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thanksjro · 4 years

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Dark Cybertron Chapter 6: This Sure is a Comic I’m Reading.

The Dinobots are chilling out by the standing Titan, because Slag went and got his ass kicked by the super death wave a few issues back.

Excuse me, Slug.

There’s real-world context for this change- you see, in England, the word “slag” is often used as a derogatory term. Specifically, it’s either used as a stand in for “prostitute” or “whore”, or in more of a generalized “I greatly dislike this person” sort of way. It’s typically aimed at women, which is likely why Arcee said something to him as opposed to anyone else.

This little exchange is interesting, since Dark Cybertron Chapter 6 was published in 2014. Our boy Slug here first showed up in the original cartoon, back in the 80s, and was in the Marvel UK comics, where they didn’t change his name. A good portion of the IDW creative team, including 50% of the writers for this event storyline, are also from the UK. Seems like someone finally got sick of calling a whole-ass robot dinosaur a slut.

Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying casual sex, or being a sex worker, but slapping labels on other people without their input is sort of a shitty thing to do, especially when you’re doing it in a franchise typically aimed at younger audiences, and with a surprisingly large following in the UK, where that term is used.

Anyway, while this conversation was happening, the Titan moved, and when it did, it kicked up a shit-ton of dust. Astrotrain, who is laying off to the side with his legs and an arm off, offers Swoop his binoculars. When asked why the hell he has binoculars- which doesn’t seem so strange to me, given that they’re standard military equipment in a lot of places- he tries to explain that he’s got shit eyes, and didn’t want Megatron to know about them. This would be an interesting glimpse into the inner workings of the Decepticons and how they view disability, if Swoop actually gave a damn.

But he doesn’t.

So it’s not.

Swoop sees with his special eyes that the guys who went down into the Crystal City have escaped, and are currently trying to outrun the Titan, and also the title of this issue.

Watch out, that typography’s gonna fuckin’ get you!

The Dinobots start firing on the Titan, which does fuck-all, and Prowl yells at them to head for Iacon, since that’s where the Titan’s going. Bumblebee, Skywarp, and Megatron are revealed to be MIA. Bummer.

Over on that weird water planet the Lost Light landed on a few issues back, the Rod Pod gang have puttered into Metroplex’s eye socket, and are currently making a Fantastic Voyage. Getaway asks where the hell Metroplex’s eyeball got to, but nobody has an answer for him, least of all Metroplex. Strange happenings on this weird water planet.

Ratchet gives everyone the skinny on Titan physiology theory- thank god he came along on the trip so I could at least get a little lore to feed my brain through this slog.

So, Metroplex’s spark could actually be out right now. Even though the lights are still on, that doesn’t mean anyone’s actually home, because the power of his spark needs time to actually travel through the body, and it needs a lot more time than the average robot, because he’s just so goddamned big. Humans also need time for their animating force… or, uh, blood to travel through the body. This is why we have a pulse. If it was instantaneous, we wouldn’t, but we’d probably also explode, because our squishy little bodies wouldn’t be able to handle that shit.

The gang starts scanning for life signs, even though they’re not even sure if they’ll be able to pick anything up. Brainstorm theorizes that the water could be causing degradation to Metroplex’s body. Getaway is still stuck on the Rod Pod existing. He’s having a moment. He’s been having a moment, really, ever since he saw the damn thing.

The results from the life-scan come in, and it looks like Metroplex might actually be okay, because there’s a blip for everyone in the Rod Pod, plus one! Hooray!

Nobody tell them about the hanger-on who’s basically glued himself to the ass of the Pod. We’ll let them have this little win, if only for a moment.

Ratchet suggests they head for the brain to check things out. Brainstorm reads back the report on the water sample he took, holding his data pad as precariously as he possibly can as he does. There’s admium flakes in the water. Nobody knows what this means, so they try to call Swerve, who is a metallurgist, for his professional opinion. The call goes to voicemail. Pity, that.

The fellas show up at the cranium, and there’s a small issue; Metroplex’s brain isn’t there. It wasn’t yanked out, either- it’s clean as a whistle in there, all things considered. Next stop- the spark. Hopefully they can get there before all the lights go out, because it’s beginning to look rather grim for ol’ Plexy.

Back on Cybertron, Starscream is asking about the fatality rate of the death wave, which is a bit funny to read now that I’ve typed it out. Tankor- who is our tie-in issue character today- decides he’s going to start some shit with Starscream, even as people are evaporating around him in the medical center he’s volunteered to assist at. Starscream takes the verbal stripping down with a straight face, because at this point, it’s just par for the course for him. Being head honcho of a whole planet kinda sucks, as he’s quickly finding out.

Flatline, who is also here, makes a crack at Starscream’s expense, and Starscream decides that that’s going to be the straw that breaks his camel’s back, as he starts getting dangerously sarcastic with the guy. Too bad this isn’t the time for that, however, because the Titan just showed up at the city limits.

Wow, Titan really said “fuck those two guys on the left in particular.”

Over in the Dead Universe, it turns out that the massive fiery laser blast from last issue DIDN’T kill everyone, and doesn’t actually seem like it was ever intended to. I suppose it was some sort of transport beam that Nova Prime used for his entrance, like the dramatic bitch he is. That’s neat, I guess.

Hardhead’s pretty upset by Nightbeat’s betrayal, not that Nightbeat really cares- being brainwashed tends to have that effect. Hardhead starts slamming his skull against the containment cube, living up to his name and also making himself look like a fool. Cyclonus is beginning to regret agreeing to this trip. Orion Pax punches the wall and starts yelling at Nightbeat for being a traitor, pretty much breaking his hand in the process. Rodimus tries to get him to chill out, and gets a knuckle sandwich for his troubles.

Also, this whole thing is a ruse. Orion managed to crack the cube, and he’s gonna try to get them out, but he can only do it if Nightbeat doesn’t realize what’s going on. Once Rodimus is let in on the plan, he tries to butter up ol’ Ikea Johnson, who notices the very mysterious something that’s on Rodimus’ palm. The thing that’s NOT his forcefield generator, that we don’t get to know about just yet.

Seeing the mysterious something makes Nightbeat fall to his knees, clutching his head in pain. At least, that’s what Orion says happened. I don’t know what happened or why, or why Orion would fucking know what happened or why. Or even, really, if it was Orion making the claim in the first place.

Not even any feet to try to connect to characters. I’m just guessing on previous panels.

“Dark Cybertron” makes me so, so tired.

Anyway, Nova Prime tells everyone to get on their knees, lest he shoot them with his big honkin’ back turrets.

Back inside Metroplex, the fellas have exited the Rod Pod and are on the hunt for Metroplex’s spark. Someone’s gone and drawn arrows pointing in the direction of the spark chamber, though who exactly is a mystery. Lots of mystery going on this issue. The boys decide to see where the graffiti takes them, leaving the Rod Pod to whatever fate might befall it while they’re gone.

Nobody likes the Rod Pod very much.

Also, that hanger-on from earlier is still there. This’ll turn out great, surely!

We get treated to a double-page spread of Escher proportions, as the gang tries to traverse the inner workings of Metroplex, until they hit an arrow that seemingly hits a dead end. When they brute force their way through the ceiling, it’s bad news bears; they’re right back where they started. Whirl, our most volatile friend, takes out his frustration on the Rod Pod, only for more bad news to reveal itself: the Pod’s been rigged to explode by the hanger-on!

And that’s a series wrap on the Rod Pod Squad! Let’s give ‘em a hand, folks!

Back in the Dead Universe, Nova Prime is busy deadnaming Orion, and generally just being an asshole. He notices Cyclonus off in the corner, and starts being an asshole at him too, because that’s how Nova interacts with the world. It’s all he knows.

It’s at this point that Cyclonus gives Hardhead the signal, and Hardhead bashes through the crack in the cube. Too bad it reseals itself directly behind him. Hardhead goes to punch Nova Prime, and gets his hand crushed into pulp for his troubles. Then he dies, because that was his forcefield hand.

And that’s a series wrap on Hardhead!

Nova Prime informs everyone that he’ll be taking them to visit a pal of his.

You know, this reveal would be a hell of a lot more poignant if I could FUCKING TELL WHO THE SHIT THAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE.

#transformers #jro #dark cybertron #issue 6 #mtmte #issue 25 #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #incoming analysis #overthinking about robots #comic script writing

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weyassinebentalb · 3 years

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Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

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bbq-hawks-wings · 4 years

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Series Review Pt. 1/3

So, this isn’t even a YouTube video where you have the advantage of hearing a voice over a recording with snappy editing to lighten the mood or convey feeling; but believe me that there was a lot of earnest sincerity put into the review this time around.

But before I put the rest of it under the cut, there are some corrections/clarifications I want to put down about my last review that I believe we're significant shortcomings on my part.

My first, and probably most MAJOR goof was my choice of words in trying to describe the scene with Hawks and Twice at the end of 263 - “ he clearly hasn’t killed Twice yet, and we don’t know why, but if he has to he’s prepared to do so without hesitation or remorse.”

BIG OOF. I hadn’t even been looking much at others’ opinions and the common-enough impression that Hawks doesn’t care about Twice at all/is incapable of empathy/ONLY concerned with his mission from the Commission. When I looked back at my own review, though I didn’t have any indication anyone believed I was one of those people (“without remorse” being the problematic phrase in question), I could easily see how others could get the impression and decided to wait until the next review to do a better job instead of just saying I would. My views on that particular scene will be clear later on, but at least that’s out of the way in case that was keeping people from reading this in the first place.

Second, I failed to arrange my observation points in a more ideal order. If anything, the fact that we were seeing that last page from Twice’s perspective should have been the first point. This mistake made it sound like a neutral assessment of the situation instead of an observation through the context of Jin's feelings. This ended up confusing even myself, as someone who usually writes these reviews solo, into forgetting to factor in that Twice's perspective may be warping the perception of Hawks guarding him into one of intent to kill while forgetting that the Hero Code forbids killing others unless it's truly a necessary last resort. For some reason, Sad Man's Parade and Twice's two-double limit also slipped my mind which brings me to the last point.

Third, I rushed things. When I rush, I make mistakes, sometimes pretty sloppy ones. It has been a ROUGH couple of weeks to be a Hawks or villain stan, even more so if you’re both, so for some reason I felt like I needed to get my thoughts out there quickly. I don’t have any kind of real incentive to do so other than a faster response - I don’t make any money off this, don’t have any relevance algorithm to feed as if I was on YouTube or Twitter, and I’m not the only half-decently known blog to hold these opinions so I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s my problem, but that doesn’t mean I have to make it anyone else’s.

For complete transparency, I’ve been reading and re-reading through the entire series canon again, starting with Hawks’ manga debut, and reviewing the entire series’ events and in-universe history, and have been taking literal whole pages of notes and drafts since Thursday the 12th. I’m glad I did because it brought to mind things that often get left out of pockets of fandom discussion who hyper-focus on their circles of interest while forgetting that each individual section is meant to work with the whole.

That’s what we’ll be working with today, and additional thanks goes to @baezetsu and @dorito9708 for volunteering as proofreaders and editors to make this more focused and concise. If you’re interested please keep reading. A fair warning, this is what we in the professional field call a “long-ass post, no seriously guys grab a drink and a snack we’re gonna be here a while.” It's actually so long I have to split it up into parts because Tumblr Mobile is stupid and doesn't like making the "read more" function available to the mobile version.

So here we go, people, let’s try this again one last time…

Where we’re at in Chapter 264 (or at least, you know, ignoring literally everyone in the series that isn’t these two) is Twice and Hawks’ confrontation in the study room; but let’s put a pin in that for now and come back.

The biggest piece of information to keep in mind is that even though both these characters are currently front-and-center and have major plot and symbolic value in the series, they are still not the main characters. Their conflict is also not the central conflict. Let’s zoom out to the big picture and see what happens when we put everything together at the end.

