#that how to read like a professor book is godlike

[heavenlymorals]

The Vampire and the Stag: A Look Into the Symbolic significance of Dutch Van Dir Linde and High Honor Arthur Morgan

Warning: This post has spoilers for Red dead 2

Symbolism is one of the most important visual and literary elements used to push the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2. The game is chock full of biblical references, animal symbolism, and references to other famous works. Hell, I might've even found a Blood Meridian reference via that Judge Meredith Holden letter, but that might be a reach. In any case, this game uses symbolism to push the story further and I want to do a short little retrospective on my two favorite characters of this game and what they represent in the literary sense.

Let's start with Dutch.

Dutch Van Dir Linde is many things. He's a violent idealist, a romantic, a gang leader, a notorious outlaw, and a legendary gunslinger in his own right.

He's also an allegory for the vampire, and by vampire, I mean the European literary symbolism of the creature.

Let's start off with looks. Right from the get go, Dutch is differentiatued from the rest of the gang members by his luxurious and eccentric appearance, something that the vampire usually has. He had gold chains, personalized gold rings, one with a D and another with a lion. His jacket seems to be velvet, he smokes cigars rather than cigarettes, and his hair is done up in ringlets as we know his actual hair texture is straight rather than curly (Guarma, epilogue, RDR1).

His color scheme is also very stereotypical of the more modern vampire. While other characters usually have a more diverse color scheme, Dutch is suited in reds and blacks the entire main game.

The nature of the undead is also with Dutch via his horse, the Count. First of all, there is just the name the Count that gives off vampire energy (Count Dracula) but there is also the fact that Dutch's horse shouldn't exist. Foals born with albinism, which is the coat the Count is said to have, die because of lethal white syndrome. The Count should have died long ago but it's still alive somehow- he cheated death like a vampire. That's also not mentioning death in the sense that death comes riding on a pale horse.

Vampires in classic literature are never just about vampires as these charming blood sucking creatures almost always exist to convey a deeper meaning of consumption. In the 1800s, this idea of consumption, with the most famous visualization of it being the older vampire man sucking the blood of young, usually virginal women, is often an allegory for selfish sex and defilement. Vampires in old media could very well be a criticism of wealthy men taking advantage of younger women, taking their virginity, and then tossing them aside and being virtually fine while the women lose everything from respect to family to even lives, which can also be the case with Dutch and Molly, but overtime, the vampire became less an allegory to write sex without outwardly writing sex in the 1800s, and became more a symbol of personal consumption at the expense of others.

The wonderful Professor Thomas C. Foster puts it best: "That's what this figure (the vampire) really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else's right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another. That's pretty much what the vampire does, after all." - "How to Read Literature Like a Professor"

Dutch is basically that. He consumes people for the sake of his own goals, his own dreams, and his own delusions of grandeur. He will believe in people as long as those people believe in him, but their belief in him is more important to him than his belief in them.

Dutch seems like a Messiah to the disenfranchised, a Jesus figure of sorts. He seems charming, empathetic, cultured, and different from other men, like the vampire. People are enthralled by him, become obsessed or loyal to him, like the vampire's victims. However, these people, like Arthur, John, Molly, Bill, Javier, etc., are used and Dutch, the vampire, doesn't return the favor as he only consumes for his own favor.

And in the end? People suffer or they die and Dutch moves on to his next victims, even if he did love these people.

Dutch is the embodiment of the vampire in every possible way except in the most literal way, which is the blood sucking.

Now let's move on to Arthur Morgan.

Arthur and the stag are one in the same when it comes to Red Dead's symbolism. If one were to mention a stag in the Red Dead universe, more likely than not, people would think of high honor Arthur Morgan. The Stag is Arthur's symbolism, but let us dig a little deeper into what the stag could symbolize beyond just high honor.

When it comes to animal symbolism, stags are almost as iconic as male lions with what they are meant to represent. All throughout various cultures, the stag usually represents a noble creature. It can represent honor (duh), strength, virility, grace, and regeneration, amongst other things, but I want to focus on interpretations of the stag from a few cultures and how they ultimately relate back to Arthur Morgan.

Considering that Arthur has Welsh heritage, or so we assume, let us start with the interpretation of the stag in Welsh culture and mythology. The stag has a huge presence in Welsh culture and mythology, with even some gods and higher beings taking the image of a stag. However, I would like to focus on the stag as a messenger, a messenger between worlds, which is what Arthur becomes in a sense to John Marston.

John's world for such a huge part of his life as the gang. The gang raised him, fed him, taught him to read, taught him morals, taught him many skills, and gave him a purpose. The gang is his world and for such a huge chunk of his life, it was the only world he knew. Sure, Abigail gets pregnant because of him, but she was a part of that world too.

Arthur was able to see other worlds. Mary wasn't a girl who was downtrodden like Abigail and thus would take on well to the life they lived. She was a normal girl and he was not a normal man. Eliza wasn't part of his gang life either, and neither was Issac. They lived in a different world, in a world of civilization, in a world where they didn't or shouldn't have had to keep one eye open to stay alive. Arthur would jump over to their worlds, even if just for a short amount of time, and then back to the gang- he has seen and experienced both of those worlds.

Arthur then gives John the message that he should leave and be a man and provide for his wife and protect his child by leaving the gang life that destroyed the both of them. Arthur becomes a messenger from one world to another- from gang life to normalcy. And with that message, John experiences a change- a change of character and motives.

The Stag is a messenger and Arthur is a messenger. A messenger to not only John, but to everyone else he tried to get out of there for he experienced two worlds and one is better than the other.

Another interpretation of the stag is the selflessness of sacrifice, which can be shown through the Greek culture of story and mythology and explained perfectly in the story "Iphigenia at Aulis" by Euripides. Iphigenia goes to her father and tells him that she will offer herself as a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. Sacrifices must be made to keep the gods happy and the people alive and happy. Iphigenia offering such a thing shows her selflessness, her want of wanting others to be safe and sound, even at the expense of herself.

Sound familiar?

Reminds me of a certain dark romantic cowboy.

By the end of the story, Iphigenia's selflessness was rewarded by the goddess, and as Iphigenia's father was about to slit her throat, the girl got replaced by a stag while Iphigenia was escorted to live amongst the gods for her selflessness.

The deer becomes the sacrifice and in a way, Iphigenia and the deer become one and the same. The deer is sacrificed for the sake of others- the stag becomes a symbol of noble selflessness, much like Arthur. Arthur sacrifices himself in order to save John, Abigail, and Jack- a noble cause, a noble sacrifice.

The stag being a noble sacrifice is also associated with certain Native American cultures (I cannot for the life of me think of which tribes they were exactly, but once I find them, I will edit this post). The stag must be killed for people to eat, thus the deer is a noble creature. The consumption of the stag is an allegory of people living better lives or having better days because of the sacrifice of a person. Because of that, the stag is a heavily respected creature.

And given that Dutch's vampire is all about consumption, Arthur's symbolism of being a stag is perfect for their dynamic since the deer is all about sacrifice and nobility and the vampire is all about selfishness and despair.

In any case, the deer represents many things across many cultures, from being a messenger to being a sacrifice, but one thing for certain is that the stag is synonymous with honor and nobility- the person that Arthur tried to be in the end.

