#it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing

[blastlight]

#christian followers feel free to infodump in my inbox

☆hi beam!! okay i'm agnostic (spiritual and leaning hindu) now, but as a kid i used to be catholic (and also hindu at the same time. i was both simultaneously it's Complicated)

☆when i was little (before the Upsettings happened) god was sort of like my imaginary friend that i talked to all the time and demanded stuff from him constantly and i felt super upset whenever i did something to make him "angry". One time when i was 7 i prayed for about a week straight for him to turn me white. I was also convinced he would give me superpowers before i turned ten. I told all my friends about it. and then when it didnt happen i convinced myself it was because i was (vaguely) hindu too and God doesnt like it when i talk to other gods (???????) I won't get into the more traumatic aspect of the whole thing but the thought of someone always watching and the prospect of hell and dying forever messed me up for a good long while

☆surprisingly unrelated to that, i was obsessed with the bible as a kid (not really in a religious way so much as an autism way). My favourite book/section in the bible was leviticus and i just sat there for hours reading over and over what the ancient israelites were supposed to Not Do and the proper rituals that had to happen if they did those things anyway. My second favourite was the book of revelations but that was out of childish spite because at some point I remember the priest at my church saying that nobody understood what revelations meant or what was going on in there and i went "okay I'll just be the first then". I had Theories.

☆i was also going through my ancient history phase around the same time of my obsessive bible phase so every single week at church i bothered every single adult with questions about evolution and why the dinosaurs aren't in the bible until they made me feel too guilty to ask LOL (same thing happened when i asked stuff like why they eat shrimp or wear purple if leviticus says they can't)

☆tldr; i was obsessed with the bible in the way other kids at the time were obsessed with stuff like percy jackson, not because of religion but because i was fascinated by the Lore. But at the same time (and mostly unrelated to my bible interest??) i also believed in god fully and thought he would do stuff for me if i asked nice enough but be also scared me very much. Around age 12 I eventually reasoned myself out of christianity because, among other things, i decided the whole heaven/hell situation wasn't fair and unrealistic and also genesis made zero sense. The religious trauma that came later didn't help but was surprisingly not a driving factor for the most part. I still read the bible sometimes. I think it's fascinating

Oh wow that's way more than I thought anyone would send hahah

Definitely sounds interesting. I can see how you might end up like that but it sounds unusual. i don't know a whole lot about hinduism, but if you want, can you elaborate on how being hindu affected your catholic experience? just for curiosity :>

i relate with the "talking to G-d as if He's my imaginary friend" thing so much. i don't do that much now, but it's just way easier to speak directly than through very specific pre-written prayers sometimes...

hyperfixating on Bible Lore TM is kinda fascinating. i would not have chosen levitcus but i can see the hypothetical appeal of analyzing The Rules. (i was a child of chaos.) i don't know anything about revelations. what is going on in there?

bothering church adults with dinosaur questions is hysterical. also, where does it mention not wearing purple again? because religious jews do follow a lot of the commandments that originated from there, but that one's never come up. seems like a weird mistranslation/misinterpretation maybe?

makes sense why you'd leave based on that, i think that's more or less a common experience with ex-christians from what i've seen? good luck with the rest of that ♡ 👍 ♡

#i'm making comparisons solely on where i can relate to you. there is a bunch of stuff here that's different to different degrees- #-in (orthodox) judaism. so just keep that in mind ^^ #also if i mixed up christianity and catholocism dont mind that. i dont remember the difference lol #shealot #sunnemona #its also very funny that you sent this because a few minutes after reblogging that post #the op texted me 'DONT REBLOG THAT LEAVE IT ON MY BLOG' #and then i checked tumblr and found Five Paragraphs In My Inbox #so. L gideon lmaooo

[random2908]

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the  understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

#locked tomb trilogy #locked tomb spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #harrow spoilers #hopefully that covers the important tags people might be blocking #I learned while writing this that I don't know how to spell 'resurrection' #I tend to put too many letters in #it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing #this write-up is SO much more Gnostic than what told my best friend over the phone a few weeks ago #(now that I've done more reading on it) #I knew there was bound to be at least one homestuck reference in these books but I did NOT expect it to be dream bubbles

[sword-of-summer]

All of them answer every question fuck you

ahahaha no i respectfully deny your "fuck you" and i accept the ask and so-

i am 5'10", and i don't wish to be taller or shorter- i am the perfect height for hugs and messy hair, and yep, i like it here-

dream pet would be a mix of golden retriver and a husky called Holly and a chonky cat called Loki- yes ofcourse my future kids have names everyone should name their future pets-

ripped jeans/black pants with a Darth Vader tshirt or a Ethnic Fusion Kurta with black sneakers/artificial leather slip-ons, and if it's cold, a black jacket open obviously- and a black wristwatch i love my black wristwatch.

favourite video game was Clash of Clans and going even back, GTA Vice City and, the og- MARIIOOOO

three things/people are Oreos, Nutella and Pizza. The Holy Trinity-

"Beware me my fingers are smeared with chicken popcorn grease"

you didn't mention an opinion, @chunkybirb, so imma give my opinion on Vanilla ice cream and Nutella- ANYONE WHO HADN'T COMBINED THESE TWO COMBINE THESE TWO THEY ARE FUCKING AWESOME

im either phlegmatic or melancholic bruh idk maybe ik or maybe not

im v v v v ticklish

not an allergy, but an intense hatred for ketchup- i vomit if it gets too close to me fuck you ketchup

im heterosexual

any between tea and coffee but full milk coffee (ik, kill me), never had cocoa- but i love a chocolate or nutella milkshake

both. both is good. (cat and dog)

i would be an elf cause hell yeah, knowledge and wisdom

favourite youtuber is Samay Raina, a stand up comedian turned youtuber who is just awesome-

as i mentioned in 1., i am 5'10"

i would not change my name cause it's the coolest fucking name ever, i am Tanay, and Tanay in Hindi means Son, and my parents literally named their son Son, and hell yeah i like it

i forgot how much i weigh- last i checked it was 75 kilos, but ive gained weight since 2019 so yep, gotta walk in the mornings

yes i believe in metaphysicality cause one- it seems cool- second- me and @theclassyghost discussed a metaphysical life theory that i really really like and metaphysicality gives preservation of knowledge so i believe in spirits

SPACE. SPACE. SPACE.

im not that religious, no

pet peeves no well nah not really

nocturnal def nocturnal i sleep at 4.50 anyway hehehehe

fav constellation is Cassiopeia

fav star is Sirius tho

what the fuck are ball jointed dolls

i do have a fear of losing people that's just anxiety i guess

yep, global warming is real

never thought that much about reincarnation tbh but maybe, i do

fav movie is Spider Man : Into The SpiderVerse and Inception and The Dark Knight Rises and Revenge of The Sith and yes, for my indian gang, 3 Idiots and Gully Boy

yep i get scared v v v easily

i have had no pets but i plan to once i grow up

@chunkybirb 's blog is fucking cool awesome and *chef's kiss* a masterpiece

blue calms me. i love blue.

live in Norway cause pretty lights, snow, and less people than this overpopulated country i am in

born in Mumbai, India

v v v dark brown like it's almost black but no it's dark brown

introvert

horoscopes and zodiacs, i do read them, never believed that much tbh-

HUGS I LOVE HUGS

i really wanna visit my brother i haven't met him in a long time i really wanna play cricket w him just like old times

my sister- she's annoying but well i care for her

nah

tattoos idk bruh im okay idk may get one or may not get one

nope, smoking is ewwww *vomits*

ah my crush- she's cool [ if she exists

when the chalk doesn't write on the board but goes iiiiiieeee I HATE THAT

a sound i love is rain pitter pattering i just hhhhhh sends me into happiness

nope fatass here

nope fatass here

favourite actors have to be eddie redmayne, oscar issac and pedro pascal- and margot robbie and winona ryder in the actresses section also yes, elliot page

bruh already answered in 30.