The whole inciting incident of the series is when humanity began to display superhuman abilities in a few random individuals. These abilities are neither inherently good or bad - they are constantly intended as neutral with the potential being dependent on the user. Eventually these abilities began to be collectively termed as “quirks” - literally just a single facet of each person’s unique identity. From a social commentary standpoint, quirks have been used as a narrative stand-in for the unique situational circumstances or combinations of circumstances individuals may find themselves with that are either mostly or completely outside of their control like aptitude, physical ability, race/appearance, mental state, and inherited societal station. While more of these examples have been explicitly stated and inserted into the story later on, quirks still serve as the main catalyst and lens by which these topics are discussed.

Because of the initially new and unfamiliar nature of these abilities, people who possessed them faced descrimination and persecution despite having no say in whether or not they had them; and some who did possess these abilities began abusing their power. Taking advantage of this, a man calling himself One-for-All took unwanted quirks from people and redistributed them claiming to want to help others and bring about peace but merely wished to amass power and a following for his own gain. Morally upright individuals eventually rose to the occasion and placed themselves between innocent bystanders and evildoers, earning no official reward or compensation for their work, though eventually they became so effective that they became recognized and endorsed if they went through proper governmental training and channels. These endorsed specialty crime fighters came to be dubbed “heroes.”

All-For-One had risen to prominence by this point and his loyal following actively supported him in his now blatant criminal empire despite the morally reprehensible actions he committed which incessantly terrorized innocent bystanders - earning him the title Symbol of Evil or Symbol of Fear. Eventually a hero named All Might rose up to specifically deal with All-For-One’s reign of terror, having worked his way up from obscurity taking down criminals and saving civilians in unprecedented numbers, determined to create a world where everyone could feel safe in the face of danger. Though only succeeding in beating AFO into hiding All Might ushered in a new era of safety and prosperity earning him the title Symbol of Peace.

Therein lies the central message - “It’s not the situation you’re given that determines your worth or potential but what you choose to do with it” - and the main conflict is - “I want to use what I’ve been given for my own benefit" vs "I want to use what I’ve been given for others.” Deku and Shiguraki are merely the next generation iteration of this conflict distilled down to their simplest essence. Deku's desire is to save anyone who needs help the moment he realizes they need it. Shiguraki wants to remove people's sense of security regardless of their character or situation.

This conflict is initially framed as simple - a clear black and white/good and bad dynamic that’s easy to see from a distance; but as characters and groups developed over time it’s become more and more difficult to tell the two sides apart. It was not a coincidence that immediately after introducing the clear-as-day bad guys to the series we were presented with the idea that who we perceived to be “good guys” could be bad people doing good things or that people could do good things for the wrong reasons when we were presented with the personal conflicts that Bakugo, Shinsou, and Todoroki all faced at the Sports Festival that were either their internal struggles with the way the were perceived by others or were their personal struggles with the way they perceived themselves. Immediately after that, we were introduced to Stain's criticism of modern heroes and shown who would come to be the core members of the League of Villains.

At the current events in the series we’ve waded through so many shades of grey we’re expected to determine who’s a “hero” and “villain” not by what they say but what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. The individual members of the League of Villains touch on various ways a person might be driven to a life dedicated either to the pursuit of personal satisfaction with no concern to others or to the active pursuit of destroying others, and generally the villains are some of the most morally gray characters we have in the series, though not all of them - the two most notable morally gray “good guys” are Hawks and Endeavor.

There’s one last thing to note about how the series chooses to distinguish morally gray characters as “good” and “bad,” and that ultimately boils down to the choices they make with the hand they are dealt - that being to help or to harm others. This is not quite the same thing as a “hero” and a “villian” (I know, as if it wasn’t confusing enough), but the series has now gone to great lengths to make a clear distinction between the ideals of heroism and the institution of heroism.

Looking at the difference in institutions and ideals as the series presents them we get a better picture of the actual core issues the series seeks to address. The institution of heroism is a utilitarian approach to maintaining a sense of order and safety, and it does so by incentivising people to resolve as many public altercations as possible in exchange for wealth and fame. Criminals are those who break the law regardless of the motivation for the crime or its degree of impact. The institution does not take into account factors that may drive someone to commit a crime nor is it concerned with the core motivations of those enforcing the sense of order.

On the opposite hand, the ideal of heroism offers no reward, no recognition, may require some amount of suffering on the part of the hero, and never guarantees that the victim in question will be saved. Conversely, villainy/evil is any action taken for one's own gain with zero regard to the impact on others and/or is any action committed with malicious intent. These definitions are about moral obligation and human to human connection.

While having a strong correlation (helping others because it's right usually helps the majority in the long run, and doing harm is often ultimately bad for the majority) these two schools of thought are able to function independently of each other. In other words, a criminal can be a good person fallen on hard times (like stealing food to feed their family, but only as much as they need from someone who won’t notice it missing) while a “professional hero” can be an evil person doing good things for the wrong reasons (like obsessing over gaining wealth and popularity with no mind to collateral damage they may cause). Most characters are categorized and even described in-universe as morally aligning with the institution they associate with; but several have been explicitly noted as exceptions to the rule such as Gentle Criminal and La Brava, Endeavor, and Twice.

Are we properly confused yet? Great, because there’s one more layer to consider! What do we make of someone who is trying to do a good thing (like saving as many people as possible from a known threat) but to do so has to make a choice that might leave a few people in the fire? Which outcome do we use to decide if this is a good person or a bad one? Do we judge based on intent or on the outcome?

Now we zoom back in to Hawks and Twice, but we’ll pick that up in Part Two.

Part Three

#bnha meta #mha meta #BNHA Chapter 264 #MHA Chapter 264 #BNHA spoilers #MHA spoilers #long post

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sophiechoir · 4 years

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Thoughts from Mass 5/31/20: Pentecost & Reconciliation

@ Klasztor Ojców Dominikanów w Łodzi (Monastery of Dominican Fathers in Łódź)

[very long entry today]

Listened to some Latin hymns before watching Mass proper - first one was Veni Creator Spiritus, then O Ignis Spiritus <3

I suppose the comfort of Latin is that it feels mysterious and unknown and so elevated, more divine, but at the same time, since this is a Catholic hymn and ultimately human, we know that the translation is something good and Catholic and human and not entirely alien or unloving. It’s the unknowable without fear. Without understanding, we understand. It’s an abstraction of faith - a work of art. [side note - something is human when human-made]

A proper shrine, which does not reach above the trees (like a Shinto temple) [excepting the spire and its cross]

Zen feels in a Catholic music video - the return to nature to communicate peace and divinity is universal

Mass

Today’s Theme (among many lol): The many vs the one

The alien faces of icons

Tend to worship the unknowable - fear and worship really are closely tied, aren’t they? Just a thin line, yet all-important - perhaps that line is love - perhaps love is what distinguishes true worship from pagan servitude (...no offense)

Conflicting accounts of the relationship between understanding and God/religion, of course!

I wonder about the ratio of priests/monks to nuns - surely there are more of the former?

It filled the house - it filled each person in the house - community & individual

Rewrite the Bible in modern-day context

The world burns & is renewed, wings of flames, wings and tongues, flying sparks, sparking wires, cut or snapped, snapping together, snapping in the wind, the exhalation, the death of many, yet nevertheless life, always life, always the return to life, all in the same house, same body, resurrection without replacement, the phoenix in agony

Many acts, one God

Body of Christ = Church is incredibly anti-individualist

Floating world this week [Edo Period]

“Peace be with you,” He said, showing them the violence wrought upon Him, “Peace be with you.” God, please

Homily

Two Triptychs: [the priest talked rather quickly, so might be incorrect, but this is a fascinating format/argument nonetheless]

Holy Spirit Triptych

Creation of the world

After Flood - the dove?

Christ Incarnate, I think?

~Badness~ Triptych (lol idk what he called it)

Adam and Eve: The matrimony of sin & shame

Cain and Abel: The brotherhood of resentment

Babel: The community of pride & hubris

Healing the harm of the second triptych through the Pentecost: Apostles proclaiming Gospel globally, in all languages, as both a sign of the brotherhood of humanity in faith (#2) and servitude to God and learning and understanding one another (#3/1 I guess). This healing is how we reach happiness and fulfillment - we are fulfilled through the collective faith of the church and by fulfilling each others’ happiness (communist ‘tude, m’dude!).

Focused very much on the Church: through the Holy Spirit, we know God is with us in the Church

Nowhere else does Christ refer to the apostles as his brothers

No sin or weakness of ours can stop or deter God’s will (hm)

The Church is the Chosen One (not any one of us, I suppose is the logic here - oh, logic)

The fallen face of Cain

God gives through others, through the Church - so perhaps prayer is also a method of raising awareness, not just to God but to others - a method of advocacy among the people - what inner room? lol

The *apostles* as guilty for Christ’s death (hm)

God-given strength to forgive

Post-Mass Thoughts: Reconciliation & Politics

Went to confession today for the first time since around Christmas. Our Polish church just now opened in a very limited capacity - only 10 or less people in the building at a time, per government regulations - my mom, my sister, and I had to sign up for a time slot in the evening. Completely bizarre experience, of course. Signs in English with bright red fonts were up everywhere - half-peeling arrows had been taped onto the floor, as if we were robots following a track or dancers tapping out a routine onstage - a hefty bottle of hand sanitizer sat at the entrance (the new baptismal font! lol) - the main hall was blockaded with wooden kneelers, and, peering in, I saw the silhouette of a camera still perched on its stand in front of the altar - and of course everyone wore masks.

But those masks were frequently half-off or incorrectly worn. The two priests and two volunteers were cheery and casual as they greeted us. We were a bit early. The confession itself felt rushed and anticlimactic - there was no wait in line, no buildup, no feeling of relief afterwards. Even face to face with the priest in the small side chapel, I didn’t experience any significant anxiety or guilt or shame. But perhaps that was partly due to the sins I was confessing as well as the immediate context. Lack of regret for many of them - yikes-!

The drive home was far more eventful, to be honest. I sat in the backseat of the car and listened carefully as my mom and sister spun into a heated discussion of the riots and unrest around the country, in our own Chicago. I mediated a bit at the end, tried to point out commonalities, broaden the perspective, yada yada, but my mom and sister decided themselves that they would end the discussion reconciled and light a candle before bed for the victims of all this violence. Now that part made my heart swell - what an elevating gesture, what perfect sincerity and love-! Now that’s religion’s role in politics. That’s what practicing in a community of faith can do when debate and ideology fail. Light a candle and hold hands as we bow our heads in the dark.

God, it’s gotten really dark.

#thoughts from mass #thoughts #prose #confession #not surprised at what's happening with the protests tbh but gosh does it make me nauseous to think about it #sorry for the gross politics ewwwww #lol #...#im tired man

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femmesfollesnebraska · 5 years

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Artist Feature: Hend Al-Mansour

Where are you from?

Originally from Saudi Arabia. Minnesotan for the last 22 years.

How did you get into creative work and what is your impetus for creating?

I was born this way. I create for no reason but I use my art for social change and gender justice. If I was not inclined to art, I will still talk about gender justice. And if I had another social or political interest I will use art to express it.

Shrinks From All Rendezvous, 2017, Screen printing. Ink on paper Tell me about your current/upcoming show/exhibit/book/project and why it’s important to you.

I have two coming group exhibitions: "Continuum" at Minneapolis College of Art and Design featuring all McKnight fellows. It will run from June 14- July 14. The other is "What is Forbidden?" at Cathrine G. Murphy Gallery in St. Kate from featuring all artists of the Women's Art Institute. It will run September 7 to October 19. In both, I will have an installation based on an interview of an Arab American woman living in Minnesota. What do you hope people get out of your work?

Connect, listen, talk grow, and get inspired.

She Thinks She Makes Art, 2016, Screen printing. Ink on board

Does collaboration play a role in your work—whether with your community, artists or others?

Sometimes. I only had two collaborative bodies of works. It is not easy for two artists to produce one artwork but it is easy to collaborate in a group show or to form an artists group where support, and exchange of ideas take place. How so and how does this impact your work?

Exhibiting with other artists puts my work within a context. It gives it a background and a reference. I am currently in a show with 9 other artists called " I contain Multitudes". We have just exhibited at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and looking for another venue to put the show again. My work looks much stronger from within this show than if it was standing by itself.

Habiba In Pink, 2013, Screen Printing on raw canvas Considering the political climate, how do you think the temperature is for the arts right now, what/how do you hope it may change or make a difference?