Yapyapyapyapyapgodifuckinglovesymbolism-

#rdr2 #red dead redemption 2 #arthur morgan #dutch van der linde #symbolism #literature #vampires #stags #yall did i cook? #i had so much fun with this #also #that how to read like a professor book is godlike

[theveryconfusedartistsart-blog]

Whoops, submitted something only half done. Let me try again:

——————

Imagine you are Asriel. Being king has gotten rather tiresome. Most of the time, you don’t want to rule, and no one wants to be ruled by you, so really it’s a win-win. You don’t feel like trying for the ones where that wasn’t the case for a long while.

How about Royal Scientist? Someone will need to keep the CORE up and running once it fails five months in, and you don’t thing the Ghost is cut out for it.

So you set out to study every science and engineering field your bored mind could hope to grasp. Years spent reading every book in the Underground and centuries spent ruling as a king made processing and memorizing the information a surprisingly smooth process, but more than once you ended up breaking a lot of somethings in sheer frustration trying to understand an incomprehensible principle.

With this knowledge, a few hundred tons of stolen equipment, and more expertise on human cellular biology than you ever wished to know, you managed to keep the CORE active, even adding a magical portal to handle the cooling process for you.

Then you started experimenting with other engineering projects, finding ways to apply lessons from watching human professors and engineers work their craft under a cloak of invisibility, and combining them with your own infinite magic to make things humans never could.

A headset that works in the vacuum of space wasn’t even the most impressive. You proudly remember when you cracked nuclear fusion power sixty years before humans managed on their lonesome. All by yourself.

Suck it humans.

Unfortunately for your first test of the completed reactor, you injected too much hydrogen and was standing right next to the part of the shielding unit that failed. In theory, in the event of catastrophic failure, the loss of confinement will just cause the fusion process to stop, and all that is let out is hot but rapidly cooling gas.

What you did not anticipate was using magic instead of electromagnetism for confinement somehow supercharged the energy output to equal a small atomic bomb. You barely have time to react before you are cooked alive by your hated enemy: the nuclear fireball.

Welp, good thing you saved before starting the test.

——————

You do eventually get the reactor working, but by then you decided it wasn’t worth the hassle over just using the CORE. For how old it is, it is far easier to maintain than to build and maintain than your new one.

If things progress in one of the ways you think it will, you suppose doing science does not require godlike magic. At least you’ll still be good for something.

There's so much he learned with his infinite time, while I'm certain he spent a lot of time basically doing nothing, I am also certain he did a lot of studying and learning to become smarter than the humans (and monsters)

(...which I'm also certain he tried the same as Flowey but his resources were much more limited)

Although, I really enjoy the idea of him becoming close to being a genius but finding that there are some things he just can't figure out, even if he spends a year or more on.

#Fanfic monster in the mountain talk

[unfoldingmoments]

VALENTINO THE NARRATIVES

by: Amia Srinivasan

In a myth revealed by a playwright at a drinking party in a story told by an old man to a young man in an ancient text written by a philosopher and transcribed by the hands of many now long dead, there once were humans who were circular in form. These humans were the children of the Earth, Sun and Moon, and like the Earth, Sun and Moon they were perfectly round and very powerful. Each of these humans had two heads, four arms and four legs. They were complete and, in their completeness, like gods. One day, the gods started worrying that these circle-humans were getting ideas above their station, and that they might soon storm the divine realm. So the gods decided to split each human in two, as one slices a cooked egg with a hair. Each human was divided into two half-humans, each with one head, two arms and two legs. The gods swivelled round the heads of the new half-humans so they could see the cut surface where their other halves had been. The sun god, who is also the god of medicine, stretched the half-humans’ skin to cover the rawness of their wounds, gathering the skin together like a drawstring purse and fastening it with a knot we now call the navel. This way, the sun god said, the half-humans could gaze down at their bellies and remember what they had once been. So it was that human love was created. The half-humans were forever in search of their missing halves, tormented by a longing to render what was now dual a unity once again. Sometimes a half-human found another half-human who seemed to fit, and then these two sorry creatures, pressing themselves against one another, would cry out to the blacksmith god to weld their bodies together for ever. And so, endlessly seeking the restoration of their ancient estate, humans ceased being a threat to the gods.

I heard this myth told once at a wedding. The bride and groom were two halves of one whole, they said, we are one person, behold! What they did not know was that the myth, revealed by a playwright at a drinking party in a story told by an old man to a young man in an ancient text written by a philosopher and transcribed by the hands of many now long dead, was meant as a joke. The joke is that this is a story of love told by foolish lovers, which is, understandably, the nature of lovers. To believe the joke is to think that we should want to return to wholeness, that we could ever be enough for one another. It is a fantasy that forgets decay, death, the hot restlessness of desire. Imagine yourself as a circle, navel-less and two-headed, godlike in your perfect roundness. Still, would you not want more, need more – more than this unbearable plenitude?

The true story of love goes something like this. At eighteen, my grandmother, who was very beautiful, agreed to marry a boy whose face she liked. She had said no to other boys but knew she had to say yes to one eventually, so she chose this one, because she liked his face. It was a kind face. She bore and raised three children, kept the house, soothed her husband’s ego when it was bruised. Most days he would gaze at her face and say that it looked to him just as it did when she was eighteen. One night not too long ago he woke her up to say he was cold. She pulled a wool blanket around him and gathered him to her and then he died. When he was alive my grandfather read many books. Now it is my grandmother who spends her days reading, though the books make her arthritic hands swell and cramp. I last saw her a few months ago, on a screen. She was holding a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper, a book I had written. She was trying to read it, she said, but she wasn’t sure she could understand all of it. Do you know how much I love you, she said to me, do you know. Ref: https://www.valentino.com/en-us/experience/the-narratives/amia-srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Her essays — on animals, incels, death, the university, technology, political anger and other topics — have appeared in the London Review of Books, New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper's, TANK and elsewhere. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, was published in 2021.

#valentino #valentinothenarratives #narratives #story #stories #fashion #amia srinivasan #loveletter #letter #love #words #writing #writer #playwright #myth

[rae-gar-targaryen]

INDULGE ME PLEASE!!!!!!! Ok but a dark academia vibe with College!EZ…. you share a writing intensive course w/ him (philosophy, creative writing, anthropology, classics, a novel based course or something) and he’s one of those always prepared types. Extra pens, extra highlighter. He’s an all around type too, definitely plays a sport, probably is apart of a club of some sort…. Only wears glasses to read but he’s so cute when he does wear them (he hates wearing them because it makes him look old like felipe lolll) ….. the both of you dont really interact till you disagree with something he says in the class you share and now you’re on his radar because he just has to pick your brain…… no one ever really disagrees with him…. He likes it?!?!?!

Anyways yeah…. This had been on my mind ALOT

those damned romantics [college!ez reyes x reader]

A/N: Well, fuck. I read this, was immediately struck, and could not let sleeping dogs lie. So... this is an entire fic now, and I'm not sorry? This is unedited, so sorry about whatever it actually is. Maybe I'll add the taglist later?

Pairing: College!Ezekiel Reyes x Reader

Word Count: 4.1k (I KNOW WHAT THE FUCK -- As soon as you sent this ask, I started typing and didn't stop) of enemies-to-lovers literary rivals, just like in the old books you both love to read.

Warnings: SMUT! 18+ ONLY. A good-old-fashioned library hatefuck, with fingering and some slight dom!EZ.

