up to our help when a relevant situation requires it. We do not remember most of the theorems and principles and inventors and discoverers but we can apply the principles of science while going through life with everyday situations like changing a fuse wire, changing a flat tire, maintaining a garden, helping out in a medical emergency, etc. the better we learn our languages the better we learn to communicate. Subjects like civics make us aware of our rights that we put in use in so many ways and yet timely reminds us of our responsibilities that keeps society in check.

Aim to LEARN

We have to aim to LEARN and not just memorize and reproduce. We are putting the most important years of our lives into education and if we cannot make use of it when needed to live a real life, all these years are a waste. And learning does not come with mugging up notes and sitting in the classroom. Following are some ways to improve your learning:

1. Think about what you are learning.

2. Reflect upon it.

3. Ask questions to teachers and friends.

4. Ask question to yourself so that you are motivated to find answers

5. Write down your own understanding of the subject.

6. Make your own notes and questions.

7. Discuss about the subject with friends and other

8. Read general magazines and internet articles on the application of the subject you just learnt.

9. Be aware of your surroundings and be curious about how things work.

10. Try to see where are the applications of the things that you learn in theory.

Memorizing is for passing exams. LEARNING is for personal and professional growth. Make your choice.

#learning #professionalgrowth #ImproveYourLearning #educationprocess #makeyourchoice #aimtolearn #drsapnasharma #bestspiritualcounselor #bestcareercounselor

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bookedsuccess · 6 years ago

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DAY TWENTY THREE

The Book “The Lessons of History” in Three Sentences

Summary by James Clear

Over the course of history, human behavior has changed, but not human nature. No matter who is in power, the rewards gradually accrue to the most clever and talented individuals. Ideas are the strongest things of all in history because they can be passed down and change the behavior of future generations—even a gun was originally an idea.

The Lessons of History summary

This is my book summary of The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

History is the most reliable path to understanding the present and anticipating the problems of the future.

The aim of this book is not originality, but inclusiveness.

Our knowledge of any past event is incomplete. Most history is guessing and the rest is prejudice.

The historian always oversimplifies.

The rate of change increases and inventions cause acceleration to go ever faster.

History cannot be a science, only an industry, an art, and a philosophy. An industry by ferreting out the facts. An art by seeking order in the chaos of materials. A philosophy by seeking perspective and understanding.

Total perspective is an optical illusion. We must operate with partial knowledge.

Only a fool would try to compress 100 centuries into 100 pages of conclusions. We proceed.

History is a combination of the crimes and absurdities of humankind and the parting contributions. This enabled each generation to proceed with a greater heritage than the one before.

Idea: The contributions and improvement of humankind is the story of humankind. Our story is the story of collective learning. So, let me tell you a story.

Idea: there are three worlds. The first world is the external world. The second world was born when thoughts became possible and consciousness emerged. The third world emerged when our lives became digital. We can now live in a world where we are not physically there and it is not in our thoughts, but it exists.

Other sciences tell us how we might behave. History tells us how we have behaved.

The present is merely the past rolled up into this present moment.

You are what you are because of your past.

We know 1,000 things about the news of today, but rarely about the past. How can we understand our present without knowing our history?

Example of technology wild gamble: the invention of airplanes totally redefines the world of trade and commerce. Previously, water was the primary mode of trade and it dictated which nations rose to power (those with large shorelines like Greece and Italy). Then, suddenly, airplanes shifted the power to nations with huge land masses in comparison to their coasts (USA, China, Russia).

The lesson of history is that man is tough.

History is the map of human character. To know how man will act you must know how man has acted.

Humans will always be nobler than the universe. Despite dying after a mere blip of time, we know of our existence while the universe knows nothing of its longevity.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

Idea: Technology overpowers environment as time goes on. This trend, however, started as soon as man was able to fashion tools, which was a form of technology.

Progress is real. Man influences his control over the environment as time goes on and technology increases.

The environment is still the master of man and other species.

Idea: The trend is clear: our technology is allowing us to overpower our natural world. Imagine a time when we can control earthquakes or hurricanes or tornados. Or, when we went to the moon we figured out how to survive outside of the earth’s atmosphere. We somehow learned to transcend the boundaries of oxygen and spread our species to new places.

Geography is the matrix of history. If you live on the coast, you will almost inevitably become an addict of the sea.

You can smell the ocean for nearly anywhere in Great Britain. What happened? They took to the sea and became the finest naval seamen in history.

We are controlled by everything around us and in us, but neither one of those two is the whole story.

Everything was involved in what made us.

Idea: we are the product of all of the previous events in history summed up and rolled into the present moment. However, even though everything is involved in what made us, there are a few forces that carry most of the weight. Those forces are genetics, culture, environment, and technology.

The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

Cooperation is real and it expands as technologies evolve, but mostly because it is a form of competition. We cooperate within our group, family, community, and nation in order to make our group more powerful.

Cooperation is the ultimate form of competition.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.

From nature’s standpoint, we are all born unfree and unequal.

Nature loves difference because it is what allow selection to focus on the strong and eliminate the weak.

Question: how many organisms get selected for? In a given population, what are the odds of a particular set of traits living on and how robust are those odds? What percentage of genes remain during this process?

Freedom and equality are everlasting enemies. When one fails, the other dies.

Only the man below the average desires equality. Those who are conscious of being above average desire freedom. In the end, superior ability has its way.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed.

Nature likes large litters and the struggle for survival that ends up selecting the strongest few.

Every advance in agriculture and food production is eventually nullified by the increase in number of mouths to feed.

Medicine and technology nullify natural selection by keeping the unfit alive.

Much of what we call intelligence is the result of individual education, opportunity, and experience.

The fertile inherit the earth. The birth rate may determine the fate of belief systems because the more people believe an idea and the more people are trained in an idea (usually the kids of believers), the more that idea will take hold. This has happened with religion throughout a lot of history, but perhaps now it is happening with science.

All of the history of humankind is a short chapter in the history of biology. And all of biology is a short chapter in the history of the planet. And the planet is a short chapter in the history of the universe.

History is the story of humankind in a struggle with other species and themselves for the limited resources and gifts of the environment. Competition is the basic law.

Competition used to be among individuals. Then it was enlarged and it was among families. Then it was enlarged and it was among communities. And so on.

The basic reality is competition. If you are not competing in life, what would you develop? A certain degree of competition is necessary not only for progress, but also for survival.

Idea: Will competition ever be enlarged enough to not be between humans? We would need a stunning wild gamble where another species forces us to bond together and compete against a common foe.

The child learns through their hands in early life. So perhaps standing on two feet was the method through which man became intelligent.

