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sharkselfies · 3 years

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The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 1

Since some folks requested it on Twitter, I’ve started transcribing The Minds Behind The Terror podcast episodes! Below the cut you’ll find episode 1, where showrunners Dave Kajganich and Soo Hugh talk to Dan Simmons, the author of the novel The Terror, about episodes 1-3 of the show. They discuss Simmons’s initial inspiration for writing the book, the decisions they made to adapt it into a television series, and the depictions of some of the characters such as the Tuunbaq, Hickey, and “Lady Silence.”

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 1

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

Dave Kajganich: Hello! Welcome to Minds Behind The Terror podcast. I’m Dave Kajganich, I am a creator and one of the showrunners of the AMC show The Terror, and I’m here in the studio with executive producer and co-showrunner Soo Hugh.

Soo Hugh: Hello!

DK: And we welcome today the author of the sublime novel The Terror, on which our show is based, author Dan Simmons, calling in from Colorado. Welcome, Dan! Hi!

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave, thank you.

DK: So let’s start with the very beginning. This was a mystery from actual naval history that you decided to transform into a novel that was crossed with Gothic horror. Can you tell us a little bit about where you got the idea from this, how you went about preparing to write it, anything that can give us insight into how you blended all of these remarkable genres into this incredible book.

DS: I’ve known since I was a kid that I wanted to tell a story about either the North or South Pole. And the reason is in 1957, 58, when I was very young, actually I was just a fetus, they had the international geophysical year, and that really caught my imagination. Now the international geophysical year saw cooperation between American and Soviet scientists, it was the height of the Cold War, that’s the first time they submit(?) a permanent base at the South Pole, and I fell in love with Arctic stories. I had one book left on a book contract with a publisher I really liked, and we hadn’t decided what that book was, and I wanted to write a scary story about the Arctic, in this case the Northern Arctic, and that happened because I was doing a lot of research on Antarctica and just couldn’t figure out what the macabre, Gothic, scary part would be. I wanted to put it in, but I didn’t think they’d go for, you know, an eight foot tall vampire penguin.

[laughter]

DK: You might be surprised!

DS: There was a footnote on a book I was reading about the Franklin Expedition, which I had never heard of, and I decided that’s what I was gonna write about, and it had a tremendous amount of the unknown that I could fill in, that’s what novelists love. And so I told my editors excitedly that this was what I was gonna do, I would call it The Terror after the HMS Terror that went with the Erebus, got stuck in the ice, all the crew disappeared in history… And they said no.

[laughter]

DS: ...it was the first time the publishers did that. I said, “Why not? I think it’s gonna be a pretty good novel.” And they said, “Look, nobody’s interested in a bunch of people that’ve been dead for 150 years.”

SH: That sounds like some of our meetings.

[laughter]

DS: So I did what maybe you do, in such a meeting, I just thanked them, and I liked them all, and I had a good dinner(?) and I said goodbye, and bought back my last book on the contract and went out and wrote it on spec.

SH: Well why don’t we take a step back, Dave, and why don’t you tell us about how you found Dan’s book and that experience?

DK: Sure! Dan, you might remember some of these steps from your side of it, which is that originally this was auctioned by Universal as a feature, and I sort of tried to get the rights and was a bit too late, and tracked them down to the producers at Universal who were running the project and got myself hired as the screenwriter for a feature adaptation. By the time I was ready to start actually committing an outline to the paper, Universal had let the rights go because there was a competing project. It was interesting to sort of rack up reasons why people wanted to make it but didn’t feel that they could pull the trigger, and we were so grateful when AMC finally called us back and said, “Look, we’ve figured out a model where we can do this as a limited series,” it really felt like ten episodes was a great length for this, because we could blend genres in a way that, you know, we could unpack sort of slowly, more slowly than a lot of shows would’ve done, and drive the plot as much as we could, like the novel, with character choices and decisions as opposed to just horror kind of entering the frame and taking over for one set piece after another. So it was a long journey, getting this to AMC, but at the end of the day I think we found the right home for it.

DS: I can no longer imagine a two hour version, feature film version of this story, and I can’t imagine a second season of this story, I think it was just right.

SH: It does feel like we did a ten hour cinematic novel.

[audio from the show]

Crozier: Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There’ll be no melodramas here--just live men, or dead men.

SH: Dan, Dave and I talk about how addictive the research gets for this when you start going down the rabbit hole, how did you approach the research?

DS: I think most novelists run into that, but since I write a lot of quasi-historical novels, at least set in history, I get totally addicted to going down the rabbit hole. Readers say, “Well, Simmons’ book is too long, and the descriptions of things are too exhausting,” but I watch your characters go on deck and there are all the things and views and everything that I tried so hard to describe and then people tell me, y’know, “talky, verbose,” and in print I have to do it that way, but you just pan the camera a little bit.

DK: You have words, we have images! For every thousand of yours, we get one!

DS: Yeah.

SH: But I remember this passage in your book where it talks about all the different ices, and you vest it with so much psychological import. We talk about that passage a lot in the writers room, it was one of our highlights, of this is how you do great descriptive writing.

DK: And you made so many parallels between things like the environments of the ships and characters, you built a kind of code book for the show without realizing you were doing it, which is making visual metaphors out of a lot of these things that would normally just be exposition or historical detail.

SH: Well especially between Crozier and the ship, I mean when you hear about Crozier’s relationship with Terror, and you have so many amazing passages about, you know, the groan of the ship and how it, y’know, and you cut to a scene with Crozier and how you feel that the bones of Crozier is embedded in the ship, and we really took a lot from that.

DS: Well I noticed that on one of the episodes where Lord Franklin [sic] is trying to get back in touch with Crozier, you know, trying to be friends with him again, I think it’s a brilliant episode you guys wrote.

[show audio]

Franklin: You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.

Crozier: I’m a captain. I’m--I’m peevish off my own ship. I leave it and I hear disaster knocking at its door, before I’m ten steps away.

DS: And that was beautifully written, that. You got so much of Crozier right there.

DK: It was a pleasure to write these characters on the backs of your writing of these characters, because you really--I mean, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you know, from having written, you know, a whole long string of historical books, is to make these people’s psychologies feel as modern as they must have felt in their day, while still being able to articulate some of the blind spots of being from the eras they were from.

I’m curious from sort of a history nerd point of view, if people watch the series and like the series, and read the book and like the book, and want to know more about this expedition, what’s the first book about the Franklin Expedition you would point people to? What was most helpful or most interesting in your research?

DS: I apologize, I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s a collection of stories about both the South and North Pole, and so it’s a short section on the Franklin Expedition, but it didn’t make mistakes, and most of the other books that I read, uh, keyed, and videos for that matter, like PBS did a story about the Franklin Expedition, but they keyed off a 1987 attempt by several doctors to figure out what happened to the crew, and they exhumed three crewmen’s bodies from the first island where they stayed the first winter, and those crewmen had only been on the ship a couple of months, but they decided because of a high lead content that the lead had poisoned them and then made them stupid, and made them paranoid and everything, but they didn’t compare that test of lead with any background people in London at the time, and later they did, so I didn’t believe the lead thing.

DK: Well that’s the fascinating thing about a mystery with this many parts and pieces, kind of in flux, is, you know, you can create all kinds of competing narratives about it, and what’s fascinating about writing a fictional version is you can’t have that kind of ambiguity, you have to make a decision. I think people will enjoy very much ways that the show and the book have a similar point of view, and also ways that they diverge in their points of view, because there are so many ways to tell this story--

SH: Well you know how much we invest responsibility in the audience as well, right?

DK: Sure.

SH: In terms of your book and our show as well, we’re not against interpretation, that there’s a responsibility on the audience’s part to put together--we’re not gonna hand feed them. There’ll be some people who put more of an onus on Franklin, and others who would say, “You know, if I was in that position, I probably would’ve made the same decision,” “Oh no, this definitely killed the men,” “No, this killed them!” and that dialogue is exciting, you know, when you read fans talk about your show and your books and really smart, insightful ways.

[show audio]

Franklin: Would it help if I said that I made a mistake?

Crozier: You misunderstand me, Sir John, I--I only meant to describe why I brood, not that I judge.

DS: I don’t worry about who or what my reading audience is. People ask me about that and I don’t imagine a certain reader. But I’ve always tried to write for somebody who’s more intelligent than I am. My perfect reader would be just smart as hell, speak eight languages, you know, have fantastic world experiences, and I want to write something that will please that person, and I think your show does the same thing.

DK: Well we were--that was our motto! We wanted to be sort of the dumbest members of our collaboration and there’s a sort of horrifying moment when you realize that’s come true.

[laughter]

[show background music]

DK: Tell us a little bit about why you made the decisions to tell the story in the order you told it, and whether you sort of felt like there was anything from the way you had told it that we were--or a missed opportunity. We’d love to know sort of what your experience of that was.

DS: I don’t think there were any missed opportunities in terms of not adapting my way of telling it, and I can’t remember all the reasons for why I broke it down that way, some of them were just very localized to, you know, when I was writing that particular bit. But I do know that it gains a lot by being told chronologically the way you’re doing it, so for me that seems now the logical way to tell it again.

DK: Have you ever read the novel in chronological order? When we hired writers for the writers room, we gave them a list of what the chapters were like in chronological order, and I think we asked half the room to read it in your order and half the room to read it in chronological order so we could have a discussion, a meaningful discussion about whether there were things about telling it without being in chronological order that we wanted to embrace or not. It was a fantastic experience and I wonder if you’ve ever read your chapters in chronological order? ‘Cause it’s also a fantastic book!

[laughter]

DS: I haven’t read it that way, they were that way in my mind before I started getting fancy and breaking them up and moving them around in time and space, but I would love to have seen that experiment.

DK: The reason we can get away with it in the show is because there is a loved book out there that people trust, and you know, it is a classic in this genre, so I mean this is a perfect example of, you know, the amount of gratitude we owe the book, because we got away with a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get away with because you came before us.

SH: And speaking of those rabid fans, Dan, it’s been really interesting reading audience reactions to the show from people who’ve loved the books and who just naturally will compare the two, and we’ve been heartened by just how supportive our fans have become--are of the show. There is this controversy, some people like our choice to give Lady Silence a voice and some people feel it was sacrilege to your book, where do you fall on that? DS: At first I was surprised. In fact when you were hunting for an actress for Lady Silence and I read about that, it said somebody who’s fluent in this Inuit language and this Inuit language, and I said, “What the hell?”

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut to her dying father]

DS: Having seen her with the tongue and heard her, and knowing the different reason they call her Lady Silence, it all works for me and I was also surprised when Captain Crozier could speak fairly fluent, you know, dialect, ‘cause I had him just not understanding a thing.

[show audio]

[Crozier speaking Inuktitut to Silna in the same scene as above]

DS: I love it when readers get rabid about not changing something from a book, and I have to talk to them sometimes, not ‘cause I have a lot of things adapted, this is the first one, but I love movies. They say “Aren’t you worried it will hurt your book?” and first I explain Richard Comden(?)’s idea that you can’t hurt a book anyway, except by not reading it, I mean the books are fine, no matter how bad some adaptation becomes. Books abide, and so I wasn’t concerned. With the changes that I see, I get sorta tickled, whereas some readers get upset, and they just have that set. So I think that the vast majority of viewers haven’t--well, I know the vast majority haven’t read the book, haven’t heard of the book, probably, they’re gonna keep watching because of the depth of the characters, and that’s based on the first two episodes, and I agree with them completely.

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut]

Crozier: She said that if we don’t leave now, we’re going to “huk-kah-hoi.”

Blanky: Disappear.

SH: We get asked a lot of questions about the supernatural element of the show and the way a monster does or does not figure in the narrative, and seeing our episodes, did it feel surprising or did it feel faithful to the way you imagined it as well to your book?

DS: It was surprising to me at how well it was done, because it’s hard, I know, to show restraint in a series like this, and certainly in a movie, but it’s hard to show restraint at showing and explaining the monster.

[show audio]

[ominous music, Tuunbaq roaring, men screaming]

DS: The way you did it in the first few episodes to me were just lovely, just, you know, a hint of a glance at something and then you see the results of this creature, so that’s what I tried to do in the novel, one of the reasons I moved around through space and time, part of what I wanted to do was not cheapen the story and not cheapen the reality of these poor men dying by just throwing in a monster, and so I tried to do it in a way that would not disrespect the true tale, and I believe you’re doing it the same way I tried.

DK: The way you incorporated the supernatural into the book, I mean, I was a fan of it when I first read it. It was jaw dropping the way that it fits so well on a level of plot, on a level of character, and on a level of theme. So when we got the green light to adapt it I was so confident that we were going to be able to do something with it that would be able to be nuanced because the bones of it are so organically terrific.

SH: It helped us know what we didn’t want to do. That formed so much of our conversation, of “this is what we do not want, this is what we do not want,” and slowly you whittled down to getting down to the essence of what this thing had to be.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling]

DK: Another character from the book that really stands out for fans that they are wondering what in the world we’re doing with is Manson. [laughter] And I was curious what you made of the fact that he is pretty invisible in the first three episodes of the show, and that some of his plot beats have been given to a character called Gibson, who I don’t remember is--I don’t think he’s featured very much in the novel. And I wondered if that caught you off guard or if you sort of intuitively had a sense of what we were doing in making that change?

DS: Any discussion of Manson to me leads to Hickey converting him to his future, his tribe, the tribe he wants to have, group of worshippers, that I think Hickey wants to have, but he does it by sex below decks. Hickey’s not gay at all, he’s a manipulator, to me, and he was manipulating Manson who was big and dumb, in my book, he’s manipulating him by this sexual encounter. But I was curious whether you were worried about showing that?

DK: Well, we weren’t worried about showing characters having same-sex affairs or relationships. We wanted to make room in Hickey’s character for actual affection, or if not affection then companionship, or some kind of connection.

[show audio]

Hickey: Lieutenant Irving! I was hoping we’d meet.

Crewman: Mind the grease there, sir.

Hickey: I wanted to... thank you… for your help. For your discretion, I mean.

Irving: Call it anything but help, Mr. Hickey. Please. I exercised clemency for a man abused by a devious seducer.

DK: We wanted to make sure that Hickey had access to command in some way that a steward, an officer’s steward, would be able to provide him, that an able seaman wouldn’t be able to provide him, and that was really valuable to us in terms of charting out all of these character stories, was how does he know what he knows about how command is dissatisfied or where the fractures are if he can’t see them from where he’s sleeps in his cot in the forecastle.

SH: I mean we know that there were relations between the same sex on ships, it just was part of this world. Not to belie that there was serious consequences for it, but you know, we have 129 characters, and we wanted them to feel fully fledged and rich, and, you know, passions do naturally develop and have no characters engaged in sexual relations would have felt just as odd and perhaps even more controversial, and when Irving discovers Gibson and Hickey, his shock is from such a subjective point of view of his moral center. It’s not the camera’s perspective, right? Our camera’s very neutral in that scene. It’s Irving, that character at that point in the show, that is infusing a sense of horror, that’s his horror moment.

DS: I’d like to add that it’s not the gay connection that would cause criticism, but I was flayed alive because the most openly quote “gay” unquote character, that is, Hickey, you know, maybe hunting for affection but definitely hunting for power, he’s the only one they said in reviews, and he’s a killer and a bad person, so I’m homophobic, but I was flayed alive for that. The word homophobic appeared in about 80 reviews. Nobody mentioned the purser, who uh--

DK: Right, Bridgens and Peglar.

DS: Yeah. I thought he was a fascinating character. I loved getting glimpses of him in the series because he’s super smart, he’s super wise, he’s probably wiser than any of the commanders, ahd he’s obviously in love with--who is it that he’s in love with in the show?

DK: Peglar.

DS: Yes, that makes sense. And, uh, so Peglar says, you know, “Is this another Herodotus?” and, “No, I’m giving you Swift now,” he’s educating the man he cares for.

[show audio]

Hickey: I understand you cleared up our “association” for Lieutenant Irving? Gibson: You spoke to him.

Hickey: Mhm.

Gibson: Directly?

(beat)

Christ, Cornelius, I’d reassured him.

Hickey: Cornelius Hickey is a “devious seducer.” That was your--that was your reassurance? You’ve got some face, you know that?

DK: We wouldn’t have dramatized Hickey’s story if we weren’t also going to pull in Peglar and Bridgens’ story, because we knew that people, you know, are predisposed to sort of make that kind of quick assumption, and we just wanted to make sure that the show didn’t have that blind spot and reflected the book, which also doesn’t have that blind spot.

SH: We had those same questions with Lady Silence, and I’m sure you did as well. When we meet her, she’s a frightened young woman who’s about to lose her father, and that’s a universal character moment that anyone can relate to, and the otherness is sort of--is secondary, but then once--in the end scene of 1.02, when she’s sitting there grieving her father and then you have that language barrier with everyone else, we worked with Nive on this because we wanted to make sure the language itself was as accurate as possible, so when you say disappear making sure that the disappear in our language means the same thing as disappear in her language. I think whenever you have characters that feel othered in most media and you’re bringing them into your show, Dave and I also just wanted to make sure we weren’t swaying on the pendulum on the other side and being almost too careful about touching them, and with Nive I think when you have an actor of that talent, she was strong, she was representing a voice that she felt very confident in, and that was very reassuring for us.

DS: And it works well, and when her father’s dying, she throws herself on his chest and says “I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I’m not ready,” and I love that in the show because if she’s gonna become a Shaman he’s dying you know it’s not reached that point of education yet where she feels secure and later on you know beyond what we’re discussing today she becomes to me in the show I see her as more and more majestic.