Summary: See the lovely @joannasteez ask, supra. I took some liberties. Some unedited enemies-to-lovers goodness.

--

You didn’t think that “Classics & Creative Writing” aka “Lit 403” would be an easy class, per se. 

Had you been comfortable in your own hubris because you’d already read a good number of the novels on the required reading list for the semester? Sure. With a heavy tilt toward gothic fiction and crime, and a syllabus full of Shelley, Capote, and Connell, you felt comfortable that you would be able to timely complete most of your assignments.

The seminar half of the portion seemed simple enough -- complete the required reading by the time of class, and participate in a seminar without about two-dozen other likeminded literary nerds. You would pencil-pick the classics within an inch of their lives -- chewing over themes, motifs, usage of simile and metaphor. 

The writing half of the course? Pick an “auteur” whose work you would attempt to emulate in order to come up with your own short story. 

This all would have been simple enough for your literature-loving heart, if it wasn’t for the infuriatingly smug, self-assured, beautiful jockish boy who sat back-row-center, annoyingly, immediately in the seat behind yours. 

He thought he was so cute. And so smart. And when you had stumbled over your explanation of isolation and ambition in “Frankenstein,” Ezekiel “The Golden Boy” Reyes had only been too quick to swoop in and snake your point from your very mouth-- correcting your point about feminist writing in the Romantic era, receiving all the credit from the professor while you sat, mouth agape, at the loss of your answer. 

If that boy thought he could slide into your idea the way he slid into home plate, securing another win for himself (both on the field and off, it seemed), he had another thing coming. (You weren’t being a dick -- not that you had endeavoured to keep tabs on him or anything, it was just common knowledge that he was here on a baseball scholarship. Taking the whole student-athlete thing a little too seriously, if anyone had asked you.)

“Ambition, coupled with a false sense of pride -- of being a godlike creator -- though of course, not actually being a god-- not unlike the prevalent concept of toxic masculinity in the 21st century, is Victor’s downfall. It feels only right that Mary Shelley -- a woman -- would be the one to shine the light on this flaw and how men fail as nurturers,” EZ had shrugged, as though the point was so simple. 

You whipped your head around after the professor had smiled at him and moved on, only to find Ezekiel already staring at you from behind his (infuriatingly hot) reading specs. Were they designer frames? You furrowed your brows in what you hoped was an intimidating glare. 

EZ just smiled his annoyingly bright “el nino de oro” smile at you, and winked. Winked. It might have been hot. Might have made you melt in your seat just a bit, if he wasn’t such an asshole. 

Oh, it was on, motherfucker. 

--

Ezekiel often saw you in the library, head bent down, poring over your worn copy of whatever novel you were reading in class that week. Worn like you had brought it from home -- not purchased it from the student store for class. 

So you were a reader, then. He’d thought it was cute. 

You would highlight and tab pages before switching gears to make notes, both in the margins of the text, and in your tabbed notebook you always lugged with you to class. 

EZ had to respect the hustle -- not many people still took handwritten notes for class. Come to think of it, the only time he had ever seen you behind a computer screen was when you brought your laptop to group for the short-story portion of the class, scrolling through the running word doc that was your obnoxiously-detailed outline. Nah. He totally wasn’t looking over your shoulder. Not in seminar, and not in group. 

You were just a lit-snob who wasn’t going to make it any other major. He needn’t concern himself with you. 

Right? 

So how exactly was it that he found himself sliding into the empty seat across from you at your table in the corner of the library? 

He liked studying on the second floor -- not as busy and chatty (people shouldn’t come to the library to socialize under the guise of studying) as the first floor; not as intensely quiet as the third floor, where people would glare at you for turning your page too loudly. 

No, the second floor was a good mix of hushed chatter and respectable pockets of studious quiet. 

You hadn’t looked up from your copy of “The Picture of Dorian Grey” as he’d approached (he had heard you’d intended to write a similarly-postmodern short story in the flowery vein of Oscar Wilde and Bronte. Not that you’d shared that with him -- he was just … observant, that’s all). You hadn’t even flinched when he slumped down his bag onto the empty chair next to the seat he was now pulling out. 

“I told you, Anna,” you had breathed, voice in a pleasant register just above a whisper, “I don’t care if the barista is cute, I’m not going with you for more coffee. I need to focus, and I can only have so many Red-Eyes in one week…” your voice trailed as you looked up to meet the glinting, mossy-amber eyes of none other than Ezekiel-motherfucking-Reyes.

He was most decidedly not Anna. And he was also regarding you with an infuriatingly easy (hah) stare, smiling in a facile way, right into your quickly-souring face. 

“Just how many Red-Eyes do you drink in one week?” Ezekiel responded in a low, velvety rumble, brow quirked and arms flexing beneath his practice jersey as he made himself comfortable in the seat across from yours, already unpacking his bag, though his eyes never left yours. 

“Enough to keep me awake during your self-important soliloquies during class,” you snipped, primly. “And who told you you could sit here?” You nodded toward the previously-empty seat he was now all-too-keenly making himself comfortable in. “My friend is sitting here.” 

There. If you kept your tone unfriendly, just to the right of a little bitchy, he’d know he was unwelcome. 

EZ chuckled at that, seemingly unfazed by your little dig at his class participation. 

“An empty seat and your ‘friend’ is sitting here? Yeah, that tracks,” he chuckled at his clever little barb that you didn’t actually have any friends, before taking in the downright murderous glare you were leveling him with and continuing, “Nah, I’ve seen Anna chatting up Marco every time I go to get coffee. The two of them aren’t going anywhere,” he shrugged, now unpacking his extra pens, highlighters and little moleskine notebook. A writer’s notebook. Pretentious. 

Strike one, you thought. Terminology Ezekiel would be all-too familiar with. You’d tried to annoy him into leaving, and that was a big swing-and-miss. If at first you don’t succeed? Try, try again. 

You sniffed lightly, steely eyes never leaving Ezekiel’s stupidly-muscular form. How did he always look so warm? The second floor of the library really was the prime study spot on campus, but friendly to the perpetually-cold it was not. 

“Did you just come from practice, or something?” You lilted, innocuous. 

EZ looked at you, eyes lightened with a note of surprise. A sincere question about his day? Was hell freezing over? 

He chuffed a little chuckle, scrubbing his hand along the back of his neck as he responded, “Uh, yeah, actually…” 

“Ah,” you’d nodded and cut in before he could finish. “So that’s what that smell is.” 

It would have been comical how quickly Ezekiel’s face had dropped into a frown, if it didn’t make your gut drop just the slightest bit. Too mean? 

To his credit, Ezekiel seemed to recover like your barb was nothing. 

“Not surprised you can’t differentiate,” he shrugged, now starting to thumb through his own copy of Oscar Wilde. “Your head being as far up your own ass as it is.”

Strike two. 

Was Ezekiel really so unbothered by your shitty little barbs? Did it really just roll off of his back like it was nothing? 

He glanced up from beneath his lashes (annoyingly long, of course -- was anything about this boy not annoying?) at you. He smirked at your scrunched brows and the firm set of your jaw. 

Fuck, you were hot when you were mad. 

To add insult to injury, he kept talking. No use in hiding the ball, right?

“You know,” he breezed, as though he hadn’t just insulted you, “You’re pretty cute when you’re pissed at me.” He winked. 

The audacity of this boy. 