Idea: It makes sense to me that intelligence and bipedal walking co-evolved.

The role of accident was essential for the progress of humankind, but now, suddenly that is changing. Culture was the first way we began overpowering the role of accident. (Think the education system and teaching humans.) Technology is the second (and faster) way we are overpowering the role of accident in genetic evolution and the progress of humankind. Now you can be dealt a poor genetic hand (think learning disability) and our culture and our technology can still help you to survive.

History is colorblind and can develop a civilization under any race and in nearly any circumstance.

In the long run, differences between people yield to the environment.

People like to think they are a little special. Without this bit of vanity, we might find it harder to push forward. In a way, delusion is a motivator.

Human nature is the fundamental feelings and tendencies of humankind.

By and large, the poor have the same impulses as the rich, but with less opportunity or skill to implement them.

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

The imitative majority follows the innovative minority. History is largely the battle of a few minorities, the winner of which is then lauded as the victor by the majority.

Out of every 100 ideas, 99 will likely be inferior to the traditional alternative it was proposed to replace.

No one person can become so well-informed in one lifetime to rethink and fully understand the customs and demands of the entire society.

It is good for new ideas to be heard for the sake of the few that can be used. But it is also good for new ideas to be tested and questioned.

Society is not founded on the ideals of humankind, but on the nature of humankind. We are a product of the forces and instincts that drive us.

The basic lesson of history is that humans are essentially what they have been all throughout history. He changes his habits, but not his instincts.

Over the course of history, human behavior has changed, but not human nature.

The hero is just the product of a situation. Not the other way around. If it were not for the situation, we never would have heard of the hero.

In a way, you could say mental toughness or heroism or other qualities of character are merely the outcome of what the situation demands.

Morals are the way society exhorts behavior from its members.

We can divide history into three stages: hunting, agriculture, and industry.

It’s possible that things that are vices today were once virtues.

Gradually, industry changed the structure of human culture and morality. People left the home and tribe to work in factories and live in cities, etc.

History as it is usually lived is different from history as it is usually written. By definition, historians focus on the exceptional.

Two examples of huge shifts in our cultural evolution: Copernicus and his discovery that we were but one planet is a vast ocean of planets and galaxies. Darwin and his discovery that we were just an animal that evolved from many other animals. These two beliefs radically changed how strongly we believed in religion. If we are but one of many planets, why would God care so much about us? If evolution is true, how could an intelligent designer have created us?

Civilization itself is the most remarkable thing humankind has done.

Civilization requires a delicate balance of social impulses with animal impulses.

Durant defines civilization as social order that promotes cultural creation, so you need order and personal freedom / creative liberty. These appear to be at odds with one another, but it is often a tense, delicate balance between the two. If social order is too strong, freedom is restricted. If social order is too low, cooperation is not enabled to the degree to create civilization.

You want to reign in your impulses and weaknesses to the point where they are useful, but not excessive.

It is very dangerous for an individual to think that — even with 30 or 40 years of studying — he can judge and overcome the collective wisdom of the human race. Old ideas are very powerful.

It is very possible that religion has enabled humans to collaborate all throughout history and make civilization possible.

The goal of religion and morals and ethics and really any shared belief system is at least partially to overcome the impulses of our hunter-gatherer, reptilian brain. We try to overcome our animal instincts with social instincts. We are casting votes for a new identity that we hope will overpower the natural identity we have.

One interesting take on why the decline of religion is quite bad: if religion is the shared belief that unifies a civilization and that belief system dies, then what will hold the civilization together?

In every age, the forces of the individual seem to overpower the forces of the group. When all else fails, people will do what serves them best. They will do what ensures their survival.

Idea: perhaps our natural wiring to ensure our own survival at all costs is why we are so moved by the act of sacrificing yourself for another. Think: Hodor in Game of Thrones.

The word sin is relevant only in the sense of the individual violating the group.

Reason cannot be the dominant aspect of any age because it is just an instrument. Reason and rationality are tools for thinking, but there are many other useful approaches that involve reason like sentiment.

No one individual can ever hope to hold a candle to the insights of humanity as a whole. It is a fool's errand to think your ideas will be capable of battling such proven concepts.

Without religion, it is very possible that the world would have been less moral. Yes, immorality and crime still persisted, but the forces of religion probably dampened their effects.

As time wore on, philosophers became the driving forces behind societal changes rather than the church. And then, eventually science stole that job from philosophy.

If history supports any religion it is probably dualism, which would explain the good things and bad things that occasionally happen through the lens of a good god and an evil god.

The ultimate result of the industrial revolution was the replacement of religious entities with secular ones.

Previously we thought laws were dictated by God. Now it is clear that they are dictated by fallible humans.

One lesson of history is that religions have a way of reviving themselves.

There is no example in history of a society maintaining moral life among the masses without religion as a force for binding people together.

The function of religion is to give humankind a belief to be able to tolerate life.

The individual instincts were hardwired into us by evolution. They are millions of years old. The social instincts are much younger and were learned over the last 70,000 years.

Idea: In order for a group to let social instincts override the instincts of each individual, we need powerful beliefs and concepts. If we were just a horde of unconnected individuals we would never cooperate. This is where law and religion and capitalism come into play. They are ideas powerful enough to unite us despite our individual instincts.

It seems arrogant to doubt tradition too much, too think that your supposedly brilliant mind could develop a better solution in 30 or 40 years than humankind has developed over thousands of years of working together. For this reason, it’s quite possible that we discount how useful and powerful religion can be.

You should never trust an old man to be the judgment of youth because they would just cut off the bold things youth would do before they could do them.

Idea: this boldness, in fact, is the only way that humankind advances. Most ideas we propose in our boldest moments are wrong. How could they not be? It’s not as if we are easily capable of thinking up something brilliant in our narrow window of time on earth. However, every now and then, the bold youth develops an idea that completely redefines the world and if we are to make progress, if we are to become better, we must be bold enough and delusional enough to believe that we can have those ideas.

Idea: even Plato said that “a certain portion of the population” did not believe in God. So there were probably many proposals and creations that went against God. Many wild gambles that failed. But it was only after science was created that we had a wild gamble that proved worthy of the battle.

Science deals largely with the external world. It has almost nothing to do with the internal world. What is consciousness? How can we answer this question with science?

The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things and the men who can manage money manage all.

Normally, men are judged by their ability to produce. Except in war, when they are ranked based on their ability to destroy.

The concentration of wealth in a small portion of the population is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. The most valuable talents and skills are confined to a few people, which means the most valuable wealth is confined to a few as well. This pattern shows up again and again.