SH: I do love the word majestic ‘cause I think it describes pretty much all of our characters. I agree, I do think there is something very sublime about who they have become at the end because when you go through that much trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful human spirit to endure.

DS: I think that’s one of the central themes of the story that you’ve brought out so clearly. In most post-apocalypse, you know, terrible situation movies and shows, everybody turns nasty as hell, they start shooting each other, it’s just like WWIII when they should be helping each other survive, and I found even though there was controversy, even though there was opposition in this story, people opposing against each other, still that they rose to the occasion. And that is so rare I think in much media these days or even books where the characters are themselves and they do the best they can, and when things get bad they rise to the occasion.

DK: The first conversation you and I had about the book, you know, I was basically pitching you sort of what I thought thematically the book was about, and I talked a lot about, that in a disaster like this, a kind of moral emergency, that we would get a chance to unpack what is sort of best and worst in these characters’ souls.

DS: I confuse readers often when I was on book tour for this book, and it was a long time ago, I’ve written a few million words since then, but I confused people by saying that if you want a theme for the survival story of The Terror, it’s love. It’s love between the men. And just unstinting love. And this came out in a piece of dialogue, in the first two episodes.

[audio from the show]

Franklin: I’ll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. If something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man.

Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John.

Franklin: For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong.

DS: That to me was right the theme I was working with, and with Crozier who shows it a different way, with Fitzjames who’s struggling to show leadership, and between the men despite their hierarchy and the British hierarchy, the rank and lieutenants and so forth, eventually they come down to loving the men they try to save. And I found that lovely.

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

DK: Thank you so much for listening to The Minds Behind The Terror, join us in our next edition when we talk about episodes 4-6 with the additional guest Adam Nagaitis phoning in from London. We will see you soon!

[preview snippet from the next episode plays]

DS: I’ll confess something else to Adam, the first time I watched it, I thought your character was a good guy because he jumped down in that grave to put the lid back on.

[laughter]

#the terror #the terror amc #the minds behind the terror #david kajganich #soo hugh #dan simmons #personal #eps 2-4 should be up within the next couple days here!#hope this will be helpful!#also i am absolutely not a professional lmk if you see any mistakes or think a dif format would be better #and i'll add a google doc link in the reblogs too the tags will just break if it try to add it now

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snarktheater · 3 years

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Hey, d'you have any French book recs? I'm trying to work on my French, and rn I have downloaded one of my favourite book series' French translations, but I figured maybe books already written in French might work better? Also have you read the Ranger's Apprentice series? 1/2

RA's def flawed - the books' narration does like to point bright arrows at the protagonists' intelligence, and the last few books def have the tone of 'old white man trying to write feminism', although at least he's trying? - and it's aimed more to the younger side of YA, but it is still a very fun series, and I can ignore the flaws fairly easily, at least partly due to nostalgia? This rather long lol but I'm wordy.

I'll start with the second question: no, although every time the series is brought up I have to check the French title and go "oh, right, I've seen these books in stores". But I've never purchased or read them. It sounds like something I probably would have enjoyed as a teen but I just missed the mark, and these days I'm trying to drown myself in queer books, so that probably isn't happening.

As for your first question, geez, I haven’t read a French book in years, so this is gonna skew middle grade/YA, though that may not be so bad if the point is to learn the language. I will also say that as a result, these may read a little outdated.

I'll put it under a cut, even if Tumblr has become really bad with correctly displaying read mores. Sorry, mobile crowd.

It's also likely that old readers of the blog will have seen me talk about most of these. I don't feel like going through old posts.

One last thing: while I was curating this list I took the time to make a Goodreads shelf to keep track of those.

The Ewilan books by Pierre Bottero

(It's a testament to how long ago I read these books that these are not the covers of the edition I own, and I can't even find those on Google. I'm settling for a more recent cover anyway since it'll make it easier to find them, presumably)

There are at least three trilogies (that I know of) set in the same world.

The first trilogy is essentially an isekai (so, French girl lands in parallel fantasy world by accident) with elements of chosen one trope, though I find the execution makes it worth the while anyway.

The second trilogy is a direct sequel, so same protagonist but new threat, and the world gets expanded.

The third one is centered around a supporting characters from the previous books, and the first couple of books in it are more her backstory than a continuation, though the third one concludes both that trilogy and advances the story of the other books as well.

Notably these books have a really fun magic system where the characters "draw" things into existence. It's just stuck with me for some reason.

A bunch of stuff by Erik L'Homme

I have read a lot of this man's books, starting with Le Livre des Etoiles.

They also skew towards the young end of YA, arguably middle grade, I never bothered to figure out where to draw the line. They're coincidentally also using the premise of a parallel world to our own (and yes, connected to France again, the French are just as susceptible of writing about their homeland), but interestingly are set from the point of view of characters native to the parallel world.

It also has a very unique magic system, this one based on a mix of a runic alphabet and sort-of poetry. I'll also say specifically for these books that the characters stuck with me way more than others on this list, which is worth mentioning.

This trilogy is my favorite by Erik L'Homme, but I'll also mention Les Maîtres des brisants, which is a fantasy space opera with a pirate steampunk(?) vibe. I think it's steampunk. I could be mistaken. But it's in that vein. It's also middle grade, in my opinion not as good, but it could just be that it came out when I was older.

Another one is Phaenomen, which was a deliberate attempt at skewing older (though still YA). This one is set in our (then-)modern world and centers a group of teens who happen to have supernatural powers. I guess the best way to describe it is a superhero thriller? If you take "superhero" in the sense of "people with individualized powers", since they don't really do a lot of heroing.

...I really need to brush up on genre terminology, don't I.

The Ji series by Pierre Grimbert

This one is actually adult fantasy, though it definitely falls under "probably outdated". It is very straight, for starters, and I'd have to give it another read to give a more critical reading of how it handles race (it attempts to do it, and is well meaning, but I'm not sure it survives the test of time & scrutiny, basically).

If I haven't lost you already, the premise is this: a few generations ago, a weird man named Nol gathered emissaries from each nation of the world and took them to a trip to the titular Ji island. Nobody knows what went down here, but now in the present day, someone is trying to kill off all descendants from those emissaries, who are as a result forced to team up and figure out what's going on.

I'm not going to spoil past that, though I will say it has (surprise) a really unique magic system! I guess you can start to piece together what my younger self was interested in. Which, admittedly, I still am.

Once again, this one also has a strong cast of characters, helped by rich world building and the premise forcing the characters to come from many different cultures (though, again, I can't vouch for the handling of race because it's been too long).

The first series is complete by itself, though it has two sequel series as well, each focusing on the next generation in these families. Because yes, of course they all pair up and have kids. Like I said: very straight.

A whole lot of books by Jean-Louis Fetjaine

OFetjaine is a historian, and I guess he's really interested in Arthurian mythos especially, because he loves it so much he's written two separate high fantasy retellings of them! I'm not criticizing, mind you, we all need a hobby.

The former, the Elves trilogy (pictures above) is very traditional high fantasy. Elves, dwarves, orcs, a world which is definitely fictionalized with a pan-Celtic vibe to it. The holy grail and excalibur are around, but they're relics possessed by the elves and dwarves with very different powers than usual. Et cetera.

Fetjaine also really loves his elves (as the titles might imply), and while they're not exactly Tolkien elves, there's a similar vibe to them. If you like Tolkien and his elf boner, you'll probably like this too. And conversely, if that turns you off, these books probably also won't work for you.

This series also has a prequel trilogy, centered around the backstory of one of the main characters. I...honestly don't remember too much about it, but I liked it, so, there you go, I guess.

I said Fetjaine did it twice. The other series is the Merlin duology, which, as the title implies, is a retelling of Merlin's story. Note that Merlin is also in the other trilogy, but it's a different Merlin; like I said, completely different continuities and stories.

This one is historical fantasy, so it's set in actual Great Britain, and Fetjaine attempts to connect Arthur to a "real" historical figure...but, you know, Merlin is also half-elf and elves totally exist in Brocéliande, so, you know. History.

Okay, that's probably enough fantasy, let me give some classics too.

L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires - Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber is a pretty seminal author of French sci-fi and I should probably be embarrassed that the only book of his that I read was for school, but, it is a really good one, so I'll include it anyway.

It's a novella collection, and when I say "sci-fi" I want to make it clear that it's very old school science fiction. It's more Frankenstein or Black Mirror than Star Trek, what we in French call the anticipation genre of science fiction: you take one piece of technology or cultural norm and project it into the future.

It has a pretty wide range of topics and tones, so it's bound to have some better than others. My personal faves were Du pain et des jeux, where football (non-American) has evolved into basically a wargame, and Tel maître, tel lion, where any animal is considered acceptable as a pet, no matter how absurd it is to keep as a pet. They're both on a comedic end, but there's more heartfelt stuff too.

L'Ecume des Jours - Boris Vian

(no cover because I can't find the one I have, and the ones I find are ugly)

This book is surrealist. Like, literally a part of the surrealist movement. It features things such as a lilypad growing inside a woman's lungs (and, as you well know, lilypads double in size every day, wink wink), the protagonist's apartment becoming larger and smaller to go with his mood and current financial situation, and more that I can't even recall at the moment because remembering this book is like trying to remember having an aneurysm.

It is also really, really fun and touching. Oh, and it has a pretty solid movie adaptation, starring Audrey Tautou, who I think an international audience would probably recognize from Amelie or the Da Vinci Code movie.

I don't really know what else to say. It's a really cool read!

Le Roi se meurt - Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco is somewhat famous worldwide so I wasn't even sure to include him here. He's a playwright who wrote in the "Theater of the Absurd" movement, and this play is part of that.

The premise of this play is that the King (of an unnamed land) is dying, and the land is dying with him. I don't really know what else to say. It's theater of the absurd. It kind of has to be experienced (the published version works fine, btw, no need to track down an actual performance, in my humble opinion).

The Plague - Albert Camus

You've probably heard of this one, and if you haven't, let me tell you about a guy called Carlos Maza

youtube

I'm honestly more including this book out of a sense of duty. The other three are books I genuinely liked and happen to be classics. This book was an awful read. But, um. It's kind of relevant now in a way it wasn't (or didn't feel, anyway) back in 2008 or 2009, when I read it. And I don't just mean because of our own plague, since Camus's plague is pretty famously an allegory for fascism, which my teenage self sneered at, and my adult self really regrets every feeling that way.

Okay, finally, some more lighthearted stuff, we gotta talk about the Belgian and French art of bande dessinée. How is it different from comic books or manga? Functionally, it isn't. It really comes down more to what gets published in the Belgian-French industry compared to the American comics industry, which is dominated by superheroes, or the Japanese manga industry, which, while I'm less familiar with it, I know has some big genre trends as well that are completely separate.

The Lanfeust series - Arleston and Tarquin

This is a YA mega-series, and I can't recommend all of it because I've lost track of the franchise's growth. Also note that I say "YA", but in this case it means something very different from an American understanding of YA. These books are pretty full of sex.

No, when I say YA I mean it has that level of maturity, for better or worse. The original series (Lanfeust de Troy) is high fantasy in a world where everyone has an individual magical ability but two characters find out they're gifted with an absolute power to make anything happen, and while it gets dark at times, it's still very lighthearted throughout, and the humor is...well, I think it's best described as teen boy humor. And it has a tendency to objectify its female characters, as you'll quickly parse out from the one cover I used here or if you browse more covers.

But still, it holds a special place in my heart, I guess. And on my shelves.

The sequel series, Lanfeust des Etoiles, turns it into a space opera, and goes a little overboard with the pop culture reference at times, though overall still maintains that balance of serious/at times dark story and lighthearted comedy.

After that the franchise is utter chaos to me, and I've lost track. I know there was another sequel series, which I dropped partway through, and a spinoff that retold part of the original series from the PoV of the main love interest (in the period of time she spent away from the main group). There was a comedy spin-off about the troll species unique to this world, a prequel series, probably more I don't even know exist.

Les Démons d'Alexia

Something I can probably be a little less ashamed of including here.

Some backstory here. The Editions Dupuis are a giant of the Belgian bande dessinée industry, and for many, many years I was subscribed to their weekly magazine. That magazine was (mostly) made up of excerpts from the various books that the éditions were publishing at the time; those that were made of comic strips would usually get a couple pages of individual scripts, while the ongoing narratives got cut into episodes that were a few pages long (out of a typical 48 page count for a single BD album). Among those were this series.

For the first few volumes, I wasn't super into this series, probably because I was a little too young and smack dab in the middle of my "trying to be one of the boys" phase. But around book 3 I got really invested, to the point where I own the second half of the series because I had canceled by subscription by then but still wanted to know more.

Alexia is an exorcist with unusual talents, but little control, who's introduced to a group that specializes in researching paranormal phenomena, solving cases that involve the paranormal, that kinda stuff.

As a result of the premise, the series has a pretty slow start since it has to build up mystery around the source of Alexia's powers, but once it gets going and we get to what is essentially the series' main conflict, it gets really interesting.

Plus, witches. I'm a simple gay who likes strong protagonists and witches.

Murena

There was a point where my mtyhology nerdery led me to look for more stuff about the historical cultures that created them, and so I'd be super into stuff set in ancient Rome (I'd say "or Greece or Egypt" but let's face it, it was almost always Rome).

Murena is a series set just before the start of Emperor Nero's rule. You know, the one who was emperor when Rome burned, and according to urban legend either caused the fire or played the fiddle while it did (note: "fiddle" is a very English saying, it's usually the lyre in other languages). He probably didn't, it probably was propaganda, but he was a) a Roman Emperor, none of whom were particularly stellar guys and b) mean to Christians, who eventually got to rewrite history. So he's got a bad rep.

The series goes for a very historical take on events, albeit fictionalized (the protagonist and main PoV, the titular Lucius Murena, is himself fictional) and attempts to humanize the people involved in those events. Each book also includes some of the sources used to justify how events and characters are depicted, which is a nice touch.

It's also divided in subseries called "cycles" (books 1-4, 5-8 and the ongoing one starts at 9). I stopped after 9, though I think it's mostly a case of not going to bookstores often anymore. Plus it took four years between 9 and 10, and again between 10 and 11. But the first eight books made for a pretty solid story that honestly felt somewhat concluded as is, so it's a good place to start.

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autumnblogs · 3 years

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Day 43: Openbound

We’ll principally be doing Act 6 Intermission 3 today, so expect lots of pictures in this one!

Believe it or not, I initially didn’t like Openbound very much; I felt like it kind of dragged on my first readthrough, and generally had a pretty hard time getting myself to care about the Dancestors. They’re a pretty unsympathetic bunch.

Then again, lots of Homestuck characters are pretty unsympathetic! I’ve been really feeling that in the second half, as retrospect allows me to view a lot of secondary characters through the lens that we’re not intended to get attached to them.

That said, Openbound is actually pretty key to helping us understand the second half of the comic, I think, and makes explicit a lot of the themes that it explores, and how it builds upon the first half.

I think that the theme of Openbound as a self-contained work within Homestuck that we can use as a tool to decode Homestuck can be concisely stated like this; “Nostalgia and a desire for unity with the past causes toxic stagnation.”

So, aside from the introduction that we’ve already gotten to Meenah through the short conversation she had with the other kids, this is our first real opportunity to get to know her! Boy is she obsessed with money.

Money, like Cake, is a symbol that is associated with the Aspect of Life. As an aspect principally associated with Raw Power - the power to do what you want, unfettered by the stringent restrictions that are associated with Doom - it’s natural that Life would be associated with money.

The origin of money in history is pretty nebulous; it precedes the invention of writing, so any theory concerning its invention is ultimately conjecture. What I think is interesting about money is that the move toward a monetary economy in history mostly (but not always) happens as a result of the fact that it is way more efficient to collect taxes; the state mints standard coins, only accepts taxes in the form of standard coins, and propagates them into the economy by buying goods and services from the market.

It’s a tool of government, and even though Meenah may abrogate her inheritance, the Princess can’t escape her birthright. Money offers control, security... and power. What makes all of this extra interesting is that money is effectively worthless in the afterlife. Here, there’s actually nothing for her to really buy or spend it on; anyone can dream up whatever they want with ease.

It’s a nice bit of callback humor that Meenah has the same reaction to discovering the Thorns of Oglogoth that Rose does, but unlike Rose, Meenah actually does destroy them on the spot.

For being so headstrong and dangerous, there are ways in which Meenah is really pretty surprisingly sensible.

Lord English can destroy ghosts - this has always been a pretty disturbing thought for me. I may have said something to this effect before, but if I haven’t I’m a free-thinking Theist - raised in the Church, and largely independent in terms of beliefs, but I’m still pretty convinced that there is some kind of life after death. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much in works that have final death as a general presupposition, but it always bothers me when some kind of eternal life after death exists in a setting, and can be arbitrarily denied by evil beings with some power or another, like how some Demons and Liches can destroy or devour a soul in Dungeons and Dragons.

In Homestuck though, it fits with the themes established by the ways in which everyone God Tiers - spiritual power can be pretty arbitrary, and generally signifies very little about the moral worth of the one who has it; it does not intrinsically elevate the one who has it. It fits with its general criticism of power and the powerful, whether that’s the Mayor’s hatred of Kings, or the associating of corporatism with the worst parts of Jane’s characterization and Crockercorp in general.

Lord English has the power to destroy ghosts and end the lives of immortals not because he has attained to any kind of heightened spiritual awareness. He’s just some douchebag who through cosmic serendipity was in the right place at the right time to become basically all-powerful.