You sat, mouth agape, as Ezekiel carried on like he hadn’t just said that to you, highlighting a line in the book and making a little note in his moleskine. You tugged the sleeves of your cropped hoodie down over your fingers, twisting the cuffs between your fingertips in your anxious anger at the stupidly hot boy in front of you.

Before you realized what you were doing, you capped your little blue pen and flung it straight into his perfectly-perfect face. The pen gently plinked off of Ezekiel’s curved nose and his designer frames before landing with a gentle thunk onto the paper of his notebook. 

Had you really just -- ??

To your credit, even you looked surprised at the little childish move your frustrations had wrought. 

Oh shit. You stared into EZ’s golden eyes for any hint of anger, retaliation, or just what he’d do next, surprised when ...

EZ’s momentary expression of shock quickly melted into a warm little quirk of his lips, not even flinching as he reached into his bag. He never broke eye contact with you as he pulled out a spare pen, clapping it down onto the table and sliding it over to your side, like it was a surreptitiously good card that would guarantee you the winning hand in a high-stakes poker game. 

He smirked at you again before going back to his notes.

You broke eye contact to look down at the pen he had offered, a warm, tingling sense of welcome surprise at the realization that the pens he carried were in the same blue ink you favored,

Well, fuck. That had no business being as hot as it was. 

You opened your mouth, a squeaking little gasp escaping your lips as you took in Ezekiel’s fastidiously moving hand, long fingers gripped around his own pen as he made neat little notes in the margin of his book, not unlike the way you did. 

“Ezekiel,” you breathed, the thoaty register of your voice enough to break Ezekiel’s concentration. He glanced at you from beneath his lashes once more. 

“I -- I’m sorry,” you began… but Ezekiel held up a large hand, waving away your apology. 

“If this is the part where you give some kind of Elizabeth Bennett-esque speech about how our respective pride makes us similar, it’s really not necessary. I know what kind of girl you are,” Ezekiel murmured, sliding his hand across the table to grip your fingers now, his long legs beneath the table had somehow come to rest on either side of where yours were in your seat. 

“Oh?” You queried gently, brow now raised at Ezekiel’s rejoinder, “And what kind of girl am I?” 

“The kind who makes fiction her identity. You bring your own books to class. You’re protective over words that aren’t even yours. You’re smart, sure, if not a little defensive,” EZ was smirking again, as though his read of you wasn’t mildly insulting. “Other people can like books, too, you know?” The smirk softened into a warm little smolder. 

The apples of your cheeks felt tingly and warm -- whether it was from embarrassment over EZ’s facile read of your character and your minor flaws or heat from just how turned on this boy was incomprehensibly making you feel, you didn’t know. What you did know was that the warmth was spreading down the column of your throat and settled into a rushing bloom across your collarbones and chest. 

“As opposed to you?” You could feel Ezekiel’s legs caging your own from the boundaries of your chair, and had decided in a split second of devilish determination to have a little fun. If he could make fun of you, you could return the favor, right? You left your lips parted as you trailed the toe of your sneaker from Ezekiel’s ankle, slowly dragging it up his calf as you continued. “A self-important, proud little boy only so eager to show he’s more than a pretty face? Trying to be Heathcliff doesn’t make you swoon-worthy. But it does make you a bit of a dick.” 

With that, you pushed back from your table, tossing your pens (and the one Ezekiel had given you) into your back, tabbing the page of “Dorian Grey” you’d just highlighted before snapping it shut. You smugly noted the look of surprise-turned-rage that crossed Ezekiel’s godlike features, his full lips twisting into something dour. 

You leaned over the table once more, invading Ezekiel’s space as you let your lips linger closely to his… 

“Ya know? You’re pretty hot when you’re mad.” 

You turned on your heel, content to sway your way out of the library in smug little victory, when Ezekiel called softly behind you,

“You’ll always be fond of me, babe,” he paraphrased, making your steps falter as he finished, “I represent to you all of the sins you’ve never had the courage to commit.” 

The line of “Dorian Grey” you’d just finished highlighting for your paper, right before he showed up. 

This boy was impossible. Strike three? You weren’t sure anymore who won. 

-- 

It was Oscar Wilde seminar day, and Ezekiel was floundering in his explanation of art imitating life, and the surface of something versus its true nature. He was mostly there, you’d give him credit. But he was missing something important -- 

“I think what Ezekiel is trying to say,” you piped up from the seat in front of him, “is that the postmodern lens Oscar Wilde writes in distinguishes it from other Romantic-era literature in that it relies less on the influence of nature and naturalism, and focuses more on industrial society and its inherent flaws.” You paused before continuing, “It’s like that one quote from the book, ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.’ The other Romantics never would have put it like that.” 

At your professor’s smiling nod, you turned back in your seat to regard Ezekiel. Only to find, once more, that he was already staring at you, a grey and thunderous storm brewing behind his usually-kind coffee eyes. 

You shrug, awarding him a little smirk of your own, a flutter of your lashes, before turning around in your seat and resuming your handwritten note-taking, feeling more than a little “Elizabeth Bennett” proud. 

--

It wasn’t until later, when you were in the library, that you saw Ezekiel again. You could feel him as he stalked over to you, standing over where you sat, all broad, heaving shoulders.

“Yes?” You placed your pen down in your notebook and sat back in your seat, giving Ezekiel your full attention.

Wordlessly, Ezekiel struck, leaning forward with a swiftness that defied his size and seizing your wrist, yanking you from your seat before you knew what was happening. 

You made to gasp, to protest, but Ezekiel turned on you, your arm still locked in his grip, as he brought his other hand up, pressing a finger first to his full lips, shushing you harshly.

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to fuckin’ talk in the library?” -- 

Before taking said finger and trailing it over your mouth, catching it on your fuller lower lip and dragging it downward, dropping his hand by his side once more. With that, Ezekiel turned on his heel, tugging you behind him as he made his way to the far recesses of the library. 

He ushered you into a row in the far stacks, wordlessly beckoning you down an aisle you had never even seen before. 

“Ezekiel, wha --?”

You couldn’t even finish your question before he pounced, dropping your wrist from his grip in favor of cupping your jaw in both hands, pressing his warm lips harshly to yours, breaking the sudden kiss to hiss between his teeth, 

“Shut,” he kissed you again, “the fuck up.” 

Using his height and the two guiding hands on you to press you into the shelf behind you, he pressed his weight insistently into you, bending his knees and lowering himself slightly from his towering height to place himself at the right spot to knock your knees apart with his own and roll his hips into yours ever-so-slightly. 

Ezekiel tore his lips from yours, where his tongue had been exploring the inside of your mouth, content to trail his lips along your jaw and down your neck, allowing his hand to trail down your side and hook beneath your thigh, hoisting it around his tapered waist. 

He breathed hotly into your ear, ragged and panting as he rolled his hips into yours again. Your brain was too sluggish, too lust-drunk to comprehend the noises he was making until well after he’d already made them. You could only imagine what you sounded like, trying to muffle your little gasping moans as Ezekiel marked your neck. 

“You were so fucking hot today,” EZ moaned in your ear, all red-clay heat, fizzing champagne gone warm in the moment. “How you fuckin’ talk like that.”