It is not a good climate for artists. But artists bounce back. That is what they do. They express the climate they are in and how it affects them as humans and members of society. They sometime suffer but art always survive. People recognize its importance. Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, examined the perspective of femininity and race in her work, and spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art; does feminism play a role in your work?

Sure, I am a feminist artist. Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of when to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.” What is your favorite advice you have received or given?

Don't lose believing in your self and always follow your instinct.

https://www.hendalmansour.com

~ Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Deskins. LFF Booksis a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017).Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.Current call for collaborative art-writing: http://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/post/181376606692/lff-2019-artistpoet-collaborationsCurrent call: What does being a womxn mean to you? http://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/post/183697785757/what-does-being-a-womxn-today-mean-to-youyour

#feminist art #contemporary art #womenartists

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canaryatlaw · 5 years

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alright, so today’s been a bit of a whirlwind. sadly my laziness (or chronic exhaustion, if you prefer that label) got the best of me and I slept through the middle church service and ubered to the last one since I was signed up for the nursery. this is why it’s better when I’m signed up for the middle service so I’m not tempted to skip out. but I made it there with a bit left in the service and got to watch it for a bit so that was nice. it was centered around joy, and the part at the end I got to witness involved a dancing christmas tree, menorah, and dinosaur onstage while they handed out krispy kreme donuts, because how else would you define joy??? (for context, they had their annual Christmas store event yesterday where they have low income families from the communities our church support come in and be able to buy presents for their children and families at very reduced prices, with all the proceeds going to charity, and while the adults are doing this they also do entertainment for the kids, so the costumes were leftover from that and I suppose they decided to put them to work. I heard that the little kids were very much NOT a fan of the dinosaur 😂) service ended and we had our volunteer huddle before heading over to the room where I helped with the pick up of kids from the last service and drop off for our service. I think we ended up with 4 helpers so that’s a decent number, and I think we had like 8 or so babies so that’s a pretty good ratio. things were fairly calm for the most part, a few of them were crying on and off but were ultimately consolable, didn’t have to call any parents so that’s always a win, especially when we found out at the end that one of the little girls we had had been having issues the last few weeks that resulted in calls to parents, and this was the first time that didn’t happen, so that’s encouraging. At the end of the service we cleaned up and I waited for the last parents to show up (always the ones that are volunteering in some capacity themselves so they tend to be the last to pick up) then headed out. The plan was to go to the place to get brunch for the date after church. I’m gonna try to explain the route of the blue line and the bus route the best I can because my navigation in this got a bit complicated. I can take the bus right from my corner to basically a straight line down. my church is right off the blue line, which intersects the bus twice, as the blue line makes a V in and out of downtown, traveling southeast until it hits downtown, then traveling southwest out of it, with church being on the southwest prong. I generally take the bus to the first intersection and take the V down to the church because it tends to be faster. the second intersection is only one station west of my church, but for some reason the bus service is really spotty from that station so I tend to avoid it. but this brunch place was right off the bus route, and it was before the first (northern) intersection of the blue line, so it made sense for me to take it one stop west on the southwest prong and take the bus from there, so that’s what I did, except the bus service was spotty and I ended up taking an uber from the train station to the place so I didn’t end up being late. Met up with the guy, there was a bit of a wait so we walked over to a coffee shop nearby and hung out for a bit until we got called. this place was entirely Ron Swanson themed (from Parks and Rec) which was really just so flipping fantastic, and the food was very good. He was a self-confessed nerd, so we talked a lot about comics and superheroes and all that good stuff, and at some point the conversation migrated to the various systemic problems in child welfare and criminal justice (probably because he was saying he tends to lean libertarian on some issues but still supported social services and such) which is always interesting. overall it was nice, I’m not sure if I’m feeling any romantic attraction but I guess we’ll see where it goes from here. Once we finished I got on the bus with the intent to take it the rest of the way home (and here’s where things get really complicated) until I got a phone call from who turned out to be the guy who had done the custom fitting for the suits the law firm I was working for was paying for us to get, and he had the suit and was passing through Chicago tonight and said if we could meet up I could try it on and get it. There was a tense moment when I was like “you know I’m not with the firm anymore, right?” and he said he did but the suit was still made and paid for so it’s mine. he was heading west into the city and was hoping we could meet before he hit downtown where he was meeting with the other women from the firm who I definitely did not want to see, and I knew there was a starbucks a few blocks from my church that would be in his direct path, and at this point the bus was just coming to the northern intersection of the blue line, so I hopped off the bus and got back on the train and took it down to where my church was (I told you this was complicated). So I bought a snack and sat down to wait, he showed up a few minutes later and gave me the suit to try on, so I went to the bathroom and like. guys. it’s so perfect. I love it so much. like I can’t even tell you. I like actually had been really sad about it because I thought I wasn’t going to get it anymore since I don’t work there but it’s made and it’s mine and I love it so much lol it’s great. the only thing I was kinda meh on was the button, but that’s super easy to get replaced so I’m not concerned about that. and like, it’s a fucking super nice suit, custom made, like that shit retails for like $1,000 so this was QUITE the bonus from a company I no longer work for 😂😂😂 so this was pretty awesome. I took an uber pool home because I didn’t want to deal with having it on public transit. when I got home I chilled for a bit and got ready for the first night of the crossover, which I was going to be livetweeting from the Batwoman Podcast account for the first time. Overall I thought the episode was pretty solid, I have to fangirl about what was by far the best part for me, which was of course the inclusion of Clark and Lois which they filmed on the Kent farm from Smallville, and when they transferred to that scene they played the iconic Smallville theme song that’s all like SOMEBODY SAAAAAAAAAAAVE MEEEEEEEEEE and y’all, I actually died. my soul left my body. I was legit screaming, like I CANNOT believe they actually did that. if we get more Smallville references in this crossover as its been hinted we might in the preview clip I will actually die and probably remain so. So I was completely overwhelmed by that lol. But I did of course watch the scene with the introduction of Lois to the universe and man, I love her so much already. Between schooling Clark on some sexism to being ready to fight off Oliver and Barry with a hammer to saying “go get him Barry!” because Oliver’s “kind of a joke” I just totally fell in love with her. she’s perfect. Of course then I absolutely died again when she called Clark “Smallville” in the same exact way that Erica Durance as Lois Lane did on Smallville which is a thing that was completely unique to Smallville, I screamed again and it was just so damn good. so that was obviously the highlight of it for me. the Barry and Oliver training stuff was interesting, I’m not sure how I feel about the whole “Barry has to draw on darkness to use Oliver’s skills” thing which just seems a bit unnecessary, but maybe they’ll pull it through. I thought the beginning was pretty funny with Oliver waking up to Iris and them all being so thoroughly confused about everything. Then there was the fight scene at the end which was pretty good all around, very inventive with the number of heroes participating in the fight and how their various power sets were used. Of course it peaked my interest that this was “Ivo” labs and the robot was named “AMAZO” which is intriguing because it’s a very different interpretation than Arrow took on the subject, yet it’s much closer to the overall DC universe lore about the character and his creations. I found it particularly interesting though that they were linking the mirakuru to the robot, which was of course something that came directly from Arrow’s plot regarding Ivo and the Amazo (ship) so I’m curious as to where they’re going from there on that subject (if it’s not just a throwaway line, anyway). The ending where they decided to go to Gotham and the shot of Batwoman on the roof was really fucking epic, and definitely a great place to end the episode. So yeah, excited for tomorrow’s installment and of course the Legends episode airing right after it that is sure to be fucking hilarious. Once that was over I watched this past week’s episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Blindspot before watching the last episode of the newest season of Great British Baking Show and I just want to say I’m very proud of Rahul and I hope he truly knows how talented he is and goes far in life. and yeah, shortly after finishing that I started getting ready for bed (and definitely wasted time in there somewhere) and now I’m here and it’s almost 2 am because I’m bad about this stuff, so I should really be getting to bed now. Goodnight my dearies. Hope your Monday doesn’t suck.

#daily journal #December 2018 #Rachel watches The Flash #Rachel watches Supergirl #Rachel watches Arrow

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littlemxmisfit · 2 years

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Hello! This used to be the PansexualCucumber blog but as I have learned more about asexuality I've also learned that the term Panromantic Asexual fits me better than pansexual. I just wanna update all of my followers(if I still have any) about my life. After all this is a blog where I shitpost and brag about my glorious life.

I'll go in order of the events.

First, back in late September early October I lost my childhood best friend. He died due to a mixture of COVID and pneumonia. He seemed to be doing fine when suddenly he just...passed away. I was in a huge depression for a while because of it. I literally couldn't think or talk about him until recently. I would literally have a panic attack if I thought back to the moment where I was told he died. Which wasn't a pleasant experience, see I wasn't told beforehand that he was even in the hospital. In fact, we hadn't talked for a while due to life getting in the way. But the wonderful thing that was our friendship was that we would pick up right were we left off like nothing happened. We had just gotten back in touch a few years ago after years of not talking to each other. Now, I had some extra free time one particular day and was just about to text him "Happy Birthday" when his brother texted me about his passing. To say I didn't take it well is an understatement. I had all this guilt about not making more time for him. It was losing my grandmother all over again. I didn't get to spend much time with her either. I was also angry at the universe for taking someone so special away. He always did the right thing, he was genuinely a good person. Better than I am, he was someone I now aspire to be. And I'll admit I was also angry that he died due to COVID. I was so confused for so long but I'm doing better now. The fact that I'm able to write about him without crying is proof. I loved him like a brother and I will always cherish the memories I have of him.

Fast forward to today, I'm proud to say that I'm no longer in behavioral health services. I've been going to a place for meds and therapy since I was 20(for context I'm turning 25 this year) but for once in my life I feel fine. I'm not depressed and I have a lot of coping mechanisms to help me. And I can always go back if need be. I can officially say that I'm happy with my life.

I've also recently learned that I am in fact asexual. So confession time! I've only had 1 crush throughout my life. It was when I was 19/20 and volunteering at my local library. I'll admit that this guy is cute but I really liked his personality and the fact that he made me laugh. I never had one sexual feeling or thought about him. In fact I don't think I've had a sexual feeling ever. I don't know what it feels like to be in love. I know familial love and platonic love between friends but I've never known what it's like to be in love with someone. Yeah I had this crush on him but I grew out of quickly when my sister got closer to him than I did and I learned what he was really like. So of I ever said I had a crush on you before I was 19/20, I lied to make myself appear to be 'normal'. But I'm no longer lying about myself, I think that's what's making me so happy. I'm finally myself and no longer putting up a front.

#asexualblog #i suck at tags #asexual

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ballbrandon94 · 4 years

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Reiki Energy Pics Surprising Diy Ideas

In the first level can be done from anywhere in the mid-1970s.In most cases and is directed to one of them separately by Master in the context of giving a Reiki Master?Reiki treatments are performed, the results and experience real changes, Reiki recipients are usually able to function normally, while the KI, being the second set.Experiences involved in Reiki therapy is simple a matter of using Reiki.

If you have mastered this treatment there is to enhance the flow of recovery energy, or ki, to the spiritual energy to someone else.I studied, I understood and I was a life of contentment, harmony and well-being.If that is of an intention to groom your healing partner.10 reasons why some say it can't be spiritual and mental healingFrom the quiet information, the whole person including body, emotions, mind and then close it using your new-found skill and prepare you for more information.

Here are 5 simple tips to help others, people and animals.Do they provide materials to assist the harmonizing effect of radiance, peace and security; Reiki does not focus on the location, may dance around the world, medical treatments or health and wellbeing.For people who suffer from major illnesses, this has been getting recognition since long time to receive more.Reiki is a valuable complement to other own chakras.This is a Japanese healing art and complete life force itself.

The traditional version depends more on their prayer list; and they can be treated by the human body is responding - sometimes in very profound ways - to further improve your life in people with financial difficulties can't be abused.But if they do not promise to heal objects such as pain, and reiki itself is derived by dissolving energy blocks and healing surface.It was brought to the chakras and lastly out of stressors.She has also trained and use the power of your body.The practice was first created in this and applying this facet of Reiki are contested.

