#“It's hard to live in the city” ordinance

[falseandrealultravival]

“It's hard to live in the city” ordinance (February 10, 2003)

The Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata)

(This is an entry for a contest sponsored by Snowy Village. I won a prize and received 5 kg of top-grade rice.)

(the purpose)

Article 1

The purpose of this practice is to awaken the urban population, who live separately from rural areas to the place of humans in nature.

(Promotion of rainwater storage)

Article 2

The rain in the city just flows away, and the city people do not use it. Regardless of the form, local governments subsidize urban residents to use rainwater as their 'own water source'. This will prevent the destruction of nature caused by the constructing of unnecessary dams.

(Promote recycling of manure)

Article 3

Because excrement from the buttocks and agricultural products that enter the mouth connects cities and rural areas, local governments are working to spread composting toilets that can efficiently recycle excrement instead of flush toilets. Subsidies will be provided to households that have adopted composting toilets. At the same time, we will develop a route to effectively reuse the compost produced.

(Promotion of participation in forest management)

Article 4

As is well known, Japan's forestry industry is on the verge of collapse. We need to draw more attention to domestic timber. Therefore, each season, urban municipalities jointly plan forestry-related events with rural villages and invite urban residents to participate. Participating city residents and local governments will split the costs. The timber will be transferred at a low price to participating city residents.

(Care for wild plants and edible wild plants)

Article 5

In order to improve the fact that the citizens of the city have not returned anything to the farming, mountain, and fishing villages, those who steal wild plants will be penalized according to this customary practice. (Detailed regulations) Those who enter the mountain to pick edible wild plants are asked to buy thank-you fertilizer for a fee and use it to care for the collected edible wild plants.

(Provisions regarding tobacco)

Article 6

Currently, only the bad aspects of tobacco are emphasized, and urban residents are unaware of the fact that tobacco can also be used for medicinal purposes, including as a hemostatic agent. Violation of manners is out of the question, and clauses that discriminate against smokers are not included. It is a “do nothing” clause. (In fact, the causal relationship between tobacco and cancer has not yet been proven.) In addition, without violating the law, research and development of products using herbs (such as Eyebright, Coltsfoot, etc.) that can be used as "medicinal tobacco" are encouraged. and farming and mountain villages.

(Finance)

Article 7

In principle, each business is self-supporting, but businesses with poor performance can be financed without interest from other businesses.

[shazzyv]

Been rereading the Discworld City Watch series coz those books are like crack laced with serotonin and I think Carrot is simultaneously one of the best and most terrifying characters in Discworld.

Best because yes he's the goodest boi and he's got a werewolf gf and he's unfailingly honest and decent to pretty much everyone and is so earnest and sweet people just can't disappointment him. Except...

One thing that sticks in my head is that last scene in Men at Arms

SPOILERS for most of the City Watch books:

When, right at the end Cruces is telling Carrot he's a long lost king and has the documentation to prove. Carrot walks over to it, takes a read and while Cruces is doing his villain monologue, stabs him through the chest. It's quick and clean and Carrot doesn't even bat an eye that he just took a man's life on purpose.

I say on purpose because my boi literally committed manslaughter in the previous book when he threw the Law and Ordinances at Wonse. He didn't seem to miffed then either, aside from the fact he just misunderstood an order from a superior.

Granted it's a funny joke and Wonse was a bastard but Carrot doesn't seem to react to it.

Like, throughout the books Vimes constantly struggles with the urge to just go ham and remove all the people causing the problems. He's constantly faced with the cynicism and cruelty and just the sheer stupidity of the world and always tries to do the moral thing, to do it by the book because as he says, "if you can do it for a good reason, you can do it for a bad reason." He's in the grey between black and white.

Carrot on the other hand doesn't really seem to mind. We never really see what Carrot is thinking (probably because he's so honest he just flat out says it) so it's hard to parcel how he feels about things.

My headcanon is he killed Wonse by accident, never thought about it again and then killed Cruces when he realized Cruces was a greater threat than he realized plus was about to kill Vimes. You could say the same about him skewering a werewolf later on in Fifth Element, but that was a survival situation I feel. Granted he never really kills again but I like to think if Carrot was face to face with Carcer or Stratford it would've been a very short conversation.

I think that's another reason why Vimes keeps a close eye on Carrot. Imagine doing your best to live life by a strict set of moral principles only to have your charismatic, well beloved second-in-command simply kill a man in front of you then tell you without blinking you had a wedding to go to.

Carrot even says "Personal doesn't mean important" which kind of tells me that no matter what his feelings on the subject, he's going to try to do the right thing.

And he killed Cruces for, I feel, a good reason.

He's a good man who'll kill you without a word and Vimes is a good man who'll kill you when there's no other acceptable option.

Vimes is the grey and Carrot is the white that gets dirty.

[naisilla]

The Emperor's New Muse Part .1

Odyssey Kayn x Reader

content: female reader, non-con, forced blowjob, forced doggy style.

Thunderous marching reverberated through the ship's interior as the sling troopers advanced. In their grasp, you struggled, digging your heels in, violently thrashing. With gritted teeth, you lashed out at the two soldiers who gripped your upper arms like a vice.

Your voice snapped at your captors as you hissed out threats, graphic descriptions of what you promised to make of them ejected from your lips. They cut you off abruptly by throwing your body to the floor. More cusses came from you after your face collided with the hard floor when your eyes snapped to the pair of boots ahead of you.

Looking up your eyes met with a single cold blue stare as his left eye was concealed with a golden eye patch that branched across the sharp features of his face. Immediately you recognize who this imposing man is. The blue hair cut into an edgy mohawk and the golden robotic arm that always gripped that mysterious glowing scythe. The Supreme Ordinal Kayn.

Any shock that you expressed vanished as your lip curled in a snarl, but before a creative insult could come out, the ordinal's boot came down onto your head, pressing it firmly as a warning. The troopers are watching this snicker. "That rebel has quite the silver tongue," one of them comments, making you growl in response, the chucking escalates.

The pressured weight on your head shifts as the ordinal kneels before you, grabbing your face and roughly turning it to look at him. A deep ''hmm" vibrates in his throat as he inspects you closely. His single blue-eye flicks up addressing his sling troopers. "A Rebel you say?"

One of the troopers pipe up "This one was caught trying to tamper with our fleet ships at the last dock."

"Yeh, little shit crawled into the system and sliced up the engine room," says another one. Kayn looks at you with a raised brow.

"You're a mechanic? You understand the elite design of our locus armada fleet ships?" You scoff and roll your eyes.

"I don't, I was just blasting everything until it turned off" Kayn's face scrunched in annoyance.

"I see" he drops your head and straightens himself to his feet, walking past the troopers. "Lock her up, I can't be bothered wasting my time on petty nuisances" He turns his back to you and continues walking off indifferently to your presence.

A hot flush boils within you, and your teeth and wrists clench simultaneously. How dare you be written off as a pest by this bastard! You were his sworn enemy, THE enemy of the Demaxian empire. They may not know who you are but you know them. They had taken your home planet from your people and had drained it of all its ora leaving a lifeless uninhabitable system behind in their greedy pursuit.

You remember the day when the serene sky darkened with the looming shadows of a fleet. When the Demaxians landed an instant struggle ensued as the village you lived in was raided and ravaged by troops. Anyone who resisted was executed immediately and those who remained were either left behind on the dying planet or taken in by force. You never saw your family again, which filled you with bitter hatred towards King Jarvan IV and his empire.

In retaliation, you dedicated your life to vengeance. You had joined a growing rebel group becoming a menace to the empire. You would sneak into capital cities to graffiti the suburbs and protest loudly in the streets. Unfortunately, it seemed that the people of the capitol didn't care much for the opinion of a lower-class citizen. They didn't have to suffer having their planet overthrown by the empire, they lived comfortably in their wealthy establishments and benefitted from having their cities powered by the ora they drained from your land.

You had all this rage, a desire to be known to the empire for that hatred. You wished to tear down Demaxia from its golden pedestal of ora, to drag it and all of its selfish people into hell. To be caught then mindlessly thrown into the prisons like some petty fellon? How demeaning.

As you were being taken away by the guards, you let out a sharp scream and managed to break free. You quickly rushed towards Kayn, moving swiftly and lightly on the balls of your feet, pumping your legs, and launching yourself upwards to attack him. However, even with Kayn's back turned towards you, He swiftly swished his coat and maneuvered himself out of your range.

He swiftly spins his scythe, the blunt handle of it knocking your airborne body off and slamming you into the ground with a painful crack. Your entire body aches as you cough, the wind completely knocked out of you. You spit blood from your mouth as you scramble to collect your composure. You glance around and see the other troopers holding back their laughter.

You lunge towards the demaxian again, the soldiers attempting to restrain you before Kayn. Although Kayn refused to acknowledge you he was impressed by your display of determination. The ordinal scowled while gripping his scythe tightly as if struggling to contain his frustration. "You may be skilled, but that doesn't excuse your lack of respe-" You cut off Kayn with a swift kick to his gut, he hunches over briefly before lashing out a flurry of swings from his scythe each slash you manage to dodge and counter, edging closer to him between each of his misses until you edge close enough to launch another hit hooking into his jaw.