I adore Meenah’s spark. Who gives a fuck if Lord English is invincible? She knows exactly what she’s going to do when she gets her hands on him, and she’s got a plan from the outset. I think it’s also interesting the way that even though Meenah is absolutely taken by the spectacle of power, it isn’t sufficient to make her want to join up with English. Only soft power works on Meenah Peixes; emotional intimacy, friendship... keeping her entertained. All of these are the actual way to moderate her violent and dangerous personality.

While neither Rose nor Meenah is a parallel character to either Gendo or Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion (I think, actually, that Dirk is the character who most strongly parallels both of them), this bit reminds me of the way that Ritsuko describes both of them;

Rose says of herself and Meenah, “You’re not very good at this, are you? ... talking to people.”

Ritsuko says of Gendo and Rei, “They’re not very adept (at)... living, I suppose.”

The same can really be said of a lot of characters in Homestuck, particularly the ones who primarily find their identity in some form of power-seeking. Whether it’s Rose, or Dirk, or Meenah, or even someone as innocuous as Jake, none of them is particularly adept at living.

Rose is pretty conciliatory with Meenah; given her attraction to danger and darkness, it’s probably not surprising that she makes such an obvious pass at Meenah in spite of the fact that she probably knows what their relationship was in another life.

Further evidence that Rose is the horniest Homestuck character.

“you know how it is with ancestors

they just kind of hold this inexplicable power over you”

Dave continues to progress down the path of not giving a shit, as did Sollux before him.

He’s not quite to the level of reluctance that he eventually adopts, of choosing to just not engage with English at all.

Gods are, to some extent, aware of the various narrative forces that govern their existence.

About the only thing this piece of nasty trash has in common with Karkat is the extent to which they both blabber, and he helps create contrast with the other, somewhat more likable dancestors. Kankri is pretty much openly contemptible, and really in the worst way. I’m almost inclined to call him a concern troll because of the extent to which his verbal essays exist purely to make him feel better about himself. Any time it comes time for him to listen to people who historically actually suffered from the systems they were involved in, Kankri shows his true colors, slut-shaming and misogynistic.

Unsurprisingly, The Other Thief is also the vector for English’s ideology in her session, “turning us against each other to make us stronger.” While Kurloz may be a worshipper of English, and Damara may have thrown in her lot with the demon because of her nihilistic despair, Meenah (rather like Dirk!) is clearly driven toward a life of violence, and restless action for its own sake.

Now we’re starting to get some insight into Feferi’s style of rulership, which in turn, probably gives us some insight into Jane. For Feferi, leadership means taking power away from the people you’re leading if it seems like they have the potential to hurt themselves (or to be a drain on society if left to their own devices). It represents a violation of agency, perhaps not so severe as the kind that Vriska perpetrates usually.

Feferi and Jane are the sort of people, I think, who want to create a perfect world - but it’s important to them that they’re the one who’s creating that world, and less important that the world is perfect for anyone in particular. Just perfect.

https://homestuck.com/story/5288

John’s whole self-conception, and especially his conception of himself as a man, and someone who might be growing up to take on the same roles as his Father, is tied up in the icons of dadliness and masculinity in the movies that he likes.

So we should expect that his disillusionment with his past will change the way that he thinks about his future, and what he’s going to do with it. It’s a shame that this line of questioning never goes anywhere in Homestuck proper, but I’ll use it as evidence in the “John/June Egbert is trans” folder. Reminds me of how my decisive lack of affinity for the Boy Scouts serves as a nice little retrospective bit of evidence in my own trans narrative.

Based on the number of trans Eagle Scouts I know, I feel like there’s a certain extent to which it be like, a fast-track to figuring that out about yourself, like, you tried all the boy stuff and just decided, nope! Not for me.

https://homestuck.com/story/5290

Man, especially if we continue to read this section of Homestuck as conflating the characters and the audience, this whole section reads as John not just having a meltdown about Con Air, but also generally having a meltdown about his own story so far - everything he’s done in Sburb, etc. It just all feels lame and shitty in retrospect, when it was something that was kind of exciting at the time, at least up until the point where his loved ones all dropped dead there at the end.

It turns out that there was nothing particularly edifying about John’s suffering.

https://homestuck.com/story/5300

Teens can be such monsters. It’s the anniversary of Bro’s Death too. Davesprite is probably as broken up about that as John is about Dad, but it’s hard for boys/men to talk about that kind of thing with each other.

Cronus is even more of an incel than Eridan. He may be the most singularly contemptible character in Paradox Space. Do I hate anyone more than Cronus? No, I think I do not.

I won’t have a lot to say about the middle leg of Openbound; it’s relatively empty of substance, and not much that happens in it is ever relevant again compared to the first and second legs.

I like to think that this leg of the journey is, more than anything, a chance to ruminate on some joke characters who were already parodies; parodies of parodies, a joke made at the expense of an existing joke. The kind of thing Dirk Strider would write, basically.

Hey check it out, the Year of Our Lord 2012, and Andrew was starting to show some mild sensitivity in his choice of words. Just mild enough to have the lowest character in the story show a tiny bit of sensitivity himself.

This leg of the adventure does give us some more insight into Meenah’s character. Just like Vriska, she’s all about being a hardass super-murder, until she starts causing problems for the people she actually cares about.

Being Evil Sucks.

This is a really weird sentiment for Karkat to have in light of like, everything else about the latter half of the comic. I mean, he hasn’t exactly had the epiphany yet that the ideas that he has about being a leader are kind of awful and shitty, so it’s possible that he’s talking the Condesce up to avoid thinking about that. IDK.

He also immediately claims he’ll leave behind the meteor to go and join Meenah’s army, so maybe Karkat is just in a pretty low place in general? That tracks.

Karkat’s little conversation with Terezi explains at the two thirds mark of Openbound exactly what this whole thing is about.

Almost the entire second half of the comic is about examining the character’s guardians, and their relationships with them. The Guardians - Grandpa and Bro especially - are hyped up to be these outrageous badasses, both in-and-out of universe, and their ambivalent relationship with their kids creates this ambiguity throughout the comic about whether the kids are worthy, whether they’re living up to their parents’ legacy - and it’s the kind of thing that plagues them throughout.

But the thing is, Ancestors can be lame, or even terrible. They’re not really anything to aspire to, and the image of success that they project onto the world is one of learned confidence, and usually that only if they’ve really managed to make it.

Even the best parents are flawed, and instead of trying to measure up to them, growing up healthy usually means learning what those flaws are, and committing not to reproduce them.

Parents don’t suck; they can be awesome, and generally speaking, for a long part of our life, they’re all we’ve got. It’s hard not to love them. But we shouldn’t turn them into idols.

(On another note, it’s one hundred percent fitting for Terezi’s Ancestor to be an outrageous coolgirl. Terezi is perpetually anxious about being cool enough, the sort of person who is breathlessly fun to be around, who commands the attention of everyone around her, and she’s surrounded by them wherever she goes.)

https://homestuck.com/story/5340

John’s distress leads him to dream about his dead Dad, and boy is he angry. He spends a lot of the second half of the comic seething in rage directed at whomever is responsible for all the suffering he and his friends endure, dishing out beatdowns toward those responsible, but I’ve never gotten the impression that these little outbursts of his are particularly rewarding for him.

https://homestuck.com/story/5358

That was quite a blow. He knocked out like a tenth of Jack’s health bar.

https://homestuck.com/story/5387

Depending on where you’re standing some really totally different things can matter to different people. From Vriska’s point of view, the things that happened back when she was alive totally don’t matter at all anymore - only the matter of Cosmic importance that is fighting Lord English.

But the stuff that matters to the people she left behind, and the suffering she’s responsible for - especially for putting Terezi in a position where she had to slay her - all of that still matters very much to the people who are alive, which is what makes her self-conception as someone who is on the side of the angels now really... not sit well.

She clearly hasn’t changed all that much. She just thinks, as usual, that now that things are even, now that the score is settled, things can go back to the way they were before.

https://homestuck.com/story/5388

Tavros and Vriska are really bad for each other in general. Like, it’s not good for her to be around someone as pliable as Tavros is, and it’s plain to everybody that it’s not good for him to be around her either; whenever he’s around her, he apes her bogus inflated self-esteem in all the worst ways.

https://homestuck.com/story/5397

Tavros’ explanation of what Vriska does suggests that storytelling has become kind of a ritual for her - a means by which she is attempting to connect with her Ancestor, by performing the same actions she is, miming her - still the same old Vriska.

That’ll be all for now. Cam signing off for now - join me for the thrilling conclusion to Openbound tomorrow, Same Cam Time, Same Cam Channel.

#commentary #neon genesis evangelion #liveblogging

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

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Book Review

Bride By Mistake. By Anne Gracie. New York: Berkley Sensation, 2012.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Devil Riders #5

Summary: Eight years ago, Lieutenant Luke Ripton made a hasty wartime marriage-in-name-only to protect a young girl from a forced union and left her protected in a remote mountain convent. Now, Luke is Lord Ripton, but he has been unable to obtain an annulment. Which leaves him no choice but to claim a wife he doesn't want. For nearly a decade, Isabella has waited like a princess locked in a tower, dreaming of her handsome, dark-haired prince. Her dreams are shattered when Luke reveals himself not as a prince, but an autocratic soldier, expecting her unquestioning obedience, which is something Isabella's fiercely independent nature will not tolerate. And while Luke and Isabella's fiery personalities clash at every turn, they remain bound to their vows, never expecting that the passionate fury they share could become passion of a different kind...

***Full review under the cut.***

Content/Trigger Warnings: attempted sexual assault, violence, sexual content, torture

Overview: When I started reading this book, I had the strangest feeling that I had read it before, but I didn’t remember how the plot went, nor could I find any record of a review, so here it is now. Bride By Mistake had the potential for a great story: a fiercely independent heroine, a journey to rescue an abandoned half-sister, love growing between two people who married to prevent one of them from suffering a worse fate, etc. I think I would have been on board if not for the hero, who I found hard to like. I didn’t feel like he respected our heroine at all, even after he opened up about his past, which made it hard for me to root for the relationship. As a result, this book only gets 2 stars from me.

Writing: Gracie’s writing seems to change between the first thirty or so pages and the rest of the book. The first couple chapters seem to rush through the narrative quickly, dumping a bunch of dialogue and a rushed flashback on the reader to set up the situation before getting to the main plot. Once we get to that point, the writing seems to flow a bit better, giving insight into what characters are thinking and feeling. Granted, it’s not a high literary style - Gracie’s prose is simple, and sometimes has a tendency to be repetitive (there’s a lot of observations of what the heroine’s legs and backside look like in her riding pants, for example, and we’re repeatedly told how Isabella isn’t pretty/not conventionally attractive), but I was able to immerse myself in the story, so I feel like it did the job.

Plot: Aside from the romance, the main plot of this novel takes place a number of years following a war. Our heroine, Isabella, and our hero, Luke, married as strangers during the conflict in order to protect Isabella (an heiress) from being forcibly married to her cousin, Ramon, who was after the family fortune. Because Luke was still a soldier, he left Isabella in a monastery for her own protection. Now, eight years later, Luke has been denied an annulment, and so he has come to Spain to collect his wife and return to England. However, before she leaves, Isabella insists on travelling to her family estate to retrieve her abandoned half-sister, who she fears might have been forced into becoming Ramon’s mistress. Meanwhile, Luke’s PTSD makes him anxious, and he constantly fights with her about returning to England so he can arrive in time for his youngest sister’s first come-out.

In terms of setting up a conflict, I feel like this book had potential. I liked the idea of Isabella doing the right thing by her sister, despite having mixed feelings about the favoritism that her father showed towards his illegitimate daughter. It nicely mirrored the family feelings Luke had towards his own sister, and the two protagonists had some good conversations based on those parallels. However, a lot of the middle of the book felt like an uneventful journey. Sure, the protagonists had personal conflicts, but nothing really built the anticipation for their arrival at the family estate. Instead, we get some silly things, like an inn having fleas and causing a whole debacle. I’m not against light, fluffy things like this, but I would have liked to see Isabella and Luke working together more to come up with a plan in anticipation of their showdown with Ramon.

When they finally do encounter Ramon and Isabella’s sister, Perlita, I found the character interactions to be both interesting and silly. I liked how Perlita and Isabella talked about their childhoods and came to respect one another, as well as how Perlita’s desires were quite different from what Isabella expected. It’s complicated and messy and utterly unsatisfying, but in a way that challenges the reader to think about accepting what other people want, even if it’s not “proper.” That being said, Ramon and Luke’s interactions completely transcended the bounds of reality for me. In one scene, Ramon and Luke threaten to kill one another over Isabella, yet once it’s made clear that Ramon would gain nothing by marrying her, everyone settles down and has lunch. Ramon and Perlita then invite the two to stay overnight, which seems preposterous given that the men almost came to blows and, as far as I could tell, still hated one another.

After they leave the estate, Isabella and Luke visit a family friend, and there, they encounter someone from Luke’s traumatic past. I found this part of the plot rather rushed and somewhat sloppy. Despite the trauma supposedly affecting Luke from the beginning, it felt like the details were dumped on the reader with barely 1/3 of the novel left, and so it felt hollow and inserted for a final bit of action. I wish this part of the plot has been more integral to the story, rather than having it all condensed into a few pages near the end.

I will caution readers that early in the book, we are shown a flashback that details how Luke and Isabella meet, and it involves attempted sexual assault. Luke, who is a soldier returning from an errand, happens to hear a girl screaming, so he goes to investigate. He finds a nameless Spanish soldier attempting to rape Isabella, who is 13 and has been stripped naked. While the soldier isn’t successful and his violence against Isabella isn’t overly graphic, we are subject to some descriptions of Isabella’s body, which, in my opinion, had a tendency to be uncomfortable. Descriptions of how she barely has breasts and no hips just shows me that Luke is taking note of these things, which feels icky. Thus, I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re sensitive to plots involving attempted sexual assault.

I will also say that this book doesn’t do a very good job regarding representing Spanish and Roma culture. Every description of Spain and Spanish life seemed to be banal, from randomly eating churros to taking a siesta. The richness and complexity of Spanish culture isn’t really explored, which is a shame since Isabella’s Spanish heritage mainly seemed to enhance the idea that Isabella = Spanish = passion, contrasting with the frivolousness of English women and society. On top of that, there is a scene where Isabella and Luke are at a market, and they happen to witness some Roma people singing and dancing. Gracie uses the g-slur, though I don’t think it was used in malice. However, the dance is sensual and erotic, which causes Luke and Isabella to become aroused. It further lent credence to the implication that Spain is a land of passion for Luke, and though Spain is not overly exoticized, I do think implying that it is a world where passion can flourish is rather stereotypical.

Characters: Isabella, our heroine, is fairly likable in that she doesn’t let Luke push her around. She’s headstrong and confident, and on top of that, she has a strong sense of duty to her sister. I admired that about her, and loved seeing moments when she would defy expectations and show that she really is capable of handling things herself. The only things I found mildly irritating was her ridiculous innocence regarding sex and her tendency to be overly emotional. Regarding the former, Isabella has cringey moments such as thinking that sex with a man might be like sex between horses or other animals. I dislike it when virgin heroines are that naive because it’s not very realistic. Regarding her emotion, emotion itself isn’t a bad thing, but it didn’t endear me to her when these moods seemed to be connected to her childishness rather than anything substantive. For example, Isabella dramatically flees the scene and cries when she learns Luke requested an annulment, in part because she had been entertaining childish fantasies that he would sweep her away from the monastery like a knight in shining armor. She also gets extremely upset and yells at Luke for not being happy that she is a virgin, which would have been ok if it were mostly about honor, but the scene also involves a discussion about Isabella’s ignorance about sex and what it entails. It just felt like all her passionate moods were in some way framed as juvenile, and I wasn’t really into it.

Luke, our hero, is hard to like because at best, he’s a gruff ex-soldier who expects obedience from his wife, and at worst, a misogynist. I could have been on board with an ex-soldier who approaches marriage as a commanding officer would, but then learns that the two are very different and a partnership is more fulfilling. Luke, however, doesn’t seem to be open to the idea. At least early on, whenever Isabella would do something, he would think things like “He was going to show her tonight who wore the pants in this marriage.” While he never hit or raped her, the idea that he would “show her who is boss” left a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, Luke would also think about how he despises certain traits in women. He thinks of Isabella’s friends at the convent as mindless and frivolous, he rejects London women because they are shallow, and says a few times that he can’t stand dishonesty in women because of the one time in his past that a woman hurt him. It was honestly tiring and because it takes so long for him to even begin to reexamine himself, I wasn’t convinced that he had any admirable qualities other than being physically attractive.

Like Luke, our main antagonist, Ramon, is also fairly misogynistic. Though he had more complex motivations than we are initially led to believe (which I appreciated), he did use words like “bitch” and “slut,” which killed much of the interest I had in seeing him as a multifaceted character.

Perlita is much more interesting in that she harbors little malice towards her sister and refuses to be rescued. She emphasizes that her living situation is enough for her and does not want others making decisions on her behalf, even if they would raise her to enjoy a more “proper” life. I liked the relationship that she had with Isabella - the two talk at length about how their father treated them differently and how they feel about each other, and I loved that they came to feel real affection for each others’ well-being.

Romance: I’m just going to say it - I wasn’t a fan of Luke and Isabella’s romance. Luke was way too dominating and didn’t seem to value Isabella at all, and it only seemed like he came to value her once he opened up about his past (and even then, he seemed to value her for what she was able to do to comfort him and keep him on his toes, not as a partner in her own right). Some may chalk it up to his anxiety about being in Spain again, where his worst memories took place, but just because a character has trauma, that doesn’t mean he can be a jerk without consequences. The point where this particularly became a big “nope” for me was when the two first had sex. Isabella and Luke are staying the night at an inn, and they start to get it on, as couples in a romance novel will do. However, when he penetrates her, she screams in pain. Instead of stopping to see what’s wrong, Luke keeps going until he is sated, and then they make a big deal about Isabella’s virginity. This lack of caring for her physical and emotional well-being put me off completely, and I gave up hope of Luke ever truly learning how to see his wife as a partner (rather than a subordinate).