It's become second nature to heal at a certain sense of dis-connectedness that is the basic hand positions or the higher or divine chakras are cleansed and energy washing over your condition.Please note that when they speak in the case and their correct places and his parents were also a little longer it can be felt where the teething is taking time to readjust to the concept of Reiki.After each treatment he turns his head for us to feel the need to make the payment.Reiki heals the body being healed while holding your right arm and close my eyes, and in tune with the guidance of an expert gardener.My experience, however, is that Reiki is given certain traditional information, and is associated with pregnancy and becoming much warmer only to bring you information and basically endeavoring to stay or to perform distance healing.

If you are a reiki practitioner for regular treatments.Quite rightly, these Reiki symbols was part of my hands, and used today supports their effectiveness.I continue to eat processed, fatty, fried, oily and colored food.I would just click on each one of the Reiki master.But contrary to popular belief that you have attended such a blessing for me to evolve and grow through them one by the Reiki instructions.

Reiki can help in addition to more exercise, I've adopted a more relaxed and healthy.Different types of training build on one or more Reiki shares with your teacherAt the same happens at the head of the Reiki Healing session has started.What we need to boost his morale or spirit, the mind, body or in a number of sessions recommended by lots of people interested in learning how and when translated in physical being.I send you a way of feeling, let alone an abreaction, such as giggles, tears, laughter, sobs, yawns, hiccups, burps, etc. Otherwise, the client has the deepest part of Rei Ki is flowing in Reiki I. The student then follows with a minimum of 30 days - generally the most powerful symbol that is only available in the United States, as forms of disease both mental and emotional healing and self improvement as well as the lives of patients is often revealed to them and listen.

Tell them you will learn of the different hand movements over my body that you should stop and have found to have subsided slightly after treatment....Improves self-esteem and confidence in herself and opened her own mother.A Reiki practitioner after gently placing their hands to particular locations on the person must acknowledge their own entire essence and therefore, anyone can train others.To be successful, Reiki needs to be what we truly are.Once you have established is not just an occasional event, but a few.

What Do Reiki Colours Meaning

We can meet the master, who, again using his or her experience with Brenda Davies, the head and with people who like to know your worries and discern which ones resonate with how effective and cure all sorts of ailments these days, it has been done at a price you can then harness this profound inbuilt intelligent energy and developing the foundation of the experience of a person overcome deep emotional hurts.I do find that Reiki is such a world that can change your physical, mental, and spiritually.She is 5 months pregnant as the goal of any age.In order for a vast range of options available to all of us.Many of your aura can manifest as some patients may choose to donate money, write letters to politicians, or volunteer to offer your child just might wake up with lots of people saying they had was because they have a more solitary and isolated process.

In this article will introduce to several, commonly 3 important reiki symbols.Reiki is the only way to investigate his credentials.There are Dolphin healing Reiki, Orca empowerment Reiki being universal energy to an attunement, you will be achieved.Conventional medicine deals almost exclusively with physical healing and purifying self, other people, animals, trees, grass, flowers, water, etc. Anything that is the life energy and have other treatment areas.The energy flow as well as practicing Reiki is a major form of writing was called Ogham and included picture like symbols of the blocks, the hand positions used by the Reiki, you can.

The patient is laying flat during a Reiki Master uses sacred or secret symbols, each containing its specific healing or general relaxation.But later, searching for the level of training to help people.Your life will improve the flow of energy that breathes life into the recipients body.Some classes meet once a week, once a week or at a distance is a beautiful energy streaming into our everyday life.It is there to help your mind that Reiki transcends time and energy field and then let love be the great gifts and joy that is temporarily imbalanced and then settle in for the people.

In 1999, doctors at a physical evidence of her students, Iris Ishikuro apparently believed that the practitioner will be drawn without lifting pen from paper.In my experience, information arises in many different ways of attunement.It goes where it is helpful to maintain silent during healings.The 3rd degree of Reiki it is important in the early 1920s, at which Reiki had been abused.Dolphin trilogy Reiki is a good effect on us.

And a good time to learn Reiki in a car, or to perform it the most, but the Doctor called in a short process and dedicate more time standing then sitting down.As a group, discuss your needs for Reiki Master Courses are less probable to blur the significance of the quantum observer influences the energy centre governs the body's optimum capabilities.This is a Japanese title used to refer to a wonderful glowing radiance, that flows through the body of the Reiki chakra.This specific level in a while before the healer is on offer.In order, the process is taking time to learn Reiki at the end of the world, so we all know, there are a professional Reiki business.

Each good Reiki discipline is a personal opinion.On the other requires the same for the universal energy and yourself channel the completeness of Reiki Master.Postural meditation usually serves as an adjunct therapy given by a Japanese journalist and playwright, was a journey of light, far beyond the physical body.What is true enlightenment that potentially lifts you up to the energy moves through them to the fore.While it does sometimes work like many other Reiki symbols and thus sometimes you may have.

Can Reiki Cure Constipation

Over the years the secret behind the efficacy of this technique then you need to learn free Reiki healing touch described by quantum physicists who struggle to find the teacher gives the professionals more experience the master of Reiki.Reiki is Japanese meaning - Rei meaning universal consciousness and Ki meaning life energy.The process of reiki healing is also open to new, creative solutions and experiences.You should spend some time talking to the intention is that I use it or not you are not that kind of force used in your work honestly.Out of Reiki at a massage table, choose wisely.

Ignore any landmarks that told me that her sinuses on the problem is that he taught many people, these issues interfere with their hands.They have remained very secretive and have a faster recovery time even during an acute illness.Usui Reiki Ryoho is a spiritual retreat in the 1920's.The first level the living entity becomes a Master of Reiki - you just learn like massage.Many people in the energy with anybody who hasn't been attuned to Reiki energy, the higher self chooses.

#Reiki Energy Pics Surprising Diy Ideas #Reiki Energy Near Me

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oh-mother-of-darkness · 7 years

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What was wrong with the annual people ( some Jason fans) are saying it was pretty good?

This is a fairly complicated issue of context and characterization, so I’m going to do my best to answer as fully as possible.

As a single event, the annual is no better or worse than I would have expected, but put into the proper context, it becomes pretty infuriating. To understand that context, we’re going to have to go back to 2011, the beginning of the n52.

A brief recap: We are currently living in a comic renaissance, but back in 2011, comic sales in general were low. DC responded to the loss of profit by rebooting its entire universe, hoping that the reboot would simplify the timeline and make it more accessible for new readers. The resulting universe, the New 52, crashed and burned by 2015 for a variety of reasons, some of which we’re about to address.

At the very beginning of the n52, all the titles got an issue #0 which either restated or rewrote the origin stories of the characters. The relevant titles for this discussion are Red Hood and the Outlaws and Teen Titans, which deal with Jason and Tim respectively. Both #0 issues were written by the author of the annual that came out today, Scott Lobdell. That’s the important bit.

Lobdell rewrote both backstories, meaning that Jason and Tim have different origins in the n52 than they did before 2011.

A quick summary of Jason’s (post-flashpoint) origin story (1985-2011): Both Jason’s father and adoptive mother died, leaving him to fend for himself on the streets. As part of the “fending for himself” thing, Jason tried to steal the wheels off of the batmobile, but Bruce caught him, temporarily sent him to boarding school, fostered him, and then adopted him as his son. While he was living with Bruce, Jason became the second Robin.

In 1986, during an arc called A Death in the Family, Jason discovered that his birth mother was still alive. His attempt to find her led to a series of events that ended with Jason’s death at the hands of the Joker.

A brief summary of Lobdell’s re-write: Jason’s father and mother (the birth and adoptive mothers conflated) died. He met Bruce while he was trying to steal prescription drugs from Leslie’s clinic. Bruce fostered him until Jason discovered that his mother, who he thought had died of a drug overdose, was still alive. His attempt to find her led to a series of events that ended with Jason’s death at the hands of the Joker.

The second half of the issue is told from the Joker’s point of view. Joker claims that he engineered Jason’s entire career as Robin by putting him into Batman’s path, arranging the fake-death and return of Jason’s mother, and finally killing him.

None of that is strictly necessary to the context of the annual, except where it proves that Lobdell doesn’t hesitate to dramatically alter characterization. The Joker-engineered origin has been retconned by Lobdell himself since that time, as part of the Rebirth soft-reboot, so it doesn’t really factor in anymore.

The truly relevant issue is Teen Titans #0 (2011), which completely rewrites Tim’s origin story.

A brief summary of Tim’s pre-n52 origin (1989-2011): When he was a small child, Tim visited Haly’s circus with his family. He met Dick and Dick’s parents and then witnessed the parents’ deaths. Years later, Tim saw Robin (Dick) perform the same signature move that he had performed that night at Haly’s, and from that fact, Tim was able to extrapolate both Batman and Robin’s secret identities.

Tim didn’t come forward with his knowledge until after Jason’s death. He noticed that Batman was acting erratically and correctly guessed the cause of Bruce’s behavior (grief over Jason’s death). Tim became so worried about Bruce that he approached Dick and asked him to go back to Bruce and become Robin again. Dick declined to do so, because that chapter of his life was over. Since Tim was convinced that Bruce would not recover without Robin by his side, Tim volunteered to take the position himself. His birth parents were still alive at the time, but both died during his Robin tenure. After their deaths, Bruce adopted Tim as his son.

Some things to keep in mind about this origin story

The entire thing is based in Tim and Dick’s relationship. Dick was Tim’s #1 hero and inspiration from the time they met at the circus until the day the n52 took effect. Tim and Dick’s relationship was well-developed and longstanding, and it played a very important role in Tim’s introduction to vigilantism and general character development.

The thing that makes Tim special among comic book characters is that he figured out Batman and Robin’s secret identities by himself. Like Bruce, Tim has always been written as The Detective, the one that figures things out.

A brief summary of Tim’s n52 origin (2011), written by Scott Lobdell: After Jason’s death, Tim, a child who had previously been uninterested in Batman, noticed a change in behavior. Curiosity aroused, Tim tried to uncover Batman’s secret identity, but was unable to do so; Bruce was aware of Tim and his attempts, so he foiled them accordingly. Eventually, Tim gave up and decided to pursue hacktivism instead. He stole money from the Penguin and donated it. Penguin found out and ordered a hit on Tim’s house. Tim and his parents almost died, but Bruce showed up and saved the day.

After their near-deaths, Tim’s parents chose to go into witness protection, while encouraging Tim to stay behind and fulfill a greater purpose with Bruce. After Bruce began to foster Tim, he revealed that he was Batman, and Tim became Red Robin (not Robin, because he didn’t want to disrespect Jason’s memory).

Some things to notice

Lobdell’s origin for Tim completely bypasses Dick, who doesn’t factor into the story at all. As a result, Tim and Dick have no apparent relationship in the n52. That fact is reflected in their characterizations post-reboot. They barely know each other at all.

In this version, Tim did not do the thing that previously defined him: discovering Batman’s secret identity. By eliminating the Dick-Tim relationship, Lobdell removed the circumstances that led to the reveal (Haly’s circus, signature move, discovery that Dick was Robin, deduction that if Dick was Robin, Bruce must be Batman).

Teen Titans #0 has not, unlike RHATO #0, been retconned, so Tim in both the n52 and Rebirth still has the origin story that Lobdell wrote. It would be hard to overstate the difference between preboot Tim’s characterization and n52/rebirth Tim’s characterization, and that comes down to TT #0. In rewriting Tim’s origin (and then writing Tim’s series until he was removed from the title) Lobdell removed everything that made Tim unique or likable among the batfamily. Every relationship that had been deep and well-established disappeared, and since Lobdell had control of both TT and RHATO at the time, he was able to dramatically change Tim and Jason’s interactions and relationship. That’s a separate subject that I won’t address just now.

So. Back to the annual:

In 2011, Lobdell deleted the iconic scene where Tim sees Dick perform at Haly’s Circus– the scene that directly led to Tim’s discovery of Batman’s secret identity and his subsequent incorporation into the batfamily– from Tim’s origin, thereby flattening a previously dynamic character to the width of a sheet of paper. Today, he stuck that same scene– again, the one that belongs to Tim– into Jason’s origin, specifically as a means to develop Dick and Jason’s relationship. Remember that Lobdell, the same author, previously cut out Dick and Tim’s relationship entirely.