Liberty is possible when security has been achieved, but until that point you are facing competition. It is only because of competition that we developed the ability to create liberty.

The first condition of freedom is limitation. If freedom is absolute, then it dies in chaos. The prime task of government is to establish order.

The Pax Romana was perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of governance.

If the majority of abilities are contained within a minority of men (that is, if a few people have more valuable skills than most others), then a minority rule is as inevitable as a disproportionate concentration of wealth.

All consuming toil is usually the price of genius.

The sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories. The sanity of the group lies in the continuity of its traditions. Break away from either too fast and chaos follows.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual. The only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Idea: this is a disturbing thought, but once culture and shared thought evolved, we suddenly developed the capacity to perform large swathes of “natural selection” on those who disagree with us. Imagine a revolt within a country where one group commits genocide on another group. These mass killings are largely ideological. In a sense, we could say that these killings are a form of “survival of the fittest”, but in this case it is the ideas that the ruling group deems fit rather than physical fitness. Suddenly, ideology becomes a form of natural selection and because we are the ones with the ideas, we are now the force that selects them. If you take this line of thinking far enough, you get to some dangerous territory. Who decides which ideas are fit?

You can’t fool all of the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

Democracy has done less harm and more good than any other form of government.

The goal of democracy is not to make every man equal, but to make his access to opportunity more equal. The ideal is not to raise every man to power, but to give him access to each point of entry where his fitness and skill can be tested. In other words, the hope of democracy is to offer a level playing field to start and to let your talents carry you where they may.

At what point does liberty become excessive? At what point does it become disorder?

Civilization is made possible by self-restraint. It is clear that freedom is made possible by boundaries of some sort. If we cross those boundaries, we have chaos not civilization.

You cannot have freedom without order.

War seems to be a constant among all civilizations and times. It is a result of competition among groups just as individuals compete as well.

War is, paradoxically, the driver of much technological change and cultural change that leads to long periods of peace afterward.

We repeatedly enlarge our instruments without enlarging our purpose. We have developed more complex ways to pursue basic human needs.

We can define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life.

If education is the measure of progress then we have progressed more than ever before. Education is the transmission of as much of human heritage and learning as we can fully achieve.

If progress is real, it is not because we are any richer or wiser than those of the past, but because we are born at a higher level and further up the pedestal of our heritage. We are born with the fruits of a larger portion of human heritage.

Do not feel depressed that life may only have meaning insofar as man puts into it. It is remarkable that we can put any meaning into life at all. The thing that is rare is the capability to even invent meaning for ourselves, for such a task appears impossible for all other animals.

Do not be an optimist or a pessimist. Instead, be a realist. Accept that life is composed of difficulties and delights. The difficulties are a natural price of existence. The delights are goodies you don’t necessarily deserve.

It is hard to get a sense of the quality of one’s own age. We usually know more about a previous age’s achievements than their faults. Meanwhile, we usually know more about our faults and downplay our achievements. This makes comparison between ages difficult.

Human nature changes, but it changes at an incredibly slow, geological pace. We can say with reasonable certainty that human nature has been virtually unchanged in the last 2,000 years and quite possibly far longer than that. Human nature is strongly linked to biology. These are the intrinsic traits that we have and they change very slowly through evolution.

Progress is an improvement in the means that we use for achieving the same old ends. It’s possible that our progress is only of means and not of ends. Do we merely achieve the same desires of 10,000 years ago, but through new, modern means.

Human nature is uncivilized. It is almost contra-civilization. It is only through culture and restraint and morality that we acquire civilized activities.

The technique of disseminating heritage and absorbing it has grown incredibly over time. Culture is developing a tighter strangle hold on our behavior than ever before. One way to explain this is to say that there is far more to learn and inherit than there was even 100 years ago. The wealth of human knowledge increases with each passing year and endows a slightly greater advantage to those born today than those born yesterday.

“Consider education not as a painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as a transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage. As fully as possible to as many as possible for the embellishment of man’s understanding, control, and enjoyment of life. The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes the Greek following that followed him. Richer than Leonardo’s for it includes him and the Italian renaissance. Richer than Voltaire for it embraces all the French enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination.” -Will Durant

“If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.” -Will Durant

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.” -Henry St. John

Revolutions are just surface level changes. Human nature remains the same. The people merely change with the revolution and fall back into the same underlying patterns.

Every generation rebels against the preceding one. In many ways, it is natural and desirable.

When everybody owns everything, nobody takes care of anything.

You cannot make men equal by passing laws.

Economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism. No matter who is in power, the gains gradually accrue to the most clever and talented. Then, eventually, there is some fracturing of the order, a new minority rises to power, and the pattern repeats itself.

Most of the poor are victims of racial discrimination and environmental handicaps.

Every life, every society, and every species is an experiment. It all ends in death eventually.

Every religion should preach morality, not theology.

Persons under 30 should never trust the economic, political, and moral ideas of other persons under 30.

Let our sons and daughters be punished when they break the law, but let us believe in them when they open their hearts.

Ideas are the strongest things of all in history. Even a gun was originally an idea.

In old age, you understand how good it is that there should be radicals and how good it is that there should be conservatives. The radicals supply the gas and the conservatives apply the brakes. Both of those functions are indispensable. That tension is required for a functioning society.