He trailed the hand not already gripping your thigh across your breast and over the soft cotton of your shirt, making his way down to where the hem of it was tucked into your flouncy, springtime skirt. He tugged until the hem came free, dragging the hot pads of his fingertips up, under your shirt and over the soft lace of your bralette, feeling the hardness of your nipple beneath, cupping your breast and rolling a finger over your sensitive bud as he simultaneously rolled his jean-clad hips into your core, grinding between your legs.

“You had your moment,” EZ pulled back from his neck in time to fix his melted-chocolate gaze onto your wanton one. “Now are you gonna be good for me, baby?” 

If your bones could melt, you figured they’d long be a puddle where you once stood, EZ’s hands had abandoned the space beneath your shirt in favor of trailing their way up your skirt, brushing your underwear to the side in a moment way-too-smooth to be unpracticed (you wouldn’t think about that now) and swiping through the warm, honey slickness of your core.

You gasped, open-mouthed and in awe of just how starry-eyed Ezekiel was making you feel, like a balmy tropical night spent lounging on white-sand beaches. In between the plucking of his fingers, and just how tingly that was rendering you, you wondered if EZ was one for cliched summer romance. 

As quickly as it had started, Ezekiel stopped. 

You had half a mind to protest, but not before EZ could shush you with the domineering press of his incendiary lips to yours. 

“I asked you a question,” he rasped, the hand on your throat firming ever-so-slightly. “You gonna quit with that smart fuckin’ mouth and be good for me?” His warm grip around your neck shook slightly, gently knocking your head into the shelf behind you, a gentle whumph as it met the books that took up permanent, long-abandoned residence there. 

You sighed, pleased as Ezekiel’s featherlight touch resumed at your core, a thick finger teasing your entrance, waiting for your response before giving you what you so desperately wanted. 

“Y-yes, Ezekiel,” you breathed into his mouth, “Of course. Y-you’re being so good to me.” Ezekiel’s smirk was back, full-lipped and mildly sinister. He let out a little snarl as he slid his thick fingers into you. 

EZ could have been a music major, you’d thought vaguely, with how well he was playing your body. The borderline rough treatment his fingers were rendering inside you was enough to make you see stars, but you wanted more. 

You were reticent to say it, but you loved seeing this side of EZ. You had seen him soft, eyes glittering wanly in a quiet moment surrounded by a bustling party. You had seen him arrogant, a confident smirk pillowing his lips as he swaggered across campus. Of course, you had seen him smug, chuckling in self-amusement at a particularly clever turn of phrase. How Stanford of him. 

And not that you'd indulge particularly nosy ears, especially Ezekiel’s own-- but this was your favorite Ezekiel -- the heady, solid man towering over you with a firm, commanding presence. His large, warm palm curved around your thigh, thick fingers beckoning you closer to just where he wants you. To just where you want you

You could endeavor to tease him a little, tug your leg out of his grip, giggling and twisting and begging for the chase. But you wouldn't dare defy him; not when he is leaning over you with dangerous eyes like melting pools of mossy hazel, just daring you to try something, to give him an excuse to grip and tug with his fingers that had been carding through your hair. Not when he bares his teeth at you in a predator's grin.

His full lips then teasingly brush over yours, just a dusting of powdered sugar, a slip of sweetness you craved to swallow whole. You could feel your skin sweltering beneath EZ's imposing form. Yes, this is your favorite Ezekiel. Something you'd never thought you'd have.

Damn him. 

You had a feeling he knew it, too. What with the self-assured way he had about himself.

Ezekiel’s fingers were quickly working you toward your peak, summoning you to an edge you’d never in a million years thought you’d experience with him. You pressed your fingers to his firm chest, pressing him away from you just firmly enough for him to get the message. 

He ripped his lips from you, his fingers ceased, and he looked at you questioningly. 

“I - I want you, EZ,” you murmured, fluttering your lashes at him, chest heaving. 

You trailed your fingers nimbly from his chest to his belt buckle, deftly undoing his jeans, choosing delicately not to comment on the sizeable, hot, hard length you now had cradled in your palm. You gave EZ a few gentle, teasing strokes with the feather touch of your hand, causing him to groan and knock his forehead into yours, eyes shut and lips parted. 

You relished your moment of victory as you guided EZ to your center, allowing him to firmly, fully press-and-thrust inside of you. EZ quickly gained his bearings, gripping your hips and rolling his own, the teasing drag his thrusts were taking on was equal parts infuriating and heavenly. 

You rocked onto your tip-toes as best you could, given EZ’s body pressing yours into the shelf, his pistoning hips knocking you rhythmically back into the shelf. With your newfound tidbit of height, you pressed your face, your lips, into EZ’s clothed shoulder, gently biting to muffle the whining moans you didn’t trust yourself to contain. Not confident every single person in this library didn’t know just what the fuck you and Ezekiel were doing, how fucking good he was making you feel.

EZ grunted in surprise at the contact of your little bite, the action spurring him to thrust into you impossibly harder as the two of you chased your peak.

Was he really this fucking good at everything? You weren’t sure if your eyes were rolling in pleasure or annoyance as you felt yourself tightening around him, the warm, sticky caramel waves of pleasure Ezekiel was ripping from your body now too much for you as you surrendered -- coming with a violent jerk of your hips, tightening around Ezekiel’s length and spurring his own orgasm. 

The two of you blinked at one another as you came down. You tapped Ezekiel’s arm that was holding the high part of your thigh in place. He trailed his fingers reverently down your thigh and to your knee, helping you gently re-place your feet to the floor and stand on shaky legs. You gripped his biceps in firm, pressing hands as you rocked gently onto your toes and trailed your mouth over Ezekiel’s in a gentle slip of a kiss. 

You and EZ helped one another re-orient your clothes, giggling softly to one another as you prepared yourselves to re-emerge into the main part of the library. 

Ezekiel caught your wrist before you exited the aisle, turning you back toward him and pressing a kiss to the wrist he held, regarding you with his glimmering ochre eyes. 

“Oscar Wilde was right,” he breathed through his stupidly beautiful grin. “The only way to get rid of temptation?” 

“To yield to it,” you finished, matching his infuriating grin with one of your own. 

--

Tagging?? ** 

#hahaha what the fuck #writing prompts #joannasteez #lovely mutuals #ez reyes x reader #ezekiel reyes x reader #ez reyes smut #ezekiel reyes smut #ez reyes #ezekiel reyes #ez reyes x you #ez reyes fic #ezekiel reyes fic #mayans mc #mayans #mayans mc fic #mayans mc headcanon #jd pardo #college!ez x reader #ezekiel reyes au #ezekiel reyes imagine #ez reyes au #ez reyes imagine #mayans fic #mayans smut

[frighthouseofalighthouse]

I'm gonna do it. I'll take all the history asks for 500, Alex!

OKAy. I may have to reblog and do an add-on, because I will almost certainly go over the 250 paragraph limit. ALSO NICE JEOPARDY REFERNCE. Okay, ready? Go.

1: Historical role model?

We could all stand to be more like Julie D'Aubigny.

2: Favorite underrated historical figure?

See above.

3: Funniest historical kerfuffle?

In 1774 Boston's Committee of Safety (John and Samuel Adams as well as Joseph Warren and PaulRevere were on it) was made up almost entirely of patriots, except for one man: Daniel Leonard. They couldn't decide anything important with him around so they would have a fake meeting and then be like OKAY IT'S AUGUST WE'RE HOT AND TIRED, LET'S GO HOME, and then after he'd left they'd lock themselves in a room and have their REAL, TREASONOUS MEETING. Reading about this is objectively one of the funniest things I have ever heard. It's literally the beack house episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine where they have a fake party for Captain Holt.