Overall, this book suffers from a lack of suspense and an insufferable hero, and while I did like the heroine and enjoyed the interaction between the sisters, it wasn’t enough to overcome the lackluster narrative progression and rapey vibes from Luke’s POV.

#book reviews

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xyliane · 6 years

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I just realized where we are rn in HxH is about Aug 2001. So now I am wondering if Togashi will have a special event corralating to 9/11 and I'm worried.

let me preface this response by saying I’ve been in research paper spiral for the last four months due to my impending advancement in june, and your question provoked a knee-jerk reaction that led to a 4h-long research spiral by someone whose specialty is absolutely not japanese foreign policy and nationalism.

the tl;dr version here, and then the explanation for it under the cut: I don’t think that’s going to happen. for one, they’re currently on a boat headed to Big Murderous Landmass (unless kurapika and co sink the whale). they’re not in yorknew/nyc. also, japan’s perceptions of 9/11 and the media representations of it are not as pervasive as american or even broader western collective trauma. while togashi is unafraid to address contemporary social politics, I don’t think he’s going to correlate a particular event to 9/11. he’s more concerned with the failings and strengths of humanity, as a whole or in parts, and might reference particular events to get across a greater point, not draw direct parallels.

now, a cut, and then several hundred words on 9/11 as a moment of collective trauma, japanese militarism, and media perceptions. it is 4000% nerdier than this ask expected.

I don’t think togashi is going to include a 9/11 parallel in a large part because of how japanese media, and anime in particular, addresses japanese communal trauma, and how togashi uses moments and evocations of these in his stories (at least, yyh, and hxh, although level e has its own quirks). namely that japan really doesn’t deal with 9/11 like americans do–but they absolutely have other traumas that make their way into anime, manga, and other media.

the thing is that, while 9/11 is absolutely a moment of international trauma (I work in india, and people there are highly conscious of it), the moment that hit the US was very different in other parts of the world. I’m old enough to remember the whole “where were you on 9/11,” itself a sort of marker of solidarity and belonging within the trauma that kind of unites people around a time. the plane crashes were broadcast everywhere in the US, and no one didn’t see it. but we got it live, fed right to the tvs in our classrooms at 8am. and america didn’t get attacked by foreigners before, not like this–problems existed “out there,” not in nyc, for however many times it’s been destroyed on film. (we have our own homegrown terrorists, but that’s a whole other can of worms.) and when it did happen, the country as a whole kicked into a jingoist gear on top of the collective trauma of someone murdering a bunch of americans. freedom fries. they were a thing.

it’s probably important to note here that media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. we’re perpetually influenced by things that happen, whether they’re collective and historical memories, personal experience, or social trends. we get our references and jokes from somewhere, and they sink into our brains and affect what we put out into the world. trauma does this more effectively than most things. trauma elicits a search for meaning, whether it’s a question of “why did it happen” or “why did it happen to me/us?” sometimes we find a meaning in the disaster, and sometimes we don’t. but it marks us and connects us (Halbswach 1992, Updegraff et al 2009). and it affects us for a long, long time.

in japan (and again, I’m not an expert on this), 9/11 is a moment of international trauma that marks japan’s re-entering into the international military sphere, but also economic flux. of the approximately 3000 people killed in the twin towers attack, 316 were non-american, including 26 japanese nationals. japan joined the war coalition almost immediately, and spent billions of USD to support the “war on terror,” while also dealing with things like shohei koda’s beheading in 2004 or the kidnapping and release of 5 journalists and anti-war NGO workers the same year, which arrived back in japan only to be ostracized for “causing trouble” for japan, with accusations that they had “got what [they] deserved” (x, x). the effect on the news media in japan was of increasing conspiracy theories and warmongering, while simultaneously wary of tensions with china, north korea, and taiwan. basically, japan politically and militarily had a lot of pots on the fire, and was feeding yen to the american pot real fast. the japanese SDF pulled out of central asia in 2007, and it’s still a divisive subject from the papers I read, but it’s more about the military than 9/11. 9/11 is not, for example, the topic of a j-drama directly or indirectly. shohei imamura’s short film “japan” in the september 11 (2002) anthology is a parable set during world war ii, although he’s much more famous for his palme d’or wins and a film about hiroshima (black rain, 1989). and uh. apparently pokemon black and white has a reference to ground zero in their map of not!nyc?

japanese media’s collective trauma in anime is often the deep personal connection with the atomic bomb, or terror attacks and natural disasters on japanese soil. which makes sense: humans will generally latch onto things that affect us personally, whether it’s a cute puppy video shown to us or an act of terrorism we watch on television. for the US, we were–and still are–being forced to confront our place in the international community (hero, victim, villain, collaborator, all of it–and americans are not very good at shades of gray) through the “war on terror,” and it comes out in everything from comic book movies like bvs directly evoking 9/11 while cavill!supes ruins buildings to kill zod, to the rise of partisan tv news. but we don’t evoke nuclear war or radioactive waste with the same reaction that japan does–there’s a lot of fear of the bomb in the 1950s and 1960s, like with dr. strangelove and them!, but it’s centered less around the impact of the bomb and its literal or metaphorical nuclear fallout, and more on the fear of the other or an outsider destroying good ol’ american culture. or giving us superpowers. (personally, the closest I think american art and literature ever got to japanese sentiments is with a canticle for leibowitz, which focuses on the cyclical nature of human failure and how the past becomes changed through the present.)

(please read a canticle for leibowitz, it changed my life and only grows more potent with age.)

for japan, the dropping of atomic bombs on nagasaki and hiroshima provides a similar and long-lasting moment of national trauma that’s been preserved in public policy and popular culture. and it’s not just grave of the fireflies or barefoot gen, anime that address the bombings through direct reference. the bomb transforms into concerns about nuclear destruction and environmental fallout, with kaiju like godzilla rising from nuclear waste. osamu tezuka’s work like astro boy is in direct response to the abuse and use of technology and hope for humanity’s future, and naussica of the valley of the wind is a fantasy post-nuclear bomb situation blended with hayao miyazaki’s love of humanity and nature (x, x). I think it’s worth noting that both tezuka and miyazaki personally experienced the 1945 bombings. miyazaki was 4, and one of his earliest memories is fleeing utsunomiya’s bombings. tezuka, at 16 and working in arsenal factories during the fire bombing of osaka, later wrote kami no toride (1977) about his personal experience, which served as both autobiography and condemnation of the vietnam war.

of more recent stuff evoking trauma, naoki urasawa actually uses 9/11 as a moment in billy bat, as part of getting to questions of humanity and modernity and technology and progress. other anime dealing with terrorism, like GITS:SAC, the “brain scratch” episode of cowboy bebop, and of course urasawa’s 20th century boys, locate terrorism not through 9/11 (and the underlying racism and not-us-ness) but more often with these japanese cults like the ‘aum death cult that carried out the 1995 tokyo subway sarin attacks, and the changing landscape of terrorism in japan. we could point to shinichiro watanabe’s zankyou no terror (or terror in resonance? iunno) as a potential 9/11 parallel, and I think it’s got the 9/11 connections, but watanabe himself places it closer to the 1995 terrorist attacks. he even commented how much “darker” zankyou no terror is than the film he was influenced by (the man who stole the sun (1979)), directly citing the 1995 attacks as one reason the last 30 years have impacted japanese understandings of terrorism. more recently, there’s also been connections to the 3/11 disaster with kimi no na wa, where shinkai explores his perennial theme of personal connection across space and time via a form of natural disaster. outside of anime, there’s also a growing body of literature on 3/11 and music, which is super interesting and well worth a look if you’re interested.

fwiw, I think it’s interesting that both urasawa and watanabe are explicitly interested in western and specifically american culture, but through a japanese lens. and not the sort of “japanese lens” that leads to the americas of g gundam or yugioh, which are The Most American Ever, but a more nuanced representation that explores technology, human connection, and modernity. which is the sort of lens creators should try to do when engaging other cultures, at bare minimum. (/soapbox)

trauma isn’t often addressed directly, but allegorically or displaced: lindsay ellis has a great pair of loose canon episodes on 9/11 and how film evokes collective trauma. while she doesn’t talk about anime or japanese films, she uses bollywood as a way to talk about indirect expressions of nationalist trauma. in the second video, she suggests that, for countries like india working through their own terror attacks with mumbai in 2008 (the 26/11 attacks), it’s easier to use other countries’ or places’ or–I would suggest–fantastical trauma rather than directly address it. so bollywood used 9/11 to understand its own trauma. not everyone does this–and a lot of times, I doubt it’s done purposefully, at least initially. but it’s there implicitly, informing decisions of artists and content creators that sometimes doesn’t get revealed until placed under a critical eye. it’s why editing and getting outside or sensitivity readers is important! for japan, the parallels aren’t to other countries, but fantastical situations in japan with Very Heavy Symbolism ranging from akira’s totally-not-a-bombs to kimi no na wa’s processing of the 3/11 disaster via comet.

as for togashi, he uses world events and figures as ways of exploring his own interests (yu yu hakusho has multiple “wow capitalism suuuuuuuuucks” subplots with yukina’s arc and the dark tournament, plus the very anti-war/anti-hate/anti-capitalism/”humanity sucks but people [kuwabara] can be amazing” sentiments of the chapter black tape; while hxh’s chimera ant arc has both a-bomb parallels and north korea/china references on top of killua’s soapbox about how corrupt and terrible governments can be). the parallel between “humanity sucks” and “people can be so very good” threads throughout togashi’s work. but it also uses a very buddhist understanding of rebirth and reincarnation to get these points across, whether it’s the unconditional vore love of pouf and youpi giving themselves to rejuvenate mereum after he’s nuked or the reincarnations of former humans as ants. but all of it connects to togashi’s personal experiences of things happening to and by japan, whether it’s the invasion of and tension with taiwan, the boom and bust of the economy, or the militaristic push by parts of the government under koizumi and abe. that, layered on top of the trauma that informs a lot of japanese media, makes for a fascinating playground togashi is more than willing to dig into.

I suppose this is all a very, very long-winded way of saying that while it’s possible togashi could include a 9/11 parallel, I don’t think it’ll be tied to some september 2001 date in the hxh universe. if he uses it, it will be 1: through a togashi/japanese lens; 2: unattached to a particular date; 3: layered in dialogue with broader war and terror issues togashi’s interested in exploring.

if you’ve made it to the bottom: holy crap congrats, hello, talk to me about anthropology of media. and if you’re somehow still interested in more, here’s an brief list of sources I used on top of the ones explicitly referenced in the post:

Baffelli, Erica. “Media and religion in Japan: the Aum affair as a turning point.” Working paper, EASA. 2008. (media-anthropology.net)

Broderick, Mick (ed.). Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Routledge and Kegan Paul International, 2014. (google books)

Deamer, David. Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. (google books link)

Japan pulls troops from Afghanistan (npr, 2007)

Japan ends ban on military self-defense (time, 2014)

Japan’s 10 years since 9/11 (al-jazeera, 2011)

Krystian Woznicki (September 1991). “Towards a cartography of Japanese anime – Anno Hideaki’s Evangelion Interview with Azuma Hiroki”. BLIMP Filmmagazine. Tokuma Shoten. (archived here)

manga responses to 3/11 (nippon.com, 2012)

Saft, Scott, & Yumiko Ohara. “The media and the pursuit of militarism in Japan: Newspaper editorials in the aftermath of 9/11.” Critical Discourse Studies, 3(01), 2006. 81-101

#hxh meta #japanese history #nuclear memory #symbolism #I'm so sorry #japanese media #9/11 #26/11 #3/11 #all of the references #THIS is what I do for fun #...#sigh #long post #talk tag #Anonymous

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rhetoricandlogic · 6 years

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Iraq + 100

The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq

Edited Hassan Blasim

Release Date: September 12, 2017

Anytime the opportunity arises to experience something new and unique, I advise you to embrace it. But I must warn you, not all of these will be easily categorized. As a matter of fact, sometimes the experience will not just be enlightening, but also challenging. Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq is more than an anthology of new voices in science fiction. It is a testament to mankind’s willpower and tenacity even in the face of certain destruction. But, and this is a huge but, it is far more than even that. This book defies contemporary concepts of what sci-fi is by adding additional layers of history, laced with emotional turmoil.

Ten stories, ten voices. A slender paperback of barely 200 pages. That is essentially all I knew going into this book. I prepared myself for science fiction stories that were going to have a different tone to them. This is, after all, the first anthology of its kind to come from Iraq. Even so, I was ill-prepared for the sheer emotion that this tome evoked …nay, that it emanated. Beneath these tales are written the pain of people that have known war for so long that many cannot remember a time that death and despair were not a part of it.

Each story is unique, but throughout them all there is a thread of the same emotion: hope. Every author herein seems destined to spread hope. Hope for their nation, hope for their people, hope for the human race. While each one of these short stories takes place a hundred years in the future, these are feelings and thoughts that are commonplace here and now. Not that this is necessarily a feelgood compilation. No, it runs the gauntlet of sentiments, forcing the reader to reevaluate constantly.

A few of the tales deal with a post-apocalyptic setting where the struggle for sustenance takes precedence over all else. There seemed to be a latent anger, repressed for so long, that festered between the lines on the pages. In fact, this is volatile enough that it will set readers on edge while winding their way to the root of the story. As an American, there are several instances that it seems my country is being made the enemy, but no sooner do I find myself defensive than the author refines the rhetoric, enabling the reader to see that it was never a pointed finger but rather an outstretched hand. After so much oppression, idealism may actually have seemed a foreign concept.

I would say the most brutally honest of the bunch was The Corporal, wherein a former Iraqi soldier appeared a hundred years after he died. His outdated concepts and feelings brand him an outsider even as he tries to reconcile what was with what is. The biggest takeaway I found was that in a sufficiently futuristic and secular society, religion would appear to be akin to terrorism. Not in its tenets, but in the passion and zeal that some seem to embody.

The story Kuszib takes a look at not just Iraq, but the world as a whole after otherworldly invaders assume mastery of our planet. More of a treatise on how all creatures view those lower on the food chain than them, this tale is a poignant reminder of how humans have destroyed far more than we have created. Even the empathy shown by the main characters is overshadowed by their needs to be comfortable at the expense of others. Graphic and darkly humorous, the author used the story to attempt to create a greater awareness of others. I did, in fact, find it extremely thought provoking.

The final story was Najufa and was by far the most emotional of the ten, at least to me. A simple journey with a relative turns out to be far more than what the reader expects. Time has moved forward but historical monuments remain, a physical representation of what has come before. But in this story a century from now, not everything must remain physical; in fact, much does not. This one caused me much introspection and was heart-wrenching on a multitude of levels. Were I to say anything else, then the story would be ruined.

If you have not yet understood, these ten tales are stories of sorrow, hope, and history all recorded in different ways by different writers. Each one seems to hold a certain pride in their country, though they show a knowledge that not all of the leaders in their past have been benevolent. A few even explore oppression in the future, speaking to the parallels with the past. As with all compilations, some appealed to me more than others. But, unusually, each offered me something in the way of knowledge. Most importantly, I felt the raw emotions of a people who have only recently been allowed to publicly dream of a brighter future and that alone would make this book a worthy read. Luckily, however, there are a myriad of other reasons why you should read this. You might even discover a new level of compassion or empathy for a war-torn people who stand among the ashes of their forefathers and dare to look up.

Let me leave you with my favorite turn of phrase from the story Baghdad Syndrome, as it seems the most fitting here: “…the language was difficult to unpack but the pain flowing from it was undoubtedly real.”

In a calm and serene world, one has the luxury of imagining what the future might look like.

Now try to imagine that future when your way of life has been devastated by forces beyond your control.

Iraq + 100 poses a question to Iraqi writers (those who still live in that nation, and those who have joined the worldwide diaspora): What might your home country look like in the year 2103, a century after a disastrous foreign invasion?

Using science fiction, allegory, and magical realism to challenge the perception of what it means to be “The Other”, this groundbreaking anthology edited by Hassan Blasim contains stories that are heartbreakingly surreal, and yet utterly recognizable to the human experience. Though born out of exhaustion, fear, and despair, these stories are also fueled by themes of love, family, and endurance, and woven through with a delicate thread of hope for the future.

#Hassan Blasim #Iraq +100 #mahreviews

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natman1924 · 6 years

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AU Masterpost

here’s a shit ton of hetalia AUs, they’re mostly Spamano with fem Romano cause I just frickin love her

So first there’s Some Hero/Villain AUs...I have four variations

1) The most expansive is definitely my hero au centered around a huge organization that’s definitely a combo of the x men and the justice league. it’s introduced through the training process for some up and coming teens with powers that show potential, including Alfred, Mattie, Feli, Ludwig, Natalya (Belarus), and Emil (Iceland). they’re trained and recruited mainly by Antonio who’s kind of a big deal plus Gilbert and Francis, but is mostly supported by his partner (NOT sidekick) Lovina. There’s a lot of angst and drama, Lovi has a sad backstory with some scandal and romance with a bunch of pairings thrown in. I really, really want to take time to really develop it and write/blog about it!

