#what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born

[anakinsafterlife]

Belgian man commits suicide after talking with Artificial Intelligence

[et-in-arkadia]

[everysongineverykey]

so-called doomerists when "If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot... no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human... Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. ...for ever."

[apoemaday]

The Second Coming

by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[montaigness]

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[porterdavis]

I'm getting sick to my stomach

The realization that Trump may win in November is starting to hit me like a physical force -- icy fingers squeezing my bowels. I ask myself how anyone could voluntarily subject themselves to a minimum of four more years of that leering, sneering, unrepentant criminal taking over their country and their TV screens.

I don't care if Joe Biden needs to have his peas mashed before he eats them or if he has to ask twice to hear something. He is a good man, an honest man with empathy and compassion who has accomplished near-miracles with the slenderest of majorities in Congress. He is surrounded by competent people. No scandals, no arrests. Compare and contrast with TFG and his coterie of criminals.

It hurts my heart to think that the American experiment -- that all men are free and equal under the law, is coming to an end, but as the history major in me knows, all empires die. Civilizations collapse. Once a certain level of prosperity has been achieved and mere survival ceases to be a concern, people start to worry about who might come and take their livelihood away. Fear of 'the other' creeps in, a fear manipulated by despots and dictators for time immemorial.

That scourge has now invaded the US. Every single American who isn't Black or Native is from immigrants, and yet new immigrants are seen as a threat to be met with brutality and hatred. The notion of equality of men has been modified, and the equality of women has been purposefully rejected.

Inequality of wealth and opportunity has increased to the point where the gap between wealth and poverty is so vast that the middle class can no longer provide a bridge between them. When the center cannot hold, the gyre collapses.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. [...] The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" - William Butler Yeats 1919

[babischlong-six]

Week 3: CROWD

…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?…

"I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night."

"But there is. Being all alone in a crowd."

[allhailthe70shousewife]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- W. B. Yeats

[stjohnstarling]

What monstrous thing might you accidentally awaken within yourself?

A helpless priest at war with his own desires, tormented by dreams of a tempting demon.

A vampire lord desperate to preserve his secrets, ruled by longings he can scarcely control.

Something is coming. What terrifying force makes tremble the very rock beneath their feet? And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Will love be enough to save them?

What Manner of Man is a free serial inspired by Dracula Daily. We're just getting started, come join in!

Read the first few chapters here!

[rabbiteclair]

here's what my brain is doing today

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. History shows again and again How nature points up the folly of man. Godzilla!

and

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound He pulls the spitting high-tension wires down Helpless people on subway trains scream, bug-eyed, as he looks in on them The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Godzilla! (zilla, zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla) God (zilla)

[lulu2992]

Decoding the scripts and secret messages in Rebel Moon

Part 2: Solving the riddle of Noble’s Bone Staff

On December 23, 2023, Zack Snyder posted this:

The idea of uncovering yet another secret got me very excited, so I looked for the Bone Staff in the guide. Here is the image as it appears on the website:

I slightly cropped it, but yes, it really is this small and you can barely see anything... Still, if you look closely, you will notice a series of little vertical lines all along the handle. Well, they’re not just lines; they’re letters, and they form the “secret inscription” fans were challenged to decode!

Contrary to what the post said, though, it seemed to me this script didn’t look like the New Imperium font. Instead, it reminded me a lot of the symbols I had seen elsewhere in the guide, on the Priests and Scribes’ outfits (more on this later), and on Kora’s gun:

I learned from AurekFonts, who worked on several typefaces for the film (along with Louie Mantia, Jr.), that this other font was most likely “designed primarily by the Speculative Civilization Advisor, Adam Forman” and called “Old Imperium”. This is the name I’m going to use from now on.

The guide says the message on the Guardian Gun means “My life for hers”, so I now had 10 letters to work with. On the bone staff, I also noticed the “brackets”, which I concluded served as spaces/word separators in Old Imperium, were upside-down compared to the ones on the gun, so I deduced that, to read the message, I first had to rotate the image by 180 degrees.

But even after doing all that, decoding the inscription remained difficult because of the image’s fairly low resolution... After a lot of squinting, I still managed to count the words and determine how many letters they contained. The message is a 38-word sentence that looks something like this:

---[-------(7th letter is grey)[-----[-----(puntuation mark)---[---[-[----[----[------[---------[--[-----[----(3rd letter is grey)[----[-----[--[---------[--[-[-------[------[---[----[-----[-----[---[----[----[-----[--[----[--------[-------[---------[--[--[----(puntuation mark)

I tried to find the 10 letters I knew... but I was struggling. Then, suddenly, I remembered this:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The poem... it had to be a clue! I looked at “The Second Coming” again, and my eyes were drawn to the last verses:

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

38 words, a punctuation mark between the 4th and 5th words, another one at the end... As for the grey letters on the staff? They correspond to double letters in the poem (“darkneSS” and “slEEp”). Everything works perfectly!

The secret inscription on Atticus Noble’s Bone Staff is the final sentence of the 1919 poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.

December 24, 2023, around 7 pm CEST; challenge completed!

And now that I had been introduced to the Old Imperium font, why not try to decode it too?

[mimicgender]

More poetry reading, please?

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This was tricky to do. I took a few tries, and I feel like the rhythm is still off, but I hope you enjoy it.

[stumblingoverchaos]

For Ineffable May 2. "The Second Coming". Collage, sticker, acrylic paint, gel plate printing.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" -WB Yeats, "The Second Coming"

[amplifyme]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats ~ The Second Coming

[lichdandy]

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[romanceyourdemons]

say what you will about yeats but “what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards bethlehem to be born?” is a sick as hell line