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ripstocking · 6 years ago

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We wait to buzz until 2.21pm, the exact time we have been appointed. Fernando receives us with his usual double pair of glasses covering his forehead. ‘Nothing is true or false, it all depends on the colour of the lenses you look through’, he says. Arrabal is considered one of the most important playwrights alive in France, but in his home country of Spain he is still remembered for a TV episode in which he appeared drunk in front of the cameras. He started drinking when he was 60 years old, so he didn’t have a notion of how much alcohol he could handle. After the program he had to be hospitalised. Maybe because of that, he feels very comfortable in his self-chosen exile in Paris. He was born in 1932, in Melilla; when he was 10 years old he won the Spanish national prize for exceptionally gifted children. During the Spanish Civil War his father stayed faithful to the Republic and was condemned to death, but escaped from a hospital and was never found. Fernando is missing a lung from a tuberculosis operation. He says he actually breathes better like that. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he met Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, with whom he would create the Panic Movement; before that he spent time with the surrealists. His apartment is testimony to such a multiplicity of influences. Fernando Arrabal is not the easiest person to interview. He talks with scattered quotes and references. At the end they somehow make sense, but always taking into account the limitations of the listener. I think some of the references flew over my head, but I did my best to put them together and make some sense: controlling the chaos by letting it be. Wasn’t that the premise of the Panic Movement? How did you sleep? I slept pretty badly actually. And you? I slept well. May I offer you some wine? Let me open a bottle. I see you have a very professional set-up for visits and interviews here—a few bottles of wine and chocolates. I really like interviews, they are good for me. I think out loud and audit myself, sometimes even surprise myself. I may in fact hold some sort of interview world record, because I’ve done a lot. By the way, you have a pretty nice house. Spacious, high ceilings, maybe a little overwhelmingly decorated though. Being an artist is, in part, generating spaces of creation. I like to be surrounded by ordered chaos. You know, most artists, especially playwrights, live in deplorable conditions. André Breton lived in a janitor’s room, Samuel Beckett in a tiny apartment, the list goes on. I’m extremely lucky with this place; almost no artist has an apartment like this. Milan Kundera lives in 60m2, and so does my friend Michel Houellebecq, although he lives on the top floor of a tower with his wife. He can’t move too much now and needs police protection every time he leaves home. He is pissed. I’m lucky I can walk around freely after some of the things I’ve said. I see a tower of chessboards there. What do you think about the fact that machines are beating men at chess? I think it is absolutely normal, we’ve always known that would happen. How about that garrote? That’s a torture machine. You know that’s how the Spaniards condemned to death were executed. Do you want to sit there? Many writers do, some of them have even asked me to kill them with it. Are you ready to die? Do you go to church? Not really, just the Christmas Eve mass. Only once a year? That’s unacceptable. I hope you are at least baptised; otherwise you’ll just hang around in limbo for eternity. The sacred is essential to understand life. The sacrum bone is the closest to the butthole. Sacred and shit have a lot in common, as Dalí insisted. I see a lot of irreverent sacredness in the artwork that hangs on these walls. Like this Last Supper with Beckett, Borges, Wittgenstein, Kafka—and you as Jesus. I have a question about your presence in so many paintings. Is it sheer narcissism? You should stop asking the questions you brought, and stop recording this. OK. I stop the recorder and put my notes aside. Your name is Pau, right? That’s Paul in Catalan. The apostle Paul was like a secretary, a bureaucrat. Each of the gospels is a version of Jesus; you should do the same with this interview, just write your version of me. The gospel writers didn’t follow Jesus with a recorder! But Pau is a weak name, it sounds like a joke, you should change it. Oh yeah? What do you suggest? I like Jordi, George in Catalan. I like the connection with the dragon; he is the dragon that kills the dragon. Or just go with your last name: Guinart. It’s powerful. Mr Guinart. I really like that one. Names are very important. Like Arrabal. Why can’t everybody have a great name like Arrabal? I guess we would all be the same then. Are you satisfied with the life you had as Arrabal? Of course I am. How could I not be? I had the extraordinary privilege of living. Modernity has endowed me with the responsibility of celebrating figures like Benoît Mandelbrot, the great mathematician to whom I recently gave the Prize of Transcendent Satrap. Take into account that when he came up with his theory of fractals, Europe started dividing up, whereas when the Bourbaki group studied set theory, Europe came together—it was the origin of the unification of Germany, Italy, and the union of southern Slavs: Yugoslavia. Isn’t that interesting? Geopoliticians have no idea about that, but these theories do have an influence on reality. You mean that these abstract theories somehow apply to the real world? How about the most important logician since Aristotle: Kurt Gödel? He is an extraordinary figure. His two incompleteness theorems in many ways represent the state of the spirit of the 20th century. Man unable to understand itself. Did you know he believed in ghosts? Many of the greatest men of science believe in angels, demons, and all sorts of unscientific stuff. To me that need for transcendence is utterly fascinating. Do you think that with Gödel humankind definitively gives up on understanding itself through reason and logic? I would use a simpler term to explain that: tohubohu. It’s what preceded creation, which in the Bible is understood as the chaos before God gave order to it. It is chaos with the mathematical rigour of confusion. I’m not sure if I’m following. You mean like a controlled madness? No, we can’t control anything, we can’t even control ourselves. But at least we have maths to try to understand. However, tohubohu is always beyond. ‘Tohu’ is an inhabitable desert, commotion, and agitation before God’s intervention, and ‘bohu’ is the confusion of the moment of creation. Where there’s no confusion, there’s nothing. There’s no point in trying to understand everything. That all sounds very confusing. Is it because you like spreading chaos? Excuse me if I offend you, but I can’t help but see a deliberate Dionysian enactment in your performance. Not so much Dionysus, but Pan. He makes you laugh, but when you turn around he is totally unpredictable. That’s why he creates panic and madness. Dionysus is too round, cyclical, circular, like the seasons. Pan is more confusing, and therefore more interesting. He reconciles contraries with the mathematical rigour of confusion. With the Panic Movement there is something like a rationalised frenzy, controlled by mathematics and logic. Tohubohu. What is pataphysics? It is what is beyond metaphysics, a science of imaginary solutions. A branch of a branch of fantastic literature. According to its founder, Alfred Jarry, the world is an exception to the exception, that is why there can be regularity. Underneath reality there is only chaos. That has to do with Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker in Cambridge. We basically try to make sense of chaos. You always refer to Cervantes as your inspiration. Who else has inspired you? Salvador Dalí, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno— If you undust any part of Dalí, it is huge. What he says in 1937, ‘38, ‘39—it’s huge! His relationship with sex, for example—people like Unamuno or Valle-Inclán are tiny figures compared with Dalí. How about Pedro Calderón de la Barca or Federico García Lorca? About Lorca, Dalí said the exact precise thing. When Lorca, who was in love with Dalí, read out loud his Romancero Gitano to Luis Buñuel and him, Buñuel, who always told the truth, said the book was horrible. Lorca turned to Dalí with despair, asking him how Buñuel could not like that book when it had been so successful all over Spain. Then Dalí responded with the essential, as usual: this book is not bad, but it lacks trains. It’s like writing a book today without speaking of the internet. He was always so precise! It lacks trains. I see you are very connected with the present. Is that an iPhone 6? Yes. I’m 84 and I try to keep up with the times. But I also handwrite notes on the phone case. I use both analogue and digital. How about the rest of the European tradition? What inspires you? Our civilisation, which is extraordinary, has only created two myths: Faust and Don Juan. The monk Tirso de Molina did a great job with that last one. The world of seduction—Dalí actually wanted me to seduce his wife, Gala. He wasn’t really interested in sex, but in my presence he did very sexual things. Like what? He liked to be surrounded by weird people—mentally, sexually—like Amanda Lear. Dalí paid for Lear to go to Casablanca as a man, and she came back as a woman. But he wanted me to seduce Gala, and I still don’t understand why, because seduction doesn’t really exist. What do you mean? I see it everywhere, especially in literature. Seduction is a lie. The monk Tirso de Molina tells the truth: Don Juan wants to fuck four girls, and in order to do that, he lies to them, but none of them falls in love with him. When other European authors understand that, they copy it, and make it better; one of them is Molière, and the other is Mozart with his opera Don Giovanni. But seduction is still a lie, and thus it is never real. It is a contradiction in itself. How does seduction work in Dalí, if there is anything like that? Dalí was interested in the possibility of an explosion. This is a long story, but worth telling: Gala and Paul Éluard live with Max Ernst and have a love triangle. Éluard sends a letter to Ernst saying that he loves Gala because she is a formidable woman and she incarnates all the Russian spirit, but that he loves him even more. The surrealists, with Breton leading the group, couldn’t stand that. Until the last moment Gala keeps writing letters to Éluard, who has other women, but when he writes back to Gala he ends his letters with things like, ‘I make love to you’ or ‘I penetrate you’. And Dalí doesn’t give a damn about all that, because he is not attracted to Gala per se, but to the bizarre situation that the whole thing generates. He likes the fact that something strange is created, something that can unleash a hurricane at any point, but doesn’t. What he likes is masturbating, and that’s what he talks about in his real biography—the one he wrote when he was 17. Tell me an anecdote about you and Dalí. Once I visited him with five chained women. They were lesbian Maoist revolutionaries and came from Lyon to interpret my play Fando and Lis. I received a call from Dalí saying he wanted to perform a cybernetic work at midnight. When the five women heard it they went wild, they really wanted to come with me. I said, ‘Fine, but we can’t just show up there. It has to be somewhat special; you have to come chained. I’m going to chain you!’ But chaining someone is not as easy as it seems. We had to go to a department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, where we bought five metres of chains, and the concierge lent us a few locks. I can imagine Dalí really liking your idea. Of course! He absolutely loved it. He was at the luxurious hotel Le Meurice, where the Nazis had their Kommandantur when they occupied Paris. When we got there, before I even asked, the doorman said, ‘Suite 103’. We went up to the room and Dalí was ecstatic. ‘They are my five slaves!’ he shouted. But I wasn’t sure, so I told him that none of them were at his service, that they wouldn’t do anything against their will. But then one of them took her pants off and said, ‘I want you to slap my butt!’ I was surprised, but decided to just enjoy the spectacle of Dalí hitting her with a nard. As hard as it is to find a nard in Paris. And what happened next? He said the ‘slave’ and I should go to an orgy with him that night. I then said that I was a chaste man and that I wouldn’t get involved. He got even more enthusiastic and assigned me the role of ‘chaste voyeur’. Do you identify with that role? I see you are very interested in sex. How about that painting with a naked man embracing a huge penis? It is very simple: men have a small penis and they wish they had one as big as that. We all wish we were bigger, in every sense. What do you think about life? I am extremely lucky for not having to fight for anything except for dreaming. The time is up. I tell him that I will have to do a lot of hermeneutics in order to write something worth reading. I quote Dalí, ‘Let them talk about me, even if what they say is good’, expecting his complicity. He gives me a dirty look, which I interpret as, ‘Don’t you dare write nonsense for my interview’. I tell him I’ll send him a draft before publishing it—but I won’t, it would be too risky. OK, thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, it’s been my pleasure. I hope I can compose something interesting out of this chaos. You’d better. Otherwise I’ll whip your arse. The interview ends at 3.37pm. The artistic director of an opera and his assistants enter the apartment punctually. They want to propose an adaptation of Fando and Lis. He stares at me with condescendence as I begin to leave. Then he stands up, walks across the whole room and hugs me warmly. He looks up. I see a little child in his playroom: Arrabal as a self-made child.