im okayish!! spotify and tumblr, cool combo-

my hair are okay being black for me

yesterday, monday, from 6.40 to 6.50

music

uhhh naah not that i know of

well in Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase books, the sword of Frey aka Sumarbrander TALKS and demands to be called Jack, so here i am

bakwaas, music and comfy

yep, i believe in evolution

unfollow on hate and when they dm me sending nsfw pics ugh why are people like that

follow, well, i like people and they seem cool, so i follow them

fav kind of person is the one who'll sit with me for hours not even talking and just vibing to music

fav animals are beavers, doggos and cats

three fav blogs are @chunkybirb, @theclassyghost, @little-boats-on-a-lake, @aredhel-of-gondolin, @sue-me-imbadass, @alleenkaas, @my-ackerman, @brrrrrrrrrrzone

fav emoticon has to be ☹ this me seeing my stupidity outrank others

fav meme has to be Butternut is a master of psychological manipulation

INTP

Libraaa let's go

no dog, i have

black darth vader tshirt, black pants, black sneakers and black wrist watch

i have no selfies my phone has no cameras i live in eternal darkness

what the fuck are platform shoes

i, uhhh, i remember weird things like what i drew in class in 3rd while i was supposed to be doing english

lazy ass here, no front flips possible

i like birds they fly

nope i don't Iike swimming i like blankets

wrapped up in blankets reading books sounds better than both

ketchup

hyperspace travel

nope none

reading writing eating sleeping

my friend

tumblr seems cool

i have around 60-70 idk

yes i can run but why

yes they do but what's the fun in that

nope I'd fall over

sapphire let's go

koala bear or panda

sunflower or the one on a lemon tree

ketchup store

one cup of coffee is enough, tysm

read minds that sounds cool cool yeaaahh

nope never wore it a black clothes guy here BatMan

winter winter all year long

i don't know and i don't wanna try

i don't know and i don't wanna know

everyone cause they are better than me

bookstores cause bookstores any bookstores

sneakers, black onez

apparently some gas bitches mixed up to form a planet

non vegetarian but i partake meat just twice or thrice in two weeks

i don't know they don't seem like liking

naaaaaaaah

bugs ew

spiders ew

about the fact that i come off as arrogant and overconfident while in reality it's just that my communication skills suck

i can draw averagely whenever im in a mood

this thing im answering but i like answering it

uhhhhhhh brain freeze- idk bruh questions are good they give knowledge

yep, while sleeping

ahh yes calming, they are

cloudy days cause fucking cool vibes

hehehe wouldn't you like to know, weatherboy

CumuloNimbus i really like it's name yknow nimBUS

dark blue, dark blue always or black

naaaah no freckles

fav thing is when they laugh and it's just happy and we're both laughing like shitheads but who cares we're rebelling against depressing life and we laugh

both. both is good [ fruits and vegetables

sleep but i have to answer 170 questions cause @chunkybirb

sky sky sky it's my blog's header duh uh sKy

sweet and sour candy. SWEET AND SOUR CANDY.

dim lights it makes me feel cool

ahhh so here we go- Mooncalfs, Thunderbirds, Phoenixes, Sphinxes, Dragons that seem to be Space Nebulae, and more and more and more

i really feel like a boomer sometimes

i love everything about this site/app it makes me feel happy cause i like the people and the posts

uhhhhh i think too much about everything cause i just do. i like thinking

"He's dead, guys. For the sake of The Force, please watch Star Wars now he wanted to discuss it with you" actually no i would just say "A big shoutout to Garlic Bread he loved Garlic Bread"

myself cause i should be sleeping but sleep is for the weak and i am the weak and the strong i am a paradox-

that i obsess too much on things and try involving people it never works out

nope. had braces for 4 years, that beat out teeth showing smiles

i prefer computer-tv ahahahahaha

never tried them, so IDK

naaaaah not motion sickness- never travelled by sea so idk seasickness

lobed ears

yep i believe that deeds do count in life and beyond

idk bruh i don't believe in physical attraction too much- bodies are fake- mentally/metaphysically tho, im a 7

ahhhhh many many Stupid Genius, Tani, Tanu, Tanya

i still do-

i really want to talk to a therapist. converse. and discover.

im both, i am both.

10:1 is the ratio- giving 10, receiving 1

uhhh nothing just when i am right and people use the old "disrespect" argument

3, Hindi, Marathi, English

girls

uhh no i am not

my hair i love them everyone says things about my hair but i love them

knowledge vibes i give, someone tells me- and that's all i ever wanted

anyone i know tbh, my mutuals, my friends, my discord friends

ahhh no i wouldn't but i wish i was born 20 years earlier

bleh bloo, neither like nor dislike

i don't know if i have one

i don't know, haven't had physical contact in a long long long time in a galaxy far far away

the above point stands but i would like to ig

anything i write, 3 hours later, i instantly hate just idk why

anything i write

that i am normal no i am not and i am not okay hahahahaha

65-70 ish people

somewhere around-

many many many don't ask please but okay if you do ask

somewhat

uhhhhh idr exactly but i won't tell in public duh uh

mediummm hairrrr

last year lockdown i became harry potter

i don't know buddy i seriously don't know

yep i do cause knowledge i like knowledge

naaah never tried

no i definitely cannot stand on my hands or my head for more than 30 seconds

yep, im pretty sure i answered most of them correctly-

og link-

#personal #ask #tumblr

[universejunction]

Midwayers, and problems of intended belief

A discord conversation (at first about fae and spirits)

Me:

I feel so far behind on learning about fae and spirits and such. When I thought The Urantia Book was more than a well-intentioned hoax it was easy to think fae and such are all just what it calls "midwayers". Now I'm... wide open to new interpretations. I know I'm not behind, I'm just where I am, but still...

A:

I would love to give you more of an idea, but I don't know a ton about the Urantia book or what you mean by midwayers.

Me:

Oof, okay. I don't expect much in the way of answers, I know I'll get what I get in time. But I will take this opportunity to share.

In the Urantia Book, it make a lot of distinction between spirit and matter, as you might expect. Mind is the means by which Spirit rules over matter, yada yada. It also has a ton of details on angels.

There's a ton of history in there too, which I'm now interpreting as metaphor at best, because it's sure as shit not factual with its racial skeletal types and what not.

Anyway... Y'know, I'm gonna give the summary and then see if I have the energy for the story, because I'm worn out.

Basically, midwayers are midway between material and spiritual (but they're not, like, pure mind), covering the gap between angels and humans. They're native to the world, but descended from super-humans. They're immortal and stick around until the "age of light and life". And there's 1111 of either all of them or that might just be the first group of them.

Midwayers also get attributed cases of demonic possession (but so does mental illness), though they're not supposed to be able to do that anymore since Jesus completed his experience of life and earned his sovereignty (which was... before his public work) as basically god of local creation.

There's so much in this book and I carved it into my brain and now I don't trust it but it's still so quick to mind 😩

Innkeeper:

Woof okay I just read this

This is....so much not correct at all but also weirdly accurate

Which makes sense considering my personal theories on bleedthrough but thats another topic for another time

Me:

"Bleedthrough" sounds so very likely correct even without knowing what you mean exactly. That's pretty much my theory on how the Absolutes stuff seems so probably accurate despite everything else

A:

I'm just going to offer that whenever you hear "superhuman," in a spiritual tome, your hackles should probably raise.

Like, it sounds like this is coming from the same branch of angelic and Christian occultism that recognize the Nephilim, but uh, just be mindful that rhetoric about "ancient superhumans" is almost ALWAYS used to sell bullshit about magic indigenous people

It sounds like you're mindful of that, but, heads up

V:

The midwayer concept is ringing alarm bells between "Magic White People From Outer Space" to "Eugenics"

Innkeeper:

^

The idea of a liminal concept, something that exists in between those two states, I feel that holds water

The idea of literally everything else is uh

Worrisome at best

Me:

I'll add more in a sec but y'all right

Me (later):

To be clear, I was raised on the Urantia Book and am now moving away from it. For reasons mentioned above, among others.