2) Basically the next three are just kind of mixes and matches of each other. first, Antonio has taken up vigilante justice for shits and gigs and is patrolling one night when he stumbles across two guys creeping on Lovina after her shift at a nightclub. But surprise surprise, Lovina is a feisty little fucker and takes them down herself, and then accidentally pepper sprays Antonio when he still comes over to make sure she’s ok. and thus a friendship blossoms. basically things happen and when Antonio is getting famous, Lovina is seen with him and associated with him, which leads to her being constantly harassed over a man whose name she doesn’t even know. Drama.

3) Next, Antonio is once again our hero, but sadly Lovina has taken up a life of crime. forced to take out loans from a mob boss (either Turkey or Russia; leaning toward Turkey) to pay her for her brother’s medical bills, Lovina is forced to repay her debts by stealing for her boss, becoming an infamous jewel thief. think Batman and Catwoman dynamic, but Antonio is just a much happier person.

4) Last, same back story with Lovina, but instead, Antonio is the lead detective trying to catch her. Basically, Lovi and Feli are downsizing and moving into a new apartment, Antonio offers to help being the gentleman he is, asks Lovi out, and Feli basically accepts for her (not knowing just who Antonio is). Lovina goes on some dates to “throw off her scent” but really is catching feelings and doesn’t want to admit. basically Lovi trying to find a way out of her situation without hurting the first person she’s ever cared about besides her brother

Ok wow moving onto some historical fiction stuff

1) So one of my favorites is my speakeasy AU. Here, Alfred and his half brother Matthew own and run a speakeasy in New York City during the 1920s. They’re helped by italian siblings Feliciano and Lovina, who Al and Matt met on the streets of Italy during a vacation. Love propositioned herself to them because she and Feli lost everything and feeling bad for them (and in need of some Italians to get on the good side of their suppliers back home), Matt and Al take the two back to the states with them. Gilbert and Ludwig are two cops that don’t get stupid American laws, so they help the speakeasy out by helping keep everything covered up. Lots of Prucan, Arthur featured as a bartender, and Lovi’s got a secret she left behind in Italy. it’s great.

2) Another pretty expansive AU is this neat 60s/supernatural AU I have. So Alfred is looking for his brother Matthew and accidentally stumbles upon this underground, supernatural world where all sorts mystical creatures and people live. Gilbert (Vampire) and Francis (Demon) take the poor guy in and try to help him figure things out/hide him because NO NON MAGICAL HUMANS ALLOWED. Eli’s a siren along with Lovina, who is with Antonio, who is a recently turned werewolf (it’s been less than 2 years). other guests in crude wizard (or maybe fairy, I haven’t decided yet) Arthur, genie Sadiq (Turkey), Witch Liz (Hungary) and a couple more I haven’t quite nailed down yet. also great.

3) I also have a Mafia AU set in the late 60s. pretty basic, Lovina is the prodigy granddaughter of a mob boss, Antonio works for their rival, essentially another Romeo and Juliet. Lots of bantering and real character development. parallels to West side story. good stuff.

And then some other random ones

1) frick yeah zombie AU. Antonio, Gilbert, Francis, and Ludwig against the world. Throw in the italians, Alfred and Mattie on a farm, and a brit with kids and you get one wild ride.

2) This isn’t an AU, but I’ve mulled over Gilbert’s transition from cold war to post Berlin Wall. I have an arch imagined for him that brings Prucan in in a really nice and natural way. just thought I’d throw that out there.

Lastly, this isn’t an AU so much as a love project for fem Lovi. I’ve pretty much got a giant character arch for her as a woman and a nation. yes there are other female nations, but I feel developing the story of a nation like south Italy that has been used and passed around is only more interesting, heartbreaking, and inspiring from the perspective of a woman. blast me for that if you want, but I just want more strong woman written about and represented. sorry not sorry.

there’s more underdeveloped ones that I want to get into later. like so many more. thnx for listening.

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dailyaudiobible · 6 years

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05/11/2018 DAB Transcript

1 Samuel 10:1-11:15, John 6:43-71, Psalms 107:1-43, Proverbs 15:1-3

Today is the 11th day of May. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is my honor and pleasure to have these minutes together as we take the next step forward, moving our way through the Scriptures. So, we've been reading from 1 Samuel in our Old Testament reading and we are entering the territory that will lead us into a new era with the Israelites as kingship is about to be introduced into their culture. And Samuel plays a pivotal role in that story. So we'll pick up where we left off yesterday. This week were reading from the New International Version. We'll read 1 Samuel chapters 10 and 11 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we covered a bunch of territory in our reading today. In the Old Testament, we now have a king. Israel has its first king, Saul. So, we have entered a new era and we need to watch as this unfolds. We're gonna learn a lot about ourselves from King Saul, or for that matter, from many of the kings. But this next patch that we're gonna move through in the Scriptures, we're (getting) an intimate look at King Saul and then we're gonna meet this guy named David. And we're gonna learn a lot about ourselves from him as well because he's gonna grow up to be king, too. And they are starkly contrasted, Saul and David. But their stories are deeply intertwined. And one of the first clues that we get about Saul, we see today in his coronation when God is selecting the person to be king from the different tribes and the different family clans. And once Saul is selected, he's nowhere to be found. He's hiding. In the New International Version that we're reading from this week, he's hiding in the supplies. Other translations have him hiding in the baggage. They essentially mean the same thing. They're the things that everyone who has come to this coronation have brought. But it gives us the opportunity to consider what baggage exactly it is that we are hiding in and are we able to rise up and be who we are created to be if we're gonna continue to hide in the baggage?

And then we get into the book of John. And we encounter what some would call the bread of life discourse. I always smile when we come through this territory cause to me, it's kind of like Jesus vampire monologue, where he tells everybody who's listening that they can't have hope in eternal life if they don't eat his flesh and drink his blood. And we see the people's reaction. They're a little freaked out about it, a little agitated about it. A lot of the people who had been following Jesus deserted him after that. So, he's willing to not grandstand. We see that in Jesus constantly. He's not trying to build an empire for himself by saying the things that people wanna hear. But it is curious enough for us to go, like what is he talking about? How can we eat his flesh and drink his blood? And are we talking about cannibalism here? Are we talking about...what are we dealing with? But because you'd think that some disturbed person, and there were plenty of disturbed people around Jesus. He set a lot of disturbed people free. But if you think about it in those terms, some disturbed person who would believe that literally would try to kill Jesus and eat him. And you can only imagine how he would defend himself in court and how that would play out on national television if it were in this day and age, right? So, if something like that were spoken in this day and age it would seem bizarre at best, which is how it appeared to the people Jesus was talking to. He was speaking primarily to a Jewish audience who had been taught by the Mosaic law not to drink blood and not to eat meat with blood in it, right? And, so, it's like Jesus is telling them to do exactly that, only to a human body. So, you can imagine why they're a little freaked out. But interpreting what Jesus actually means leads us to divergent theological schools of thought. And I have worked tirelessly, really really hard over the years, to not try to tell you what you are supposed to believe and do. I believe that is the work of the Holy Spirit. But when we do come to historically divergent things in the faith, we talk about them. So, for many over the centuries, this has referred to the Lord's table, to the eucharist or communion. And billions of people over thousands of years have held to that idea that in taking the eucharist, the elements become the flesh and blood of Jesus. They go inside and transform us spiritually and make us have eternal life. Other schools of thought equally as old, just as longstanding, have said, essentially, Jesus is not talking about the Lord's table or communion here. It hasn't even been instituted yet in the book of John. Jesus hasn't had his last supper yet. He hasn't passed the cup or the bread. He is speaking metaphorically about a spiritual reality in the same way with the woman at the well he talked about eternal water flowing from within to eternal life. And in the same passage that we read, Jesus seems to illuminate that by saying, the spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you they are full of the spirit and life. So, this has been wrestled with for a long time, going all the way back to the early church fathers. So, for example, St. Augustin of Hippo was very influential in some of the doctrines that we believe as Christians. Things like original sin, things like the doctrine of the trinity, he had a voice in all of that. Regarding this passage he summed it up by saying Believe and you have eaten. And this is because when we believe in Jesus, we enter into life with Jesus. And the apostle Paul would say it's no longer me who's living, it's Christ who lives in me, which would parallel what Jesus said. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. So, there's a couple of ways of looking at this passage. And I think we would pretty much agree that Jesus isn't inviting us to become cannibals or vampires. Although, this is exactly what the early church got accused of. And what brought a lot of marginalization to early Christians in the societies that they lived in and what brought on persecution.

And then we get to Proverbs. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. And that would submit that that's pretty self-explanatory, but pretty deeply penetrating into the ways that we interact. That proverb is worth committing to memory. It's worth remembering and calling to mind before any conversation is going to take place. Because knowing this verse after the fact, right? After things have already blown up and world war 3 is raging, well, it's a little late. But walking into a situation knowing a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Knowing that going in changes how you communicate. So we've covered some serious ground today.

Prayer:

And, Father, we invite you into it. It touches on a lot of different things. It touches us theologically, it touches us practically, it touches us historically. All these things that they keep churning as we continue to move through your Word and you keep touching every part of our lives. And that's what we want. We want all of you, all that you have for us. And in return we give all that we are to you, which is such a lopsided trade. But it's what we have. We give our hearts, our minds our wills, our bodies, our spirits to you and invite your Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. And we ask expectantly, knowing that you will. We ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it's home base, it's certainly where you find out what's going on around here, so be sure to check in and check it out.

Check the resources that are available in the shop. Visit the prayer wall while you're there and stay connected.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, that can be done at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link right on the homepage. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the give button in the upper right-hand corner. Or if you prefer, the mailing address is P.O. Box 1996, Spring Hill, Tennessee, 37174. And as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi everyone, it’s Karen in St. Louis. Hey, I just wanted to celebrate with Terry. It was so great to hear you calling him and also hearing all the others who have called in. And we have all been praying for you brother. And I totally agree with what Bob from Michigan said today and loved how we talked about doing the kill and fill. I try to pray for the Holy Spirit to fill me each day before I get out of bed but I never thought about killing that flesh. And, so, I just wanted to say thank you for that. And also, I want to lift up Hopeful. I heard your prayer request for a child and I will be praying for you. And God can do it. My best friend got pregnant when she was 42 years old after many years trying. And, so, I pray that you will just have peace in the waiting. And, oh gosh Brian, once again your commentary on Proverbs 14:30-31. I unplug from social media from time to time and as you all know the desire in my heart for having a husband and a family has never happened. And, so, as the years have gone on, I mean, I’ve celebrated with friends and family who’ve gotten married and had kids but, gosh, I just find it harder and harder. And envy has been an issue that I continually have to write down even had at our Good Friday service at church. We had to give a funeral and pick up flowers for one besetting sin. The one that I picked out was envy. And, so, I would just ask that you would all pray that the peace that surpasses all understanding would just fill my heart, every square inch of it, and that the Lord would take away this desire if it’s not his. But, anyway, thanks again Brian and I love you all. Bye-bye.

Hey, this is Blessed Like Me coming to you with a message of knowing who God is. Now, we all have our own idea who God is but one thing we can all agree on - denomination to denomination, reverend to layman - we can all agree that God is sovereign but sometimes we forget this and sometimes we try to play the position of God. We try to pull the strings that God does. We try to do the things that God does. That’s not the thing that we are to do. God has given us, gave us commandments and things to do. We are to love God with all our heart all our soul all our mind, but we are to know that God is sovereign. And when we know that God is sovereign there are certain things we don’t do, there are certain things we don’t do. And we don’t try to manipulate or try to change things that God has already ordained and put into place. Now, one thing He has placed for us to do is to go. And don’t want us to sit on our hands and be Christians that can’t do anything, but He also wants us to know that God is in control. He is in control. Our God is in control. Somebody needed this today. Somebody needed to know that God is in control. No matter how much you worry. No matter how much you contemplate. No matter how much you try to design and change things, God is in control, and know that your life will go so much easier in your Christian walk with Him. Remember you’re not walking in front of Him you’re walking with Him. And God wants us to be his children. And one thing children do is they know their father, they know their parents. So, He wants us to know Him and to know what He wants from us. Blessed Like Me coming to you from __ knowing God’s sovereignty. God is sovereign. He’s all sovereign. Love you guys. Miss you DAB family. I Love you so much. Thank you, Jill, and Brian for this ministry. Love you guys.

Hey DAB family. This is Jordan from Texas, first time caller. Been listening since the end of Deuteronomy. Anyways, just wanted to introduce myself and let you guys know how blessed I am by this ministry and all of you guys prayers, poems, singing, it’s awesome. I just wanted to encourage a couple people that I’ve heard lately. Terry the truck driver, a lot of people been praying for you and giving you words of encouragement. Just wanted to say, aw man, you mentioned that you feel like God has given up on you and I just want to remind you about Jesus saying, you know, I want you…to His disciples saying...saying, you know, forgive those who sin against you 70×7 times in a day. And, you know, He did mean 490. He meant however many it took. And, so, if He required that of us, how much more is God willing to forgive you then. And, you know, it’s just a big fat lie that He has given up on you. So, be encouraged brother. I hope you are. I’m praying for you. Last person, if I have time here, Hopeful, just listened to yours, May 8th, desperately wanting children and the doctors saying you’re too old, 40, turning this year. I met a woman last year, she’s on her 12th child and she’s 50. So, it’s not too late for you and I just want to encourage you and let you know that I’m praying for you daily. So, all right, love you guys. It’s a blessing. So, have a good day.

Hi Fam. My name is Leah E. This is my second call. My first call was spoke so quickly and nervously I don’t think it was understandable. That was about a year ago. I’m calling today because 14 years ago the Lord found it fitting for me to leave a life of substance abuse and isolation. And over the last six years things got kind of rough. I lost my mother, my father, two close friends and my brother all in separate tragic incidents, incidents most of which I witnessed firsthand. Despite this, I stayed the course of sobriety. And I know now that’s because of prayers that begotten more prayers that begotten more prayers all started by a friend of mine who I love very dearly. Now that friend is struggling with substance abuse and depression and terrible seizures and that often terrify her children. Of course, she’s decided to call herself an atheist. The prayer chain she began reached thousands of people and blessed me with comfort and healing when I needed it the most. Also, another dear friend checked herself into the hospital today to keep from committing suicide. It’s a regular pattern that she can’t break alone. I know what that feels like and I know that God lifted these feelings from me as easily as He did the substance abuse, like peeling a glove off and exposing a clean hand. I know that with all of you out there praying my friend’s illnesses don’t stand a chance. Prayers are miracles and I can’t wait to see the miracles that He puts in place through you all. My friend’s names are Stacey M. and Mayly L. Thank you, family. Also, shout out to Slave of Jesus. Everything you do inspires me man. Thank you, guys. Bye.

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thebatgurrl · 4 years

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I was asked this weekend why I was researching coal mines in the Pacific Northwest. You know coal has an ugly image and most people wish to forget it exists or existed. Let alone that it was historically a huge business in their own backyard.

My answer was how this search for old coal mines reminds us how time changes all things. In this time of great change we are immersed in, we forget that we are not the first to upending the status quo or forever norms. In 100 years what was huge and profitable is now a forgotten memory. This quest to find old mines just punctuates the nature of change. It can be over night but usually it is just a drip drip and we hardly realize we had moved to a new plane.

Enough philosophical thought but do remember that these essays and adventures of mine hunting are rooted in my grasping the threads of change.

Indian Coal Mine or formally named “The New Black Diamond Coal Mine” was a bit of a late comer to mining in the area. The story around it is one of how the changing times came quickly, oil replaced coal, persistent mine dangers, errors made while prospecting this new mine, poor quality coal, ineptness and greed in the company, and how the land was not respected.

For decades I would drive down Maple Valley Highway (SR 169) along the Cedar River. I remember a long cement building that the King County Maintenance Department owned and occupied. Kind of an old Art Deco building for a hard working group of people who maintained our roads and infrastructure. Never really thought much about this place.

Google Image from 2009 – Sunset Materials owned the property at this time

Where did this building and ground come from? I was surprised to find it was the headquarters for the Indian Mine. This plot of land in the mid-1920’s was host to this building, a huge processing plant and the mine shafts that pushed into the hillside.

A lot of what follows I have to thank the Black Diamond History Blog for helping me with my research and many of the vintage photos.

In Black Diamond we all know that Coal was King for nearly 150 years. The area surrounding it has many mines and even a ghost town. Black Diamond sits upon one of the best coal seams in the USA – the McKay Seam. The coal is low ash & sulfur making it great for household use. The first mine was founded in the early 1880s and from there many more were dug.

Years passed and what was called Mine 11 was developed in 1896 and called the new mine. It was located off of SR 169 behind what is now a small shopping center. You can see piles of construction debris and dirt back there. That is the spot.

I have to note that a mine never really goes into past tense. It is just closed up and hidden from view but the tunnels are still there. Often I have trouble with the tense to use on them. Such as …. “It was located” could just as easy been “It is located”. I pick past tense because it does not look like this picture any more. The hole in the ground is disguised and invisible. Guess that is past tense.

Mine #11 in Black Diamond from apx 1904

It was a very deep mine going down 6,000 feet when it was closed. It was reputed to be the deepest slope coal mine in the world. It had a 20 degree pitch. It was 2,200 feet to the surface at the 12th level and 1,500 feet below sea level.

It was a dangerous mine to work in. There was a condition called “bumps,” which was when the floor raised and the roof came down. It was like a small earthquake. It was caused by atmospheric pressure and became worse as they went deeper. Whenever a bump occurred it was felt in town. (from Black Diamond History).

Time (there it is again changing things) came in 1927 when they had to close it due to it’s danger. Men who worked there later said that they just left everything down in the mine. By this time the Indian Mine was open and many miners just took the train each day down the cedar river to the New Black Diamond Mine.