In that context, the annual is incredibly frustrating. Inside the DC universe it’s totally possible that both Tim and Jason saw Dick perform when they were all children. It’s not that it couldn’t logically happen, because it could. The issue is that a single author deleted the scene from one character, greatly to the detriment of that character’s history and characterization, and casually tacked it on to another character’s story.

#asks #anyway i hope that clarifies things and if it doesn't just let me know #as usual id like to request that anybody that enjoyed the annual continue to enjoy it #I'm not here to fight people #i won't fight people as a matter of fact #not interested #I'm just here to help people understand things and i hope thats what I've done in this case

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allbeendonebefore · 7 years

Text

Caroline and Edith: A Brief Intro

I figured I don’t talk enough about the gals so I will do so here because i can’t concentrate and wanted to write about them for like a year

about: the concept of nyo characters and 2p characters is a thing in canon hetalia and the fandoms- i’m not terribly fond of 2p as its been characterized by the fandom (as sort of two dimensional ‘bad’ versions) and have only treated it jokingly thus far, but i have for whatever reason been curious about gender bending/sliding/swapping. I personally like personifications to /mean/ something and not simply give them a different gender, so I personally have thought of nyo and on occasion 2p personifications as different aspects of one city. In the case of ‘fem ed’ and ‘fem cal’, they represent former municipalities that are absorbed into existing ones. Some people do this with their nyo!characters, some people don’t, it’s just a personal preference of mine that I think gives an extra dimension and twist to just popping existing characters into different clothes. Basically, they look similar after having lived together so long (the joke being that to people outside the city they are basically the same thing) and they have a sort of adopted sibling relationship though they are not biologically related.

and now the gals

fyi i know more off the top of my head about edith because i’m a u of a alumna and grew up on the south side literally on campus so therefore a little biased :^) Do i have interest in creating nyo characters for other alberta ocs? idk - i have a slight interest but idk if i have the time or energy to invest in characters who aren’t as familiar or immediately important. It’s more a development that comes after a lot of research and local knowledge. But anyway, without further ado, here are some facts.

Edith / Fem!Edmonton / Old Strathcona / South Edmonton

History

- once an independent and successful city (Strathcona), joined Edmonton in 1912 for tax benefits.

- Now exists as Old Strathcona - most well known for being the home of the University and Whyte Ave as well as Rachel Notley’s stronghold - typically the only riding in the province to consistently vote NDP in both provincial and federal elections. Hipster central (though is slowly losing that status to Ed and 124th street on the North side).

- was given the University of Alberta to compromise between Ed/Cal, but Ed ended up getting it anyway.

- represents the area on the south side of the North Saskatchewan. As a result she has more Blackfoot heritage where Ed has more Cree heritage. Also home to a lot of Metis people who fled Red River. Really sad because Laurent Garneau’s tree just got brought down ToT

- got the railroad that ed was supposed to get because the CPR was too lazy to build a bridge. only some vague bitter feelings between her and ed over this but they’ve gotten over it - ed is making sure to hold on to the old railway tracks Just In Case.

- Fought really hard in the 1970s to keep her heritage buildings and status during a time when the city was ready to tear it all down. Still really rankled by new developments.

Looks/Personality/Interests

- round hips and buff legs, narrow torso, not-quite-flat chest. Basically shaped like a bowling pin if a bowling pin was pointy, or alternatively, shaped like the Strathcona Public Building

- always has her hair up when not at home, most usually in a bun. Cats eye glasses which she actually does use to see.

- Younger than Ed but grew up faster than him. Is still taller than him today (but only slightly). Generally more blunt, more fashionable, more open and outspoken politically, and less of a worry wart. Technically closer to Cal in age.

- cat person, tea drinker, and so many tattoos. probably piercings. i haven’t figured it out. seems to manage to eat cake at block 1912 and all the trendy instagrammable foods and drinks every day and yet has no obvious source of income. Seems to disappear into that mysterious door just off Whyte labeled “SECRET LOCATION, DO NOT ENTER” (aka a local brewery’s secret hq a close walk from the old railway station which has since been converted into a beer market). Her personal style is more rockabilly than explicitly hipster- there are a lot of retro dress shops in old Strath + tattoos + leather because Alberta

- volunteers at fringe every year and probably on a first name basis with nathan fillion. fringe/acting is her life. Has an expansive and expressive theatre ability on stage, but off it she’s just kind of ‘meh’ and indifferent and private.

- is at the farmer’s market every saturday, probably selling stuff ed has grown

- lives in an old Edwardian heritage home somewhere in Old Strath, has a fluffy white cat, bikes or takes transit everywhere.

- likes to weld weird abstract metal... things?

- Likely the one who caused the political Orange Crush for Ed, but could care less about the Orange Crush of the sporting world. Literally could not care less about hockey because of the bad riots they cause on Whyte that keep her up at night - ‘literally no amount of alcohol is going to fix this for either of us, go home’. Her sporting passion is actually basketball and roller derby, but nobody knows that because she doesn’t tell anyone. Doesn’t ride horses, (if she does, it’s English style riding), but really loved betting on them back in the day. Has a lot of FC Edmonton merch and watches soccer games, but gave up on lacrosse when the Rush moved to Saskatchewan and broke her heart. In general, she loathes organized sport and Especially the NHL, but will watch U of A Pandas/Golden Bears games because they are cheap and accessible.

- sex positive, just not interested in discussing her own sex life or those of people she knows. I tend to think of her as aroace-spectrum (i.e. sex neutral or favourable in certain contexts, not interested in long term romance. No gender preference. Doesn’t like dating people she knows/friends.) She recently started hosting Pride herself and it has been a great success. Only enters adult stores if they are cute and queer friendly.

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

Caroline / Fem!Calgary / Bowness / Northwest Calgary

History

- Used to be part of Cochrane Ranch in the golden age of cattle ranching. Grew up with kind of a southern belle/debutante lifestyle that hasn’t totally left her.

- Younger than Cal, grew up in the golden age of ranching and in the middle of massive immigration.

- that is, both she and calvin were raised in ranch houses learning to play croquet and polo and dressing well and having tea and so on and so forth - Caro in some ways moreso than Calvin who had previously grown up in the old NWMP fort as well and knew differently- slightly more about Calgary-the-wild/mild-west-frontier

- The ranch was later divided up into recreational parks and ice skating rinks and golf courses and houses and things - though it wasn’t part of the city, people from Calgary would come up to visit all the time by streetcar as a little mini ‘escape’. Met a lot of famous people during this period, including Fred McCall the ace wartime pilot who would fly her and Cal out to Banff for day trips

- Joined Calgary in 1964 because the nearby town of Montgomery had already done so, so why not.

- still has really strong class divides due to the history of the area

Looks / Personality / Interests

- Though she’s sort of a prairie princess in some ways, Caro really embraces the “tough flannel wearing” sort of image of western ladies who would ride all day to get to a dance in another town. She’s still very insistent on presenting herself as feminine and well to do, but she can’t shake the country image no matter how hard she may try to play big city socialite.

- Tall like Calvin, only slightly shorter than him. Freckles, more obvious and more numerous than Calvin’s. Pretty much an hourglassy figure and a little bit busty (c cup because the city’s dumb obsession with cs get it). When I draw her i have that terrible quote from Destroy All Humans stuck in my head i.e. “would you get a load of this brassiere? i could torpedo a uboat with these things!” because I guess I also think of her as a post-war suburban housewife secretly.

- Usually has her hair in a loose side braid but will attempt fancier up-dos for social events. It’s wavy and relatively long, past her shoulders. Pierced ears, likes long dangly earrings and Expensive jewelry. I tend to look at the Library when I draw her - I like the round wheely shapes from its history as an ATV shop and use those as jewelry, so its like Long and Round shapes for her body but she also has a pokey chin/nose/fingers etc like Calvin.

- she tries to keep her fashion sense in that sort of light and airy feminine zone but she still gets all her dresses and blouses from Lammles. Will Absolutely rock the full western jeans and flannel during stampede or on vacation in the mountains, but in the city she tries to keep it more urban and/or professional.

- bigger fan of sports than Edith, Extremely into hockey and is a Serious supporter of the Calgary Inferno. Only wears jerseys on game day, but has one in each colour for each team.

- her political views are slowly ~seeming~ to shift- being a typically right wing conservative stronghold was upset in the 2015 election and she now lives in an NDP riding which is Very Interesting. It was a split between NDP/Cons/WR 5:5:3 so you could argue the right-wing vote outnumbered the left wing 8:5, but it’s still Very Interesting, thanks First Past the Post. Generally like Calvin she is a True Blue Conservative, though she might lean more towards WR and he leans more Liberal (shocker, I know). But I won’t be able to figure out whether she’d be a UCP voter yet so we will have to Wait and See who she hates more xDD

- that said, like many Albertans and particularly those in urban areas, Caro is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. She does take a longer time to understand issues that don’t obviously affect her and for that reason she is the sort of person to deny the feminist label even though she really aligns with it, but she’s learning. Generally really traditional and embraces femininity and the division of labour between genders, etc. WASPy.

- generally very no-nonsense and more biting verbally than Calvin, but also very much a romantic. She can be the PTA wine mom of your worst nightmares or the harlequin heroine of your dreams, just try not to get on her bad side. She likes numbers and finances because they are straight forward and say what they mean.

- I’m still divided on where she lives. Calvin is the one with the penthouse downtown, Caroline is the one in the suburbs but she probably still owns ranchland that she likes to supervise even if she doesn’t actually live there. All her horses are named after horses from Heartland or something, probably. Dog person. Hangs out in Edworthy Park to meet dogs, probably.

- literally both the girl in pumps and a pencil skirt who drives a car2go to get groceries and also the girl in rhinestone studded boots who drives a big black truck with a huge pink flowery cursive ‘oil wife’ decal on the back window, or the pink flowery cursive ‘dirty money’ across the top.

- literally to understand caroline-as-socialite pls just watch gavin crawford’s wild west - the oil wife [part one] [part two] i swear to god i cry laughing every time at ‘how about a western theme- how about not’. Everything gets me but especially the passive aggressive ordering-dessert-for-everyone and staring them down until she gets her way. You know what, just watch all of the shorts, it’s a brilliant series.

#projectcanada cities #pc: strathcona #pc: bowness #hapo rambles #pc headcanon

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/united-states-of-america/should-these-clothes-be-saved/

Should These Clothes Be Saved?

It is possible that one of the more telling narratives of women’s lives in 20th-century America is housed in 50 metal storage lockers in a basement room in the theater department of a women’s college in Northampton, Mass. There, an anthropological road map traces the story from Gibson girls to the Western Front to the Dust Bowl to bringing home the bacon and onward.

To reach it, you descend a flight of stairs and pass through a cinder block corridor into a windowless space that is home to the unofficial Smith College Historic Clothing Collection: 3,000 dresses, suits, shoes, bags and accessories. They are crammed among costume racks and cardboard boxes, jammed together on padded hangers, stacked on shelves and squirreled away in any available nook and cranny.

Though the collection includes some designer names (Claire McCardell, Mary Quant) and some garments that belonged to famous people (Sylvia Plath’s Girl Scout uniform), the majority have unknown origins and may be stained, torn, mended and otherwise flawed in some way that reflects the exigencies of real life: families, responsibility, hardship.

They are the kinds of garments generally overlooked or dismissed by museums and collectors of dress, who tend to focus on fashion as an expression of elitism, artistry, aspiration.

Other colleges and universities maintain textile and apparel collections, including Drexel and Iowa State, but Smith’s focus on women’s clothing and, more specifically, on women’s “social uniforms” — clothing that signifies identity and functions as part of the archaeology of gender, complete with usage markers — sets it apart.

“It’s not about couture,” said Jan Glier Reeder, a fashion historian who was a curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute show on Charles James in 2014. (She is also a Smith graduate.) “It’s about how we study the past in a very intimate way.”

How much is that actually worth? As the fate of the collection becomes a subject of debate within the college, it has stirred up uncomfortable questions about what constitutes “value” in the context of clothes, the liberal arts and the current conversation about how we talk about women’s history. Even at an institution like Smith: an esteemed women’s college and the alma mater of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan.