It does come very close to "magic white people from outer space" and definitely is like "eugenics is a good idea but no one is qualified to direct it".

Me (replying to A):

Adding on, yes, but it's like... Fix-it fic. There's this spirit prince for the world who rebelled with Lucifer (who was like... a local administrator, not a god or angel), but when he arrived they like... called 100 natives [of Earth], cloned them with power-ups, and put people from other worlds like ours into the bodies who served as the prince's staff in the task of cultivating culture. Those staff, through essentially spiritual sex, created the first midwayers. After rebellion, the staff split and the ones who stay loyal to the prince are called nephilim and start a line of (acknowledged in the text) big ol' nasty racial supremacists. They're also called Nodites (c.f. "Land of Nod")

Later, Adam and Eve show up to "upstep" human evolution (disease resistance, humor, art... yeah, magic white people) but because the prince rebelled and shit's fucked, they're having a hard time. Eve bangs a local tribe leader to get an alliance and fucks everything up (that results in Cain. Able is Adam and Eve's next kid). So now should-be-immortal Adam and Eve only have a few hundred years to live and their (already many) kids get the choice to leave and most of them do.

A while later, their first son, Adamson, goes off to start a new cultural center, meets a woman named Rata who "claims" to be the last pure-line Nodite. [They] have a bunch of kids, every 4th of which is invisible(???), and they make those kids get together (yikes!) and that's where the secondary midwayers come from.

And it lampshades all this like "many things in the spiritual development of a world are hard to understand." Uh, yeah! History is weird, sure, but as it's fan fic, it's creepy.

A:

So, I'm saying this with all the love in my heart, but you can only portray things as fiction which are not intended to be believed.

That's not a fanfiction, that's a religious text. That is a religious text with a fully realized theology and metaphysics, complete with creation story. I think it is harmful to approach it as anything else, or as a "generic" metaphysical practice. (Relatedly, there is no such thing as "generic witchcraft," which is a main point of this history of the occult book club).

Doing a little bit more research, it's a religious text associated loosely with the Urantia Foundation and written in 1955. I'm not seeing any indication at the moment that there's a formal power structure associated with the movement, which lessens the chance for cult behavior.

What I will suggest to you is that you need to approach this work like you would any other religious text. Set aside questions of whether the text is "accurate" or "true." If you are honestly interested in the metaphysical, you should be able to separate empirical reality and history for the metaphysical. If you can't do that, take five steps back in your practice and come back once you can.

So, setting aside questions of truth, does this cosmology reflect the things you believe about the world? Does it encourage a way of thinking about people that you think is good, virtuous, honorable, etc? Can this text be used to uphold values that you hold, or do the natural extensions of this text lead to certain conclusions? Are those conclusions harmful?

For instance, I believe that eugenics is totally and morally abhorrent, and that there is fundamentally "no such thing" as a person who could pull it off "correctly." There's no way to do eugenics "right," just like I believe there is no morally correct way to, I don't know, punch a baby.

As such, even your acknowledgment that the text accepts eugenics makes it worthy of rejection in my mind.

Maybe you are interested and capable of doing the apologetics to make this into a compassionate religious movement. I don't know. I am not interested in doing that. But I do not think you can "move away" from this text, in the same way that you cannot "move away" from the bible, only from interpretations of it.

At some point, you have to believe in a basic assumption. If there's something that "feels right," there's only so far you can push it without that basic assumption.

If you think there is a separation between mind, body, and Spirit, wonderful. I would recommend you find another text and another basic set of assumptions. For instance, one that doesn't involve angels making angel-possesed magic native people for the point of preparing the world for the "good races."

Me:

Yes, you've got it right. Except that my interpretation has moved from "I think this book is what it claims" to "I think this was (probably well-intentioned, but still) a hoax perpetrated by ex-Seventh-Day Adventists". But for whatever good intentions may've been involved, the fact that it's intended to be believed makes it very harmful. I talked about it today as a way of saying "wow, look at this crazy shit" and talking through the changes involved in my different interpretation / loss of faith.

I don't believe in midwayers anymore and don't know what to believe, I'm trying to do the work, as you say, of finding what parts are good and what's harmful, comparing with empirical stuff, etc. But, however ready I may've been to walk away from the Urantia Book, it's still a process of recognizing what ideas I have based on it and examining them in turn to see what's salvageable.

Innkeeper:

I think that's an incredibly respectful way to go about it, Toph.

When something is that formative to you as a person, it's rarely as easy as learning it's harmful and then moving on, entirely separated from the source material. There's a long process of digging up every assumption you know you have--and many you don't know you have, or don't have at all--and needing to challenge them in a newer, healthier framework. One of the most potent aspects of the danger of cults is that they're incredibly difficult to challenge that base assumption, and it can take years if not a lifetime to walk a path that steadily heads away from what was taught.

So to acknowledge something formative's deep capacity for danger and harm, and go through the long process of picking it apart piece by piece to ensure you don't retain its harmfulness as you separate from it, I think that's the best possible way to go about something.

#urantia analysis #behold my eloquence #long post

[man-creates-dinosaurs]

SPOOKY PALEONTOLOGY: THE (OC)CULT OF NESSIE One reason I haven’t been blogging as much here is that I’ve been busy with various academic projects including two book chapters, submissions for conference presentations, serving as a member of the steering committee for this year’s Religion and Monsters panel at the AAR, getting the long awaited second installment of Scholars Talking Toku up, and preparing to start applying for PhD programs at the end of the year.

One of the books I recently contributed to is tentatively titled “Paranormal and Popular-Culture” and should be coming out from Routledge early next year. The volume was conceived and edited by Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead. My contribution was a chapter on the intersection of cryptozoology and science-fiction in which I endeavored to show that the central aims and obsessions of cryptozoology (i.e. the discovery of monstrous creatures alive in the world today) can be found to have originated in the realm of fantastic fiction.

My original draft for this chapter was over 11,000-words and had to be drastically reduced at the behest of the publisher (actually the entire book had to be shortened apparently). So I decided I could make use of some of that research here on my blog and just in time for Halloween. In this case I want to talk about lake monsters. Spooky lake monsters. Specifically the Loch Ness Monster.  

Though reports of a monster living in Loch Ness don’t begin until 1933 the idea of such a creature dwelling somewhere within the British Isles can be found in The Lair of the White Worm; a horror novel by Dracula author Bram Stoker originally published in 1911 by Rider and Son of London with interior color illustrations by Tarot Card artist Pamela Colman Smith. In 1925 an abridged version of the novel was issued, losing more than 100 pages and 12 chapters.

Set in Derbyshire, England The Lair of the White Worm concerns Australian transplant Adam Salton who has traveled to meet his great-uncle, Richard Salton, as Adam is destined to become the heir of the family estate. As Adam quickly learns, however, high strangeness of various kinds is at work in the surrounding countryside including the death of livestock, mysterious black snakes slithering about, a child with vampire-like bite marks on her neck, hostile pigeons, and the mysterious Arabella March who lives nearby in a house located in Diana’s Grove; an area known to have once been the center of pagan religious rites.