Let us get started with a general view of what the Indian Mine land looks like today off of Renton-Maple Valley Highway (aka SR 169). This video is from my investigative trip this week. So, you could say it is super fresh.

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To give you a feel for the lay of the land. This video looks south across SR 169. It starts on the east (Maple Valley & Black Diamond direction) side of the property and sweeps towards the west (Renton).

Another thing you need to get orientated is this map below from the early 1930s. I have snipped this from a large 1931 map that included the tunnels, slopes, buildings, & processing plant. I have flipped it so the top of this map is south vs the usual north. That will help you stay orientated to the video view.

Indian Coal Mine Industrial Complex Map from apx 1931 – took a printed version of this with me to the site

The east side of the gate is where the office-maintenance building (the long skinny one on the left) stood. Behind that was the Wash & Boiler Rooms. Behind that is a road that leads up to a small field that extends across about half of the property.

There were two mine tunnels behind the industrial complex. The first one they dug is located on this east side above where the Wash Room was located. It was a bust and then they dug the one that tons of coal flowed from on the west side.

On the west side of the gate was the tipple, bunker & picking tables. What is a tipple you ask. Here is a quick article on Wiki for you – Tipple. This was a massive structure as you can see in the feature photo at the top of this blog post. On the map you can also see a huge water tank and how the tipple was built out over the railroad tracks. Today there is no railroad at all and I can’t remember it being there in my lifetime.

Now that I have the big picture set for you let’s go into more detail on the individual pieces; The Office Building, the Tipple/Bunker, the Mine Entrances and a Tramway.

The Office-Maintenance Building:

This was built after the Tipple/Bunker and lived a much longer life. It was erected in about 1927 and was demolished in 2016. Some wanted to preserve it due to historic designation. However, it had deteriorated too far to be saved. All that is left is the concrete slab and the entrance road that ran between it and the Tipple.

Indian Mine (New Black Diamond Coal Mine) Maintenance Building under construction with bunker in background

This first picture above shows the building’s beginnings with the already existing Tipple/Bunker. The stacks in the photo are on the Wash/Boiler Rooms building. The next photo is from the hillside and faces north toward the highway & railroad. The mine tunnels are behind and to the right of the photographer.

Maintenance Building in upper left corner and wash/boiler Building in foreground – Indian Coal Mine

How about a view of it from the road? This is in the late 1920s and shows off why some wanted to save this building. It was pretty spectacular for a place out in the sticks.

Indian Coal Mine (New Black Diamond) Office-Power House Building – late 1920s

Now comes the end of it’s life span with a couple photos from google. There are two street views along Renton-Maple Valley Highway (MVH). One is from the street and the other from the trail that runs parallel to it. They have updated the one from MVH but not the trail nor the satellite view of the area.

Indian Mine Building 2009 Google street view

In this 2009 satellite view the Office Building is still visible on the right. The left side of the entrance road was where the Indian Coal Mine Bunker/Tipple stood. (north is at top)

This google satellite view of the site shows not only the office building but where the other pieces of the complex stood. That white dirt blob in the trees is the upper area I mentioned earlier. I believe this is the support area of the mine entrances.

Tipple/Bunker:

This huge coal mining processing plant had a much shorter life span. It was built in the early 1920s about the same time the mine tunnel/slope was being dug. They rushed to get it all finished in time for opening of the mine on 1926.

The first view above at the top of this article shows it from the railroad/highway side or looking southwest. This one below is viewed from the hillside and is looking northwest.

This view of the Indian Coal Mine (New Black Diamond) Tipple/Bunker is from the mine side view

It must have been huge!! Look at the rail trestle that connects it to the mine. It must be 3 to 4 stories high.

Next we have the photo of it being dismantled. When the mine finally failed they scraped the building and sold the metal to Japan. This was right before World War II.

In the book published by Black Diamond Historical Society called “Black Diamond – Mining the Memories” Evan Morris stated it pretty simply:

“They never really made any money on it, so they shut it down and sold the big steel bunker and machinery as scrap to the Japanese before WWII. We got it back at Pearl Harbor and the South Pacific.”

Demo of the Indian Coal Mine Bunker in 1941. View is from the west side looking northeast.

Nothing left of this huge complex except the ground and cement entrance road.

View in 2020 looking Northeast over the ground that used to hold the Indian Coal Mine Bunker.

One thing is left of the complex! The concrete road that ran between the Office & Bunker.

Concrete Road at Indian Coal Mine (New Black Diamond) – all that remains.

The Mine Entrances:

Let us start with a photo of a bunch of proud miners and owners in front of the Indian Coal Mine Slope Entrance on it’s opening day in October 1925. Not really open to mine but rather when the vice-president pulled the switch which set off the final blast breaking down the 9-foot barrier of solid rock separating two tunnels.

In a future article I will talk about the Jones Brothers and how they found the coal seam up on the hill behind this area on the Cedar River. They were bought out by the company, who then dug a tunnel into the hill to met up with the Jones Brothers shafts. This photo was from the day these two tunnels met up.

1925 photo of opening of the New Black Diamond Coal Mine aka Indian Coal Mine.

This mine was so modern and it created a lot of excitement in the workers. They hoped to go from the dangerous Mine #11 to this safer and up to date new mine.

Modern Electric New Black Diamond Coal Mine in late 1920s.

I think this excerpt from Russell Mowry in the Black Diamond – Mining the Memories sums up what really happened to the New Black Diamond Mine (aka Indian Mine).

“The Company sold the steamers of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company and took that five million to invest in that property at the Indian Mine. They had a partner Tozer who matched that.

They thought they had the McKay seam there but they did not. They spent a lot of money on that Indian Mine out there on the Cedar River and all they did was hit water. They built two holes in there. That one tunnel they put in there, they ran into water. I was in there about the day they hit the water. Underground rivers running in there about like the Mississippi. There was nothing but sand, you know how water will eat into the sand. It was coming in there so fast they couldn’t stop it.

So they gave up and moved over to the other tunnel. It caught fire too you know. We spent a lot of money there on the bunkers and warehouses and all that. The Company never made a penny on the Indian Mine.”

As you can tell they worked hard to overcome all the obstacles that they missed when they prospected the area. It all lasted about 15 years but just was not the McKay seam and the coal was poor quality. Add to that how King Coal had been unseated by Petroleum. Like I said time caught up with them and they did not see it coming.

Back to this week and the search for the mine entrances. Have to admit a dangerous exercise and due to caution I had mixed success. Here is what I found on the west side or second successful tunnel that was connected to the Tippler/Bunker complex.

See the trail/road that climbs into the woods?

This is where I climbed up thinking I might follow a trail right up to a closed mine. Oh if it was only so simple. First I found a well pump house right behind the first string of saplings, tall grass and blackberries.

Pump house still on site exists. Not sure who built this? Looks newer than 1930s & more like current cinder blocks.

I scrambled up this rock pile next. This shot looks back from the levy they built to control a creek that seems to flow down swiftly during heavy rain.

Looking back and down from the berm controlling the creek bed

This was an interesting spot I stood on. In front of me was a washed out gravel creek bed that was bent by man to the west instead of flowing down upon the pump house.

Creek bed that hopefully leads to the mine entrance

That creek bed looked rough but my engineering mind said. “That mine could have funneled water down this after it was buried shut.” I did not know what I would find but climbing a little bit up was required. Before I climbed up look what I could see to my left (or east).

Old poles covered in moss rose from the forest edge.

What was this? They were all in a row & still had huge spikes sticking out of them. Not power poles for sure. Here is a closer view.

Close up of the poles in a row.

I will come back to these but at the time I thought it was a hopeful sign from a time about a century ago vs the new pump house below.

Next I scrambled up the rocky creek bed. It was tough going and I climbed around the log you see in the picture below. There I found myself blocked by a very large tree. Beyond that the creek bed got more overgrown by brier and debris.

About half way up the cut, the hill got deeper and downed trees were there.

Looking back from the downed trees

I got around that obstacle since it did not 100% block the rock creek bed. However, soon I found a tree I could not easily get over. I suppose I could have but it seemed prudent to turn back.

Large log blocked my progress and things looked really tough ahead

Well that was a bust but it did give me good info. Perhaps the mine was up there or perhaps it is in the hill to either side of this steam bed.

I then walked over to the other side of the site to where another road moved up into the trees. This one actually is a small road (vs a rock creek bed) and leads to that plateau I mentioned earlier.

Looking down little road behind where the Indian Coal Mine complex used to be.

When I arrived I found a field of grass and a small building. The grass was all dewy and the sun reflected brightly making for this imperfect video.

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Someone else had been there in the recent weeks. They had left trails in the grass for me to follow. Which made it a bit easier and I got less wet because of this. A small building was off to my left (east) and piles of brush were off to the right (west).

I decided to start with the main mine which was to the right. When I got over there I realized that I was above where I had been earlier. I saw the poles in a row again on the bank of this upper area. Here is a photo that if you look hard you can see them.

Believe me those poles in a row are right here and align with the height of the plateau.

Behind me I found the trail someone else blazed thru the grass. It went up towards a trail into the hill. That sure smelled like a good way to get to the mine entrance. Off I went.

Looking back towards the highway and where the row of poles are

A timber across the entrance to the trail

Concrete close to the timber

This time I was thwarted by my evil nemesis… Stinging Nettles and a trail that became very bushy. Not dressed nor desired that much adventure I only went a small distance up. I did find some old timbers and concrete. Plus if you look at the view looking back it lines up with the poles in a row.

Once I got home I reviewed all my photos and maps. I have concluded that the poles in a row were the support timbers for the trestle that came over to the mine from the Tipple/Bunker building.

That means I was correct on where the mine entrance was. Since they had to seal it with a bulldozer I could even have stood on it. The other option is it was just beyond where I had hiked to. Much closer than I thought.

Next I was off to the other mine entrance. The one that leads to nowhere and the water ran like the Mississippi River. First I stopped at the odd building that who knows why it was there and a pile of junk including old timbers.

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Yikes, the path was also blazed here for me but the nettles were even more proflific. I again only went so far and stopped because I was not prepared to battle nature.

There is a trail there but lots of nettles.

Here is a view looking back towards where the complex stood. I found this carved out area interesting. At first a potential mine entrance but perhaps it was where a water tank and small building stood. Or it was direct access to the first tunnel that failed and the plateau was built later. I still wonder if this upper area was support for the mine at the time it was in operation or built to close things up.

Looking north off the east side of the plateau at the carved out area.

The Tramway:

To solve the problem of where to dump all the non-coal rock and rumble they built a tram to transfer this material. It went over the hill and deposited the debris into a gully on the other side. Here is a link to the Black Diamond History Blog with more info on the Tram. Plus here is a photo from that article.

Indian Coal Mine Tram from Tipple/Bunker

I am pretty sure the photo below of a bank covered in blackberries is the location of this tram. At one point I was thinking it was the debris below the mine entrance. However, under much examining of things it did not line up. Then I remember the tram & bingo…. we have a winning match.

Location of Tram to move rock debris over the hill about 100 years ago at the New Black Diamond Coal Mine.

Of course I had to figure out where this gulch was so I pulled up a USGS map of the area. Lo & behold you can see right where it all went. See the blob with little speckles next to the road to the left of the mine entrance which is a little y shaped line?

Indian Coal Mine on USGS map 1973 updated version.

Before I go, I found the flat scraped land where the industrial complex had been was full of Killdeer. They are the little birds that pretend they are hurt to distract from their nests. I would say there was at least 30 of them.

Killdeer at old site of Indian Coal Mine.

That is enough today on this big messy coal mine. Hope you are feeling my message about how time changes all things. How nearly 100 years later a huge mining complex is only a ghost of it’s once past glory.

I have been reading Gore Vidal’s novel “Burr”. Here is a quote I leave you with:

“Oh there are ghosts among us. But then what are memories but shadows of objects gone to dust?”

Want more on Lost Coal Mines? Here is a link to a directory I created of all my coal mine seeking adventures. Locating Lost Old Coal Mines of King County

Indian Coal Mine – Big and Messy I was asked this weekend why I was researching coal mines in the Pacific Northwest. You know coal has an ugly image and most people wish to forget it exists or existed.

#100 yr ago Coal MInes #Coal Mine HIstory #Coal Mining #Indian Coal Mine #Jones Brothers Coal Mine #New Black Diamond Coal Mine

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shabbychicboho · 4 years

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Self-Isolating With Friends: 11 Best Movies to Watch During Quarantine

With the state of the world these days. Making it even easier are programs like Zoom, the digital meeting application, that allows for any number of people to interact with both voice and video at the same time. So even if you aren't with them in person you and all your friends can have a virtual movie night! With no limit to how many can partake in the fun, because we all know how much of a bummer it is being the one that has to sit on the floor. You've already brought your friends, now we'll tell you what the best movies to watch with friends are. Teamwork!

Lights. Camera. Action

Depending on the tastes of who is in charge of movie night there is a great selection of movies to watch with friends, no doubt something for everyone. It is probably unlikely that something too serious or too depressing will want to be chosen though. Movie night should be an escape, something we enjoy, not something to remind us of the stress we are going through! Taking Time to Feel Good and Laugh it Off 1. Mid90s: Made in 2018 this is a total love-note to the 90s, hence the name. It is a coming of age film set in skateboard culture. The forming of self-identity and what forms who we are is quickly established here. It would be a great choice as a sort of unifying throwback film. While not all of your friends may be skaters the culture of the 90s is something that would be reminisced about. Not fully comedic but not fully heavy drama. It's a time that everyone will recognize in their own lives. The vibe can recall "Kids" from 1995 but is nowhere near as explicit. 2. Evil Dead 2: This will top the list regardless of how many years pass since its release. There is no requirement of watching the first and there is no concern should any of the bunch be particularly worried about a scare. This film is what camp films aspire to be but can never achieve. Sam Raimi basically invented the game here with Bruce Campbell. Simply put, the main character Ash has traveled with his girlfriend to a cabin. When there he discovers an audiotape with recordings from a book of ancient texts. He plays the tape and it unleashes a number of demons that torment him. Don't worry, it's intentionally hilarious. 3. Isn't It Romantic: This film has nearly every single Romantic Comedy trope that that genre could throw at you, somewhere in it. It is a satirical film that is making fun of that genre while still kind of being one at the same time. Great watch when you need a feel-good movie that isn't too overly cheesy. Rebel Wilson as the lead was made for the undervalued Architect that eventually comes into her own by the end of the movie. It's one of the roles that feel weird if someone else would have been in it now that you have watched it cast the way it was. Recommend it, especially if you are a person that isn't afraid to laugh at yourself and your tastes sometimes. 4. What We Do in the Shadows: Before there was the tv series on FX there was a film directed by the immensely talented director Taika Waititi. While we are distancing ourselves at these times, these characters are coming together. For those unfamiliar, it is a "reality" documentary about four vampires from different areas and different eras coming together to live in a home on Staten Island. If they can come together and live in unity we certainly can! The mockumentary style ends up being very quotable and perfect for a group of friends to share with each other and in a movie night setting. We Aren't (Actually) Alone. 5. Castaway: You know, even Tom Hanks had to deal with a form of social distancing or isolation of his own kind and all he had was a volleyball named Wilson. He overcame that challenge and was stronger for it. A movie like this can remind us that even when we feel most alone we can still find it in ourselves to be our strongest and make it through a hard time. Plus, who doesn't love Tom Hanks! 6. The Revenant: When you have the film that Leonardo DiCaprio finally achieved his oscar for, you know that it is a winner. This film speaks to the emptiness much like the selection below, "I Am Legend". Survival after an event, leaving us worn and ravaged. Sometimes this is literal, in the physical sense and sometimes it is figurative in the emotional sense. Hugh Glass (Leo) had more of the physical but who is to say his tundra isn't our empty streets. 7. I Am Legend: Another beloved name staring here, Will Smith. He is a scientist that is the lone survivor of a man-made plague, turning humans into mutants. He lives in and wanders New York City hoping to find other possible survivors. As he is immune to the plague he has been working on a cure for the disease. There are parallels for the time we are living in although a much scarier situation. But we can see how he, again, deals with isolation. Watching Will Smith live in that type of environment, expressing how it really feels being that alone is almost therapeutic. With the added benefit of being a great sci-fi movie (based off a great book!)

A Themed Night of the Best Movies to Watch With Friends

Make a game out of it or even better a theme out of it! Movie marathons are great too. But the fun of making up a theme or finding ways to make it into a game adds another layer to the mix. A great example would be "Comic Book Movies". These days the comic book hero movie have become less the outlier and more really fun movies to watch with friends. Another direction to go would be a time period like: Welcome to The 80s John Hughes was the king of the 80s. His films are clearly products of the 80s yet have a charm that has aged well. Dedicate a night to that charm, showing that movies both new and old make great viewing parties. 8. Sixteen Candles: Let's be honest, can there be an 80s night without Sixteen Candles? I suppose it could be possible if it were swapped for Pretty in Pink. 9 out of 10 times this is the first movie that comes to mind when John Hughes is mentioned. The coming of age comedy featuring Molly Ringwald another member of 80s royalty. As a teen dreading her 16th birthday and the standard social anxieties already coming with highschool. Having to deal with the romantic interests of one boy she is interested in and rejecting another (typical nerd!) she wants nothing to do with. 9. Breakfast Club 10. Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Another of the universally loved greats of the 80s. So much so that the National Film Registry selected it for preservation because it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." 11. Planes Trains and Automobiles: The end of the list and towards the end of the section, Planes Trains and Automobiles is a buddy film on the road. Two comedy legends, Steve Martin and John Candy play the lead roles. The two cross paths multiple times while traveling, with their problems starting on a flight going from LaGuardia to O'Hare. Chaos ensues from there as Neal Page, Steve Martins character, stresses about the need to get home for Thanksgiving. Making the story as enjoyable as it is are the stark differences in their personalities. Steve Martin the caricature of the uptight executive and John Candy the good-hearted but loud and jovial salesman. There had to be at least one non-John Hughes on the list, to be fair!