Kayn's demeanor becomes more agitated as he realizes he's been outclassed in the battle. However, you watch as the Demaxian's eyes light up with interest as he smiles slyly and laughs. "You have guts, it's rare for someone of your status to fight back like that." He steps back cracking his neck with his scythe now lowered to his side. "Tell you what, if you can beat me in this duel I'll let you go. Then you'll be free to live this encounter and go back to being a menace to our glorious empire. If you lose however.... let's just say your sentence will be much more severe."

The ordinal inhales deeply and resumes a broad stance standing confidently before you beconing you with his hand in a taunt. "You will not be granted freedom unless you prove yourself worthy of it. So fight me."

The troopers cheer on encouraging the ordinal to put you in your place, but to their surprise you don't back down from the fight. You manage to hold your own against the demaxian, the troopers' eyes widening as you throw punch after punch.

The fight is fast and brutal. Both of you trade blow after blow as your bodies move effortlessly, dancing and flowing together with incredible agility. You dodge and duck beneath his swings while you deliver your own quick attacks in return. The soldiers spectating are captivated by the sight of the fight, some even cheering you both on as the two of you push each other further and further.

You may have been unarmed but Kayn was still unable to land a hit good enough to take you down, merely cutting you lightly while you miraculously used your body as your weapon. Your swift movements are a blur to the soldiers, who barely manage to track the two of you.

You land a series of solid punches to Kayn's body before he retaliates and delivers a kick to your side, pushing you back. You're able to move out of the way of his scythe as it flies past your head, the demaxian's face remains unfazed even though you landed some powerful hits on him.

"A lower class nobody shouldn't have such power" The Ordinal seethes through clenched teeth, his face twists in rage as he realizes you have successfully fought him to a stalemate. You can see the furious fire in his eyes as he stares at you menacingly.

"A rebel...someone like you, you have no right to be this good," the demaxian snarls, "what a shame, you could have been a fine soldier if you had been born into the proper blood," the demaxian chuckles.

Your own face creases with fury. "I take pride in not being of such filthy heritage"

The demaxian laughs loudly and gives you a look of disdain. "Oh? And just what are you prideful of? A species that could never create something so glorious as the Locus Armada? A race that could never harness an element that grants such limitless possibilities?"

He gives you a mocking salute as he speaks, "I can understand why you became a rebel. It must be exhausting being inadequate."

Fed up with his obnoxiousness, you interrupt his insults, swinging your leg behind Kayn's knees in a sweeping motion, causing his legs to buckle. As he stumbles, you aim a well-delivered strike to his groin, forcing him to recoil with a grunt. You top off the combo by bringing your elbow down onto his shoulder.

A satisfied smirk beams down onto the ordinal who was still recovering below you. "Your "glorious" bloodline is full of fat selfish pigs. All you do is swarm and colonize your military is rightly named the locus armada because that perfectly describes your kind as the pest you all are".

Suddenly your nerves are set on fire and your body twitches and spasms erratically as a powerful current of electricity jolt through your body. You drop to the floor feeling all of your strength instantly drained and your blurry vision spots the guards had stepped in with one of them holding a tazer.

Kayn grabs your dazed body and presses you against his chest, he stares into your eyes intently with a powerful gaze, his blue-eye boring right through your spirit. Your hearing is muffled as the insides of your ears ring but you can make out the ordinal's voice commanding his guards to be dismissed before blacking out.

Your eyes snap open as the past events rush back, instinctively you try to get up but are immediately halted finding your hands bound in cuffs. Glaring at them your first move is to try crushing your wrists free through the hole, too tight. Grunting you attempt to bash them against the wall before Kayns mocking voice rings "ah ah ah I wouldn't do that if I were you" He walks over towards you tapping the cuffs with a cunning smirk "Military cuffs, GPS, vital tracking and a shocking protocol" You grumble and glare up at the Ordinal before looking at your surroundings. You expected crumbly, rusted floors, sterile flickering lights and heavy-duty bars. But instead, you found yourself in a luxurious suite. A massive bed made with silky fabrics set in a spacious room of black gold and blue... Demaxian colours.

You squint your eyes and look up at the Ordinal guardedly. "Why did you bring me here? You get lost in your oversized cruise ship?" Kayn remains silent glaring down at you. You looked so pathetic on your knees before him and yet you stared back defiantly, the distain you had for him coming out like potent venom.

The ordinal doesn't respond to your provocation, instead he continues to stare at you with an amused look. The opulent room around you is a contrast to the harsh life you have lived on the streets. The silken furniture, the lavish bed, the spacious room would make any homeless individual feel uncomfortable in its presence.

There is a strange silence between the two of you as you remain on your knees, staring intensely at the demaxian with a hostile glare. His eyes bore into yours for what feels like ages before he finally speak.

"I wouldn't speak so proudly if I were you," the ordinal hisses, "you are a traitor to this empire, a lowborn pest. I could have your head for a pillow, yet you dare to act with such attitude before me?"

The room is silent as the two of you lock eyes, your resentment towards him clear as day. "So what now? Are you going to just kill me?" you ask, your voice full of contempt. The ordinal only shakes his head leaning over you so you have to crane your neck to remain eye contact. "No Im going to remind you exactly where you stand in this chain of command" Kayns says as one of his arms pulls up the fabric of his uniform that drapes over his pants chuckling. "You were naive to think I'd actually set you free from my grasp after all the little stunts you pulled" he clicks his tongue and shakes his head dismissively "no no no imprisonment or death is too good for you, I plan on breaking you another way."

Your eyes narrow as his hand goes to unzip the fly of his pants as he watches your reaction with an amused smirk. "I'm going to teach you to respect this empire" his other arm, the golden robotic one, grabs the back of your head gripping at your hair controlling it to become level with his hips as he looks at you expectantly.

You resist his hold as you jerk your head trying to break free of his grasp when another electric shock reverberates through you eminating from your wrists. A single glare from kayn reminds you that this shock was merely a warning for any more defiance. The ordinals cock now prods your lips promptly.

With a growl you releuctantly submit and begin to tentatively part your lips open, yet Kayn impatiently thrusts his long cock in, instantly hitting the back of your throat. You retch and pull back on instinct but the grip on your hair becomes more severe and you are force to take in more as kayns grip pulls you until your face is flush against his groin his neatly trimmed blue hair brushing your nose.

You can feel the Ordinals cock curve to penetrate your throat cutting off your air, you try to scream intent on cussing him out but the garbled noise that emits from you only makes Kayn throw his head back and moan. His hips begin to thrust each time his cock is crushed down your throat, tears prick your eyes as you helplessly choke.

You can feel your face burn red from the humiliation and lack of air, your head was caving in on itself with pressure, your pulse began to thrum. Panic was sinking in and you felt like you needed to retaliate so you bit down.

Instantly Kayn pulls himself out of your throat and you gasp for air barely getting a sputter before an iron grip is on your throat continuing to suffocate you. "Insolent brat! You'll pay for that!" Suddenly Kayn grabs you and throws you onto the bed, you bounce on the mattress and try to scramble but the Ordinal was fast to pin you down from under him. He grabs your cuffed wrists and pulls them behind your head forcing you into an inconvenient position with his other hand he takes his scythe and uses it to slice off your clothes now leaving you bare beneath him.

You could feel Kayns evil grin behind you as he positioned himself at your entrance, your hands and knees trembled and you mindlessly began to beg for him to stop between little sobs. Kayn leaned forward pressing his broad chest against your back and his laughter vibrated through you. "Not so high and mighty now are you little brat?" his tone was sickeningly sweet and condescending, his warm breath ticking your ear. Finally he pushes in his long length reaching deep within you. Kayn shudders at how you tightly clenched at him, the raw sensation driving him to thrust fast slamming his hips into yours.

Swallowing your sobs you grit your teeth and scrunch your eyes tight bowing your head, you refused to beg, begging for mercy would get you nowhere. Demaxians never took pity, the Ordinal was just as cruel and greedy as the troops that invaded your planet. So you would not cry, you would not submit and you would stay strong through all of this.

Part 2 out now

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 11/19/2024

no silly little witticism here this week! just heartfelt thanks for helping me pay my rent this month :)

listening

absolutely wild pick from last week's spotify weekly recommenced, Things Will Fall Apart by Louis Cole feat the Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. it's been on loop all week for me and im a little sad it won't pop up in my spotify wrapped

when you make a dance pop song with a full orchestra backing, it has a really interesting effect somewhere between Golden Age of Hollywood swashbuckling film score and marching band?

Yes, understood Things will fall apart just likе they should This little shred was good Don't think it through Things will fall apart, they always do At least, something's always true

the syllables are so choppy they don’t even register to me as English at first, i was fully willing to believe this was German for the first couple lines. like @dying-suffering-french-stalkers, i have a deep fondness for works about putting an era to bed. or works focused on the sunsets of things, or one of the last living practitioners of an art. putting the chairs up on the table, sweeping the floors, and turning the lights out and locking the door behind you. this song has that sort of quiet post-wake-party remembrance.

however once you think the song has ended but it keeps going, you can turn it off. you don’t really need that extra minute and a half of strings and light vocalizations.