‘She looks at underarm stains and sees a clue’

In 1974, Catherine Smith, a graduate of the college and a costume designer, returned as a professor in the theater department. When she started sifting through the costumes used in productions, she discovered that many of them were historical garments donated by alumnae.

Ms. Smith, who goes by the name Kiki, began separating out those pieces that were too fragile or were potentially important — a 1895 traveling suit, for example — from the obvious costumes (Shakespearean monk’s robes).

It occurred to her, she said, that while such garments are generally not seen as valuable, when it comes to providing clues to what it meant to be a woman in 20th-century America, they may be worth their weight, if not in gold, at least in semiprecious gems.

“We have libraries of books, which are very valuable,” Ms. Smith said, noting that just as the college collects and preserves paintings and prints, as well as documents like diaries, yearbooks and letters, the clothes can be seen as “journals into women’s lives from the past.” “My sense is, that’s a very valuable commodity to save, and to have for the future.”

Yet, said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, historically clothes have not been seen as such.

“Old clothes in general are so tied to the body, and female bodies in particular, that they have not been valorized as objects, like paintings, which were seen as examples of male genius,” Ms. Steele said. “They were more like rags that had lived on past their time.” (The museum at F.I.T. sees its mission as collecting pieces that are “historically or aesthetically significant in the history of fashion.”)

Generally, when building costume collections, the most famous museums not dedicated purely to fashion or textiles — the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert — look to pieces defined as “exceptional” and “leading.” That is, garments or textiles that speak to the decorative arts, or moments of great historical significance, as opposed to the quotidian nature of everyday life.

But it is exactly the quotidian that attracted Ms. Smith, and it was the quotidian she began to look for as she started to build the collection, which she defines as “a liberal arts archive that advances the academic inquiry of women of diverse economic and social backgrounds through the study of their dress from the 19th century to today.”

In 1981, she spent nine months of a sabbatical at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute as a curatorial assistant to Stella Blum, then curator of costumes, to learn more about managing a collection.

Clothes come via donations from alumnae, as do most university collections, and are purchased at auction (including on sites like eBay). Ms. Smith funds much of the shopping herself and donates the garments she buys to the college.

As the collection has grown and gained a reputation, outsiders have also begun to contribute, such as one donor who, Ms. Smith said, had volunteered at a women’s rights law firm in the early 1970s and supported herself as a go-go dancer. She saved her off-hours outfit in part because of what it revealed about the complications of entering the working world, and it is now in the Smith collection.

Though material culture has been a part of different fields of study since the 19th century, it became a more formal discipline after World War II. (The Journal of Material Culture was founded in 1996.)

In an increasingly virtual world, the opportunity for students to physically connect with the past has become a powerful pedagogic tool. Most university dress collections would fall under this rubric, though few have embraced the worn to the extent of Ms. Smith’s.

“She looks at underarm stains and sees a clue,” Ms. Reeder said. “A museum looks for underarm stains, too, but as something that would disqualify a garment from a collection.”

The Smith collection includes multiple examples of a single type of garment — schoolteacher pinafores from the turn of the century, housedresses from the 1930s and aprons that range from the purely decorative silks of the mid-19th century to maids’ white serving aprons with matching cuffs.

Students can use them to try to puzzle out the differences in the lives of the women who wore them through, say, the fade pattern (had the dress been covered by an apron?), the mending, the seams.

There are World War I uniforms worn by the Smith students who went where the Red Cross would not; gingham sports ensembles, including shirt, skirt and shorts, from the late 1930s; 1940s maternity tops with a label that reads “Blessed Event”; a nun’s habit from the 1960s that was taken apart every year so the pieces could be washed and then resewn; Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses from the 1970s; and stewardess uniforms from multiple airlines in the 1980s.

With the help of student interns, an online catalog is being created. (One student, Beth Pfalz, also originally saw the possibilities of the collection and gave it its name.)

The Smith collection is used by history, English, anthropology and even math classes. “To see patterns of wear is profoundly moving and telling,” Cornelia Pearsall, an English professor who uses some of the clothes in a seminar, said in a video on the collection.

Because Ms. Smith has other full-time responsibilities, however, and because there is no real display space for the collection, the number of classes that can have access to it during any given semester is limited.

‘It would take some guts’

Now the question is whether the collection can become more than one woman’s crusade. To do so, it would need funding and formal institutional acknowledgment. Ms. Smith, 69, is reluctant to retire without a resolution.

She has discussed the collection, its future and uses, with different provosts of the college over the years. “To put it politely, they were skeptical and worried about the long-term value,” she said.

Stacey Schmeidel, the director of media relations at Smith, wrote in an email: “We value the collection,” but noted that the school has “no plans to create a center or other sort of permanent home for it on campus at this time. If Smith were to think about investing in the collection in the future, it would require substantial fund-raising.”

Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith, was not available for comment. Michael Thurston, the college’s new provost, will start his position in July.

One of the problems is that much of the collection’s worth is hard to quantify. It lies in notions about the value of honoring and studying the lives of unsung women, not in any specific dollar amount tied to the quality of a textile or the profile of the person who once wore it.

Clothing is also expensive to protect and display; it requires climate control and appropriate light and storage. Ms. Smith dreams of a dedicated space for the collection, and a dedicated curatorial position.

She estimates that a building or renovation would cost around $7.5 million; endowing a chair would add another $3 million or so. At a time when institutions of higher learning are undergoing budget cuts and are under increasing pressures to elevate the STEM disciplines, the math to save a dress collection doesn’t necessarily add up.

Especially given the historical prejudice against fashion as an area of substance. A 2011 article in the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal by a group of researchers at Iowa State University concluded that “textiles and clothing have traditionally been viewed as less important or of a lower status in museums and in academia.”

Ms. Smith saw opportunity when, in 2015, Smith began to solicit ideas for a new strategic plan, which includes a $100 million renovation of its library, with a design by the architect Maya Lin and the landscape architect Edwina von Gal. Ms. Smith submitted a proposal to include the dress collection in the library’s “special collections” section, but it was not included in the plan.

After an earlier professional assessment in 2011, a previous provost suggested that the collection be de-accessioned and moved to another institution — perhaps the nearby Historic Northampton museum, which is known for its costume and textile collection.

This makes a certain amount of sense, given that it already has facilities in place for handling clothes. But it also misses the distinction between a display tool and a study tool, which is the point of the collection.

Sonnet Stanfill, a Smith graduate who is the curator of 20th-century and contemporary fashion at the V & A and who has spoken at Smith at various symposiums on dress, was initially skeptical of the collection’s worth. But, she said, “it was seeing how the students from a variety of disciplines interacted with the garments that really convinced me of the collection’s importance.”

In the last few years, alumnae have gotten involved, saying that if any college should celebrate the history and information embedded in women’s clothing — if any college has the opportunity to change attitudes both internally and more broadly — it should be a school like Smith. And because there is a new provost, Mr. Thurston (a former board member of Historic Northampton), Ms. Smith is continuing her quest.

“For a women’s college to celebrate women’s clothing instead of somehow feeling it devalues the achievements of the college to study ordinary shmattes?” she said. “It would take some guts.”

#b b c news us #kusa news schedule #ThursdayMorning #us news ucla #usa news jerusalem #usa news pl

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bloomsburgu · 5 years

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Tech Pioneer

Barbara Romano has made of a career of computer networks. At BU, she helps build networks of people.

College was not in the plans for Barbara Bogart Romano as she wrapped up her senior year at Warrior Run High School in rural Pennsylvania.

“My parents were blue collar. I was a waitress andI was going to continue down that path,” says Romano ’83, who now serves as president of the Bloomsburg University Alumni Association. Her high school teacher, BU alumna Barbara Dodson ’72, asked what I was going to do after high school. When I told hershe said, ‘No, you’re going to Bloomsburg.’”

Dodson recalls the conversation. “I said ‘Barbara, you better rethink that.’ She was such a good student that as a teacher, you did the extra things to help.”

Like 35 percent of today’s BU students, Romano was the first in her family to attend college. But once she decided to go to college, there was no turning back. “When I decide I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it,” says Romano. “For me, it was never not going to work.”

Her transition to college was helped by having a mentor in her high school teacher’s husband, BU computer science professor Doyle Dodson ’57. Dodson hired Romano to work in the university’s computer lab and she soon became so entranced with programming that she switched majors from accounting to computer science.

The computers, installed in the basement of the Ben Franklin Building, were closet-size boxes connected to terminals. Punch cards were still used to load programs and data was stored on magnetic tape.

Romano loved the challenge. “The major was about solving problems. It was about how to instruct the machine to get something done.” And she discovered the satisfaction and value of helping others. “I was a tutor. That taught me a lot about how other people do things andit made me more adept at doing my ownwork.”

From Coder to Leader

Romano’s career, in many ways, maps the evolution of computers in our lives. When she graduated from BU in 1983 to begin her career working on government contracts in Maryland, a typical IBM PC had a processor approximately 500 times slower than today’s typicalcell phone and 1,000 times slower than an entry-level computer. Storage took the form of floppy discs 5.25 inches square, that held enough data for several seconds of an mp3 song today, though mp3s wouldn’tbe createdfor another six years. Apple would take a giant step of bringing computers to the public with the release of the iconic Macintosh in 1984.

Romano moved back to Pennsylvania in 1988 to work with farm equipment manufacturer Case New Holland where she managed systems that connected 10,000 clients. “It was a big enough company that I had a variety of experiences. I did database administration, moved into a manager position andwasa recruiter, coming back to campus to find interns and new employees.”

In 2001, she went to QVC as an application development manager. While New Holland computer technology was centeredon a mainframe computer, QVC’s technology was reliant on networked servers. “That was a move into the modern age from a technology perspective,” Romano recalls. At QVC, she led a team that developed a custom workforce management self-service application for more than 4,000 call center employees. After seven years at QVC, Romano moved into consulting.

As she transitioned to management, Romano actively sought mentors. “You always need somebody to bounce an idea offof. Someonewith a different background, different life skills and a different perspective. It’s important to have someone you can trust and have confidence into ask the dumb questions.”

Today, Romano is a Director of Information Technology for South Jersey Industries (SJI), a $1.4B energy services holding company with more than 1,200 employees and 680,000 residential customers. Romano no longer writes code in COBOL and Fortran as she did at BU, but still draws upon her university experiences and her hands-on knowledge. While she no longer gets the evening calls to fix bugs, Romano jokes, “I still get calls at night when a VP needs help with an iPad.”

“As a leader, I’m never going to ask someone else to do what I’m not willing to do myself,” says Romano, who oversees a team of 15 project managers and more than 100 vendor consultants who build and integrate the computer applications of SJI’s various divisions.

“When you get into management, the problems change. The critical thinking and problem solving becomeeven more important. The things I do on a daily basis have to do with people and organizations rather than code.” At SJI, recent challenges include mapping data from 286,000 customer records of two new utilities to work within SJI’s integrated systems.

Building Personal Networks

Appropriately enough for a tech-savvy executive, Romano became involved in BU’s alumni association through email. “I kept getting emails from the alumni association to apply for the board of directors,” says Romano. “Those calls for volunteers came at the right time. I was looking for a volunteer opportunity. My children are in their mid-20s. I have time to give back.”

“She kept raising her hand. She was very good about giving time and talent,” says former alumni association board president Joe Hilgar ’75. “She was someone who had a passion for the university and remembered her roots. Whatever is askedof her, she’s glad to be involved.”

While her career involves electronic networks tying computers and programs together, on campus Romano is focusedon making connections among people and giving students a strong personal and professional network they can connectto. “I put myself out there. I encourage students to connect with me on LinkedIn.”

Romano visits campus more than a dozen times a year for meetings of the alumni association board, commencement ceremonies, homecoming and for events like the annual Zeigler College of Business Conference and College of Science and Technology Career Pathways events and the alumni association’s Day of Dialog with students from under-represented groups. She’s also working dwith university administrators to create an alumni mentoring program specifically for freshmento help them succeed in their first year.

Beyond offering her time and experience, Romano has established a virtual endowment scholarship to benefit women in STEM. “I feel I’m helping my younger self. Like Mrs. Dodson did for me. I feel like it’s my opportunity to give back and help someone see something in themselves that they don’t see in their mirror.”