Options for Viewing

At this point, everyone has heard of Netflix. But just because it is a household name doesn't mean it is your only option! Take a look at all of these great options. From Anime fans to Horror Buffs to the very selective Cinephile, all of your bases are covered. Having a broader range of services means more options and it being more likely that you can play a gracious host to your friends and be the one in charge, at that! And ranging from $6 to $11 they aren't going to break the bank

Great Films Mean Never Spending Time Alone

A great film opens up our world to something so much larger, even when it seems so small. Sharing that with our friends and the ones we care about just makes that so much better. Our list of best films to watch with friends will get you on the ground running and ready to be a great host! Come back for more great content and follow us on social media for updates and news, the buttons are at the top of the page. Read the full article

#films #Movies #quarantine

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hiphopandtheirishquestion · 4 years

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Year Zero

The first rap album I really got into was Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show. Till then, it had mostly been one off singles and compilations. Public Enemy also conformed more to the traditional format of a band. Nothing as clichéd as guitars and a drummer of course, but they far were more than a DJ and a rapper. Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, the S1Ws and Terminator X... PE! And in June 1988 they were coming to Dublin.

PE dressed all in black, bar Flav who liked red tracksuits. The S1W’s (Security of the 1st World) were their military wing, and it was said they carried Uzi Sub-machine guns on stage. Chuck D was the front-man and was angry. He wanted revolution yesterday. He was asked if he was playing a game. No, he said, ”We’re not playing any game. Everything else is a game. This is the un-game".

I liked that. The Ungame

They were playing in McGonigles off Grafton Street, so the Def Road Massive (all two of us) made our way to the big smoke. But we made sure to get into character first. TV programmes like Rapido suggested whistles were an essential accessory for any self-respecting b-boy. And being PE, we thought plastic Uzis would be a nice touch, something that didn’t help our 17-year old chances getting served in a pub.

Going to Dublin to see your first out-of-town concert is a rite of passage for us culchies. The fact that mine was a rap band from New York, one that most of my schoolmates would not even have heard of, gave it added weight, at least in my book. I had seen Dublin punks Paranoid Visions and The Human League in Waterford - both great experiences in their own way. But this was different.

Public Enemy, hip hop, was mine. I could leave the other meatheads back in Tramore CBS to headbang to Quo or Van Halen or whoever they fucking liked. To the extent that any of them even knew who PE were it would have been to dismiss it as not being music. Good. Keep it that way. I’ll have my “music” you have yours, you dopey shower of cloth eared, black-shoes-and-white-socks wearing, In the naaaaaaammme of luuuuvvvvvvv singing along with, shit-for-brained bastards.

There - that told 'em.

The day began with a hip hop hors d'ouevre. PE were performing on the grounds of Trinity College that afternoon. I turned up at college green radiating as many rebellious vibes as I could, because I, of course, was a kindred spirit, coming from the crime and poverty riddled slums of Tramore.

The Golden Horde came on first. They played fast, thrashy punk music, and were great. PE - less so. They began by asking everyone to do the peace sign. We half-heartedly followed suit. The whole ‘throw your hands up in the air’, crowd participatory thing is one of the more questionable aspects of the live rap experience. Particularly in the middle of the afternoon, to a crowd of mostly curious onlookers as opposed to actual fans. The punks who had been enthusiastically stage diving ten minutes previously began drifting away, muttering ‘what the fuck is this shit? or words to that effect. And they had a point.

When PE eventually got round to playing some music, they played one song, a tuneless Bring the Noise. It didn’t bode well for main event. Bring The Noise is a banger. If that sounds shit, what hope for the rest of the gig? Perhaps the setting was wrong but I hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come. I didn’t want to spend the whole night being bequeathed to 'say yeah, throw up the peace sign, say yeah, say hell yeah', do anything really except jump around, pump my fist a bit and, in the words of Mantronix, get stupid.

In was all worth it though. Brief set over, PE left the stage and happily mingled with the handful of fans there, belying their reputation as serious, humourless militants. I came away with the inside of my jacket signed Tx (Terminator X), Flavor Flav, PE #1 (Chuck D) and S1Ws (Professor Griff). Was this the musical wing of Louis Farrakhan, the black racists who believed white people to be devils, the angriest group in the world? Lovely chaps to a man - but I looked forward to furious anger later that night.

And so to McGonigles. The music pre-gig was a revelation. I knew a track called The Terminator from a mixtape I had secured somewhere. It sampled Arnie and The Darleks ‘ex-ter-min-ate’ mantra. Here, it made sense. The Terminator would not rest till he had taken out all ‘wack MC’s’. Chuck D had once said that rap was meant to be played loudly, not on your headphones. I now knew what he meant.

In truth, I had no idea what went on at a rap gig. Another song I loved was The Manipulator by Mixmaster Gee and the Turntable Orchestra. ‘Turntable Orchestra cut it up!’ went the refrain, before a wordless chorus of scratching. PE consisted of a quite a lot of people. Only Chuck, Flav and Terminator X had clearly defined roles. Was everyone else on stage scratching up records like a turntable orchestra? I held out some hope that this would be the case (it wasn’t).

Between the pre-gig tunes and a roomful of hip hop starved fans, McGonigles was hopping by the time the band came onstage. And despite being a bit short, involving quite a lot of between-song preaching and a dodgy sound system, it was utterly brilliant. Life-changing, even.

Nothing could diminish the impact of seeing a rap band, and my undisputed favourites at that, up front and personal for the first time. The S1Ws stood on either side looking menacing. Flav did a dance with a bunch of clocks around his neck. Terminator X stood behind the decks, huge PE logo at the front, looking cool as only a hip hop DJ can.

The quality of the sound, the fact that it took me about two minutes to even recognise Rebel Without A Pause, was irrelevant. It was a hip hop love in, and PE could do no wrong. Perhaps the Irish crowd associated with the underdog, or with the sense of standing up to a perceived oppressor. At one point, someone handed a tricolour on stage. This kind of mawkish, come-on-foreign-rock-star-say-how-much-you-love-Oireland nonsense usually makes me want to puke. But here, it was powerful.

Chuck took the flag and told us how lucky we were to have it. We’d kicked the Brits out and were independent (the words may have been different but that was the sentiment). They, on the other hand, as black Americans had nothing. No flag, no homeland, nothing. As a speech for oppressed minorities it was up there with Pearse’s graveside oration.

If there’s a defining moment in 80s Irish hip hop culture then this gig was surely it. Schoolly D and London Posse had played in Dublin, but it was PE at McGonigles that marked year zero for the new generation of B-boys and girls. Eamon Carr saw historical parallels.

‘The Clash in the exam hall in Trinity and Public Enemy in McGonigles, it’s a bit like 1916 in the GPO. We were there! There are so many others who wish they were or think they were there’.

Eric Moore, or DJ Laz-e, old skool hip hop head and DJ at RTE Gold, was another of the lucky ones. “I remember you couldn’t breathe. It was so packed. I was only just sixteen and it was the first concert I’d ever gone to. I’d lied and said I was staying at a friend’s house. And it wasn’t like I was drinking or smoking or anything. Hip hop was my only vice.”

Unsurprisingly, considering his pedigree as a Breakdancer and soon to be champion DJ, he was never going to rock up with a mere whistle and plastic machine gun in the line of accessories.

"I had a pink feather going through a rope gold chain – I thought this is really Zulu Nation. And all my friends were in character too. We wanted to be different. We were like punk rockers. We were obsessed with this shit".

Eric’s Clondalkin crew went on to do great things in the Irish hip hop world, the likes of Sherlock, Tron, Mek and Cutmaster Jay, all of whom were in McGonigles that night, cleaning up at national DMC DJing championships over the ensuing years. The Def Road Massive, alas, remained steadfastly underground. Deep, deep underground.

As did hip hop generally, at least in Waterford in 1988. But that didn't mean we weren't right - a conviction my grandfather and the other 1916 rebels also held 82 years previously. And there would be no need for MC James Connolly to call on his followers to 'raise the roof' – the guns of the British army would see to that.

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malwarewolf404 · 7 years

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I just got a cool idea.

So my biggest criticism about LOK’s plot is that it didn’t stick to one sole villain, in the manner that ATLA did. Granted, the four villains were all very complex and interesting characters, arguably even more so that Ozai, and they did show growth and development in our main character, which was something ATLA didn’t show quite as prominently. My issue with having four different, complex villains who either died or changed their ways at the end of each season is that they just didn’t seem nearly as intimidating or powerful as Ozai. Aang spent nearly a whole season talking about how it will not only be very difficult to defeat Ozai and how anxious he is to, but also struggles with the morals of taking another’s life, even one as evil and powerful as Firelord Ozai. In that same time Korra had to meet, fight, struggle with, and defeat one of her villains. This sacrifices Korra’s struggling time in exchange for showing us the more gritty side of the life of the Avatar: people want you dead.

For a while I’ve pondered on what could be done differently in another Avatar’s story. Roku would be a very interesting character to follow, but in his time, the Fire nation was celebrating 100 years of peace. Republic City was the location of a war on two separate occasions, and of course Aang lived in a world plagued with war, so thematically Roku may not have a very interesting story by comparison (although would would never catch me complaining about having a series or even a miniseries about Roku, expanding on what we saw during ATLA.)

If we’re to follow the Avatar Cycle however, the next story should be about a member of the Earth Kingdom.

Here’s where I may get a little biased. LOK was cool. It was a great fucking show with LGBT rep and more lore-building and yeah just fuckin great. But in my opinion, LOK began to depend so much on two things that really diverged it from the original Avatar series. The first was it’s historical similarities to real life. As far as I know, ATLA doesn’t have very strong historical ties to any particular time-period. It does it’s own thing. The Fire Nation has huge metal war machines. The Earth Kingdom is a rigid and vast monarchical society with more cultural aspects than any other place. The air nomads are an all but extinct spiritual people, once immersed fully in tranquility and peacefulness. The Water tribe is so unique and out-of-this-world, it’s hard to find the words to describe it. Avatar did draw some cultural aspects from real-world countries and peoples (hence the source of the different nation’s ethnic parallels and so forth,) but other than that it pretty much did it’s own thing.

Korra? Korra tried very hard to draw parallels to the early twentieth century. Inventions, the idolization of cities, the strong parallels between Republic city and New York City, freaking jazz music for crying out loud. They definitely do keep the Avatar flare to it, but it feels almost undeniably different from the previous content. Now granted, different can be good, I just feel like they could have tried a little bit harder to show 60 years of change in the Avatar universe than just slapping a bunch of Roarin’ 20′s New York parallels onto it.

So what’s my idea?

Well, I was thinking, instead of stumbling forward into an Avatar’s life during some sort of weird Cold-War era parallel, our next Avatar could be from before Aang, before Roku, hell, why not go all the way and make it before Kyoshi, Yangchen and Kuruk too. This also plays into my desire to have Korra and Asami’s ending as kind of a final word, like there’s no avatar after this!!! It ends with two beautiful bisexual women journeying together!!! fuck off!!!!!

So yeah, I wanna see an Earth Kingdom Avatar who came before Kyoshi (meaning it went our Earth Avatar, A fire Avatar, Yangchen, Kuruk, Kyoshi, etc.) This is bound to be set in a really interesting time period, where a lot of curios stuff happens. For example sometime near here, Won Shi Tong brings his library to the physical world. The Northern Water tribe breaks off, forming the both the Southern Water Tribe and the Foggy Swamp Tribe. During this period, the Sun Warriors of the fire nation begin to fade into obscurity. During this time, the Earth Kingdom is united under one rule, the rule of Ba Sing Se. Oh and that’s another thing, it is during this time period that the four nations begin to form, humanity splitting into kingdoms based on their bending art.

All of this takes place 345 years before the Air nomad genocide, and this is important because during this same era, Yangchen’s predecessor, Yangchen, and Kuruk all lived and died. The Avatar the lived before Yangchen’s predecessor is the one I think we should follow next, because it could potentially take us back to an Avatar series that brought back the feel of feudal east-asia, and could take place during a rocky formation era where kingdoms are fighting to survive, fighting one another over land, and just generally doing ancient human nation formation things. It could potentially make for a great story.

#ATLA #LOK #I just want to specify: I absolutely love LOK #I just feel like it is different from ATLA #in several good ways #but I miss ATLA so this post is just me being a nostalgic critic #shhhhh #Avatar

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johnchiarello · 5 years

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Corinthians 5-6

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1ST CORINTHIANS 5:1-7 Okay, now we get into some tough stuff. Paul tells them that he has heard about a situation where one of the brothers is sleeping with his step-mom [fathers wife, though probably not his mother]. And the rebuke is they are not repenting over it, but instead are kind of proud of the whole thing! Paul says to ‘deliver him to satan for the destruction of the flesh so the spirit may be saved’. Now I already showed you the way I view this verse. I tried to follow the other times where Paul speaks this way in this letter and when using this type of language I see him speaking of physical death [chapter 11- sleep-death as judgment to a believer who sins]. I often ‘day dream’ how bout you? I’m not sure if it’s the lord at times trying to tell me stuff. One of my noble fantasies is I can picture myself as the sole Christian preacher who has survived some nuclear holocaust and I am responsible to train the survivors. In this scenario [I am kinda ad libbing here, I don’t day dream this much!] I have both Catholic and Protestant believers. Although I am tempted to raise this new generation of people as Protestants, I instead teach the Catholics true Catholic doctrine [though I don’t fully agree with it all] and I teach the Protestants their stuff. Now, I think this little day dream in some way speaks to what I need to do at times on this blog. I need to honestly tell both sides! In this verse ‘commit to satan for the destruction of the flesh’ some do see it a little differently. You can read ‘flesh’ as meaning ‘fleshly nature’. Paul does use the word this way at times. You can’t really make the distinction by going to the Greek. Instead you have to simply look at the context. So this view would be saying ‘deliver this believer to the enemy, don’t allow him to remain ‘in the camp’ and continue to receive the benefits of the believing community. As you ostracize him he will feel the effect of not being with you, he will come to his senses and leave his sin’ [which in this scenario is ‘his fleshly nature’] so the ‘destruction of the flesh’ in this interpretation would fit in well with Arminians. Now, do I believe it this way? No, but I sure feel noble, sort of like the Protestant preacher in my ‘day dream’. [p.s. if you tell anybody about this day dream, I will deny it!]

(953)Yesterday I managed to catch a few TV shows that were good. National geographic did a special called ‘the first Christians’. It was excellent. They covered more historic truth in one hour than you would get from years of sermons. They basically taught the New Testament word for ‘church’ [Ecclesia] and showed how because the early Christians did not believe the ‘church’ was a building, that therefore they spread rapidly without lots of money. They then covered the historic development of the ‘church building’ and the effect this had on them. They also got into the ‘end times’ scenarios that are played out over and over again by today’s prophecy teachers. They interviewed true theologians who put Johns Revelation in historical context. Just an excellent job overall. I also caught the show ‘Journey Home’ on E.W.T.N. [the Catholic channel]. I do like the show, it often gives good historical stuff. Last night they were a little ‘too Catholic’ [I know, what should I expect]. They had a good brother on who left ‘non-denominational Christianity’ and became Catholic. Now, most of these brothers are very intelligent believers who make this choice out of sincerity. They usually study the early church fathers and realize the ‘Catholic tone’ of these early believers. I simply felt the brother who spoke last night was a little too critical of his former church experience [Willow Creek]. I then caught Scott Hahn [an excellent Catholic scholar and apologist], he always has stuff that interests me. He brought up an argument I have heard before on how the early church saw the ‘real presence of Christ’ as being in the Eucharist. Others have made this argument before from the Catholic perspective of Jesus being with us, as opposed to the detractors arguments that he misled the early followers to think that he would soon return and set up a literal earthly kingdom. I have heard and do understand this reasoning. In essence it defends Jesus and his followers by saying ‘Jesus didn’t let down the early church by not returning and ‘being with them’ he was with them all along thru the Eucharist’ good intentions. I would prefer to argue the same point thru the fulfilling of the Fathers promise and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. Jesus says in John’s gospel ‘I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you’ it is understood by most theologians [Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant] that Jesus is speaking of the Holy Spirit. Jesus actually refers to the Spirit as ‘One just like unto myself’. The new testament very Cleary speaks of the Holy Spirit as Gods presence tabernacling among us in a real way. So in my thinking I would prefer to argue the real presence of Christ as being among the early believers as fulfilled thru the Comforter. Overall it was a good night of viewing some good teachers. I also couldn’t help but notice how I have been skipping over the ‘more popular’ preaching shows of the day. I did click on one of the prophecy guys, he was defending ‘the rapture’ and I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the good theological discussions from the earlier shows, and the ‘silliness’ of what this brother was teaching. I don’t want to demean you if you hold to the rapture theory, it was just such an obvious ‘step down’ from the level of theologian to the level of popular prophecy preaching. In our current study of Corinthians we just went thru the verse ‘though you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you have only one father’ [Paul referring to himself]. I couldn’t help but get this sense of the modern seen. You could flip thru all the religious broadcasting of our day and get every possible conceivable viewpoint on some subject, ten thousand of them! But there is a consistent voice of truth and wisdom that comes to us from both scripture and church history/tradition. I think we would be better off sticking with ‘the father[s]’.