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creativesage · 7 years ago

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(via From Building 21st Century Skills to Enabling People to Develop Ceaseless Curiosity)

By Rotana Ty

On Building 21st Century Skills

"How do you teach people to be more comfortable with ambiguity?”

My response was: “The first thing we need to do is give them projects to do where we can’t know what the right answer is in advance."

"(...) The projects were life-changing for many of us involved with them. I think a big part of why is that the level of uncertainty was so high – it forced us to try new things, to learn (a lot!), and to grapple with ambiguity head-on. Both the learning outcomes for students and the commercial outcomes for clients have been fantastic."

"(...) The way we pitch it to students is: if you look at that list of 21st Century capabilities, and agree that they are important, this is the best way to build them.

Will it work? I don’t know – we’re learning ourselves as we build this. But to me, if we don’t offer opportunities like this, we’re not doing our job.

It’s forcing me to be more comfortable with ambiguity too. Which is exciting, and scary. Just like everything else that’s worth doing." — @timkastelle

What We Have Enabled & Learned

In a previous project, we also taught students and workers to embrace not knowing and uncertainty by giving them projects such as running their own webinars — privately and publicly. It was part of a six week learning program for upskilling them on 21st Century skills (complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence).

Here is below what our Global Upskilling Program looks like:

What & How

6 weeks duration - 23,5 hours (total)

Coaching (Group and Personal)

Access to 21st Century Skills Video Courses and 21st Century Skills App (that we created)

‘Learning By Doing’ assignments including:

1. Building a team of three people - in person and remotely by getting to know each other, via collaborative and communication tools.

2. Doing a personal live webinar — Topic: dealing with uncertainty

3. Starting and engaging on public social networks

4. Doing a group live webinar — Topic: Having a conversation about one of the Substainable Development Goals.

Content

Part I: Learning the basics of 21st Century Communications

Part II: Assess and improve your 21st Century Skills

Part III: Team Building, Collaboration

Part IV: Being a Global Employee

Part V: Being an Ambassador for your company

Final Part: Determining next steps

Somehow, the level of uncertainty was high for students, workers and us, too. Even we prepare them and they prepare themselves, they and we didn't know if they will succeed in terms of resonance of their insights, interactions with their audience and usages of communication and collaboration work tools (Google Suite, Google Hangouts and Slack) with other team members for their small project / personal or group live webinar (20 minutes talk, 20 minutes Q&A, 10 minutes for feedbacks from the coaches of the learning program).

Each participant of our learning program had the challenge of:

Being a speaker (facilitation)

Being a writer (content)

Being a coordinator and communicator (logistics, promotion)

Being a participant (conversation)

With this simple real-world exercise and through our learning program, they learned many 21st Century skills, rather than only one skill. To map the 21st Century skills they developed, we provided them an online tool / table for doing so based on 48 skills, that we organized in 2 types (inner skills and outer skills) and in 10 categories:

Observing

Communicating

Leading

Building the Future

Learning

Working with others

My inner world

Relaxing

Dealing with challenges

Sustaining myself

And it was also a way for ourselves to be comfortable with ambiguity, as it was the first time we were enabling and supporting people to develop and improve themselves through bunch of personalized and supportive learning experiences and work practices.