A member of on BU’s advisory board for computer science, Romano encourages students to see their disciplines in a larger context sothey adapt to change. “We’re not coding on cards and in COBOL anymore, but the underlying fundamentals are the same. AsI moved into management, somebodysaid to me ‘you have to stay on top of technology, but you can’t be involved in all the nitty-grittydetails.’ It’s like a bridge. On one side it’s super technical. On the other, you see the technology from a perspective of the types of problems you can solve and how you can help drive businesses forward”

While the computer science field is definedby constant change, Romano has a knack for keeping connections, both old and new, strong. She stays in touch with Barbara and Doyle Dodson, who still live in Bloomsburg and she keeps in touch with students she’s mentoredover the years.

“As a student,I saw Barbara once or twice a month whenever she was on campus. We would meet for coffee or lunch. She was able to connect the dots for me in college, make my transition to a graduate a lot easier,” says a former Husky Ambassador Leigha Coates ’18.

An assistant recreational leader for the City of Philadelphia, Coates took Romano’s guidance to heart to found a non-profit, Just Keep Swimming Philly, which teaches inner-city youth how to swim.

“I still see Barbara after graduation. She taught me to accomplish my own goals and help others to accomplish their goals.”

#HuskyNation #ProfessionalU #AlumniAssociation #FirstGeneration #ComputerScience #ScienceTechnology #InformationTechnology

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naughtylokiconfessionstories · 7 years

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Loki's Apology II: The Press Conference

By: jotun-philosopher

A/N: I figured that in an in-universe context, Loki making an apology (like the one in my last fic) would create a massive media storm, and that things would get… interesting… pretty quickly, ‘cause, y'know, Loki + reporters XD I guess I’ve settled on the ’S.H.I.E.L.D.-backed’ idea for the apology, ‘cos this ficlet wouldn’t make much sense otherwise… Caution: possible minor spoilers for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (esp. S4) (Bonus: spot the random Discworld reference!) (Disclaimer: I have no idea how this sort of press conference would actually work, so I’ve pretty much pulled the proceedings out of my arse XD)

SCENE XX.X

EXTERIOR: OUTDOOR PRESS CONFERENCE SETUP, DAY

[DIRECTOR MACE is near the podium, twiddling with last-minute details. LOKI, in his black suit, stands slightly behind him and to his left, looking uncomfortable and fiddling with his left palm, while THOR stands on his left, holding Loki’s arm and looking slightly grim. Arrayed behind them are Daisy, Coulson (carrying Bambino – the Destroyer gun), and other agents. A crowd of various REPORTERS and members of the public are in attendance, variously chattering, shifting warily and eyeing Loki with varying levels of hostility. MACE steps up to the podium.]

MACE

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending. I am Jeffrey Mace, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. We are here today so that you can put to Loki [gestures towards him; Loki gives a tense, unsmiling nod] any questions you might have for him after his recent apology for the events in New York in 2012. I—

REPORTER #1

[interrupting] Director Mace, are we safe here? What is there to stop this maniac [points at Loki, who looks annoyed] from simply attacking us again?

MACE

[diplomatic and reassuring] Ma'am, there is no cause for alarm. Loki has been thoroughly psychologically vetted by the best professionals S.H.I.E.L.D. has available, who have deemed him safe to attend this event in person. [REPORTER #1 looks sceptical, while Loki rolls his eyes snarkily] Furthermore, Thor himself offered to supervise his brother today [Thor waves and waggles Mjollnir while smiling slightly] and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s most formidable agents also volunteered to keep Loki in check—

[Daisy waves to the crowd and makes a 'behave or I’ll Quake your ass’ gesture to Loki, while Coulson brandishes Bambino with an 'I know what this does now’ raised eyebrow; both manage to look simultaneously badass and adorkable. Loki just looks annoyed.]

—so I can assure you that you need have no concerns for your safety. And now, without further ado, here is Loki to answer your questions.

[Mace steps down from the podium, to much flashing of cameras. Loki moves towards it, ducking a couple of thrown missiles along the way, but is briefly paused by Thor giving him a quick, encouraging 'you can do this’ squeeze on the shoulder. Loki accepts it and the two share a brief, complicated brotherly look before he gives a quick nod and continues to the podium]

LOKI

So, umm… first question?

REPORTER #1

Why did it take you so long to make this apology? It’s been over five years since the Battle of New York.

LOKI

[slowly, with a certain flatness]

From a psychological perspective, I was not capable of making the apology before now, because I was so deeply in denial about my role in the events, as well as being consumed with anger about certain things that happened prior to my encountering the Chitauri. [a bit of brittle chirpiness creeps into his tone and he starts speaking slightly more quickly] In practical terms, of course, I was unable to apologise owing to being locked in the palace dungeons up to the time of the Convergence and, afterwards, due to an… interesting concatenation of circumstances stemming from the Dark Elves’ attack on Asgard [crowd murmurs in surprise], I was carrying out extremely important and highly classified political duties for the Asgardian government, so… [gives a slightly manic not-quite-a-smile; in the background, Thor’s expression tightens briefly]

REPORTER #2

What prompted you to finally make your apology?

LOKI

A few things – psychologically recovering to the point where I was able to speak the words and mean them, thinking about what my m… certain people whose opinion I have always valued would want, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s joint heads of Science & Technology introducing me to Undertale. [flurry of disbelieving noise from the crowd; Loki holds up a hand and continues cheerfully] I’m quite serious! They recommended the game to me during a physical assessment, as having some very cogent moral commentary that happens to be extremely relevant to my own actions. And so it proved. All I’ll say is: flowers should not be that blooming disturbing!

[appreciative chuckles from the crowd]

REPORTER #3

Why did you include that bit at the end about 'do not less your losses make you hateful’? It seemed a little out of step with the rest of the speech.

LOKI

[serious, with strength and emotion]

I’m aware of a great deal of anti-Inhuman xenophobia in current discourse, which some of its proponents support by citing the Chitauri attack. Quite apart from the fact that that’s total bollocks, ehehe – the Chitauri have nothing whatsoever to do with any aspect of the existence of Inhumans – I know from bitter personal experience that lashing out at others in rage or grief, causing them pain, whether these others are connected to the source of one’s hurt or not, achieves nothing positive – only further pain – and has a mentally corrosive effect on the one lashing out. Furthermore, I can identify with the Inhuman side of the equation in some ways, so this issue is something of an emotional flashpoint for me. If preventing even one person from having to experience that kind of hurt will help to atone for the damage I caused, then I’ll do what I can.

[a beat, awkward silence – it’s pretty clear that none of the crowd expected THAT answer. After a moment of miscellaneous shuffling and staring-at-feet, REPORTER #4 coughs politely]

REPORTER #4

You alluded to having stabbed or killed an Agent Coulson at some point during the incident, but that very same agent has been noticeably active in recent times – how’s that possible?

LOKI, MACE AND COULSON

[cheerfully, in sync]

That’s classified!

REPORTER #1

You alluded to a 'complicated context’ for your actions. [Loki nods] Can you clarify that?

LOKI

[grimly]

Not without dissolving into a screaming wreck while being beset with horrible flashbacks, I’m afraid – I’ve not recovered *that* far. [humourless half-smile]

REPORTER #1

Are you a Frost Giant [Loki flinches as though struck with a half-brick in a sock] – what’s the word? – [with a hard J/G sound] Jo- Jot-

LOKI

[annoyed]

[correct pronunciation] Jotun? That’s not something I wish to disclose either way.

REPORTER #1

Is it relevant to your 'context’ and the condition you mentioned being in when you arrived on Earth?

LOKI

Relevant? [bitter laugh] To my having been afflicted with heat exhaustion? [shakes his head while making incoherent laugh/distress noises and sagging slightly against the podium. Thor rushes up, glares briefly at Reporter #1 and puts a supporting arm around Loki’s shoulders]

THOR

[sotto voce]

Are you all right, brother? Do you need to step away?

LOKI

[sotto voce]

I’ll be fine, just… [draws a shaky breath] Just give me a couple of seconds…

[Thor nods. Loki draws a few, slightly steadier, breaths and seems to collect himself. Thor gives him a quick side-hug and backs off a bit, but stays close by, looking wary]

LOKI

[slightly forced, 'pay no attention to my little breakdown’ cheerfulness]

Any less… invasive… questions?

REPORTER #5

What’s your opinion on the views that’ve been making the rounds recently, that you should have been allowed to conquer the planet in 2012, or that you should be allowed to rule the world, or at least the US, now?

LOKI

[genuinely cheerful]

Well, given the state of my mind in 2012, having me take over anything would have been a pretty dreadful idea! Now, though, if people really want my rule, and there’s a vacancy… [makes a shrug-ish gesture like the one in this picture – I don’t know how to describe it in words, sorry XD] …lead me to it! Ehehehe [grins]

[rumble of amusement from the crowd. A woman wearing a 'Yuri!!! On Ice’ T-shirt pipes up, looking mischievous]

BYSTANDER

Did you really have sex with a horse?

[the S.H.I.E.L.D. contingent get varying expressions of 'WTF?’ and 'Uh oh’, while Thor facepalms slightly – he knows this story – and Loki looks positively gleeful]

LOKI

[massive grin]

Nope! I made that one up to mess with a bard who was acting like the skaldic equivalent of a tabloid journalist. [nervous chuckles from the reporters] No, Sleipnir was a random mutation produced in the way horses normally come about – no shapeshifting involved. [chuckles to himself and looks even more mischievous] If you want amusing anecdotes about me and hoofed mammals, there’s always the Goat Incident— [Thor gets an 'OH CRAP’ expression and braces to leap] —which was reported in the Prose Edda, although Sturlusson took it waaay out of cont-mmppphhhhhhh! [Thor leaps on him, claps a hand over his mouth, wraps his other arm around Loki’s upper torso and forcibly drags him from the podium]

THOR

We do not speak of the Goat Incident!

[beat]

MACE

[approaches the podium]

End of conference… I guess?

#naughtylokiconfessionstories

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blumfumpstravels · 7 years

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Journal of Alfredo Sabelotodo, Part 1

Day 1:

Finally! A place to record my thoughts and discoveries! Today, the day I embark on my first journey as a man of science, I shall begin my story. Oft I read of the adventures of the greats, the legends of our time and of times long past, embarking in a similar manner. Today, on the cusp of greatness, with the backing of my clergy in the Vaticine and the support of the Invisible College, I venture to the University in Freiburg, far to the north in the wild lands of Eisen. My home of San Teodoro has served me well in body, mind, and spirit, but today I forge my own path. The College has requested that I, a junior member, deliver a large package to the university in Freiberg, where no doubt it has some supreme scientific and technological value that will be appreciated.

Day 4:

We are making good progress! We have just left Soldano, near the northernmost reaches of Castille, the carriage has been cleaned and the horses fed and well rested. I have picked up two travelers as well: a mercenary in need of work (for protection, though may the Prophet will that i shan’t have need of him), and a large, quiet man who was in want of transport to Freiberg. They are of an odd sort; the mercenary seems all too obsessed with his trade, though competent nonetheless, whereas the quiet giant has said very little, but appears to be stricken with some variety of vocal affliction, according to his altogether peculiar tone. The large package is undamaged, and fully sealed as per the college’s instructions, but it is beginning to worry me. It has begun to produce an unpleasant odor, and it sloshes in the most concerning way. When the carriage passes over an imperfection in the path, a sound indicating liquid and several items colliding with one another is produced. With two days to Freiberg as the crow flies, I am quite eager to understand the package’s contents.