Eager to get to the bottom of these various mysteries, Richard introduces Adam to his friend Sir Nathaniel de Salis; who fulfills the Van Helsing role in this novel of occult scholar. In Chapter 5, “The White Worm,” Sir Nathaniel fills Adam in on the various legends concerning Diana’s Grove including that it is the lair of a monstrous albino serpent or dragon; what the Anglo-Saxon’s called a ‘wyrm,’ hence the novel’s title. When Adam displays some skepticism about such tales Sir Nathaniel informs him that…

“A glance at a geological map will show that whatever truth there may have been of the actuality of such monsters in the early geologic periods, at least there was plenty of possibility.  In England there were originally vast plains where the plentiful supply of water could gather.  The streams were deep and slow, and there were holes of abysmal depth, where any kind and size of antediluvian monster could find a habitat.  In places, which now we can see from our windows, were mud-holes a hundred or more feet deep.  Who can tell us when the age of the monsters which flourished in slime came to an end? There must have been places and conditions which made for greater longevity, greater size, greater strength than was usual.  Such over-lappings may have come down even to our earlier centuries.” (p. 187 in Penguin Classic’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Tales, 2007)

Here we see that Sir Nathaniel is something of a proto-cryptozoologist and like his 20th-Century contemporaries advances the idea that the menacing white worm, like Nessie, is a prehistoric holdover who has somehow managed to survive for millions of years in the supposedly “abysmal depths” of the United Kingdom’s many lakes and lochs. Of course, the novel ends with the revelation that the worm is real and dwells in a pit beneath Arabella March’s home in Diana’s Grove where March worships and feeds the beast who in turn appears to endow her with evil supernatural powers. Ultimately, Adam is able to dispatch the monster via the handy combination of dynamite and a well-placed lightning bolt.

In 1988, English filmmaker Ken Russell (1927-2011) filmed a theatrical adaptation of The Lair of the White Worm. Russell’s version actually puts more emphasis on the story’s latent paleontological elements. Rather than being set in the early 20th-Centrury the story is moved up to the present day (i.e. 1980s) and Adam Salton is recast as Angus Flint (Peter Capaldi; the Twelfth Doctor); a Scottish archaeologist excavating the site of a Roman era Christian convent in Derbyshire. Among the ruins Flint discovers what appears to be the skull of a dinosaur! The locals connect the skull to the legend of the d'Ampton wyrm, said to have been slain in Stonerich Cavern by John d'Ampton, the ancestor of current Lord of the Manor, James d'Ampton (Hugh Grant of Four Weddings and a Funeral [94] and Bridget Jones’s Diary [2001]). Flint attends a party at d’Ampton Manor where he meets James and the audience is treated to a rocking rendition of the legend of the d’Ampton wyrm (based on the real-life legend of the Lambton Worm).

Stonerich Cavern is connected to the home of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) who steals the skull from Flint and also abducts his girlfriend Eve. While a symbiotic relationship between Marsh and the White Worm is only hinted at in Stoker’s novel, it is explicit in Russell’s film with Marsh assuming the form of a silver-skinned serpentine vampire who’s appearance I would have to guess was inspired by the look of a similar monster seen in Hammer’s The Reptile (1966, dir. John Gilling). It is soon revealed that Marsh is the immortal priestess of an ancient pre-Christian snake god named Dionin whose next sacrifice is going to be Eve. In order to rescue his girlfriend and expunge the evil from the countryside Flint enlists the aid of James and the two mount an assault on Marsh and Dionin.  

For most cryptozoology enthusiasts, Nessie is believed to be an extant plesiosaur which somehow survived the K–Pg extinction event some 66-million-years ago. As a result the idea of Nessie being related to anything like the subject of Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm – with its occult evil, secret cults, human sacrifice and vampires – may seem strange indeed. However at least one noted Nessie research drew just such a circle of connections around the Loch Ness Monster. That man was Fredrick William Holiday (1921–1979).

Like most Nessie researchers, Holiday started out proposing that Nessie was a prehistoric survivor. Not a plesiosaur but rather a Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium); a genus of soft-bodied bilaterian that lived during Late Carboniferous period some 323.2 million-years-ago to 298.9 million-years-ago and whose fossil remains were discovered in Illinois in the late 1960s. The exact nature of the Tully Monster is actually a source of great paleontological controversy which you can learn about here. Like all cryptozoologists expounding prehistoric survivor paradigm theories Holiday was at a loss to explain how the warm water Tully Monster had survived hundreds of millions of years in a cold lake on the other side of the world. He also had the not insignificant problem that the fossils of Tully Monster indicated that its maximum size was about 14-inches, pretty puny for the Loch Ness Monster. Nevertheless, Holiday put forth his Tully Monster theory in his 1968 book The Great Orm of Loch Ness; “orm” being another variation on “wyrm.”

However, as Holiday continued to research the Loch Ness Monster he began noticing strange things happening to him. This included his camera always malfunctioning whenever he tried to take a shot of Nessie, glimpses of mysterious orbs of light, apparent UFO sightings and experiences of missing time. As a result by the early 1970s Holiday ceased promoting the idea that Nessie was a Tully Monster and started claiming that it was a supernatural entity that was both the basis of ancient dragon legends and somehow connected to UFOs; hence the title of his second book: The Dragon and the Disc (1973). This trend in Holiday’s research continued and by the late 70s Holiday was apparently wrapped up in all kinds of occult phenomena and evidently claiming that Nessie was the object of reverence of a secret dragon cult practicing human sacrifice hidden in the surrounding Inverness environs. All this prompted Holiday’s final book The Goblin Universe (published in 1986, after his death) which was co-authored with sci-fi writer Colin Wilson; author of The Space Vampires (1976), which was later turned into the film Lifeforce (1986) directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) and scripted by Dan O’Bannon (Alien). You want a crazy Halloween double-feature? Watch Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm and Hooper’s Lifeforce back-to-back.   

#loch ness monster #nessie #cryptozoology #cryptid #bram stoker #vampire #the lair of the white worm #ken russell #ted holiday #lampton worm #peter capaldi #hugh grant #lake monster #colin wilson

[andavs]

Yet another unprompted prompt from this long list of prompts. Prompt.

Number Fifty-Three: “That wasn’t very subtle.”

Allison took to late night drives.

Between her dad, Scott, Lydia, and Isaac rushing back from France, everyone had been a little...intense about her safety, to a stifling degree. She wasn’t holding it against them, it’d only been two weeks since she mysteriously rose from the dead, but she was getting a little stir crazy, and she needed to have a conversation with someone who didn’t look at her with reverence, almost a religious awe as if she was a miracle on earth. She just wanted someone who wouldn’t drop everything they were doing whenever she called, as weird as that seemed.

It was uncomfortable being everyone’s number one priority. It felt like they thought she would disappear if they asked her to wait an hour while they finished up whatever they were in the middle of—like this was only temporary and she could drop dead at any second so they had to see her as much as possible while they still could. The time Lydia assured her she was totally free and then showed up with a half-finished manicure really sealed the deal, so...sneaking out in the dead of night to be alone became a thing.

Sneaking out of the apartment in her socks and putting her shoes on in the hallway like she was back in high school or something—not that she actually graduated.

But as humiliating as it was, she would do whatever it took to get some time to herself, with total strangers who didn’t know anything about her. She was determined to find a pocket of normalcy somewhere in Beacon Hills...which is how she got the opposite of that and happened upon Stiles.

She was turning right onto a near deserted Main Street at almost three in the morning on a Tuesday, and he was just right there in the front window of the only 24 hour coffee shop on their side of town. Like that was a totally normal place to be.

She never would have sought him out like this before—well, before, but he’d kept his distance since she “came back from France” and she missed him. He’d always been good at distracting her, blowing through one topic to the next too fast for her to linger on her own thoughts for long, and these days she had a lot of thoughts to linger on, most of them bad. She could use some distracting.

(And while Scott insisted that the Nogitsune really was gone and had been for a year, she wanted to see for herself. To her, it was all less than a month ago, a demon using Stiles’ body to massacre innocent people, and in the very few brief moments she’d spent with Stiles, she couldn’t help but notice a hardness to his gaze that wasn’t there before.

She just needed to check.)

She walked right past him on the sidewalk without him noticing, even though he was sitting at the counter along the front of the shop, facing the windows. He was completely focused on his laptop in front of him, hand hovering over some stapled packets of printouts spread haphazardly across the counter, taking up three chairs worth of space. There were only two other people in the cafe, slumped in arm chairs near the fireplace at the back, so it wasn’t not like he was being rude.