4: Favorite conspiracy theory revolving around history?

Whatever the fuck the real story of the X FIles was (I've watched the whole thing multiple times and I still don't know what exactly what the point was. DOn't get me wrong I love it. It just makes no sense.)

5: Favorite political scandal to examine?

The XYZ Affair because I was there for it all and it's...a lot

6: Opinion on the presidential assassinations and their impact on America?

I answered this in depth last time I got that question and you can read my response here.

7: Which time period would you like to live in?

Either take me back to the revolution or put me in Victorian England (BARRING MEDICAL NONSENSE AND SOCIAL BARRIERS)

6 (again?!): Favorite historical fiction book?

See the assassination link!

8: Favorite tv show based on historical events, but not really faithful to real life?

Top choices are Outlander, TURN: Washington's Spies, Black Sails, and Ripper Street.

9: Favorite musical based on history?

*sarcasm* Definitely NOT Hamilton whaaaaaaat why would you even assume that?! Ahem. Also Les Mis is cool I guess.

10: Favorite movie based on history?

Wonder Woman!!!

11: Favorite biography?

The Swamp Fox by John Oller

12: If you could prevent one tragedy, which would you choose?

The Trump Administration.

13: Fun fact?

MLK and Anne Frank were born in the same year.

14: Favorite female monarch?

Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots.

15: Favorite war leader?

I'm biased but George Washington.

16: Favorite controversial leader?

Winston Churchill

17: Favorite feminist pioneer?

J U L I E D ' A U B I G N Y. Also Mary Read and ANne Bonney my queer pirate gals

18: Which president, in your opinion, was the best speaker?

No contest, Abraham Lincoln.

19: If you would travel back in time and kill anyone, who would it be?

Listen I’m not a fan of these questions when people are like “I’d kill Hitler” etc. bc butterfly effect, BUT The British officer who shot John Laurens can CATCH THESE MF HANDS

20: Opinion on each of the founding fathers?

Oh boy. This is an interesting question at this point in time because I am currently grappling with the fact that the people I worked with did not really believe in equality for all, and the system we built was designed to reflect this. However, it is a system that I believed in and put my everything towards so I have many conflicted feelings toward it rn. Anyway here's the low-down on the major ones. GEORGE WASHINGTON: Good guy, needed to loosen up and not be a slaveholder. JOHN ADAMS: old stinky man. Called me mushroom excrement once. Put him back in the swamp from whence he came. THOMAS JEFFERSON: Rapist. Slaveholder. Really stuffy. Founded an entire political party for People Who Don't Like Hamilton. Fuck him foreverrrr. JAMES MADISON: Friendly with me but betrayed me when Jefferson came back from France. 2/10, cute but do not trust him with your secrets or coffee order. JAMES MONROE: A teenager during the war and I barely ever saw him after that but he was fine ig. ALEXANDER HAMILTON: that me! Made mistakes but all around a cool(tm) guy. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: fresh funky and really funny. Cooler than you'd expect an old man with gout to be.

21: Which leader do you think would make the best spouse?

No leaders are good spouses bc superiority complex.

22: Most pointless war in your opinion?

All. But King Phillip's War was especially whack.

23: John Wilkes Booth - crazy or crazy with a cause?

I mean of course he had a cause, but it was a bad one and having a cause doesn't make him less crazy. He was...really yikes.

24: Why do you think Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and did he act alone?

Most certainly did not act alone. But I feel based on timeline of events and maps of the area that either he was paid off either by our own government or the Soviets, or one of the two set him up as a patsy. Then Jack Ruby was paid to cover up the tracks.

25: Opinion on assassinations of leaders in general?

Same as killing anyone else, I guess, murder is bad, and I don't think that's really the route that should be taken to remove dangerous parties from power. But in some cases it may be the only way of removing them, and, well, that is what it is.

26: Do you think we're going to repeat history because we haven't learned from it?

Always. It is constantly happening. There is nothing new.

27: Have you ever been teased for being a history nerd?

hahahahahahahahaha yeah. Ever since first grade.

28: Which historical figure do you think has been subject to the most fictionalization and elevated to a godlike status nowadays?

Due to the musical, Alexander Hamilton (me.) People need to realize that I wasn't perfect but also not evil. Just human.

29: Rant about your favorite topic?

See the other part of my Lincoln Assassination rant here

30: Favorite kids/teens history books?

The Dear America series and the Liberty's Kids novelizations are WHERE ITS AT.

31: How was your interest in history started?

I don't even know exactly when or how anymore. My mom's a book nerd and an archaeology/anthropology major, so I grew up in a house chock full of books, including history books. I've loved it ever since I could read, honestly.

32: Do you know a history professor?

I do not!

33: How did your favorite history teacher structure their class?

I was homeschooled so it was my mom. She made sure we covered every period, but other than that just let me pick out what interested me and what I wanted to read and explore. She read a ton of big historical books right alongside me and we'd discuss as we read. We still do this!

AND THAT'S THE HALFWAY POINT OF THESE. I HAVE TO GET READY FOR AN OVERNIGHT SHIFT AT WORK SOON SO I WILL LEAVE THIS HERE FOR NOW AND REBLOG WITH THE REST OF THEM UPDATED TOMORROW. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

#a series of essays anonymously published #history asks

[dailyfantastic]

IT’S ONLY FOREVER: THE ETERNALS RECAP PART 1

ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE: THE ETERNALS ISSUE 1

Jack Kirby is the king of comics for many reasons, like his peerless art, boundless creativity, and frightening productivity. Also probably his amazing narration skills. Check out Mister Miracle to see what I really mean. But you can also check out The Eternals, which opens with the most powerful question of all:

“IS MAN ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?”

If you’re a thoughtful Marvel comics reader, though, you might recognize a flaw in this question. The year was 1976, and it had been 14 years since Jack Kirby conclusively answered that question in Fantastic 4 Volume 1 Issue 2, “The Skrulls From Outer Space.” Mankind is not alone in the Marvel Universe, because there are Skrulls and Galactus and Impy the Impossible Man. Likewise, Jack Kirby had also already told us mankind is not alone on the Earth, because he has written comics featuring Atlanteans (like Attuma) and mutants (like Unus the Untouchable) and Inhumans (like Aireo).

So what’s the deal? Well....

Literally in this first line, I realized something no one has ever said about the Eternals before: this book is not supposed to take place in the Marvel Universe.

Mankind is not alone in the universe, but the Eternals are alone in their own Universe.

This thought is something we’ll be tracking throughout our read-through. I’ll tell you now, there’s more evidence coming soon, notably that Not A Single Other Marvel Character Even Cameos In This Book.

Depicted: The kind of thing the Fantastic 4 usually would handle

Look, it makes sense. Kirby did not like having his characters messed with. We know he resented the way his ideas got treated once he was gone, and we know he desperately wanted to make his Own Thing. That was the point of New Gods, right? Kirby wanted to carve out his own part of the DC Multiverse; he wanted to tell one complete story that no one else could meddle in. And he tried, but then they did.

So it obviously makes sense that Kirby would want to just have his own little sandbox to get cosmic in, without needing Reed Richards to explain why the Celestials can’t just be threatened with the Ultimate Nullifier this time.