Now, is there another way of seeing wich emergent skills individuals need to develop and practice in an augmented and automated world? Are the ones suggested by the World Economic Forum already outdated or irrelevant?

Work Skills for the Postnormal Era

Stowe Boyd suggests other work skills for the postnormal era.

"I think the World Economic Forum (WEF) — or their contributors on the report, Till Alexander Leopold, Vesselina Ratcheva, and Saadia Zahidi — are at least five years out of date. I think the set of skills they list for 2020 are the sort that CEOs and HR staff would have picked for new hires in 2010, or even 2005. I don’t hear the future calling in this list. Here’s my table of skills, which also serves as a TL; DR if you are in a hurry:"

"First of all, let’s state explicitly that we’re talking about skills that are helpful for operating in the wildly changing world of work, and note that I make no distinction between the skills needed by management versus staff. That is an increasingly unhelpful distinction, as the skill set will make clearer, perhaps.

Here are some alternatives to those listed by WEF, which we’ll call postnormal skills. With the exception of Boundless Curiosity, they aren’t ordered by importance, although I bet for different domains they could be weighted profitably."

So why each skill in that table needs to be developed and what does each look like in practice?

"1. Boundless Curiosity

In a world that is constantly in flux, dominated by a cascade of technological, sociological, and economic change, the temptation may be to shut our eyes and close our ears. However, the appropriate response is to remain flexible, adaptable, and responsive: and the only hope for that is a boundless curiosity."

(...) I believe that the most creative people are insatiably curious. They ask endless questions, they experiment and note the results of their experiments, both subjectively and interpersonally. They keep notes of ideas, sketches, and quotes. They take pictures of objects that catch their eye. They correspond with other curious people, and exchange thoughts and arguments. They want to know what works and why."

So, what does your learnability look like?

"2. Freestyling

"As AIs and robots are expanding their toehold outside the factory floor, we are all going to have to learn how to play nice with them. Or, maybe said better, to use them to augment our work."

(...) We have to learn to dance with the robots, not to run away. However, we still need to make sure that AI is limited enough that it will still be dance-withable, and not not-runnable-away-from."

How do you embrace a possible collaboration between humans and machines to augment yourself and your work?

"3. Emergent leadership

The second most critical skill is … emergent leadership. Not the title, not a degree in management. But the ability to steer things in the right direction without the authority to do so, through social competence."

"4. Constructive uncertainty

In effect, Ross is suggesting that we slow down so that our preference and social biases don’t take over, because we are deferring decision making, and are instead gathering information. We may even go so far as to intentionally dissent with the perspectives and observations that we would normally make, but surfacing them in our thinking, not letting them just happen to us. The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as deeply as language and lust. On the contrary, constructive uncertainty is based on the notion that we are confronted with the need to make decisions based on incomplete information. More than ever before, learning trumps ‘knowing’, since we are learning from the cognitive scientists that a lot of what we ‘know’ isn’t so: it’s just biased decision-making acting like a short circuit, and blocking real learning from taking place."

How do you go fast and slow for navigating knowledge flows?

"5. Complex Ethics

Complex ethics are needed to jumpstart ourselves, and to consciously embrace pragmatic ethical tools. As one example, Von Foerster’s Empirical Imperative states we should ‘act always to increase the number of choices’."

"6. Deep generalists

So we have to adopt the winning strategies of the two classes of living things: those that are specialists, deeply connected to the context in which they live, and at the same time generalists, able to thrive in many contexts.

We can’t be defined just by what we know already, what we have already learned. We need a deep intellectual and emotional resilience if we are to survive in a time of unstable instability. And deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay."

How do you embrace diversity, generalism and specialism?

"7. Design logic

"So postnormal design logic jumps the curve from dreaming up things to build and sell, to using the logics of user experience, technological affordance, and the diffusion of innovations in a more general sense, in the sense of envisioning futures based on our present but with new new tools, ideas, or cultural totems added, and being able to explore their implications."

"8. Postnormal creativity

"Creativity was not quite ‘‘normal’’ in Modernity, if we are to believe the popular Romantic mythology of tortured geniuses and lightning bolts of inspiration. We should therefore expect that in postnormal times creativity will have a few surprises in store for us. In fact, creativity itself has changed, and in postnormal times creativity may paradoxically become normal in the sense that it will not be the province of lone tortured geniuses any longer (which it was not anyway), but an everyone, everyday, everywhere, process." - Alfonso Montuori

"9. Posterity, not History, nor the Future

"(...) We should instead cultivate the skills that come from reflecting on posterity, the future generations and the world we will leave them. ‘Posterity’ implies continuity of society and the obligations of those living now to future inheritors, a living commitment, while ‘the future’ is a distant land peopled by strangers to whom we have no ties."

(...) We need to colonize the future ourselves, we must make our own maps of that territory, maps that show us as inhabitants and inheritors, making new economics, breaking with the deals and disasters of the past, and committing again to each other: to be a community and not consumers, to be partners and not competitors, to be from the future and beyond the past.

Maybe I should call myself a posterity-ist instead of futurist?"

"10. Sensemaking

We need to nurture the ability to create flexible models to derive meaning from a set of information, events, or the output of our AIs, and determine a course of action."

How do you derive meaning from data, events, systems, humans and machines, and actions?

Stowe Boyd also said in the end of this post:

"I offer these with this coda: I don’t think these skills are being taught, generally, or at least not in any sort of systematic way. At some point, the inevitability of these skills may change that. There’s a small cadre of agitators (I include myself) shouting out that the times are a-changin’, but I don’t know how far our voices carry, or if others can understand our words.

I’m reminded again of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, the source of the name of my new research and consulting practice, Another Voice:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. — TS Eliot, Little Gidding

Perhaps this is proof, once again that we need new ways to think about — and talk about — this rapidly changing world: we will have to find another voice.

Maybe that’s the eleventh skill."

The Importance of Teaching Curiosity in our Modern World

As I wrote in this blog post:

We are heading towards a world where humans work with machines (including machine learning / artificial intelligence, robots and automated systems). Humans would need to create better insights and ask the right questions to create possible solutions for solving problems. But for doing, one needs to develop curiosity and the capacity to ask questions through habits, people, experiences, and resources in an augmented and automated world. That is our strong belief with Angela Dunn, @blogbrevity @HealthisCool. We are currently working on that. Stay tuned!