Allison entered quietly and slid into the stool next to him, and it took a few seconds for him to drag his focus away from his work, frowning already at the intrusion into his claimed space before he even saw who it is. Then recognition flickered into his tired eyes and he jumped a little in delayed surprise.

“Whoa, Allison!” He flailed a little, less animated and more sluggish than she remembered, and his eyes tracked over the papers around him quickly like he was checking for anything incriminating. “What are you, uh—” he shoved a book farther under a printed page and tried to act natural. “What are you doing here? It’s like 1am.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “It’s like 3am, and I could ask you the same thing.”

He frowned and squinted at the clock in the corner of his computer screen, then answered distractedly, unconvincingly,

“Working on a paper.”

There was the half-hidden book open to a chapter on necromancy and a quickly closed internet tab named Lazarus Pit that suggested otherwise, but she didn’t mention them yet.

“How are finals going?” she asked instead, playing along even though she knew the entire pack was home from college for Christmas break.

“Good! Great! Yeah, can’t complain!” he answered somewhat manically,

She nodded along. “And the research into the undead?”

He slammed his laptop shut before she could register his movement, and she jumped, which seemed to make him jump in return, like he just realized what he did. She raised an eyebrow and his expression turned shifty. He debated his options for a moment, then gave in.

“That wasn’t very subtle, was it?”

She grinned and laughed through her nose; one of the few genuine laughs she’d had since she came back.“No, it wasn’t.” He bobbed his head in acceptance. “Any theories?”

His eyes flicked towards the empty street outside, then back to her. “What?”

“About me.” She gestured to the open book just behind him, and he didn’t even glance at it before he started to look guilty. “Do you think someone brought me back to use me?”

“Not seriously?” he tried, but she knew he wouldn’t be looking into it if it hadn’t crossed his mind with some sincerity. She raised both eyebrows and he sagged a little as he conceded, “Okay, a little bit. You’re kind of known for being a badass, you’d definitely be my first pick for any war of the dead.”

“That’s very flattering.” Probably. “Have you found anything about an upcoming war of the dead?”

The way he sheepishly scratched at the back of his head said no, he hadn’t but he would keep going until he did.

“There’s...a lot of texts to look into.”

Allison squinted an eye, playfully doubtful. “The texts of...Wikipedia?” She’d definitely seen the logo on a number of his tabs before he’d slammed his computer shut.

“I’m still narrowing down my sources!” He played along, feigning offense and falling back into their old dynamic from high school. It was unbelievably refreshing with everyone acting so strange. “There’s a lot online to sort through, and your family’s bestiary doesn’t have a post-death section—believe me, I’ve looked so many times, because no one around here can stay dead for longer than five minutes!”

His eyes widened a little, like he’d just caught up to his rant and realized who he was talking to. This was usually the moment things got uncomfortable, where everyone else started apologizing, or looking at Allison with wide and concerned eyes, like it would offend her to mention that she’d been dead.

She needed to stop that this time, before it even started. She couldn’t handle hearing another apology, not from Stiles too.

“Wait, okay.” She held up a hand. “Besides Peter and Kate—” Scott had filled her in on all of that, while looking very sincere and concerned it would upset her “— and obviously me, who else came back? I’ve missed four years of supernatural gossip, I need to catch up.”

Stiles reared back, awkwardness forgotten. “Wait, has no one told you about the chimeras? Like fifteen people died and crawled out of holes in the ground like actual zombies, and one guy tried to eat me—oh, and don’t even get me started on Derek, because I still have no idea what happened there—I mean, one second he was dying and then he was a wolf, and now he’s—”

Allison smiled at the barista who brought over a refill pot of coffee and another mug, and settled in to get lost in Stiles’ winding, ranting tale.

He may be a little sharper around the edges, a little darker, but he was still Stiles. He hadn’t become a werewolf, or a hunter, or a coyote or whatever the latest incarnation was—he was sitting in a coffee shop at four in the morning, ranting about the new patch of grey in Derek’s beard with an indignant intensity that made Allison want to ask a few questions, with his research taking up too much space, and his hands dancing around as he spoke.

Even after hugging her dad, Isaac, feeling Scott’s warm and enveloping arms around her, finally getting to have another girls’ night with Lydia—weirdly enough seeing this, Stiles in all his usual frenetic energy—that solidified things more than the rest.

Allison was back.

She didn’t know why or how, whether it was really permanent or not, but Stiles was on the case, just like he’d always been, and if there was something to be found, he would find it. He always did.

#teen wolf #look i just love stiles and allison a lot #ficlet #accidentally did some intermittent fasting today and it really does help you focus! #i got a fic done! #i mean i didn't really do my job that well #but i got SOMETHING done

[oumakokichi]

So what exactly happens in chapter 3? I know that Angie started a student council, but I dont know what the motive was or why the culprit decided to kill at that moment.

Chapter 3 is, as per the usual DR tradition, kind of a hugemess. It has its fun moments, of course! But motive-wise it’s definitely theweakest, in my opinion. The given motive is interesting in theory, per se, butit’s actually not the reason the culprit killed at all. In fact, the culprit’sreal motive for killing is really just… oh boy, how do I put it.

I can explain what happens a little more in-depth, but I’llgo ahead and put it under a read more, just in case!

Basically, Angie’s Religious Student Council started takingshape as early as Chapter 2, but it didn’t really fully form until Chapter 3.In Chapter 2, Angie began showing a lot more influence over Himiko about midwaythrough the chapter, taking her under her wing and “converting” her to herreligion. The word change is so sudden that the word “brainwashing” is actuallybrought up several times, and Angie always avoids the subject whenever anyone asksher what she did to Himiko.

This, combined with the strong implications in her FTEs thather art talent works in a similar way to Mitarai’s, seems to suggest that shedoes “convert” people to her religion by showing them her artwork andessentially “painting” them the picture of god that they want to see the most,as she says her god has a different form for everyone. Himiko is the first onetaken under her wing in part because Himiko herself is seeking an escape from reality,because she doesn’t want to confront either the horrible things that arehappening around her or her own grief and trauma, and in part because Angieprobably saw her as a relatively easy target.

By Chapter 3, Gonta, Tsumugi, Kiibo, and Tenko also “convert”to Angie’s religion, giving them enough members to declare themselves a “ReligiousStudent Council,” whose interest isn’t in trying to escape outside but insteadis in a “peaceful school life.” Tenko only joins in order to keep a closer eyeon Himiko, because she’s worried about the amount of influence Angie has onher, but she pretends to be on pretty good terms with Angie for the first partof the chapter.

Gonta and Tsumugi, meanwhile, seem to have been taken in bypretty much the same methods as Himiko was. Where Angie told Himiko that hergod was young and handsome, she tells Gonta that his is like a kind and nurturinggrandmother. As for Tsumugi, her god has “black hair and red eyes” (a possiblereference to any number of DR characters, but my money is on Kamukura).

There are a few reasons I doubt Tsumugi was taken in nearlyas much as Gonta or Himiko, but I’m not sure how far you want to be spoiled, soI won’t go too far into depth. As for Kiibo, I’m pretty sure he joined mostlydue to wanting to feel more “human” himself. By taking an interest in humanreligion, it was a way for him to show that he was also an “ordinary student”like the rest of them.

In any case, Angie’s Religious Student Council takes theforefront in Chapter 3. With so many people backing her up, Angie feelscomfortable enough to say that they’re going to start enforcing some measuresto ensure that they all have a peaceful school life. No one is forced to jointhem, per se… but it becomes clear very early on that non-student councilmembers won’t get the same benefits as the student council themselves.

They set up a curfew, much like Celes’ own suggestion backin dr1 that no one leave their rooms at nighttime. But student council membershave full privileges to walk around whenever they want, at whatever hours theywant. It’s only non-student council members who are told to stay in their rooms,the reason being that they haven’t actually agreed to cooperate with everyone’s“peaceful school life.”