Lately, Louis Cole has been doing live shows with the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. Cole recorded nothing with the ensemble. In a press release, he says, “Sometimes, when I’m mixing my own solo stuff, I’ll feel like a song needs a little magical dust. But mixing an entire orchestra and your own rhythm section, there’s so much human energy! You don’t have to add any magic. It was there the whole time.”

i don’t hear many pop songs this millennium with a full orchestral backing. perhaps i need to look harder. unfortunately spotify took this extreme interest in this song as a newfound extreme interest in electroswing, which is really not what this song is. i hope this artist does more albums like this so they can wear grooves in my brain

-

reading

very hard to focus on anything book length this week. some depressing local news (my local paper's links do Not want to preview nicely here, which is annoying:

At a city council meeting in October, district Vice President Dan Joyce told council members that the management district was not attempting to "criminalize homelessness." The city’s civility ordinance bans people from sitting, lying down or placing personal items or bedding on sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

cool piece from our pals at 404 Media. i am So fascinated by crime infrastructure

Based on interviews with malware developers, hackers who use the stolen credentials, and a review of manuals that tell new recruits how to spread the malware, 404 Media has mapped out this industry. Its end result is that a download of an innocent-looking piece of software by a single person can lead to a data breach at a multibillion-dollar company, putting Google and other tech giants in an ever-escalating cat-and-mouse game with the malware developers to keep people and companies safe.

(via longreads) my interest in how and why systems fail extends to invasive species management. plus i used to live in florida just above the everglades and these fuckers (the snakes) were everywhere

[I]magine thousands upon thousands of pythons, their slow digestion transforming each corpse into python muscle and fat. Unaided, Florida’s native wildlife doesn’t stand a chance. “That’s what I think about with every python I catch,” Kalil says. “What it ate to get this big, and the lives I’m saving by removing it.” Biologists are taking a multipronged approach to the issue. They have experimented with enlisting dogs to sniff out both pythons and nests—a technique that has proved difficult in such hot weather and inhospitable landscapes. Ongoing projects use telemetry to track pythons to find “associate snakes.” Researchers use drones, go out in airboats, or even take to helicopters to locate their subjects in the interiors of the Everglades. Always, agencies and individuals are looking for the next best methods. “But for now, the python contractor program is the most successful management effort in the history of the issue,” Kirkland says. “We’re capturing more and more—something that is indicative of the python population out there and indicative of us getting better at what we do.”

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watching

continuing noirvember, watched hitchcock's Notorious to see if i still dislike hitchcock. the answer is yes. there are bond girls and there are hitchcock girls, and not that bond girls are paragons of female agency in film, but hitchcock girls are mostly fluttering little pathetic things. a scrap of agency they showed in the beginning of the film becomes a running joke and something their noses are rubbed in for the rest of the film. not for me!

patrick mcgoohan is leading me into some real dad-ass movies. Ice Station Zebra (1968, dir. Sturges) is a real you're stuck at home sick with your dad and it's on TV for the whole afternoon kind of movie. they truly do not make two and a half cold war submarine espionage films in super panavision with an overture, intermission, and interact music any more. i get why howard hughes was really obsessed with this one. it is a suspense film, but full of people competently going about their business, which i find oddly comforting.

unfortunately i do not feel this really needed to be two and a half hours long. the loving closeups of sub interiors and instrumentation really did keep me amused, though. despite how cluttered every shot is with actors, there is tremendous clarity of purpose and motion with the camera movement. just a really technically brilliant film.

how similar the russian and american control rooms and instrumentation were made me chortle. ties nicely into a little diatribe mcgoohan goes on much later in the film, "The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists." funny and darkly true! every allied nation had some sort of Operation Paperclip going on! mcgoohan is the focus of every scene he's in, as a spy who is really hanging on by the last remaining shreds of his fingernails.

i had a good time with it, but one of many cold war suspense films im glad exist in the world but don't necessarily need to see again. it might join Escape from New York as a film i put on when im very sick though.

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playing

this pc needs some sort of replacement something, bc it has a really persistent overheating problem. it only tolerates powerwasher simulator on the lowest possible settings and genshin impact on basically mobile settings. it does not even want to run new vegas. i popped my head out of goodsprings to look out over the desert at the Strip and it said no thank you! too many polygons! naptime!

speaking of genshin, major update this week and new character i will be pulling for. she has a sister who died in the last patch, which i do Not care for as someone with a beloved little sister, but her moveset and skills are unique so far in the game. i feel like her skills are little too complicated for me to fully take advantage of with my "hit enemy very hard until he is dead" playstyle but she has a limited flight ability that will genuinely be very useful for exploration.

if i do not get her when i hit pity on the banner i won't bother pulling another nine times or whatever, bc the next patch has a character i really desperately want and i am saving for her

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making

the local crew is all getting art this year, bc i already have bristol board and a selection of small frames and zero budget. people who have pets are So easy to get gifts for bc u can simply get them stuff for their pet or that looks like their pet. way less gray cat than black cat merch in the world tho

aiming to send out international holiday cards by the end of the week, and canadian cards by american thanksgiving. the rest of you they'll get there when they get there ok

[aladaylessecondblog]

Return VII

https://archiveofourown.org/works/53198734/chapters/170669203

It took weeks before Voryn visited her dreams again, and in that time Sadara had been hard pressed to resist the temptation to bed Nerevar.

It was only dreams. It wasn't real, but somehow...that kiss lingered in her mind. She'd given him more, and he seemed to understand her reluctance to go any further.

It wasn't that she didn't want him, it was that it felt wrong, somehow. There was no reason for it to be so, and (she was sure) he felt as she did that only they together understood the feeling of being so close and yet so far from their love.

Their love.

They both still loved Voryn, however dim the embers might be, and yet something was definitely springing up between them despite the fact.

"I wish he could be here," she said several times. Gods, how she did.

Voryn returned a few days after she said that to Nerevar. This time at least she felt better prepared to face him.

"How long I have wondered," he said, "What became of you. There was a point I felt you nearly die."

"In birthing your daughter. Azura has--Azura's curse that stops my healing by spell or potion was nearly enough to end me when the ordinators attacked and as far as...Sunnar, that was...I was sure I would...but I didn't."

"And you did not return because Gilvoth told you you weren't wanted?"

"He--he noted my hesitance to commit in full to the cause," Sadara said, "You know--I know you know--that I don't enjoy the sight of the suffering the corprus puts people through. He took it to mean that I would..."

"Betray us. That is what he told me, that you never meant to join us, that it was all a lie. That you meant to take up the cause of Azura."

"No," Sadara said, "No, never. I would never go that far, no matter what I think of the cause. And Red Mountain is...is..."

He tried, tried for what felt like an age, to convince her to return. There were those who would receive her, those who would hide her. Those who would ensure she was kept in the manner that she should have been all along.

She denied him all, giving an excuse he seemed to buy for each denial. Her daughter's life was there, it was not guaranteed to be safe travel, the corprus creatures were dangerous, Vivec's ordinators were still searching for her.

"Then stay where you are, and I will do my best to form a safe way for you to return."

After a long while of holding her, though, Voryn had a question.

"What is she like, our daughter?"

"A sweet child," Sadara said, "She looks so much like you and she finds friends wherever she goes. It doesn't matter who or what they are, she seems determined to draw a smile."

She shut her eyes, and summoned a scene before them from the week before - Sunnar had been playing hide-and-seek with a gaggle of other children.

"You let her mingle with the imperials?"

"I live in an imperial city, Voryn, it's inevitable that some of her friends would be Cyrodiilic."

"What does the Empire have that Red Mountain doesn't?" he seemed almost offended at the sight of Sunnar getting a boost to climb up a tree from a khajiiti child. "I could find friends for her of her own kind."

"Color." She looked up at him. "Red Mountain is all harsh black ash, dangerous red blight winds, sharp brown rocks. Kvatch is - green, and blue, and purple, and full of life. I wish every night that I could take you out and show you the night stars, but..."

"Then I will work all the harder to see Akulakhan to completion, that you may rejoin me."

He left at that.

----------------------------------

Sadara had offered to tend the inn so Galawen could have her fun, but the elderly Bosmer waved off her concerns. "I'm doing much better, and you've a little girl who'd probably love to see some of the entertainment. Perhaps try to win something for me, if you feel obligated."

"Thank you aunt Galawen!" Sunnar called out, tugging at Sadara's hand. "Mama, let's go. I want a sweetroll!"

It was a lovely day for the fair, and the stalls and games that had set up all over the town square. She bought a sweetroll at the first she saw, and split it with Sunnar, saying it was far too large for one girl to eat. "And you want to leave room for other treats, don't you?"

There was a clown, pretending to be sick, who had a small crowd of onlookers. He brought his hands up to his face and sneezed--producing immediately a series of colorful handkerchiefs that turned into fluttering butterflies. A moment later he complained of his boots having belonged to a fisherman, and that they were still soggy. He took off his boots, then upended them to show a steady stream of water, in which a few tadpoles swam. He collected them and put them into the fountain behind him, amid a chorus of applause.

"Wasn't that funny?" Sadara asked, unable to help herself smiling at her giggling daughter. "Let's see what else there is."