But it explains, already, one narration box in, why this comic feels like such a weird fit in the Marvel Universe. It isn’t about Skrulls or Kree or Kronans. You’ll see that it doesn’t really mesh with Marvel’s everyman themes. This is something new.

This is...well, it’s...something.

There’s probably more worldbuilding in this issue than in any other single issue of any comic, but the plot that happens is basically just a lot of people going to South America. Which is fine, I guess. We’ll talk about the plot later, but let’s take this time to establish some of the primary lore elements we’ve learned so far.

Eons ago, unknowable space gods called the Celestials came to Earth. They saw apes, and like any unreasonably powerful godlike beings, they decided to evolve them into three forms. 

Depicted: Some Deviant art

Humans are pretty run-of-the-mill. The Jolteons of the crew, if you will. You know them: they love to cause problems on purpose and on accident. The second bunch are the Deviants.  They aren’t artists who love Sonic the Hedgehog, but horrific monstrosities who love doing evil. Flareon, of course. And lastly, the Vaporeons: the Eternals. The Space Gods’ greatest triumph. We learn in this issue that the Eternals are beautiful, cannot die, can hover, shoot lasers out of their eyes, and probably do whatever. Then the Celestials left, only to return semi-regularly to check in on their cool evolutions. Throughout history, Eternals and Deviants have appeared in human legends as gods, heroes, monsters, and demons. And now, in 1976, we are finally becoming aware of this fact as the Celestials return to cast their final judgment on all three species.

They’re doing this in some incredibly-cool-looking Kirby space ruins, located in an Inca temple. Cultural appropriation is obviously a big problem in all Ancient Alien comics, but I can’t deny that the visuals are the best part of the Eternals.

Depicted: South America is basically space

We meet a few characters as well, who are going to show up a few times. The Professor and his daughter Margo are our two main humans. He’s studying ancient history, and has agreed to let a mysterious man named Ike Harris show him these ancient ruins.

Who is Ike Harris? Well, if you say that name really quickly, and pronounce the “I” incorrectly, you’ll realize he’s Ikaris the Eternal, in disguise to try to get to the Andes to send a beacon to guide the space gods back to Earth. We don’t know much about Ikaris yet, aside from that he’s a handsome blond man who can shoot lasers out of his eyes and rearrange the atoms in the air to turn it into a solid wall.

Also joining the fray in this issue are Kro and Tode of the Deviants. Kro looks like how the devil looks when he shows up in certain Twilight Zone episodes, except he has the sunglasses that the Koopa Troopas wear in the early Paper Mario games, and Tode looks like Jabba the Hutt with arms and legs. The Deviants have a couple of key problems. One is that they can’t produce consistently-viable offspring and are instead breeding Deviants who are basically just Humans. The other is that they don’t want the Celestials to return to Earth, presumably because they’ve been naughty and they’ll get in big trouble.

Depicted: Kro’s parents

Also they live at the bottom of the ocean and shoot down airplanes for no real reason.

So the last thing you need to know is that Kro and his henchmen ride a submarine through a stone dragon’s mouth to reach these Inca ruins from underwater, which is a little weird when you remember that most Incan structures are several hundred miles above seawater.

And then, here we are: Humans! Deviants! And Eternals! Together in an Incan ruin, with the Celestials on their way.

It’s a dense issue. We literally learn all of these facts here, and still have time for Kro to try shooting Ikaris with a laser gun. I have no idea how quickly they’re gonna attempt to explain all of this in a major motion picture, but we’ll worry about that later on I guess. For now, we’re left off an exciting cliffhanger: the Celestials are on their way back to Earth, and no one knows if that’s good or bad!!

We aren’t alone in the Universe, but I’m kinda thinking things were an awful lot simpler when we were.

And coming next issue...Does Jack Kirby know any Inca mythology anyway?

#eternals #the eternals #eternals 1 #it's only forever #marvel #comics #mcu

[bluewatsons]

Anna E. Clark, Twilight of the Mentors: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my gatekeeper, The New Inquiry (May 19, 2020)

Mentors have a dubious lineage. Since the 1980s, when the corporate world co-opted the concept, mentoring — long a synonym for teaching — has come to stand for almost any kind of professional guidance, and especially that which rank-and-file employees provide to one another. As mentoring has become increasingly linked to workplace diversity initiatives, a mentor is more likely to be the person sitting next to you than a CEO, a shift that echoes the economic devaluation of historically male-dominated jobs now occupied by women. As Helen Colley, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Education and Social Research Institute has argued, mentoring is no longer a system in which powerful people support other structurally powerful people but a burden passed on to the masses. Though presented as an unalloyed good, mentoring is an additional encumbrance, a way of shifting what should be the responsibility of the institution to the individual.

It might be tempting to view this now ubiquitous corporate mentoring model as further evidence of capitalism’s capacity to extort our emotional labor, but it’s more accurate to say that corporate culture’s embrace of mentorship surfaces the extractive, obfuscating qualities that have always been integral to the concept. Mentors enable and thrive in systems of obstruction and privilege. By embracing them now as vehicles of ostensible inclusivity, companies, nonprofits, and schools gesture to diversity while shoring up the opaque gatekeeping structures that keep power consolidated. Meanwhile, as mentorship becomes increasingly inseparable from its corporate repurposing, the term itself has come to subsume other forms of teaching and caregiving, blurring the lines between labor coerced and labor freely given. Now, we are all the conscripts of mentorship.

Mentorship has become so pervasive, such a taken-for-granted value, that the shallow history of its contemporary meaning has gone strikingly unremarked. Though articles about mentors like to say that they started with Homer’s Odyssey, where Athena disguises herself as someone named Mentor in order to tell Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, to kick Penelope’s deadbeat suitors out of the house, the mentor as it exists today is a uniquely late-capitalist construction. Mentors start popping up with frequency in 18th century literature, where the term means something like “stern but well-intentioned teacher.” In The Task, William Cowper’s charmingly meandering 1785 epic on, among other things, nature, sofas, and God, the speaker describes a thin board frequently strapped to aged backs in the service of posture as “a Mentor worthy of his charge.” By the 19th century, a mentor is as likely to be a piece of instructional literature as a person. The Bible is a “mentor.” So too are didactic texts on everything from fashion to marriage to living a moral life. In the early 20th century, the Mentor is the title of a popular American magazine charged with giving its readers “knowledge that they all want and ought to have.” Here, “mentor” suggests a kind of anonymous trustworthiness and authority, like a particularly salutary encyclopedia.

Something changes, however, in the 1970s. A search for “mentor” in the Google Books Ngram Viewer — a convenient tool for charting broad shifts in printed English — shows a modestly steady increase in the word’s usage from 1800 to the earliest years of the Reagan era, when the graph starts to mimic a textbook illustration of exponential growth. “Mentoring” is almost nonexistent until the mid-eighties or so, when it too sees a similar spike. For comparison, a search for “adviser” (a common synonym) in the same period yields a graph that looks like a mountain range.

What shifts in these years? One clue exists in a 1980 installment of William Safire’s On Language column in the New York Times, where Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, practiced his layman lexicography for nearly three decades. In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek piece titled “Perils of the Fast Track,” Safire codifies the new meaning of “mentor” by close reading a recent exposé of what was arguably the first corporate sex scandal: A 29-year-old VP, Mary Cunningham, was accused of a “romantic liaison” with her mentor, William Agee, who also happened to be her CEO. She was forced to resign; Agee stayed on.