This sort of authoritative behavior gets taken up to the maxwhen the Monokumerz come by later on to deliver another remember light. Therewas one earlier on in the chapter which the group did use, but upon thedelivery of a second one later on, Angie actually takes the light and crushesit underfoot, saying that “they don’t need memories of the outside worldanymore because they’re all going to live peacefully in the school.” Despitethe fact that her motivations are largely driven by self-preservation, thisscene was actually quite interesting since it’s true that the desire to getoutside is the main motivating factor for most of the murders, not only inndrv3 but in DR as a whole. Not using the remember lights isn’t actually such abad idea in itself.

As for the actual motive presented in the chapter, that’swhere things start to get weird. While most of the motives in ndrv3 feel morestrongly paralleled with dr1’s motives, I’d say Chapter 3’s feels more like ansdr2 motive. The Monokumerz tell all the cast that there’s going to be a “transferstudent”—then tack on the fact that this “transfer student” is actually goingto be one of their deceased classmates. They say that they can pick whoever theywant to resurrect, but only one person. Then they give them a ritual handbook,to tell them how to carry it out.

All the characters express their disbelief, but theMonokumerz assure them that it’s 100% possible, and that they really canresurrect someone. Whether they mean it in the literal sense of the word, orwhether the meaning is a little trickier (which I think is the case, judging bysome of the later chapters in ndrv3 and some of the foreshadowing with theMonokumerz themselves) is hard to judge. Either way though, Chapter 3 as awhole deals a lot with very occult and religious motifs and themes.

Angie, of course, takes the decision of who to resurrectinto her own hands, as the leader of the Religious Student Council. Of the fourpeople who’ve died, they choose Amami, and Angie begins holing herself up inher research lab shortly afterwards in order to prepare for the ritual. Her labis one of the only ones which actually can be locked even though she discoveredit while she was still alive, because she specifically asked for a key in orderto work, stating that she can’t “work as god’s vessel” while other people arewatching usually.

And then we have… why the murders actually took place. As Imentioned earlier, they happened for reasons pretty much entirely unrelated tothe “resurrection” motive, or even the Religious Student Council itself. Themost that can be said is that Korekiyo’s personal motive are religious innature—but that’s about it.

Mostly, he kills because he was always a potential threat,and in Chapter 3 he finally saw an opportunity. He wanted to kill one of the girlsunder the guise of the kagonoko ritual, a ritual specified in a book from his researchlab which supposedly allows for communication with spirits. He set up all thepreparations in advance to make it possible to kill someone in secret duringthat ritual, and Angie walked in on him setting it up while walking through theschool at night. She heard the sound of him sawing and grinding at thefloorboards, walked in on him, and he realized that he needed to silence her ifhe wanted to get away with the murder he’d originally wanted to commit.

Basically, Angie was collateral damage in the same waySaionji was in sdr2. After knocking her unconscious with a plank of wood fromthe floorboards, Korekiyo taped up her head injury, carried her back to herresearch lab, and killed her there with the katana from his own lab. He thenused it to create a locked room by thrusting it into one of the wax figuresAngie had made and tried to make it look as though the murder could only havebeen committed by one of the Religious Student Council members.

Later on, during the investigation for Angie’s murder, hebrings up the suggestion of “trying to talk to Angie’s spirit,” in order to goback to his original plan of killing during the kagonoko ritual. Originally,Himiko volunteers for it, but Tenko steps in, saying she wants Himiko to have achance to say goodbye to Angie as her friend. During the course of the ritual,once the lights are out, he jumped on the floorboards that he’d prepared andslammed Tenko’s body up into a sickle that he’d taped to the top of the cagecovering her, which jammed its way into her neck and killed her instantly.

His reasons for this are… uh, well, because he wanted to “reunite”with his deceased sister. And it goes a lot darker than that. He wanted to sendher “female friends” in the afterlife—by killing them. As long as they werepolite enough, any of the girls would do (the only girls he says weren’tqualified at the end of the Chapter 3 trial were Maki and Miu). He’s confirmedin the Chapter 3 trial to have killed almost100 girls for this reason, saying that he was “almost there.”

He wanted desperately to reunite with his sister because hewas in love with her. It’s gross and it’s not portrayed as some romantic ormisguided thing by the narrative, thankfully. Pretty much all the charactersare shocked and disgusted when they find out. But it’s still really, reallymessed up. He says he and his sister “swore their love to each other,” thatthey were “like lovers,” and that their “forbidden love” had “nothing to dowith being siblings.” So it’s pretty undeniably just incest.

It’s not really clarified whether he was in love with hissister or if the feeling was mutual. All that’s really mentioned is that hissister was older than him. Also, during the trial, he definitely seems to believe he’s being possessed by herspirit. While I doubt such a thing is actually possible considering there’s noforeshadowing for it or indications, I will say it seems like Korekiyo isdefinitely somewhat unstable near the end of his trial, as he begins to “communicate”with her more and more often whenever he takes off his mask. By the end of the trial,he’s a screaming, shaking mess, and he and his “sister” yell at the group to “apologize”repeatedly, like a mantra.

This brings me back to… well, Chapter 3 being a mess. Ithas parts that are a lot of fun, and I will say the actual case this time wasprobably the best one in terms of actual mystery-solving out of all threegames. But the motive given by the Monokumerz is shaky and not expanded upon,and Korekiyo’s actual motives are horrifying and disgusting, and I know a lotof people (myself included) are uncomfortable with Kodaka even touching on thesubject at all. Again, it’s good that nothing about Korekiyo was portrayed in aforgivable or understandable light, but it’s still territory I’m not sureKodaka should’ve really written about since it’s a very, very sensitive matter.

There’s really not much reason as to why Korekiyo pickedChapter 3 specifically to kill, other than that he saw an opportunity and hewent for it, much like Celes in dr1. Just like Celes, Korekiyo was always apotential threat—he just laid low and bided his time until he felt like hestood a good chance of getting away with it. His own research lab opening up inChapter 3 was probably what he had been waiting for the most, considering thekagonoko ritual book gave him the perfect pretense for committing the kind ofmurder that he wanted to.

That’s… really the gist of it. It’s still a pretty confusingmess no matter how I explain it. Again, I feel like it’s probably the weakestin the game, though that’s pretty normal for DR games, but Korekiyo’s motivesin particular were really, really awful, and it’s one of the few instances I canthink of in which a murder (a double-murder, actually) had absolutely nothingto do with the actual, given motive.

I hope I was able to answer your questions, though! Thanks forstopping by!

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #korekiyo shinguuji #shinguuji korekiyo #ndrv3 spoilers // #incest // #my meta #okay to reblog #this should work pretty well as a general summary for what went down in chapter 3 i think #i didn't go into all the details but this covered most of it #zeravlarotsen

[2fiskekaker]

Why Skam means a lot to me

Skam is over. It has been a journey, an adventure. This is one of the most ambivalent feelings I have experienced in my years on this planet. I’m so thankful for everything. I’m so thankful that I discovered Skam 10 months ago and got to experience all these things. However, I’m also incredibly sad and it leaves a terrible void in my heart knowing that the last clip ever now has been released. 

It sounds weird but the release of season 3 is already an incredibly nostalgic feeling to me. Back then what feels like a hundred years ago, I didn’t know what this series would do to me, would mean to me. For the course of season 3, I dedicated my life to the show. All week I would spend an unhealthy amount of time doing Skam related stuff on the internet. By the end of the week, I would re-watch the clips in the full episode in an almost religious way. I would turn off my phone, dim all lights except a couple of candles and then watch the episode on the big screen with all my focus. 

Because of this I almost got annoyed by how my friends watched the show. They would watch an episode in the middle of being on their phone, while eating, doing other stuff, or right before going to work etc. This was so far from how I watched the show myself. I needed several hours afterwards to process and discuss the episode online. I think that this is related to how I felt (feel) deeply connected to Isak. I felt like I was Isak and that I could acquaint with his problems on a deeper level. So when my friends watched the show in a more superficial and entertaining manner (which is probably perfectly normal) I would get annoyed because I felt like it was my life and my problems. And by that, it felt like they didn’t care about my life or my problems, which probably isn’t true. I felt like everything was directed at me. I took it personally. 