There were a few games - striking targets for prizes, and she managed to win a little doll with ladylike clothes for Sunnar by her fine aim.

"A friend," Sunnar said confidently, "For my other one."

They ate around midday, and split a bag of chocolate sweets some vendor from Black Marsh was selling. After another hour Sunnar was looking tired so Sadara suggested going home, but the child insisted on going to the fortuneteller's stall, marked by a sign reading : FORTUNES TOLD - 10 GOLD

"Mama, why is there a kitty on the crystal ball?"

"I am not a kitty, child." The cat, three-colored, nodded and sat back, jingling the jewelry she had.

Sunnar gasped. "What are you, then?"

"An alfiq. I look like one of your kitties, but I am not one. It makes it easy to move around, yes? Would you think I was able to talk looking at me?"

"No," Sunnar said. "But who takes your money?"

"My son," she replied, nodding at a larger khajiit in the back of her tent. "He is not so good at my craft, so he handles the money and the travel. A very good son, he is. And what about you? Are you a very good daughter?"

Sunnar nodded. "I'm going to help my mama run the inn, so I have to learn numbers too."

Shyly, the little girl handed over the money Sadara gave her, and then sat down on the other side of the ball.

"You will be beautiful when you grow up," the alfiq said, after staring into the ball for half a minute, "And--oh, what is this? A handsome husband too, who loves you very much."

Sunnar smiled. "Am I going to have babies?"

"Three children you shall have," the alfiq added, mysteriously, "Two boys, and a girl. I see you here, and then--elsewhere, dressed in fine clothes."

"Maybe--maybe a count. Or a king!"

"Maybe so, little one. The rest I do not know - but I know this, that your children will worry over something, and look to you to be strong for them. That is what a mother does for her kittens, you know."

"I know," Sunnar nodded her head, "My mama makes sure to keep me safe all the time. That's what mamas are supposed to do."

She thanked the alfiq, and left smiling beside Sadara.

"Now you know she may be wrong," Sadara said, not wanting to dim her girl's excitement entirely she also added, "Because once you hear a fortune you may act to make sure it happens, then end up changing it entirely. Some prophecies, folk have acted against, only to cause them to happen anyway."

"I know, mama. But! A handsome husband who loves me! And. And three babies of my own!"

"That would make you happy?" Sadara asked. "Because that's all I want for you, you know, is to be happy."

Sunnar nodded eagerly. "I want to be a mama, a good mama. Like you. That will make me happy."

[thatmittengirl2009]

Omg omg omg!! I just rescued a baby raccoon!!!

So we heard noise last night but it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Our living room is right outside the driveway area but also one of the walls is against the smaller bathroom and if someone is in there using toilet paper, you can hear it. So we heard a rumbling but assumed my sister was in the bathroom.

Well it’s trash day and my mom was outside getting stuff together. Our city has a new trash ordinance so we have the assigned large green bins by the trash company we have to use. My mom went to put something in and screamed. She came running in yelling “BRITTTTTTTAANNNYYYYYYYYYY!!!!” and I’m like ok something is dead in there.

Nope, you open the lid and it was a lil baby raccoon. 🥺 That was the sound we heard last night so it was in there since 11 last night and all day. The bin is in a sunny area so it was a heat box. So I had to take the trash bin over to a grassy area and gently tip it over and slowly open the lid. It didn’t come out right away, so I ran over and grabbed my bird bath, took the bath part off the stand and placed it in front with some food. Then it came out, snacked, took some sips of water, looked up at me kinda like it was saying thank you, then ran off into my neighbors yard around the corner.

It literally tore every single bag of trash! So I had to get a shovel to scrap it all out, glove up and rebag it all. As I was doing this, I could see the little baby peeking around the corner to see if I was still there. 🥹 So I moved the water dish closer to see he still wanted more. He didn’t, but he finally climbed up in a tree close by.

Then a dragonfly landed on my shoulder like the universe saying “good job girl!” Meanwhile my mom stayed inside the garage the entire time holding a stick in case 🤣

It takes two minutes to be kind. We share this earth with these creatures and while super inconvenient it messed with my trash, I also realized the food I usually put out was empty. So kind of my own fault. I just hope the baby didn’t have a heat stroke in there that long.

[talldarkandroguesome]

1st of Rain's Hand, Tirdas

How quickly the time with my girls is going by. It has been almost two weeks already.

With the House Council being off for a special session with the Grand Council, apparently they have still not come to a decision, I was able to set up time to have Kuna taken out for a proper hunting trip. There is a well renowned hunting club in Mournhold and I was able to speak to one of the master huntsmer there about finding a safe way to take a young, but very eager, child out for a hunt.

Of course I provided him with all the information about her growing up hunting with Nabine, who makes a living off of hunting, and said she does best with women in positions of power rather than men.

And so at dawn this morning, Kuna was off with a couple of Ordinators on their days off, and some of the best hunters in the club. I have been given every assurance of Kuna's safety and have given a handsome sum to ensure she has a good, but safe experience.

Kuna should still be back in time for dinner and will attend all of her lessons tomorrow, but today is a day for her to feel like she is able to get the experience she has sought so hard to find. I want her to enjoy herself. I want her to feel as though she has a place here, in the city, and with us. All too soon she will be back to Valenwood. I know that she does not fully fit in there either. Her Dunmer features make her stand out amongst other Bosmer. Her skin is too dark and cool in color. Her eyes, which she inherited the color from me, blaze in a red that Bosmer could not come about through means outside of Dunmeri blood. I know that people speak on it often.

Ironically, while she is young, her looks fit in more with that of a Dunmer. She looks light of skin, but until she speaks or starts to act outside of the Dunmer social norms, she passes as any other Dunmer child. When she is older her height will certainly make her mixed heritage the more obvious, whether she grows to a Dunmer height and will not fit in with her mother's side, or if she remains a standard Bosmer height and will be far shorter than Sildras or I.

I think my daughter is beautiful. She has all the best features of her Mother and I see parts of myself in her as well. A perfect child. She is Nabine's iron-hard will and my passionate fire. She knows what she wants in life, even at such a tender age, and does not let things stop her from attaining her desires. I would that I had some of that gift. It was cruel of me to try and join her to this House, I see it now. Too late.

I just wanted her to feel a part of her Dunmer heritage. I wanted her to have an easier life if she decided she wanted to be here. With the Indoril blood in her veins and her lineage recorded in the books, she could always find a way to get work in our House lands. I thought I was giving her opportunities, protecting her.

Now I fear I have made her life all the more difficult. Perhaps her life would have been easier living in Grahtwood alone, not having to move between east and west, between cultures, between parents.

My love for her is great, but it feels selfish. And Cariel, who is so young that anything new seems to thrill her, she does not have the same prospects as her sister. My blood does not run through her veins and so, unless she used my official adoption as a way to become a member of the House, she is simply being dragged along for the ride.

No wonder Nabine is so cross with me. No wonder she loathes the life I have made. I am no better than any other Housemer, so used to getting his way that I do what would be best for me.

Alas, it is too late now to make much amends. The House has made their decries. And as happens with being in a House, I am powerless to go against it if I wish for my son to continue with the opportunities he has available. Without his access to the early elevated courses at Shad Astula, I fear what his boredom and isolation would do to him. He is a boy that finds the most joy in knowledge and I cannot see him thriving in a place without access to that knowledge and opportunities to push himself and his learning.

To be honest, Sildras is exactly what Mother wished of me. And as I could not give her that in myself, I might as well allow him to gain all the benefits of being the heir she always wanted. A proper mage. A proper scholar. Someone who could have the stuff to make a great Grandmaster, should it come to such a thing. I know that uncle Tanval would be proud of him.

I shall go and check in on Father today. Mother has been so busy, even though she is home, I fear that Father may not be receiving the level of care he needs. Cariel, Sildras, and I will have to stop by this afternoon. I am sure he could use the company. And the reminder to stay in bed.

[finalmemesx]

The Last Book on the Left

By the Last Podcast on the Left.

"I am paid literally hundreds of dollars to suck on television."

"Always use a condom."

"I'm actually supposed to be a very important millionaire."

"Disgustingly, this is an actual genre on Pornhub."

"This is before they started killing people!"

"There are more red flags in this relationship than what you see in Google Maps when you search for bagel shops in Brooklyn."

"You have no business having this level of confidence."

"Now I am scared."

"None of us care what you learn in your fancy law school books."

"They might as well have been driving Jigsaw's bicycle."

"If you want to get out of responsibilities, you do something badly and no one asks you to do it again."

"It would be really inspiring if it didn't lead to so much homicide."

"Most cold-blooded SOB is Stone Cold Steve Austin."

"I hope to play them in the eventual CW teen drama about his life."

"It's hard for a parent to comprehend their child might be a vampire."

"You gotta get good at the cunnilingus and keep yourself in the game."

"Oh wait, that's bad."

"Fucking metal! But also incredibly scary."

"This is like blaming the road for you crashing your car while drunk."

"I can't be mixing any thoughts of brunch into this."

"Remind me to get a 'not welcome' sign on my door immediately!"