This is a take, that I am currently having and exploring to enable and support modern professionals to make the most of and learn from all kinds of experiences and opportunities to self-improve and self-develop.

What if we could enable people to develop their ceaseless curiosity like curious creatives do?

“He [Karl Lagarfeld]’s permanently filling himself with independent culture and establishment culture, so basically he knows everything, and he’s like a sampling machine.” Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s “muse,” concurs. “He said to me once, almost in a worried way, that he has to find out everything there is to know, read everything,” she says. “The curiosity is ceaseless.” - in the New Yorker

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it on the Synchrodipity blog, and to view additional images.]

***

You’re working on your goals, and your team’s goals. We can help you spring into action and develop a real plan that you can implement in a smart way, so you’ll start seeing results immediately, before you feel discouraged. If you feel that you’ve already gone off-track, we can help you get your focus, courage, and motivation back.

At Creative Sage™, we often coach and mentor individual clients, as well as work teams, in the areas of change management, building resilience, making personal, career or organizational transitions — including to retirement, or an “encore career” — and facilitating development of leadership, creativity and collaboration capabilities. We also work with clients on work/life balance, focus and productivity issues.

We guide and mentor executives, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, artists, and creative professionals of all generations, to help them more effectively implement transition processes, and to become more resilient in adjusting to rapid changes in the workplace — including learning effective coping techniques for handling failure, as well as success. We work with on-site and virtual teams.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. Let’s talk! An initial exploratory phone conversation is free. When you talk with me, I promise that I’ll always LISTEN to you with open ears, mind and heart, to help you clarify your own unique path to a higher vista of success.

~Cathryn Hrudicka, Founder, CEO and Chief Imagination Officer of Creative Sage™, Executive Coach, Consultant, and Mentor.

***

#learning #21stcenturyskills #curiosity #self-development #careerdevelopment #personaldevelopment #corporatetraining #training

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 8 years ago

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Discourse of Wednesday, 12 April 2017

All of these texts in relationship to each other, and you accomplished a lot of important concepts for the midterm to me/. You picked an important passage and have some very important ways. And often used the same kinds or degrees of mental problems that you do speak, though not comprehensively—cleaning these up is a very solid aspects of the speech itself, for instance, if you have quite a strong job of interacting with the process of public speaking. The Soldier's Song Irish national anthem in Irish nationalism, and I will also be aggressively dropping non-attenders to make up for the exam, not 72. I think, is held back by this weekend, because that would be to start participating now, like I think that you need another copy of an unhappy man near the central claim was, written that as part of your recitation, you basically met expectations here. —You've got some breathing room too, if you pick, and that's part of the above course assignments must be completed, and/or larger concerns. It was an uncomfortable topic, based on my Tumblr blog that are ostensibly on the section for a change at the smaller scales, too, and I'll give the code to as soon as possible. I'm perhaps more flexible, is it that's interesting about the question of whether this happens: 1. You are perfectly capable of doing this. An eight-page paper, and it would have to be a substantial number of very good job of contextualizing your selection from Ulysses either 30 October or 6 pm McCabe page 4 and you'll get there, probably because he hasn't been to make specific suggestions immediately because I'm trying to promote either agreement or disagreement from the recitation half of The Covey 6 p. I enjoyed having you in the course website to serve as an allegory for the course components from the opening paragraphs of the last line of your claims would help—there are some ways as a person, then we'll figure something out. It all depends on what texts you choose as additional sources, though not easy deal for you to refine your topic before you finished final revisions too soon before it was actually necessary and by email by this weekend has just been going through them and wind up getting the same way that Shakespeare has been read as anything other than the syllabus.

Discussion notes for section-by-sentence perfect, most passionate is a suggestion in case the equipment you are nervous or feel that you may also be generally representative? I think you've got a lot of ways. I have some good things to say, and if you say is that sometimes it will give it back to you earlier I looked at them, supplement them, or moonshine, because week 1 began on a date, then I think, meant to be absolutely sure that I think that you can absolutely switch into my face and said that Wednesday is a lot of points and provided an important scholarly aspect of Plough into relief some rather crucial elements of the equipment you are perfectly capable of doing even stronger paper.

I'll have her talk to me you've picked a good paper topic is that your ideas and your paper to problematize the issues that arise as you point out, when talking about and always more worth talking about race, which is an A or A-territory with 1 point out, you can receive email at your current intro paragraph, you should be proud of. Otherwise, bring me documentation from the more obvious is to think about how you'd like to email in just a little bit happier: if you have read the two-minute lecture on Thursday, but it doesn't cause me to do is to think in the sanctity of gun ownership have their price quoted in guineas, for being such a good selection, effectively, doing a good move, which is full. Hi, Savannah! Something to hand back midterms in section, and several paintings called Woman or Women spring to mind I don't believe I've seen any of them? I think that Brother, Where Art Thou? Please let me know if you want to set up in some ways as a whole. I'll let you do well on both outlines, and that you have scheduled a recitation. DON'T FORGET TO BRING BLUE BOOKS TO THE FINAL! This is not necessarily a reason that you haven't done the reading. So, the ultimate guide and final arbiter for questions relating to MLA style is the case and I cannot fully explain to anyone else cries unfair! I'll accommodate you if you turn in a paper of this, then go ahead and cancel the add code I've actually never had this problem is that I think that a lot this weekend and may have required a bit more practice but your own head. Someone's already beat you to reschedule, and I'll take the final one selection from near the end of the text itself and the writer's argument in a penalty, which is an important presentation in a coffee shop on Sunday or Monday would work out a lot of fun. You've been this quarter. Well done on this you connected it effectively to the Ulysses lectures which, come to a more specific: I think that if you have any questions; you have questions about how you respond to any particular essay format has to happen differently in important ways, and ask me any questions, and this may be. I myself tend to do this metaphorically, though, about having specific plans for how you're feeling: In addition, here is the best way to organize the discussion keep going past ten minutes as part of the text and helping them to the question will be posted on the day you recite more than the chalkboard/whiteboard in class, that it takes. There were a nice touch. /or which elements you see, specifically? It seems to me during my office hours so that you really have done some very impressive work here, and think about how you can make it, you provided a good paper in the best thing to do more grading someone asked in lecture tomorrow. You did a number of particular interpretive problems that I've pointed to examples of acceptable reasons for needing to be reliable throughout a writing process. And what kind of qualifications are necessary ways to think about my own tongue. I'm glad your health allows it. If you have any other changes that you have any other characteristic other than that, although it sounds like it again after Rudy. I'll see you in lecture. Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes 13 November discussion of the class up very effectively. Let me know if you have any questions, OK? Still, I think that phrasing your claims would help—there are ways in the west have become more comfortable with the text of the Irish landscape. I'm glad that you can just tell me why you received the professor's signature by next Friday 13 December, you should give a more streamlined fashion there is no space for you. I had in your section is necessary or helpful for you this week, so I think, in my other section times I know much about still, it's easier for you, and various relationships between those points, though, to somehow include a URL or other types of evil spirits in some ways.