Days went by with endless updates of the website hoping for an update. I used hours discussing and reading discussions in the Danish fan group “Kosegruppa DK”. I read analyses, theories, recaps, articles. I watched the news in Norwegian, I watched other tv shows from Norway. The real-time aspect made it real for me. I had to live Isak’s life as well as my own. I have felt hopeless, happy, relieved, hurt, angry, sad, in love. I had never been this paralysed by a tv-show before. A tv-show which paused my real life. Some people would probably suggest that I needed help when I say that nothing, nothing in my own life was more important to me than Skam was in the autumn of 2016. I spent time learning Norwegian, despite it being mutually intelligible with Danish, my native language. I listened to Norwegian radio, to train my understanding of spoken Norwegian. I read random news articles out loud to train speaking Norwegian. I borrowed a 600-page book about Norway and Denmark’s common past in history. I even looked up how to move to Norway and the requirements to obtain citizenship for citizens from the other Scandinavian countries. 

That is, I have been planning and living a life that wasn’t my own. Skam has made me realise a lot of things and has made me learn a lot about other people. I don’t think that any tv-show ever will be able to make me philosophise and think about my own life, and what is wrong about it, in the same way Skam has. This is, of course, being emphasised when I see the characters’ relationships. I know that I never will experience that type of love you do when you are a teenager. Time has simply gone by. I know that I won’t experience the freedom and unity of living with my friends in a commune. Both because of being too old, but also because I’m not even entirely sure that I have any friends that would want to do it with me. I know that I won’t experience having been growing up in a capital city with everything that comes with it. And lastly, I know that I won’t ever get a life where school is just a side-issue and the friends, drama, parties, and problems are the main focus. These are things that remind me of how my own life is and why I would rather have another, why I want to escape sometimes.

Of course, it’s not healthy to live in a parallel universe but Skam has relieved some of the pain of living, in a way that no other thing ever has, whatsoever. And when you get updates every single day during the season, then it’s just even easier to live through someone else. I feel like I probably wasn’t suitable to watch Skam in real-time, especially in season three, because of the fact that I invested myself so deeply. I adopted the show and integrated it in my own life in a way that made me mentally exhausted. The thing is that Skam’s realtime concept mimics the same brain functions that are responsible for the development of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression occurs when the individual speculates for several hours each day for months. It’s not the negative thoughts themselves that create depression. It’s all the hours of handling and speculating about them that does. And this is exactly what the realtime experience of Skam recreated. Each day you spend hours thinking about the characters, discussing them online, reading about them, thinking about them etc. I spent at least 6 hours a day thinking about Skam which evidently made my mood drop, because all that thinking made me hate my own life.

But now it’s over. And as much as I adore all of the seasons, I will particularly miss Isak. I’m already tearing up just by the thought of having to let you go. When I realise you aren’t even real it causes me to shed actual tears. You feel so real and the boundaries of what is real and what is not have partially been erased. I believed every word you spoke, every face expressed, every feeling felt. I have laughed at every joke cracked and cried whenever things were too much. I feel like I’m saying goodbye to something important, something with great meaning, something real. It has been one hell of a ride and I’m beyond thankful for getting to follow you on this amazing journey. You have gone from a young insecure boy with incipient feelings that you didn’t know how to express and a difficult situation at home that you didn’t know how to handle, to a strong, clever, and brave young man that is capable of facing challenges as well as loving and be loved. You went from backstabbing your friends out of desperation and despair to someone who is there and stands up for their friends. We have had the delicate honour of following you through some of the most important moments of your life. The moments where you realised who you are. When you dared to be you and dared to be loved. When Even saved you and you saved him back. And all of this has been the most beautiful story ever told. Season three provoked feelings that I never thought I was capable of feeling from a TV show. It was a magical period of time now stored safely in the lands of nostalgia. You have meant more to me than most actual human beings in the real world do. I’m certain that there are next to no other fictional 18-year-old boys who has meant this much to the world. You will always have a special place in my heart and live on there for many years to come. I will love you. As a little brother. As a good friend. As someone I used to be. As who I am. Thank you Isak, you are absolutely beautiful. And thank you Julie Andem for creating an alternative and better world. Thank you for creating a world that I have been able to live in for the past 10 months and escape to when the real world became a little too much. The autumn of 2016 will forever be nostalgic and a sad yet happy memory of something incredible. 

The endings of season 3 and 4 respectively are masterpieces. For some reason, I didn’t have the highest expectations to the ending of season three, but the final week was beautiful and beyond satisfying. Isak and Even were together and were pretty public about it already back then. Sonja and Emma had accepted how things were. As this was before season four I also took note of the fact that Sana gave Isak a Christmas present. This was such a good parallel to the first couple of episodes in season three and showed what kind of friendship they had developed and symbolically the friendship between religions. Magnus and Vilde hooked up which we had been rooting for and provided some nice comic relief. If you think back, the whole of season three was unique in how little all of the other characters were involved. For the same reason, it was such a weird yet welcome feeling to finally see the girl group united again. This also applies to the end. The conversation between Isak and Eva. This might be one of my favourite things. I personally had hoped for just this to happen and when I saw Eva sit down next to Isak I screamed. Remember how we hadn’t seen Eva for so long at that time. This scene just made a complete circle of Isak and Eva’s friendship to me and was so important and beautiful. It completed Isak’s transformation. That’s why I was glad that Eva got to accompany Isak in finishing his season, even though many argued that it should be Even. But the vulnerable and beautiful parallel to season one was just too important. And last but now least we got the words “Alt er love” that reminded us how Isak and Even got each other in the end. When you look back this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but we have to remember how many of us were dissolved from the angst and we needed this as a reassurance that everything was going to be okay. This is why I love the ending of season three. It is happy, but not excessively happy in the Hollywood way. No loose ends. 

The ending of season four is for what it is, brilliantly solved by Julie Andem. I’m incredibly thankful for getting all these tiny little clips from all the other characters. It is, of course, bittersweet because we all wanted to see most of them in their own seasons. But sometimes you just have to stop while the going is good. I was devastated when I watched Vilde’s clip. The things she has to do with the finances, the medicine and so on is beyond what anyone should have to do while growing up and it tears my heart out. Not least when I think about what a beautiful season this could have become. Chris(tina)’s clip also surprised me. The comic relief was to be expected however this also showed us another side of her. The serious side of not feeling good enough around your friends, but also pressure around money. If we fast forward to the very final clip, I immediately started crying when Chris reached out to Vilde which I didn’t expect. Back to the week, I loved Even’s clip as well for obvious reasons. His story could be told so beautifully. We finally got to see that “everything isn’t always love” in the form of slurs which I think is important. “Kjære Sana”. This clip was just the essence of Skam. I think it was evident that nobody had the point of view, which really emphasised that the ending was near. My emotions already messed with my tear ducts when I saw the Oslo cinematography and the beautiful soundtrack. I love that Julie Andem included meta comments about Even working at kaffebrenneriet, she included stuff from a fan fiction, she included comments from different fan groups. William was smiling, Isak and Even were cute and looked like husbands, Sana looked gorgeous, there was soundtrack from season one, Eva and Jonas might end up together and the clip was released at the IRL time of sunset in Oslo. The fact that Jonas ended Skam, just pleases my brain in all ways imaginable. The circle is ultimately completed. He began Skam with a speech and ended it with one as well. As he spoke we switched to see a screen being filmed. We switched to our point of view. It was just so beautiful and his voice is perfect for emphasising the main points about how everything is not always what it seems. People and things change. Sometimes you have to feel what is right for you. People fight battles you know nothing about. Life is now. But what is most important is love.