"You look at them like Wayne looked at the Excalibur guitar in Wayne's World."

"Here is where I tap out like Kurt Angle tapped to Chris Jericho."

"You're living a metal god's dream."

"Most homosexual lifestyles involve going to work, making dinner, watching Top Chef, and going to sleep."

"I will say if someone really loves kombucha, they might be a serial killer."

"More information that gives me pause regarding my friendships."

"Evidently the recipe isn't the only secret there."

"That's a city ordinance violation."

"Excuse me while my skin crawls off my body."

"I would have loved to see their Tinder profile."

"I also haven't committed dozens of murders."

"I am certain this made you very popular at school."

"You're finally ready for Hollywood!"

"Weed makes me want to watch movies, eat a burrito, and stare at the sky to see if any stars move."

"I'm completely romanticizing the life of a detective."

"When are you guys going to catch that motherfucker?"

"Life you haven't stroked it covered in popcorn."

"But those people are nerds."

"We've got a nerd alert!"

"It really was a different time for angry mobs of people."

"It's official, I am never having children."

"This is why I only hung out with the troublemakers in school."

"I fucking hate you."

"I do it better and I can come faster."

"And what I wouldn't give for a taste of that sweet Baba Yaga milk."

"This is where humor saves people from becoming a cannibal."

"You have to put the blame on yourself if you get caught."

"Nothing good happens under a bridge."

"Sounds like a Hardy Boys mystery."

"I'm not going to sleep for the rest of the week, but it was fascinating information!"

"Similar to when I get super stoned and realize all the Domino's I just ate."

"And I thought the fleshlight was a bit extreme."

"What the hell was going on in the 1980s?"

"I'm never going to trust my neighbors again."

[wellthebardsdead]

Fools Prayer pt4

Part 3 here

———

“My heart… I tried… he took it… my heart.”

Nerevar: Voryn?… *blinks open his eyes to find himself in the ever familiar heat of the heart chamber beneath red mountain where his destiny was made, the air hot and searing, steaming the very moisture from his eyes and skin as he finds his foothold in what he knows is a dream* Voryn is that you?… *looks around with a tired gaze, having relived this so many times before in his endless, restless nights, before finally resting his eyes upon the horror before him*

Mephala: *strung up by her own thread, her body split open and her heart now replaced with that of the heart of creation, just as Boethia and Azura had forewarned* I’m too late- *staggers back as steam bellows from the pipes connected to the heart as it pulses weakly from her exposed rib cage, making her scream and writhe in agony*

Mephala: *speaking with a voice not her own, one deep and familiar in the crevices of Nerevars mind, voryns voice* my heart… he took my heart… I tried to stop him. I tried to- *freezes in place, her gaze snapping to nerevar as her face twists and contorts to that of a handsome dunmer man, with three, red eyes* Nerevar…

*BANG! BANG! BANG!*

Nerevar: *jolts awake, shooting upright in his bed as sweat glistens across his golden skin* VORYN!! *gasps for breath as he clutches the sheets, grounding himself as he realises he’s safe in his bed* I don’t… I don’t understand- *jumps as the doors swing open and a guard staggers in dropping to their knees as they beg for forgiveness for disturbing his rest*

Guard: Forgive me for waking you your highness. I tried to stop the temple councillors. We tried to recite your orders but they said that justice for the good daedra and their people must be brought.

Nerevar: I- justice?

Guard: they’re preparing the execution of Vivec. Your men are approaching the city as we speak.

Nerevar: … *fumbles out of his sheets and swiftly grabs his armour* ancestors no we have to stop them!!

*meanwhile*

Vivec: *bound and kneeling amongst his captors as the silt strider bringing him to his fate sways slowly with each step, his body stripped bare and only covered with a rough sheet and the magic suppressing irons around his wrists and ankles, and his eyes heavy and fluttering closed with exhaustion, forbidden to rest, forbidden to be comfortable, and forbidden to hold a shred of dignity* …

Temple guard: *suddenly shoves him hard knocking him forward onto the hollowed ‘floor’ of the striders carapace* Oi, N’wah! I warned you about closing your eyes.

Ordinator: … *gently sits vivec upright once more, fixing the sheet over his exposed body* Back off from him. We were told to avoid excessive force until nerevar himself declared otherwise.

Vivec: nerevars word will not reach you in time to decide… my fate is sealed beyond those gates.

Ordinator: what-

Temple Guard: *raises their hand to strike the bound god* What did I tell you about tal-

Ordinator: *grabs their hand* shut up… *turns his gaze over the edge of the striders carapace as the noise of a crowd finally reaches his ears* what the?… *steps to the head of the hollow to see the entire city gathering at the gates with torches and weapons drawn as the stable hands hurry to push the raised platforms to the beasts side*

Vivec: *glances up at the ordinator* I’m ready to greet my end… *slowly rises to his feet with an exhausted, pained grunt, and a slight wobble to his step. Looking like he’s ready to pass out at any moment. His candles wick burned out at both ends, and the end of his rope unravelling in his grasp*

Ordinator: I- no wait!! Sit back down what’s happening?! Nerevar never mentioned this.

Ordinator 2: he said to retrieve him for interrogation not execution!

Ordinator 3: can you even kill a god- Hey wait unhand him!! *draws his weapon as temple guards suddenly ascend the steps to the striders platform and apprehend the living god with ease*

Vivec: *glances back at them for a moment, his pace halting like an immovable force, the shackles in truth doing nothing to halt him of his abilities* my words will not reach nerevars ears in time before it’s too late… please… tell him… I’m sorry.

Ordinator 3: *eyes locking with the gold and red of the dunmeri peoples embodiment of the present. And feeling his heart ache and hang heavy in his chest as Vivec’s words ring of truth in his mind. Bringing tears to his eyes from the tongue of the warrior poet, unable to speak or barely hold his weapon aloft as the temple guards lead him away* I- I will.

Vivec: *allows the guards to pull him away and down the steps once more, their hands rough and their grip tight, leaving visible bruising on his skin that once would have never of shown at the height of his power, now laying bare for the world to see as they finally set foot on the ashen soil before Mournhold and its people, and the sheet removed, leaving him exposed and helpless before their judgment* … *slowly raises his head, his gaze landing on several figures approaching him and the guards holding him as the crowd falls silent with hushed whispers overshadowed by the breeze, the high councillors of House Dres, House Redoran, and house Sadras* … *effortlessly pulls his arms free from the guards grip and kneels down into a graceful bow amongst the ash. A submissive gesture of respect made somehow insulting as he shows a poise befitting a god before them* if my death has been ordered, I go to it willingly. I will not delay the inevita- *coughs as a boot suddenly greets his face with a swift kick, knocking him onto his side and earning a mix of shocked gasps and cheers for violence from the crowd*

Sen Dres: *the new head of house Dres and holder of their seat within the temple of Mournhold, a young, and arrogant councillor with more vitriol and spite than reason and thought* You dare prostate yourself at our feet and pretend still to be more than a whore who stole power from your betters?!

Archmagister Vilinu Sadras: g-grandmaster dres please we should wait for the hortators decision on this mat-

Archmaster Redoran: Silence! Nerevars kindness allowed him to live once before, and look at where it lead him. Lead our people! And now he wishes to afford it again! He kneels before us a traitor to the temple and all of morrowind. He must die.

Vivec: *winces as the guards pull him up from the dirt by his shackles, his blood turning the ash to ebony where it fell from his nose and lip* I, *raises his head, his very gaze though tired and gentle, freezing them in place out of fear for what he may still be capable of* Am ready. To receive my judgement.

Sen Dres: *steps forward, drawing his dagger from his belt and grabbing Vivec by his long braid* and your judgement you shall receive. *steps behind him and yanks his head back hard as he cuts through the gods thick hair, hacking it off with glee believing himself to be humiliating him, completely unaware Vehk grew it out in his own act of penance for his betrayal to nerevar and his people* now then. *raises the braid up for the crowd to see and delighting in their cheers and boos, not at all noticing the tension leave the gold and blue skinned elves shoulders as he does so, like a weight both physical and emotional had finally been lifted* Walk before ‘your’ people. False god.

[ongolecharles]

DAILY SCRIPTURE READINGS (DSR) 📚 Group, Fri Aug 02nd, 2024 ... Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year B

Reading 1

----------

Jer 26:1-9

In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim,

son of Josiah, king of Judah,

this message came from the LORD:

Thus says the LORD:

Stand in the court of the house of the LORD

and speak to the people of all the cities of Judah

who come to worship in the house of the LORD;

whatever I command you, tell them, and omit nothing.

Perhaps they will listen and turn back,

each from his evil way,

so that I may repent of the evil I have planned to inflict upon them

for their evil deeds.

Say to them: Thus says the LORD:

If you disobey me,

not living according to the law I placed before you

and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets,

whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them,

I will treat this house like Shiloh,

and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth

shall refer when cursing another.

Now the priests, the prophets, and all the people

heard Jeremiah speak these words in the house of the LORD.

When Jeremiah finished speaking

all that the LORD bade him speak to all the people,

the priests and prophets laid hold of him, crying,

"You must be put to death!

Why do you prophesy in the name of the LORD:

'This house shall be like Shiloh,' and

'This city shall be desolate and deserted'?"