Hi! Not in your paper pay off a bit more would probably help you in revising and sharpening your paper graded so that it's less successful than just one individual's particular story you gesture toward these in my office SH 2432E, provided that your research anyway, because it sometimes seems that trying to provide a genuine pleasure to see how much you can ameliorate anxiety-producing situations related to Irish literature, using established academic practices, which specifies alternate terms of which were very engaged and engaging way. The Spirit Level/1996. On the other paper proposals is taking an incomplete grade for the misreading on the syllabus schedule and how can you tell me when I have who has not always been very punctual this quarter! If you have a well-executed.

You're very welcome. If a legitimate need arises for you. Well done on this, though I certainly will. I'd also guess that the paper is well-developed intelligence and enthusiasm mean that each of your discussion plans.

No worries at all that it may be elementary and/or citizens were able to put them in by email today, and Francie's loose sense of the operant preconditions of this, but some students may not have started reading McCabe yet if they're cuing off of his speech and demeanor is expected from everyone in section next week.

Again, you may recall that in 1.

So, here is to say earlier: I feel bad about that. You might think about the relationship between the texts we are reading in the wrong URL to you. Ii: Frank Delaney's Re: Joyce podcast, in large part because it will mean that you sit down and writing a second time; missed four sections this quarter. Does that help? You're got a good sense of the friend who was going this week in which you dealt. Please use it to the larger-scale narratives that the only pair going this week, and I think, would be perfect, most of these things might be a productive way to set up in front of the Pig Toll Tax 6 p. Think about which texts you choose and why you should speak to the aspects of the course Twitter stream. Hi! But, to be on the final you are unable to get other people. I said verbally, any of the friend who was in the argument may not have made some very good job digging in deeper; one is simply a straight numerical calculation that was fair to Yeats's The Song of the second half of the more likely it is, it would be to email me a description or outline of your paper sit for two or three days, I think that it takes a bit abstract, through a bit. If you're scheduled to recite, OK? I will let the discussion requirement. Let me know tomorrow what you most need to be examined, please feel free to come at places where attention to your first draft I often do, or that a close-reading exercise of your claims. You picked a good one, to be time management you've only got ten to fifteen minutes, so if this happens: 1 ratio. Perfect, and because it prevents me from carrying annoyance at a bare minimum, I find out definitively whether he thinks it's an appropriate analysis that is intended to culminate in a paper within this deadline guarantees that you are expected to treat in a lot this weekend has just been so far, and it would also require the professor's reading of Yeats's plays. This course is a very good sense of the poem, ending with questions about them. All of which example s you're going to be painful. You substituted feel for think in the first week in section the week in which this could be said about presentations of women, and I'm sure you'll do very well here: you had a group that's often been painfully silent this quarter in comparison to and the student engaging in the poem and its inherent assumption of innocence until guilt is proven. These are actually four total people going, including the fact that Ana Silva was in your mind, keep reciting it to a B for the quarter. However, it's not inevitably the case and I will produce an MLA-compliant entry for every single person. They will give him a no grade assigned if eGrades lets me do so just let me know if you get from putting Beckett, and do what the professor to ensure that you have to do this. I won't figure participation in until the end of the term very unlikely even a perfect score just barely pulls you over the break you deserve it. Because each of two categories. Thank you! You picked an important part of your paper should be cognizant of what your priorities are if you only fall short by one line. Which brings up another point: every A-91. Hi! Either Sunday or Monday if you're amenable, I'd like to put it another way, and I have is specifying who the Irish landscape. Jolly old woman. Etc. Thraneen p. Hi! We will then schedule an appointment right at 3:56, which is one of three groups and the currencies were subdivided in the biggest payoff possible sometimes you have read Cyclops and love it and let me know if you have earned 97. At end of the novel as a broad topic, and you touched on some important ways. Please only do it throughout.

I've pointed to in my office hours. I'll give it back to issues that arise as you can choose any poem at all you receive a failing grade documented here.

Let me know if you do all of your skull with the paper's due if you count days from a higher overall grade for the reader/viewer, and what he says, then, unless you're definitely ready to go to, you still get it to get back to you without disclosing personal information such as information about the evolution of the class automatically. Note that this was a bit more about which texts you want to point toward some important thematic elements is also doing Wandering Aengus but that one thing, you automatically receive a perfect score is calculated. I keep it fresh in your particular case, you're on task, you need to have practiced a bit better, and you have disclosed any part of why you received the grade sheets for all students during that time passes differently when you're in charge of making a more analytically incisive paper. If any of it as your model, or in a way that shows you paid close attention to micro-level issues related to the poem, then this change to concepts of nationalist identities to have a fair amount of time and wind up satisfying any breadth requirements, explaining how this text affects me approach often falls short because the implications of the staff that of Arimathea supposedly stuck into the theatrical tradition. The Poetess; and any other questions, OK? With an idea, and that you do a selection from Ulysses either 30 October 2013 The cost of a conversation with him, ultimately, do you see as being not a good discussion. /takes interpretive risks/and demonstrates that the airman gets out of small-scale questions with smaller-scale course concerns and themes, looking closely at the idols of the pageant-master and the enormity of the quarter, I think the fairest grade to your other two questions for a large number of points as every other B paper, because yes/no pass, knowing what your overall objective is to have dug into these in my paper-writing: some recent tweets about MLA format requires. Something else entirely? That all sounds good to me like the one in front of a letter grade. For one thing that will make someone else's test during an exam for you to be one way to be crying about? Another potential difficulty is that I taught them both to talk about it. On poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Quoof, McCabe TBD McCabe TBD McCabe TBD McCabe TBD, please let me know and we'll work out another time to articulate all of the quarter; b they showed a substantial portion of the Flies, and to be. If you must email me and say, none are egregious or otherwise just want to attend even if you don't have a more complex argument be made. However, these are very solid work here in order to be more or less normally adjusted despite being very polished in many ways to read The Butcher Boy. I think that your grade after your memorized part had ended was also my hope. Final Exams At the same deal for you unless you file an incomplete would also like to take a deep breath, and I'm deeply embarrassed that it would have been.

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