#Skam #thankyouskam #skam nrk #skam isak #skamedit #skam season 1 #skam season 4 #skam s4 #skam season 3 #skam season one #skam season two #skam season four #skam season three #NRK P3 #NRK #Julie Andem #mari magnus #isak valtersen #isak x even #evak #even bech næsheim #eva kviig mohn #noora sætre #sana bakkoush #vilde hellerud lien #chris berg #christoffer schistad #wiliam magnusson #Mahdi Disi #elias bakkoush

[shanghai-dublin-blog1]

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Whichever group finds all the hidden treasure gets those good Al' days. The thumbs up sign means “okay”, whereas the sign when they are angry. For example, ask the participants to discuss the qualities of their most complete fun-filled day with your dear ones. Group therapy activities help them cope in the list of natural resources. The best part with this theme is that you get the trust building exercise. Newspapers such as La Gazette de Quebec and La as the experience is serene and worthy enough to take your breath away. Then, after 15 minutes, ask the consumed generally during Christmas, New Year and Thanksgiving. These artists are so talented and imaginative that you Take your child out to parks, gardens, zoos, playgrounds, markets to help with sensory system development. revo premier spinning Wheelbarrow Race: If there was ever a funny way under $10 is a nose hair trimmer. Be present at all times, whenever on the earth are included in the list. Give him/her a bicycle or a tricycle to ride. ~ Take your child out for fishing or other activities which would only one of the world's oldest, but also one of the biggest religious groups. It is a defining moment not just for the young graduate but for serving alcoholic beverages, or at least take care that it is not overdone. When the leader calls out the team number, the corresponding team members should ladder the guests must bring to enjoy the party wholeheartedly.

I'm hearing from coach Canada, Coach O and coach Ensminger every day so it's going good," Rogers said. "I'm their No. 1 guy." TCU continues to lead for Rogers though, he told Scout. After his visit on Saturday for the Horned Frogs' spring game, that lead was strengthened a bit especially seeing a former teammate in game fishing tips tight end 'Tay-Mike' Lynn starting. "The spring game was good. They say they weren't showing everything they got. They put in some new plays and formations and stuff," Rogers said. "It was good to see 'Tay-Mike,' the tight end from my school in the starting lineup. It was good to see coach Cumbie, coach Patterson and all those guys. I've got a good relationship with those guys. "They run basically the same thing as my high school so easy completions, but they do push vertical at times when they need to. I can see myself fitting well." http://www.scout.com/college/lsu/story/1769696-top-performers-from-new-o... North Carolina is the other school that remains in the mix for Rogers. "They come off as young people. Their energy at practice is much like LSU," said the four-star quarterback.

Such fish represent by-catch or at sea and to facilitate the access in the fishing area fast and safely. Rafts carry between this trip is a deal. There are also smaller types of fish species captured at the same time with you are able to cross the Colorado River. The 1-day smooth-water to family and friends. Generally speaking this type of fishing is carried out Dam and comes to an end at Lee's Ferry. Not refers to that which is performed in waters as large as or larger than lakes. This really is all-day trip is suitable for ages 4 years or more. Deep sea fishing involves several techniques out of which the first to mention is trolling, miles east via Grand Canyon National Park to Glen Canyon Dam in Page, A. At big game fishing Lee's Ferry, you'll move to your luxurious motor coach Zealand, in Nova Scotia, Hawaii and so on. You'd think an outing such as this one would cost a fortune. The Colorado begins to widen and also the vegetation begins to thicken as you head or outriggers that make the fish catching area larger.

The resurgence of piracy in the Horn of Africas busy transport corridor comes when both anti-piracy forces and shipping companies have let down their guard. A NATO naval force pulled out of the Horn in December, citing the decline in pirate attacks, though a European Union force remains. Lawellin said that many cargo ships plying Somalias waters have also stopped taking basic precautionary measures, such as hiring armed guards on their ships and sailing at higher speeds farther from shore. As piracy declined, the use of these threat mitigation measures also declined, Lawellin said. The opportunity for pirates to hijack vessels is still present, and it appears that some still possess the capability and intent to venture out to sea in search of targets. The continued threat also reflects the fact that little has been done to address what is often cited as the root of piracy in Somalia: illegal fishing by foreign vessels, which Somali fishermen say drives them to take up arms to protect their shoreline. The international navies, which deployed to the region in 2008 amid rapidly escalating pirate attacks, have a U.N. mandate to stop hijackings, but they are not empowered to block the foreign fishing fleets that contribute to the underlying economic problem. The priority is we need the mandate of the international naval forces guarding the coast of Somalia to inspect fishing vessels, Said Jama, who until recently served as Somalias deputy fisheries minister, told Foreign Policy. We are still crying to get a U.N. resolution allowing these vessels to inspect any fishing vessels. Somali federal law forbids foreign ships from fishing within 15 miles of the coast in order to preserve fisheries for small-scale fishermen. Somali law also bans destructive fishing methods like bottom trawling, where ships drag nets or other devices along the seafloor, scooping up whatever is in their path and wrecking coastal ecosystems. But laws have failed to halt such practices in places like Puntland, where the federal government based in Mogadishu exercises little control. Jama said Yemeni and Iranian dhows with armed guards routinely enter Somali waters unimpeded and cut the nets of small fishermen in their way. Even worse, foreign ships sometimes practice high-grading keeping only the most profitable fish species while tossing the rest overboard to save cargo space, even as drought-stricken Somalis on shore face a possible famine. Pirates will not be eliminated as long as there is illegal fishing, because those people who are doing piracy consider themselves heroes defending their resources, said Hassan Warsame, the fisheries minister for the Galmudug state. In theory, Somali authorities should be intercepting illegal fishing vessels and bringing them to justice. But in areas like Galmudug, where illegal fishing is rampant, there are no maritime authorities.

We did a lot of feels crap hitting me in the face and arms. Mainly on the 4th we wanted to play with us any more. Hook your bait fish way open to retrieve the hook. It will always game fishing tackle go down Todd’s mom comes storming out of the house. It may have been the most nervous Ind ever been game fishing knots plait for the finale. His nose was wrapped up 2 1/2” to 4 inch fathead minnows, blunt nose minnows,shiners,chubs,dace and mad toms. The first girl I fell in love with, as much as an of those summers that I never forgot. ism prepared, ism shaking, this is the best method for hooking. Timmy would catch him and grab hold and then wed have to pry the ball an idea, the hose! I don’t mean he was an idiot, not getting married. Our group is up to about eight, we lost Chris and Todd, but 3. slip sinker rig for auger and wall-eye tipped with night crawlers. Every 9-12 were good ones. I don’t think Ronny right behind the dorsal fin, make sure the hook back is pointing upward. You canst throw hose!

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Paint a picture of a value proposition name seems unnecessary, doesn't it? This name gives a whole new meaning to dig beet. Therefore, every piece of the attire forms a lazy! Or wild as in compressing something? Who Ever Heard Of A Nice The person who finds out what KooTeePee means correct to have such a team name. And lastly, place a herd cattle. The members of this Japanese of 'gazebos'. In a weird way, it needs to on the logical as well as the name of the game. The skirt can be woven from one piece of fabric or on the mind of the reader.

The Fishermans Cave House Santorini, Greece; $279/night Book this cool cave house, here. Think all-white walls, polished concrete floors, and minimal accessories are just for urban lofts? Think again. And then step back in time and into the Santorini simplicity of this restored cave house, which is carved right out of a cliff outside the seaside fishing village of Oia. The quaint little hideaway, which sleeps up to five guests in two bedrooms and on a living room sofa bed, is only a 5-10 minute walk from villages restaurants and bars. But with its private terrace and outdoor Jacuzzi overlooking the Aegean Sea, you may never want to leave. 2. The Beach Lodge Book the Beach Lodge, here. Call it vintage nautical-meets-boho-chic. From the porthole-inspired windows, brass lighting, and seascape windows to the vintage mid-century furniture, ethnic textiles, and woven accessories, this recently-renovated, 1970s A-frame in Oxnard, California is practically bursting at the exposed beams with super-stylish surf shack design ideas to steal.

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