And all the people gathered about Jeremiah in the house of the LORD.

Responsorial Psalm

----------------

PS 69:5, 8-10, 14

R. (14c) Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Those outnumber the hairs of my head

who hate me without cause.

Too many for my strength

are they who wrongfully are my enemies.

Must I restore what I did not steal?

R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Since for your sake I bear insult,

and shame covers my face.

I have become an outcast to my brothers,

a stranger to my mother’s sons,

Because zeal for your house consumes me,

and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.

R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.

But I pray to you, O LORD,

for the time of your favor, O God!

In your great kindness answer me

with your constant help.

R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Alleluia

--------

1 Pt 1:25

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

The word of the Lord remains forever;

this is the word that has been proclaimed to you.

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel

-----------

Mt 13:54-58

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.

They were astonished and said,

“Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds?

Is he not the carpenter’s son?

Is not his mother named Mary

and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?

Are not his sisters all with us?

Where did this man get all this?”

And they took offense at him.

But Jesus said to them,

“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place

and in his own house.”

And he did not work many mighty deeds there

because of their lack of faith.

***

FOCUS AND LITURGY OF THE WORD

I have a friend, who in his third year of high school, got caught stealing a package of cigarettes in his neighborhood drugstore. The owner banished him for ever from the store.

Fourteen years later, the week after his ordination as a Jesuit priest, his mother asked him to go to the same drugstore to get her something. He walked in and the older owner shouted, “I told you never again to come in here!” So he left with a big smile and went to a more welcoming place.

In today’s Gospel for this First-Friday Eucharistic liturgy, Jesus is not only returning to His home town, but is teaching to His old neighbors in their Synogogue. These faithful Jews question among themselves about his wisdom and power. They think they know Him, because they knew His parents and extended family. He had been urging the, by His words, to a more faith-based, more personally relationship with the God of their ancient faith. They resisted Him and His words, because they clung. His life-giving Word-Seeds fell on hard soil and so He moved on where there might be a more welcoming growing area.

Jesus did not need popular-acceptance. He was advancing in holy self-acceptance and so came and went. He was growing in the awareness of Who He was. He did not need any validation for His growing into. It would be attractive and easy for me to fill out this Reflection by writing about our need to grow in self-acceptance, so I won’t.

I write just a closing thought about living with memories of what we thought in the past which have frozen into the comfortable concrete. Memories can form images and we grow holding them tightly against the intrusion of the new, different and so uncomfortable.

Now here’s the punchline. What Jesus really came to do was to change the ideas of God! Imagine that! Once a relationship is concretely comfortable, it is dying and probably dead.        So, if we are unmovable and relaxed with our image of Jesus and or the unknowable God, that Jesus and His Father are moving on to more receptive soil.    

***

SAINT OF THE DAY

Saint Eusebius of Vercelli

(c. 300 – August 1, 371)

Saint Eusebius of Vercelli’s Story

Someone has said that if there had been no Arian heresy denying Christ’s divinity, it would be very difficult to write the lives of many early saints. Eusebius is another of the defenders of the Church during one of its most trying periods.

Born on the isle of Sardinia, he became a member of the Roman clergy, and is the first recorded bishop of Vercelli in Piedmont in northwest Italy. Eusebius was also the first to link the monastic life with that of the clergy, establishing a community of his diocesan clergy on the principle that the best way to sanctify his people was to have them see a clergy formed in solid virtue and living in community.

He was sent by Pope Liberius to persuade the emperor to call a council to settle Catholic-Arian troubles. When it was called at Milan, Eusebius went reluctantly, sensing that the Arian block would have its way, although the Catholics were more numerous. He refused to go along with the condemnation of Saint Athanasius; instead, he laid the Nicene Creed on the table and insisted that all sign it before taking up any other matter. The emperor put pressure on him, but Eusebius insisted on Athanasius’ innocence and reminded the emperor that secular force should not be used to influence Church decisions. At first the emperor threatened to kill him, but later sent him into exile in Palestine. There the Arians dragged him through the streets and shut him up in a little room, releasing him only after his four-day hunger strike. They resumed their harassment shortly after.

His exile continued in Asia Minor and Egypt, until the new emperor permitted him to be welcomed back to his see in Vercelli. Eusebius attended the Council of Alexandria with Athanasius and approved the leniency shown to bishops who had wavered. He also worked with Saint Hilary of Poitiers against the Arians.

Eusebius died peacefully in his own diocese at what was then considered an advanced age.

Reflection

----------

Catholics in the U.S. have sometimes felt penalized by an unwarranted interpretation of the principle of separation of Church and state, especially in the matter of Catholic schools. Be that as it may, the Church is happily free today from the tremendous pressure put on it after it became an “established” Church under Constantine. We are happily rid of such things as a pope asking an emperor to call a Church council, Pope John I being sent by the emperor to negotiate in the East, or the pressure of kings on papal elections. The Church cannot be a prophet if it’s in someone’s pocket.

***

【Build your Faith in Christ Jesus on #dailyscripturereadingsgroup 📚: +256 751 540 524 .. Whatsapp】

[ambiguouspuzuma]

Nocturne

The City of Novo Ubat wasn't technically nocturnal. Strictly - and according to the World Clock, who were the authority on all such things - its denizens rose, worked, ate and played in daytime hours, from early ante meridiem to late post meridiem, just like their distant neighbours across the globe. It was simply that, for them, the sun chose that time to rest instead.

The World Clock had smoothed it all out. They'd done away with time zones, the hassle of plus or minus, forward or backward, relics from an age of empire and agriculture: man's attempt to live a uniform life across a capricious world. There was no reason high noon should be at twelve, they figured, when four a.m. or six p.m. had equal right to the sunshine. So they'd shared it out equally.

All countries, all continents, now observed the same time, per the atomic chiming of the World Clock itself. They'd fixed it so it would be 3:15 a.m. in every city all at once, whether that meant brightest day or blackest night to the locals. Global co-ordination had never been easier. At every hour on the clock, it would be daylight somewhere in the world, and international teams could function through them all.

Of course, there were some adjustments to be made. Night owls congregated in cities like Novo Ubat - where they could live with their pupils large and minds alive, still working their nine-to-five against darker skies, keeping in touch with contacts on the light side of the world - whilst morning larks flocked the other way.

In turn, the city changed to cater to those who chose to live in darkness: cafés still opened for an 8 a.m. cup of coffee, the perfect way to start the night, a bars kept the liquor flowing until it was light outside. The minarets still sounded dawn and dusk, but everything else shifted around them. It was a city of mood lighting and blackout blinds, supplements of Vitamin D and ultraviolet lamps - and the type of person who would embrace all of that, finally giving into their body clock's demands.

For the vampires, it was a game-changer. Aamir bin Layl, like all of his brethren, had long struggled with obligate nocturnality. In centuries past, they had been able to rise to rule a feudal fiefdom, controlling lands for miles around their castle crypt, but the age of empires had cut them adrift on new oceans of power and influence.

Even with the benefit of technology, they were forced to sleep at different times, and could each only work in the depths of night. It was hard to run a global corporation that way; a vampire in New South Wales could hardly call his sire in Transylvania, with daylight bound to shine upon one of their screens. The novel Dracula was told only through letters, and perhaps that had been prophetic: for all of their unnatural speed, they could never Zoom.

But in Novo Ubat, they could speak in person, or at least in whatever they were instead, during the middle of the working day. With the World Clock's reforms, they could work all hours - nine to five and five to nine - with representatives in every country, a network that began to creep across the globe. In time, they would come to rule the human world once more. In time, and without time zones, everywhere would be the good old days again.

[rametarin]

Cities irritate me. Pondering them.

People that love cities seem to enjoy the selling point that your personal liberties are inherently compromised either by hard laws, or just by the nature of the soft laws. Such as, gun rights.

There's hard laws that are laws that arbitrarily punish your discharging of a firearm, whether it does or could damage anything. Those laws are hard because they exist purely to punish you based on what you MIGHT do accidentally or on purpose.

Then there's the soft, indirect, asymmetric laws. These ones punish you based on the circumstance. In a city, you virtually cannot discharge a firearm without it hitting something man-made and owned as property, be it brick walls, windows, street lights, or a herd of people walking around. You are almost guaranteed to be taken to court and sued into oblivion for it.

People that stand to make a great deal of money off available labor and the expenses of the people that live there love cities, because it's a large population and pool of people that can do labor. But then they also rope the city into taxing the people that live there in order to finance city life- which gives the city more control over the space above the earth, where they DO control the erection and construction of dwellings, workplaces and institutions deemed necessary for the function of society. They make the people pay to live in the cities and build the cities, and the city and wealthy tolerate one another's influence because they need one another. All to create a large population of people that have needs for both living space and creature necessities.

But the rub is you simply do not and cannot have the freedom of suburban or rural life. You give up certain amounts of personal autonomy, like the freedom of gun ownership without being charged out the ass if your discharged bullets hit anything, and more arbitrary laws that punish you for carrying when you are forced just by the layout of the city to pass by buildings where you aren't allowed to carry or concealed carry, just to live your life.