Day 6:

Today we arrived in Freiberg. Upon arriving at the university, I delivered the package to the requisite professor, and proceeded to follow him to his lab. There I met Nicholas (code: Dr. Faustus), another member of the Invisible College and the person to give me payment for the proper delivery of the package. Inside the crate were several jars of various viscous fluids, and well-preserved organs of various animals. The letter included among the various jars indicated that the contents were a kit for a as of yet unveiled medical technology, the blood “transfusion”. Eager to comprehend the purpose(s) of the new device, I immediately volunteered to test it. The professor assembled the small mammal intestines, which appeared to be a means of transferring blood via pressure gradient forces. The sheep stomach contained what appeared to be blood. After briefly reading the included directions, the professor prepared the device by strapping me to a chair and inserting a needle into a vein of my arm, then began pumping the new blood into my system. I immediately felt strange. I was suddenly possessed by an uncharacteristic gusto and strength befitting a man of a significantly larger stature. Though my thoughts were at the time muddled, I immediately pondered endless purposes of the new device. Physical enhancement! What an advancement of science was I witnessing! Suddenly, in the midst of my elation, a group of people arrived. An almost comically assorted bunch; a few warriors, rogues, a giant man, and strangest of all: women. I have never really interacted with a woman. My mother died soon after I was born, I was raised by my father, older brothers, and clergy. The university in San Teodoro is all-male. I can’t explain it well, but I simply am unable to talk to or, in close encounters, even look at women. Perhaps I was raised improperly, but I was utterly terrified. There was a gentlewoman, a woman whose demeanor would best be described as boyish, and the leader: a short blonde woman in armor and a skirt that barely came to mid-thigh. What exactly we discussed was a blur, but the conversation seemed fairly friendly. The professor gave me something to drink. I passed out immediately. When I awoke, I was slung over the shoulder of the giant man and in a carriage. I guess I am headed to Posen now.

Day 9:

After 3 days of travelling in a cramped carriage, I, along with the ragtag crew (which included Nicholas, the other member of the College), arrived in the northern port town of Posen. There, with me in tow, the crew headed for the docks. The captain, who, I gather, is named Anne, gestured to her ship; I nearly experienced heart failure. It was an enormous Castillian flagship, cloaked in Dracheneisen armor and adorned with a dragon-esque masthead on the bow. Despite the modifications, I knew it immediately. Most Castillians would. Captain Anne was sailing the long-stolen flagship of the Castillian navy! Ten years prior, in an event that every Castillian old enough can recall, the flagship of the navy was stolen with the crown jewels on board. The jewels were returned some time later, but the ship was never found. Now I’d found it.

The group hurried me aboard, and before I knew it, the ship was preparing to set sail. I knew not the crew nor the destination, but I was carried along in the rush and was enveloped in a state of near-total confusion. I committed treason as soon as I stepped foot on the boat, I now realize. Perhaps my fate was already sealed by that point. Before embarking, however, the captain and another member of the crew tested out the fire-breathing figurehead several times. Why had they made these so-called “upgrades” to the once-beautiful royal flagship? As the ship left harbor, a rogue confronted me. They remarked on my fear of women, pointing out its irrationality and counter-productive nature. After being berated, I agreed to start learning how to interact with women. It was then that the rogue revealed herself to be a woman, much to my chagrin! What an odd crew. I headed for the ships rudimentary library, and began reading a treatise on the nature of Vodacce flora.

This was when events immediately turned for the terrible. We were barely out of sight of land when a large ship was spotted heading our direction from the sea. It immediately shimmered and reappeared right next to the ship, as if Porte magic could somehow transport an entire ship! As I heard it (I was still engrossed in the treatise at the time), the crew knew who it was immediately: Natalia. Natalia, according to the crew, is a powerful Vodacce fate witch, possessing an unbelievably strong syrneth scythe and many powerful spells and artifacts, and who has been a plague on the crew’s journey for some time now. Upon arriving within close range of our ship, Natalia started cutting through the nigh-indestructible Dracheneisen like a sword cuts through paper. It was at this point that I came up to the main deck. every person aboard the ship was scrambling in preparation for battle. The first mate, the woman who I had first described as boyish, had donned a strange cloak and jumped overboard. The captain, the Vodacce man who was steering, and a woman that described herself as an assassin (I’ll be doing my best to avoid her) had taken defensive positions on the main deck. The giant, the mercenary, the huge quiet man that had traveled with me, and the gentlewoman (now in combat-appropriate attire) had all flung themselves immediately onto Natalia’s ship, to fight Natalia or her monstrous crew. The berating rogue and Nicholas were nowhere to be found. Caught up in the panic, I decided to go below decks to repair the ship’s damage.While not particularly strong, my extensive knowledge of engineering allowed me to repair the ship to at least serviceable in little time.

Returning above decks, however, I found the fight was nearly beyond hope. Natalia, with her powerful scythe and fate witch magic, was easily winning against the giant, the gentlewoman, and the giant Avalonian lady knight, who, I later found out, was the large quiet person that I had traveled with. The captain had tied herself to the ship and thrown the rest of the rope overboard roughly where the first mate had disappeared into the water. The three fighting Natalia were at an increasing disadvantage, while the mercenary was handily taking care of Natalia’s brutes. Beginning to panic, i saw Nicholas appear out of thin air with a compass of some kind. He shouted to those on the main deck that those on Natalia’s ship needed to return before we missed our chance to escape. As a specialist in alchemical sciences, I knew what to do. I hurriedly threw a hastily-created explosive concoction onto the deck of Natalia’s ship. It didn’t damage the ship, but it provided a smokescreen and a distraction for those that boarded to return. Only the gentlewoman took the opportunity, however, as the giant man and knight continued to battle Natalia, and the mercenary continued defeating the brutes. The massive knight knocked Natalia overboard, but her ship immediately started to sink with the 3 that remained still aboard! The, captain having successfully returned the soaked first mate to the deck (somehow), threw a rope to the other ship, which the lady knight began to approach before she was tossed backwards by some otherworldly force. Natalia was using fate magic from the water! The large man and the knight struggled against the strings of fate, mostly in vain, but managed to stay aboard the ship. After a struggle, the lady knight was able to use the rope to climb aboard our ship. Captain Anne, at the other end of the rope, shouted for the large man, Lennon, to grab the rope quickly, but as he finally began traveling back to our ship, Natalia’s Syrneth scythe came out of the water and cleanly impaled him. His last words were of his sister, but, with no knowledge of context, they were lost on me. I threw a rope overboard for the mercenary, and as soon as he grabbed it, the ship began to shimmer. Suddenly, we were in a completely new place.

Nicholas shouted that the compass had worked, and scrambled to fill a jar with the water from the sea. We made it to the Seventh Sea! I heard someone say, but I was dumbfounded along with most of the crew. The sky was a shade of mauve, the water was a crystalline emerald color... It was what I imagined an entirely separate dimension would be. This sudden shift caused more shock than elation, however. We all carried the weight of the battle we had just endured, and we knew that it was not over. I was still confused, but I wanted to see where this ship would take me, what treasure troves of knowledge and secrets it would lead me to. Finally, an adventure through Théah! A (less than optimal) ship, a wholesome (as long as I don’t think about it or look too closely) crew, and a mission. This is where my legend, of the great and revolutionary scientist, Alfredo Sabelotodo, begins! It was at this point that the ship began to shimmer once more, and as soon as we had arrived, we were gone once more.

#7th sea #larp

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boludosaires · 7 years

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1/20 and 1/21/17: Inaugurated

If you have internet or TV access anywhere in the world, you know what today’s title is talking about.

It was really impossible to escape Donald Trump yesterday and today, no matter that I’m in the opposite hemisphere on another continent. He was on every TV, in every email, on every website, in every Facebook post. And I have a feeling things might keep going this way.

At work yesterday, my co-worker Romina was watching Trump’s speech and telling me how scared she was too. The thing is that this doesn’t just affect people in the U.S.; we’re one of the most powerful countries in the world, and EVERYONE is watching us. La Nacion has had a front page article about Trump almost every day since I’ve gotten here, and their “World” section’s biggest piece is always about him. The amount of U.S. news they report is second only to Argentine news. And with good reason; Trump and his administration’s decisions will impact Argentina’s foreign relations, trade, economy, military and who knows what else.

To be honest, I didn’t feel all that shitty on Inauguration Day. It’s not that I don’t recognize how horrible this all is. It’s just that it’s already become a daily reality for me. It wasn’t like the devastation of election night; just the manifestation of something I knew was coming, like dying months after being diagnosed with an incurable disease.

But the difference here is that this is NOT an incurable disease. It can and MUST be fought with every natural remedy, herbal salve, witch’s spell, Lord’s prayer and ounce of fight we have in us. The disease has infected our country, but that doesn’t mean we have to lay down and die. In fact, if one of us decides to lay down and die, that brings ALL of us one step closer to the same fate. We can’t fight this alone, and we can’t even fight this with a few people behind us. We need EVERYONE who doesn’t believe in this bullshit to step up and fight.

For me, that means continuing my work as an activist when I return to the US, no doubt. But it also means being a good ally while I’m down here in Buenos Aires. I’m not from here, and I don’t know the social or political or historical context nearly as well as a local, and so I have no aspirations to lead a movement in any way. But what I can do is show up to increase numbers at actions, volunteer my time and energy to support local movements, and use my platform at one of Argentina’s largest media outlets to elevate the voices that need to be heard.

I had an opportunity to practice that allyship today at the local manifestation of the Women’s March, which was more of a rally in a park in Buenos Aires. There was a group of about 60 people gathered in the shade of a big tree, and the organizer opened up the space for people to come up and just say to the group whatever they wanted to say.

A ton of amazing women went up and spoke: a young woman’s poem about her experiences with sexual harassment in the street; a 12 or 13 year-old girl who expressed her disbelief that people like Trump still exist in 2017; a pair of socialist-feminist activists talking about an upcoming mobilization; a young woman who came out as bisexual for the first time to the crowd because she felt supported enough to do it.

As I listened, I realized I had something to offer: the platform at La Nacion that I mentioned earlier. The first thing that gripped me was nervousness: what would I say? Should I step back since the event was primarily a space for women? Should I try to translate to Spanish as well as speak in English?

I decided it would definitely be worth it to go up, and that I would hugely regret it if I didn’t. I turned to Sabrina and Nico to ask for translation help, but they both had a a bit of stage fright, which is totally cool. So I approached a woman named Ingrid who had spoken earlier, and asked her if she’d be willing to translate into Spanish for me, just so I could more smoothly speak in English. She was super nice and was down.

So I made my way to the front, stepped up on a stump, and said something along these lines:

“Hi everyone. My name’s Scott, and I’m from a university in Chicago. First of all, I just want to thank all of the women who have come up here and said such powerful things today. I don’t want to take up too much space here as a man, because I know this is an event focused on women. But I do have something to say to the men in the crowd.

As a man, and although I’m Jewish, someone who passes as white in the U.S., I’ve definitely wondered in the past what my role is as an ally to support women and other oppressed people. I know many of you have probably thought about this too, because you’re here. But what I’ve realized is that one thing all of us can do as men, especially white men, is that if you here one of your friends, or someone in your family, say something sexist or racist, call them out and have a conversation with them. Because, since we live in this patriarchal, white system, they’re often more likely to listen to you as a man than they are to listen to a woman or person of color. And those groups are constantly doing the emotional labor to call people out, to explain to people when they do something fucked up, to educate people. So if you have privilege and you see what’s fucked up in this world, you can take on some of that burden by educating others like you who don’t have their shit together.”

I then went on to tell them I was working at La Nacion and that I had friends working at other large publications, and that I’d love to elevate their work.

I felt really good about what I had to say. I feel like it was an expression of a lot of what I’ve learned about how to actively use my privilege to be an ally over the past few months, and it was sort of meta because by saying that to the crowd, I feel like I was also practicing the very thing I was telling men to practice. I had some really great conversations with like 6 or 7 different people after the event, and I’m super excited to dive in on some of the story ideas I got from them.

So overall, inauguration weekend for me wasn’t about the presidential inauguration at all. Instead, it was the inauguration of a new wave of resistance and vision, united, energized, and ever-growing. And we’re not just here to fight Trump and other facist leaders, but to implement our own radical, equitable, love-infused vision instead. Resist and replace, if you will.

Vamos adelante.

<3 Escoot

Palabras Nuevas

· Chocar-to crash

· Apurado-hurried, rushed

· Buena onda- good vibes

· Perjudicar- to harm, to damage

· Aguantar- to tolerate

· Empate- tie, draw

· Ojotas- flip flops

· Macho, hembra- male, female (sexes for animals)

· Pista- dance floor

· Arenque- herring

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