(954)NOW IT’S A PARALLEL/BUBBLE UNIVERSE! I watched the first TV special I ever saw on the multi-verse theory. I think it’s the first one of its kind by the history channel. It was very eye opening. It seems as if its defenders have been told ‘your initial argument is nonsensical’ and they have made some adjustments. As you read down thru the Evolution section you will see that one of the arguments against a multi-verse is that it is a ‘non physical’ argument. It is metaphysical. This meaning that you could never truly prove the existence of another universe thru the science of Physics. Why? Because the original definition of ‘the universe’ was every thing that exists in the time/space continuum. If by definition, all that can be seen or detected is ‘part of our universe’ then how in the world can you detect something outside of it? [they have some ideas on this, but its pure speculation as of right now] Once you detect it, it, by definition is in our universe! Well the brothers now realize that they fell into this obvious contradiction, so they seem to be moving the goal posts a little. In the special I just saw, they now seem to be saying that our universe is simply one ‘bubble of universes’ that’s floating around in space [before, space and the universe were synonymous!] so they seem to be simply shrinking down the definition of universe and making it mean ‘our closed existing time space continuum, which is simply one of many’ Ahh, you guys are cheating with his one! But hey, how many viewers realized this? That’s the problem with these theories, they come up with them for the purpose of having another explanation for existence, but they then get into more trouble trying to keep their theory alive. Remember, the reason this theory started in the first place was to come up with some type of explanation, apart from God, to explain the fine tuning of the Cosmos [read my sections on fine tuning under Evolution]. The unbelievable fine measurements that have been found to be exactly right to support life have no other real explanation apart from a creator. The multi-verse theory simply says ‘well, if you have millions and billions of unseen universes [pure speculation!] then the odds on one of them getting it right just went up’. So this theory was originally floated for this reason. Now, even if this theory were ever proved [according to the new definition of the universe!] it would simply mean that instead of trying to figure out how ‘our universe got here’ [the original question] now we have to figure out how they all got here! It really proves nothing. But I thought it interesting to see how these giants of Academia now realize that they were violating the basic laws of logic by espousing the theory in its original form! [In essence, all these so called floating, bubble like universes would have originally fallen under the heading of ‘the universe’. You wouldn’t have seen them as a bunch of separate universes. But they had to change the definition in order to keep their argument in the boundaries of logic and common sense]. They also borrowed from Einstein’s theory on worm holes. But Einstein surmised that worm holes might be these tunnels in space/time that one could travel thru and exit at another dimension, a different location of the universe. He did not use this idea as traveling from one ‘bubble universe’ into another, like the proponents of the multi-verse were doing. The show then got too silly to even give it a speck of serious thought. They then theorized that there are possible duplicates of us, and duplicates of other sports teams and presidents and all types of stuff. They thought it possible for the Giants to have won the super bowl in one universe, though losing it in ours [and you call this science!] they even said that this theory has moral implications. How did they come up with this? One of them explained that you could be ‘good’ in one universe, but if you realize that this holy altar image of yourself is doing good somewhere else, then this might effect your choice of being righteous in ‘this universe’ WOW! As we continue our study thru the book of Corinthians, keep in mind Paul’s teaching on the foolishness of men’s wisdom, I think we just saw a good example of it. There is this stature that we give in our modern day to any ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ that comes down the pike with any nonsensical idea. We see them as a special class, the Academics can’t be wrong! After all it sounds intellectual. A few centuries before Christ you had the great philosopher ‘Philo- Betto’ [O wait, that was Clint Eastwood’s character in ‘every which way but lose!’] I mean Plato. Truly Plato and Aristotle and Socrates have had tremendous influence on Western thought. You would be hard pressed to find other later philosophers who have had the same influence [maybe Immanuel Kant]. Plato built this great school of learning in ancient Greece. He bought the land from a man by the name of ‘Academe’. Eventually we would call this pursuit of knowledge ‘the Academic world’ or Academia. Hey, don’t be intimidated by these guys.

(955)1st CORINTHIANS 5:6-8 Okay, lets get back to Corinthians. ‘Your glorying is not good, get rid of the old leaven. Don’t you know that a little yeast can affect the whole lump? Get rid of it, you are all unleavened, Christ is our new Passover Lamb who has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’ [my own paraphrasing]. A few things. I want you to see something here, over the years I have read and studied lots of great theologians. It is common for these brothers to go back to the reality of the early church fathers belief in the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist [Lords supper]. It is also becoming less common [in theological circles!] to defend the symbolic view of the Lords Supper. I believe Paul is presenting the idea of all believers spiritually sitting at the ‘table of life’ on a daily basis and receiving from Christ’s new life in a spiritual/symbolic way. He clearly says ‘let us keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’ [clearly symbolic!] Peter writes of the new sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving. Jesus speaks in an interesting way about this in John chapter 6. The Jews ask him ‘show us a sign, Moses gave us bread to eat from heaven. If you’re from God then prove it like Moses’. I find it interesting that in the key chapter of Jesus being the bread that comes down from heaven, the conversation turns to Moses. The beginning of the chapter does say the Passover feast was getting close, but the imagery is Moses and Manna. Moses represented the Old system of law and works, John’s gospel tells us that ‘the law came from Moses, but grace and truth from Jesus’. Jesus contrasts himself with Moses. He says ‘I am the real bread that has come down from heaven, if men eat my flesh and drink my blood they will live’. Now we must understand the tremendous offence this statement caused. The Jewish people had Levitical laws [commands in their law] that forbid the drinking of any type of blood, never mind the blood of a person! But yet Jesus would speak this way to them. In the conversation the hearers acknowledge the difficulty of the saying, Jesus will say ‘the flesh profits nothing, it is the Spirit that gives you life. The words I am speaking to you are Spirit and life’. At the last supper [which was the symbolic end of the Passover and the beginning of a new celebratory meal centered on the final sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God] Jesus seems to be saying ‘from now on, as long as you do this, you are showing my death until I come again’ [we get this from Paul later on in Corinthians]. As you put all of this imagery together, you get the sense of the New Covenant being one of an ongoing continual New Covenant meal from which all believers daily eat from and ‘keep the feast with the new leaven of truth and sincerity, not the old leaven of sin and wickedness’. You clearly see a symbolic element in this language. Now, I do not discount the importance of the actual ordinance of the Lords Table. I recently defended the Catholic idea to an ex Catholic who is now Protestant. They said ‘how can people believe something so silly’ I had to say that many serious intellectual believers accept the Real Presence doctrine by faith in the literal reading of Jesus words. Luther himself believed it, he made no bones about it when he slammed his fist on the table in his dispute with Zwingli and said ‘this IS MY BODY!’ [I think he slammed his fist, he might have carved it in the table?] Standing for the literal interpretation of the sacrament. John Wesley, the founder of the great Methodist movement, wrote many hymns speaking of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. So make no mistake about it, many good believers hold to the literal belief. I just wanted you to see that it is also in keeping with the scripture to see the entire Christian walk as one huge ongoing ‘feast’ that is kept with spiritual sacrifices and symbolic language. Jesus is the bead that came down from heaven, those who would stay with ‘Moses bread’ [law] would die, those who would eat from this new table would live forever.

(957)1ST CORINTHIANS 5:9-13 Now Paul clarifies what he meant when he said ‘don’t associate with those who sin sexually’. He wants to be clear that his instructions on ‘not being with sinners’ is not misunderstood. After all we are called salt and light, Jesus himself was accused of spending too much time with the lost. So Paul says ‘what I meant was don’t keep ongoing fellowship with a brother who is practicing unrepentant sin’. He also says ‘if you thought I meant all sinners in general, then heck you wouldn’t be able to live in society this way’. Some believers have taken a stand on ‘separation from the world’ in such a way that they have no unbelieving friends. Others seem to view the unbeliever as the enemy. Sort of like we are in this culture war and the enemy is YOU! I can’t even watch the O’Reilly factor [Fox news] too long, he says he’s fighting this culture war and then in the ads for upcoming shows he shows the raciest pictures on any news show. What’s up with that? I feel we need to make the distinction between separating from a sinning brother [for his own good] and having friendships with unbelievers. People you can influence down the road. Paul also says if we judge our own [by shunning them for their own good] that this is a type of ‘present chastening’ that believers do experience. But those who are ‘outside the camp’ [unbelievers] are left to be judged by God. We see this same theme in chapter 11 ‘when we are judged we are disciplined by the Lord so we will not be condemned with the world’ [at the final judgment]. I believe that this idea is one of the best arguments for eternal security [once saved, always saved. Though I don’t like this language, you get the hint]. The concept of believers being presently dealt with for sin, even to the possible point of physical death, seems to indicate that they will not face a future judgment like the lost [eternal damnation]. When we recently did one of our Old Testament studies, I overlooked a verse that said to King David ‘I will raise up one of your sons [Solomon/Jesus- dual Messianic prophecy] and he will build this new temple/people. The way I will deal with the people under this new covenant is, if they commit sins, I will chasten them, but I will not utterly take my mercy from them’ [my paraphrasing- it is said to the actual son, Solomon/Jesus, but in the New Covenant revelation of the church actually being part of the Body of Christ, this is how you could apply it]. You can also read this idea in a few other places. I think Jeremiah uses it ‘I will give them a new heart and I will put my Spirit in them’ and he also speaks about not being totally rejected if they commit sin under this new covenant. So the point is, if there is a mechanism under this new covenant whereby sin is dealt with in the present time, and if this is compared to the other choice which is ‘judgment at a later time’. This would seem to indicate a type of ‘in house discipline’ that says ‘if you openly sin now, God will judge you now. He does this for your own good, so you won’t face the judgment of the unbeliever at the end’. So the fact that some were sinning, even pretty badly! Did not mean that they were expelled completely from the benefits of the covenant. As a matter of fact, temporal excommunication itself was one of the benefits! I don’t want to be too dogmatic on this, I just want you to see a repeated theme in scripture that says God will deal with his kids in the here and now [no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous- Hebrews] but this in itself is a blessing that is designed to ‘produce the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby’ Hebrews.

(958)1ST CORINTHIANS 6: 1-7 Paul rebukes them for taking each other to court. He tells them ‘don’t you have any wise people among you who could handle this? Why go before unbelievers!’ he also tells them ‘plus, why even fight for your rights, if you think you have been wronged in some way by your brother, then simply see it as part of the cost of carrying your cross’. Paul contradicts the prevalent mindset in much of Christianity today. He doesn’t teach ‘get what’s yours, know your rights!’ he teaches the ethos of self denial, of living with the expectation of giving up your rights and dreams. Of taking loss, if it glorifies the Father. Now we get into some ‘stuff’. Paul appeals to them by saying ‘don’t you realize that we shall judge angels some day, we shall judge the world’. A few years back there was a debate going on in theological circles. Some theologians popularized a new way to look at God’s sovereignty. This new system was called ‘Open Theism’. Scholars like Clark Pinnock and others held out the possibility that God doesn’t foreordain all future events, they actually went further and said ‘he doesn’t know all future events’. Well of course this sparked off a firestorm among the Calvinists. Does scripture teach that God is sovereign and does know all that will happen? To be honest about it, yes. But the idea of open theism was saying ‘because God has chosen to give man free will, he, by his own design, has chosen to limit his knowledge in the area of knowing all of mans future choices’. In essence that God purposely ‘does not know’ the future outcomes of decisions that have not been made by humans. If free will is real [of course the Calvinists say no] then God must limit himself to knowledge in these areas. I personally do not believe this, but I think I needed to share it to explain this section of scripture. Paul does tell them they will judge the world and angels. In second Peter 2, the apostle says the fallen angels are being held for a future day of judgment. In Matthew [19-?] Jesus says those who follow him will play a part in a future ruling over human government. These scriptures do indicate that believers will play a role in future judgment scenarios. So if we ‘judge angels and the world’ we should be able to arbitrate between ourselves! Now, in the world of theology you have sincere questions on ‘is it fair for God to judge people who have never heard the gospel’ or ‘if God is truly sovereign in all things, even in predestinating certain people to salvation, then this is unfair’. Many have turned to universalism, or a belief in ‘no hell’ in order to quell these questions. I want to simply float a scenario to you. Jesus says ‘whosoever sins you remit [forgive] they are forgiven. Those you retain [not forgive] will be retained’ while there are differing views on these verses, I want you to see how these scriptures, in keeping with all that I just showed you, might leave us room for another possible way out of all the so called questions on Gods ‘fairness’. Say if at the judgment, we are all gathered [Calvinists, Arminians, Catholics,…] and say if we are all waiting to see who’s right ‘I’ll show that Arminian…I’ll show that Catholic…’ and we are at the day where the future destinies of millions are at stake. What will God do? It’s possible that much of the final decision will rest in the hands of the church. I know it sounds heretical, but keep in mind all the verses I just quoted to you. Say if all of our pompous pontificating [wow!] amongst varying theories of the atonement and universalism and all the other stuff. Say if Jesus turns to us and says ‘You are now going to make the most important judgment of your lives, you shall judge the world and angels’ and all of a sudden all of our scrutiny of God’s fairness turns on us. We see in the crowd of masses, faces of people who we hate. People who have been demonized by history [Darwin, Hitler]. Those we always wondered about [eastern religions] and now much of their final destiny rides on us. Even the possibility of fallen angels being forgiven! [Hey, maybe Origen was right?] The whole point of this scenario is to simply say we might have been asking the wrong questions all along. Now for sure, no one gets in without Jesus and his blood! But there are also a few other verses [Peter] that seem to indicate a second hearing [or first!] of the gospel before the final day. The point being how willing are you to really carry out something like this? Are you really ready for the great responsibility of having someone’s destiny depend on how forgiving you are? I really don’t believe 100 % in this scenario I just floated. But Jesus does put us in positions of responsibility all thru out our lives. He does say ‘whoever’s sins we don’t forgive, these sins will be held against them by your own choice’ we keep people in ‘chains of bondage’ today! Never mind the future. God has committed to us great responsibility as believers, if we are still fighting each other over insignificant things [taking our brothers to court, if you will] then we are truly not ready to ‘Judge the world’.

(959)1ST CORINTHIANS 6: 8-20 Paul paints a ‘canvas’ of those who will not inherit the Kingdom. The list not only includes the big ones, but also the ‘average Joe’. Homosexuals, covetous, straight people who commit sexual sin; just the whole gambit. I do want to stress that Paul is not politically correct, he does categorize homosexuality as sin. He is not simply saying ‘non monogamous homosexuality’ but all types. I know there is an honest effort being made to try as much as possible to be more inclusive of other people’s views and lifestyles. I am for this approach as much as possible, but we also need to be honest about sin, all sin. Now covetous is that strong desire to amass wealth, it is the daily longing and confessing and believing for more material abundance. Yes folks, it’s what many of us have been duped into thru wrong teaching. I had a homeless friend who used to tell me how his dad, who was retired, used to wake up every day and simply consume his day with the stock market and how his retirement was going, he didn’t realize that he made the funding of his retirement [an okay goal] the main thought pattern of his life. I also just saw a story similar to this on some business channel. We need to be ‘ware’ of covetousness. Now Paul makes special mention of the destructive nature of sexual sin, he says ‘it destroys you’. I have been reading Proverbs the last month or so and there are many warnings about sexual sin. It says ‘he that does this destroys his own soul’. A few years back I watched [or read?] a local story of a professor who came down with a disease called Dementia. As they shared his story they described the progressive nature of him slowly losing his mind, and how his family eventually brought him back home [he was not married, his parents took him in] as they shared the sad story, they kinda tactfully said ‘one of the possible signs of this disease is obsessive compulsive sexual behavior’. They basically were saying part of this mans history included obsessive sexual sin. I wonder if the dementia in some way is a result of the behavior, as opposed to a symptom. There was also a study done years ago that showed the difference in the brain scans of Homosexuals and Heterosexuals, they seemed to have found some real physical brain distinctions. But once again, is it possible that sexually engaging in certain sinful behaviors is actually ‘destroying the soul’, or causing a change in the brain? Paul singled out this sin [not just Homosexual behavior, but all sexual sin!] as causing actual damage to a person’s physical make up in a way that was more damaging than other sins. I think we all need to heed his warning. [note- sexual sin is a common struggle in life. Many believers do struggle and have fallen into this sin. Paul actually is addressing these sins because of the prevalence of the problem. I don’t want to condemn any one who reads this site and struggles this way, Paul is offering hope and forgiveness thru out this letter. He seems to be extra harsh with the Corinthians because of their lax attitude towards this sin].

1Corinthians 5:1 It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.

1Corinthians 5:2 And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.

1Corinthians 5:3 For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed,

1Corinthians 5:4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,

1Corinthians 5:5 To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

1Corinthians 5:6 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?

1Corinthians 5:7 Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:

1Corinthians 5:8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

1Corinthians 5:9 I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:

1Corinthians 5:10 Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.

1Corinthians 5:11 But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.

1Corinthians 5:12 For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?

1Corinthians 5:13 But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

1Corinthians 6:1 Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?

1Corinthians 6:2 Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?

1Corinthians 6:3 Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?

1Corinthians 6:4 If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.

1Corinthians 6:5 I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren?

1Corinthians 6:6 But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers.

1Corinthians 6:7 Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?

1Corinthians 6:8 Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.

1Corinthians 6:9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

1Corinthians 6:10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

1Corinthians 6:11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

1Corinthians 6:12 All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

1Corinthians 6:13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.

1Corinthians 6:14 And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.

1Corinthians 6:15 Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.

1Corinthians 6:16 What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

1Corinthians 6:17 But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.

1Corinthians 6:18 Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.

1Corinthians 6:19 What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

1Corinthians 6:20 For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

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