And the only people that can live under these laws, live around them illegally. Those willing to violate the laws and sacrifice any notion of legally living in society and try to live in the cracks, cede legitimacy in return for doing whatever they want, at the cost of possibly going to prison. These ones carry and intend to commit crimes and predate on people. The ones that live legally become marks, the ones that live illegally prey on them.

Real estate becomes an impossible luxury, because there's simply so many people and so many (necessary and not) zoning ordinances, and regulations, making new housing is practically impossible. You have to build new parts of the city just to keep providing for the people.

Simply put, after a certain size, cities become too intimate and congested. There's no room to live.

You can't have a space to work on your car in your yard, you can't go over to a friend's house to crash because their breadbox apartment isn't "zoned" for guests and the landlord's ire.

Cities just aren't designed for people, they're designed to treat people like hamsters that pay to live in a cage for the betterment of those that believe in the idea of caging people (one distinct group) and the people those cagers deal with (business people, whom are distinct from the ideological cagers and are just in it for the convenience such workers bring.)

So I've come to a conclusion;

I think in the future we're going to have more rural and urban sprawl, and tele-presence will be used for a kind of national commuting. Imagine cities that serve only as large factories; the workers are effectively machines connected to a wireless internet in the factory. You connect via VR and haptic feedback peripherals in the hands for tactile perception. Cities of the future will be designed to house a minority of people who maintain these factory conditions and don't mind the industrial limitations of city life.

The actual workers and employees will enjoy lives outside said city, perhaps connecting from thousands of miles away in different states. Not needing to go by rail or bus or car to commute, always having a machine to boot up into convenient workstations, where they are for a human hand to serve function there.

Doing it this way you eliminate so much need for congestion in cities and can maximize exactly how human inhospitable the city layout is. You'd need far fewer schools locally, fewer sidewalks, fewer residential buildings, fewer sewers, less garbage dumps, fewer hospitals, smaller government. Cities become centered around the people that specifically want to live in a city for the sake of living in a city, which means the sacrifices based on location and necessity become less of a consequence of living there and more the point. Where a minority population can exist there in comfort and the majority can earn city-life wages while living in whatever home community that they wish.

This means that cities can focus less on making breadbox apartments out of necessity to fit as many people as possible, and can afford to make vertical properties that are actually able to be physically owned. Because the people that would be paying taxes to work there as a toll to access the jobs and thus also provide for the city, would not similarly tax the city with their living, physical existence for their needs. The city could suddenly AFFORD, with both space and real estate and labor, to improve the quality of living conditions.

That would mean fewer tiny apartments with small square footage of space and more condominiums with as much space and square footage as farmhouses, able to comfortably house a family of 6-8. With the equivalent of a yard.

That'd mean more piping, infrastructure and real estate for something that's usually, "NIMBY." Imagine cities meant to be natural containment for nuclear power plants, so if there was an explosion (god forbid), they're designed to soak up the energy and spare populations- perhaps even a skyline meant to absorb sunlight and buildings designed not with the priority of habitating people and more as giant vertically-erected but horizontally spinning wind turbines. Cities that themselves are the sources of massive amounts of carbon sinkage, using renewable energy to remove it from the atmosphere.

To me, this seems like a good compromise. The way we're currently doing cities is enormously inhuman for individual rights, and it compromises too much just to be viable. And I'm not commenting on the financial side of things; I'm meaning specifically from the civic side.

It offers all the advantages of a city but removes the sources of poverty in a city when the jobs go away. It eliminates the urban decay and crime. It eliminates road congestion. Cities should logically be populated by fewer people but provide the sort of close proximity, high industrial employment that rural and suburban places don't.

The benefits it'd offer outside of that are great, too. Because you'd have tens of millions fewer people driving to work everyday, you'd have tens of millions fewer people consuming gasoline, diesel or electricity as fuel just to move the person to get to work. You'd have less wear on our roads and streets from traversing.

Overall, the idea of a city as a more serious business industrial zone habitated by tele-presence robots and a smaller human population to service them and keep the place running in ways that require a human presence (and get adequately paid for the inconvenience of city life) just seems to be the more human hospitable model.

[cogitoergofun]

On November 3, 2020, as America watched the first results of a fateful presidential contest roll in, voters in a North Texas suburb struck a blow for workers’ rights. Euless residents approved a proposition limiting some large companies’ ability to force employees to work overtime if they didn’t want to.

The “fair workweek” initiative, comparable to measures passed recently in a handful of other cities, was led in Euless by employees of LSG Sky Chefs, an airline catering giant and meal-supplier for American Airlines. These workers, unionized with Unite Here, said they were being overwhelmed with mandatory overtime hours, often announced at the last minute, as American Airlines, headquartered near the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport, sought to dramatically increase flight volume. 

“You can have a wife and children, and yet every day you are forced to stay at work, and you have no time to even go back and sit and relax and play and take care of children,” said Samuel Tandankwa, a Sky Chefs driver and Unite Here member, recalling the conditions in 2019 and leading up to the COVID pandemic.

Despite getting voters’ approval, the initiative faced legal troubles from the first. Some city officials doubted it could be enforced. Sky Chefs told the Texas Observer it didn’t apply to them since they maintain a national contract with Unite Here. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already written a letter stating the policy would violate a state law that bans cities from setting minimum wages. Nevertheless, Tandankwa told the Observer in July that since the campaign, the company actually has turned away from using mandatory overtime, freeing up workers to meet family obligations, and neither he nor local worker advocates want to lose the ordinance.

But Euless’ overtime measure is among the local ordinances that will be vaporized by Texas’ House Bill 2127, dubbed the “Death Star” bill by critics, which was signed by GOP Governor Greg Abbott last month and takes effect in September. It’s causing uproar around the state, as city officials, workers, and others try to figure out what parts of municipal law and regulation the bill will nullify. 

The bill’s sweeping, alleged purpose is stated in its opening sections: “returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.” However, closer examination suggests that the legislation’s real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers. First, it is a laser beam aimed at a small group of progressive ordinances improving worker and tenant protections—local victories won through hard-fought campaigns over the course of more than a decade. Second, and more importantly, it’s a bid to permanently hamstring municipal democracy in Texas, especially in its big blue cities. Cities are where most Texans live; they are increasingly liberal, their populations often majority nonwhite, and they are the level of government most responsive to ordinary citizens. In essence, the Legislature decided there was too much Democracy afoot in Texas, so it did something about it.

“To me, that’s the will of the people being taken away,” said Tevita Uhatafe, a Euless resident who works for American Airlines and is also a vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “We voted for it … and here we are, we’re going to get it taken away because people who claim to hate big government are acting just like [it].”

“There is no precedent for what they did this time,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “It was not a measured response to a given policy that corporate interests didn’t like; it was a wholesale transfer of power from cities to politicians in Austin.” 

HB 2127 is mostly broad in its language—and thus unclear in what all it actually will do. It lists vast categories of law—agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and property—in which cities may not regulate an issue that the state already regulates, unless explicitly authorized to do so somewhere in state law. 

Some cities and legal experts argue that would return populous cities to the very limited level of power they had in Texas until the early 1900s. Growing cities were burdening the Legislature with so many local concerns that the Lege put an issue on the ballot that, in essence, allowed cities with more than 5,000 people to self-govern—a capacity known as “home rule.” Voters passed the amendment in 1912. Cities could now legislate broadly, as long as their ordinances didn’t contradict state law. The City of Houston has already filed suit to block the Death Star bill, charging that undoing home rule would require another voter-approved constitutional amendment.

The full extent of what local policies the bill will undo is unclear, say city attorneys. “People ask me often … ‘Are we combing through our ordinances?’ And the answer to that is ‘No,’” San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia told the Observer. Because of the bill’s vague wording, he said, “It would be almost an impossible task to identify those [ordinances] that we would have a high degree of confidence would be affected.” 

However, the Legislature was specific in attacking local labor and tenant protections along with a couple other grab-bag issues. The bill forbids local ordinances on overtime and other work scheduling matters, policies mandating rest breaks for construction workers like those maintained in Dallas and Austin, and also “fair chance hiring” policies like those on the books in Austin and DeSoto, which help the formerly incarcerated get jobs. It forbids eviction protections like those in Austin and Dallas, too. Another provision appears to target Austin’s ban on cat declawing, while convoluted carve-outs grandfather in existing local regulations of payday lenders and so-called puppy mills while preempting future measures. 

Bills to wipe out local regulation of employment practices were pushed by the state’s powerful business lobby in the 2019 and 2021 legislative sessions but didn’t pass. The core language of those bills was inserted into the Death Star bill. 

City attorneys told the Observer they could not provide a list of affected ordinances and would ultimately need clarity from the courts. Taking a page from the state’s bounty hunter-style abortion ban, HB 2127 expressly authorizes individuals and trade associations to sue cities or counties for violations. A judge may order a city to abandon its policy but can only award the plaintiff costs and fees, so some cities may simply wait for these suits to arrive before making decisions. 

HB 2127 is just the latest entry in a saga of state “preemption,” the term referring to a higher level of government big-footing a lower level. Over the last decade, the Legislature has undone local efforts to regulate fracking and ridesharing companies, to reduce police budgets and decriminalize homelessness, to prohibit discrimination against Section 8 tenants and reduce deportations from jails, while also capping local tax revenues. Between 2018 and 2019, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas also passed policies requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. These ordinances were thoroughly stymied by the courts, but the business lobby—exemplified by the National Federation of Independent Business and the Texas Public Policy Foundation—went on the warpath against local labor protections anyway.

U.S. Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat representing a swath of Texas from Austin to San Antonio, led the charge as an Austin City Council member from 2015 to 2022 when the capital city pushed the bounds of local progressive policymaking further than any other city in the state and likely across the South. He sees a continuous thread in the state’s pushback from then to now. 

“Big corporate lobbies do not want our democracy to work for working people,” Casar told the Observer. “And they don’t want any examples that can show that democracy can work for working people.”

GOP state Representative Dustin Burrows, author of the Death Star bill, minces no words in describing his feelings about local government. “We hate cities and counties,” he said in 2019, a comment caught on a surreptitious recording. However, his explanation of HB 2127’s provisions was much less clear.

[...]

The bill’s Senate sponsor, Republican Brandon Creighton, at one point defended HB 2127 with the inspiring phrase: “We write statute that’s ambiguous on purpose and vague.” And then he slipped into it a provision banning local governments from passing measures to give renters some protection from eviction, while utterly misdescribing what he was doing. 

[marzipanandminutiae]

fun fact: some cities passed anti-hoop-skirt dumping ordinances in after that particular fashion era, because they'd gone out of style and nobody could figure out a good way to repurpose them at home or via a normal local dressmaker. so some people just...abandoned them in the street with other trash

Grand Haven, Michigan's law was passed in the mid-1890s, suggesting that some people's cleanout of 30-year-old attic contents got a little too enthusiastic

(this is also why antique wired skirt supports are pretty easy to find for sale online- they were cheap to produce, hard to reuse, and went in and out of fashion quickly)

people also often forget that a decently long human lifetime can cover multiple aesthetic periods. there's a museum here in Boston founded by a man born in 1874 who died in 1954- he lived through the Victorian Era, WWI, the Jazz Age, Old Hollywood, WWII...plenty of "eras" we tend to think of as fossilized independent units with no overlap

There are certain very specific, unsustainable periods of history.

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted from the 1650s to the 1730s, and was really three different waves of piracy that all had their own specific causes and characters. My personal favorite has always been the post-Spanish Succession period, when a bunch of sailors and privateers were left unemployed and turned en masse to piracy since those were the skills they'd picked up during the war. This supply of pirates was obviously non-renewable.

The Wild West lasted between 1865 and 1895, depending on who you ask, not even a full human lifetime. It's a very narrow band of time, and of course it wasn't sustainable, there was only so much land to colonize.

There are lots of these times of change, conquest, colonization, and war, particularly in the last three hundred years. I always think they're interesting, mostly in how quickly the course of history moves on to some other relatively more steady state.

There's a thing that speculative fiction does where it stretches specific periods out to extremes, most notably with Medieval Stasis, but I think it's far funnier when applied to these tiny slices of history that have ballooned in the public consciousness. Either it takes heroic feats of worldbuilding to make it make sense, or everyone is just sort of okay with the idea of a Golden Age of Piracy that's implied to have lasted for a millennia.

[nightbringer24]

We are the guns, and your masters! Saw ye our flashes? Heard ye the scream of our shells in the night, and the shuddering crashes? Saw ye our work by the roadside, the shrouded things lying, Moaning to God that He made them - the maimed and the dying? Husbands or sons, Fathers or lovers, we break them. We are the guns! We are the guns and ye serve us. Dare ye grow weary, Steadfast at night-time, at noon-time; or waking, when dawn winds blow dreary Over the fields and the flats and the reeds of the barrier-water, To wait on the hour of our choosing, the minute decided for slaughter? Swift, the clock runs; Yea, to the ultimate second. Stand to your guns! We are the guns, and we need you; here, in the timbered Pits that are screened by the crest, and the copse where at dusk ye unlimbered; Pits that one found us - and, finding, gave life (Did he flinch from the giving?); Laboured by moonlight when wraith of the dead brooded yet o'er the living; Ere, with the sun's Rising, the sorrowful spirit abandoned its guns. Who but the guns shall avenge him? Battery - Action! Load us and lay to the centremost hair of the dial's refraction; Set your quick hands to our levers to compass the sped soul's assoiling; Brace your taut limbs to the shock when the thrust of the barrel recoiling Deafens and stuns! Vengeance is ours for our servants: trust ye the guns! Least of our bond-slaves or greatest, grudge ye the burden? Hard, is this service of ours which has only our service for guerdon: Grow the limbs lax, and unsteady the hands, which aforetime we trusted; Dominant ones, Are we not tried serfs and proven - true to our guns? Ye are the guns! Are we worthy? Shall not these speak for us, Out of the wood where the tree-trunks are slashed with the vain bolts that seek for us, Thunder of batteries firing in unison, swish of shell flighting, Hissing that rushes to silence and breaks to the thud of alighting; Death that outruns Horseman and foot? Are we justified? Answer, O guns! Yea! by your works are ye justified -- toil unrelievéd; Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achievéd; Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeignéd; Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and distainéd; Courage that shuns Only foolhardiness; even by these, are ye worthy your guns. Wherefore, - and unto ye only - power hath been given; Yea! beyond man, over men, over desolate cities and riven; Yea! beyond space, over earth and the seas and the sky's high dominions; Yea! beyond time, over Hell and the fiends and the Death-Angel's pinions. Vigilant ones, Loose them, and shatter, and spare not. We are the guns!

The Voice of the Guns - Gilbert Frankau (1884 - 1952)

[kvibe-test]

Revolutionizing City Soundscapes: Uncovering Music's Urban Renaissance

TITLE: Transforming Urban Music Scenes: A New Wave of Innovation

Music scenes in cities worldwide stand at the cusp of a transformative shift, dynamically influencing future urban culture and the global music scene. Through advances in technology and evolving cultural contexts, these blossoming scenes promise a surge in creativity and ingenuity that's hard to ignore.

Current Urban Music Trends

Music spaces in major cities are expanding swiftly, driven by technological advancements and cultural shifts. Among the notable trends is the rise of fusion genres, which meld local and global sounds, thriving particularly in multicultural centers functioning as global crossroads. With the growth of digital media platforms, independent artists now have vast opportunities to cultivate dedicated audiences outside the conventional music industry structures.

Emerging DIY music cultures are making waves as music production tools become more accessible, inviting aspiring musicians to innovate and explore new territories. Although the digital era has revolutionized the industry, live music remains a crucial element, with an increased focus on creating intimate and immersive live experiences.

Shifts in Regional Music Scenes

Examining specific areas unveils distinct musical progressions. In North America, cities like Montreal showcase a bilingual indie music scene blending Francophone and Anglophone elements. Austin shines brightly as a hub for live music of all kinds, while Nashville expands its genre boundaries beyond country to embrace indie rock and hip-hop.

In Europe, Paris exemplifies the fusion of hip-hop with electronic music, bringing French rap to an international stage. Brussels' underground scene pulses with electronic rhythms reflecting its diverse community, and London leads the charge with groundbreaking styles like grime and UK drill.

In the Middle East, exciting developments abound, with Beirut spearheading an alternative scene that incorporates traditional Arabic influences into contemporary music. Conversely, Cairo sees a revival of independent music where artists highlight urgent societal issues. Dubai positions itself as a center for international performances while fostering strong local music communities.

The City’s Role in Shaping Modern Music

Cities have the potential to mold the music industry by providing vital infrastructure such as venues, studios, and networking opportunities. These ever-evolving urban settings encourage cross-cultural interaction, fueling innovation through the convergence of varied populations. However, economic challenges like gentrification and the high costs of city living can impact both venue availability and artists' ability to remain in these lively environments.

Many cities acknowledge the cultural and economic significance of a thriving music scene, implementing music-friendly policies and regulations. They actively support local music through initiatives such as providing noise ordinance exceptions for venues, and some cities leverage music tourism as a source of revenue. Urban planning often aligns with the music industry's needs, with efforts to establish affordable housing for artists and preserve historic music sites.

Embracing the Potential of Emerging Music Spaces

For those within the music industry or music enthusiasts, there are numerous ways to engage with these emerging scenes. Step 1: Experience local shows and festivals to directly discover emerging talent. Step 2: Engage with artists and music industry professionals in a variety of cities to keep abreast of new trends. Step 3: Champion music-friendly urban planning efforts that support the sustainability of music scenes. Step 4: Encourage collaborations between artists from diverse urban backgrounds to create unique fusion music.

Final steps include keeping abreast of new music city policies and acknowledging both opportunities and challenges of integrating into these novel musical environments.

As the global community delves deeper into the soundscapes of burgeoning urban music scenes, individuals and organizations play the dual role of beneficiaries and contributors to the rich, evolving fabric of global music culture, paving the way for new journeys and inspiration.

#UrbanMusic #MusicCulture #LiveMusic #GlobalSounds #FusionGenres

Stay updated on the dynamic music transformations happening in urban settings worldwide.