“Today,” Safire begins, a mentor is “a senior management figure who takes a younger person under his wing, risking rumor and innuendo if the protégée, or mentee, is an attractive woman.” Safire goes on to explain that though the word comes from Homer, it’s been “adopted” by the corporate world to signify “‘career guide and executive nurturer.’” Safire’s point is that, despite mentor’s new status as business-world lingo, its fundamental meaning hasn’t changed. “Here’s the beauty part,” he writes in the column’s kicker. In the Odyssey, Athena uses Mentor’s identity as a disguise. Thus, Safire concludes, “It was all a trick. . . . As Mary Cunningham learned, at the start of her own odyssey to CEO, mentors can be trouble; even Homer shook his head.”

Safire sounds authoritative — his prose tends to have the air of someone with a comment rather than a question. But his closing “gotcha” nod to Homer is an empty rhetorical flourish. While it’s true that Athena disguises herself as Mentor, the aim isn’t mischief. Taking on his appearance allows her to overlap her identity (all-powerful goddess of wisdom and strategy) with his (a nobleman and guest), which is capable of setting the young Telemachus at ease. When Athena/Mentor takes leave of Telemachus, now buoyed on praise for his bravery and manhood, he has himself become “godlike.” Mentorship here looks not like a “trick” but like a subtle, enlivening transfer of power.

Why does Safire mention the Odyssey at all? Because aligning the fundamentally new meaning of corporate mentorship with Homer is an ideological move, part of the larger linguistic project of Safire and other conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley and George Will, who seek to revive the conservatism that had fallen out of favor since the 1960s by linking it to free market economics, reframing American identity as a matter of Christian faith, “Western Civilization,” and capitalism. In this context, classical learning serves as a form of arbitrary clout, a way of invoking time-honored authority for extant power structures. Things have always been so, says the reference. Who are you to think they could be otherwise? It’s certainly true that men in positions of power have long cultivated the careers of their successors, entrenching their own control by choosing their likenesses to carry it on. But calling this practice mentorship is, in 1980, a new evolution, a way to elide the less savory aspects of business-world patronage by associating it with the term’s blandly benevolent connotations, articulating a vision of corporate life that is not profit hungry but humane, generous, and invested in individual success. At the same time, portraying mentorship as part of a timeless tradition makes it easier for Safire to blame Mary Cunningham for her own termination. The fault lies not with her boss, or the board of trustees who forced her out, but in her own naive assumption that mentorship at work might mean anything other than the same old patriarchy.

It’s tempting to read Safire’s casual endorsement of mentorship’s worst impulses as quaint anachronism, but the Janus-faced definition he helps to shape continues to inform the concept today, overwriting things we used to call teaching, counseling, advising, and friendship. We talk easily of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus as mentors and the solidarity practiced by people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities as mentorship; at the same time, official mentorship programs syphon up the language and labor of these informal networks, turning their aims not to structural change but to objectives such as employee retention and professional success. Or, as a 2019 Forbes article puts it, “Employees are happy, engaged, and productive when their individual needs and the needs of the organization are in sync.” Like company softball leagues and team-building retreats, mentoring has become another cheap substitute for the structural transformations needed to upend entrenched injustices, superseding tangible forms of support such as money, time, health care, and job security. Even in government and philanthropy, mentoring’s primary aim is economic advancement. In 2002, George W. Bush endorsed January as “National Mentoring Month” in an effort to bolster the professional prospects of youth from underprivileged backgrounds, a cause later taken up by Barack Obama. Granted, when we talk of community and social-justice leaders as mentors, we don’t usually mean “executive nurturers.” We use the term to capture a sense of an affective heritage, in which the meaningful work of social change gets carried forward. And yet, that we turn to “mentor” at all is largely thanks to the term’s Reagan-era reclamation. However much we might want to claim “mentor” for other uses, its every application to the labor of solidarity, caregiving, and comradeship refracts back on its corporate context. Like so much of what was formerly grassroots organizing and activism, it too has become professionalized.

There is one additional feature of the Odyssey’s mentor scene that Safire leaves unremarked. There, as Athena guides Telemachus, preparing him to fight alongside his father, the mentee looks less like an apprentice or a novice than like someone ready to assume the mantle of responsibility, a sharp difference from contemporary corporate mentorship. This is the torch-passing version of the mentor-mentee relationship still common in Hollywood blockbusters and video games, where it’s so frequent that it gets its own mention on the pop-culture wiki TVTropes.com — think of the Jedi masters of Star Wars, or Morpheus tutoring Neo in The Matrix. It’s an archetype that still informs how we often think of the relationships between teachers and students, raising up the young to take over from the old. But it’s an anachronistic fantasy in an era when the structural forces that enabled older generations’ well-being no longer exist — when, in fact, the material comforts of past generations bear responsibility for a climate crisis that will be borne largely by generations to come. In these circumstances, a meaningful transfer of power between mentor and mentee might look less like a torch passing — a replication and renewal of extant practices and beliefs — than like a wholesale rethinking of what power meant and entailed.

Academia, a system with its own long mentorship history, is especially useful for thinking about how conditions of scarcity and upheaval have changed the concept’s meaning. Here too, “mentor” has typically bled into other offices — those of teacher and advisor, which recall the mentor archetype. It’s common for academics to refer to their “mentors” with reverence, as if the term connoted a specific kind of guidance and personal instruction. The term speaks to the idea of intellectual legacy, the way that advanced graduate study was, in a less precarious era, an induction into a genealogy of thought that one would eventually pass on to one’s own mentees.

But academic mentorship has never been perfect, often replicating the same inequalities present outside its walls, and its contemporary application has only heightened its propensity for exploitation. In an era in which the gulf between well- and underresourced institutions has become increasingly stark, mentorship is often uncompensated labor, a trait that compounds the arbitrary ways it has long been dispersed. Mentorship is something many professors can fail at or excel in, disperse with equity or bias, wield as a cudgel or dole out as a gift, often with little penalty or risk to themselves. Students and colleagues rely on such support for their advancement, yet they are often without recourse if they don’t receive it. While some schools and programs might assign mentors, others leave it up to the student to find their own support, whether by networking, charm, or nepotism. The fuzziness of mentorship as a category of academic labor perpetuates this inequality. How do you measure it? What does it involve? What kind of training does it require? What does it even mean? Though the academy has become increasingly willing to use the same productivity quotas honed in the business world, it has remained stubbornly resistant to quantifying the work of mentorship in meaningful ways.

At the same time, mentors bear the weight of institutional efforts to increase diversity. Here, perhaps even more than in the corporate world, it’s often treated as a form of charity, a service obligation one can assume or disregard, reserved mostly for those who see inclusion as an ethical and political obligation as much as a professional one. While universities may pay lip service to its virtue and form committees to facilitate its practice, it usually counts for little in the tenure process. The labor and value of mentoring is a dominant theme in Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, English professor Patricia A. Matthew’s indispensable collection of interviews and essays on the experiences of the “diverse” faculty academia claims to celebrate. Here, as sociologist Andreana Clay suggests, being a mentor is often “inextricably linked to the position of the educator,” encompassing mutuality, allyship, friendship, activism, and role modeling. But ambivalence and frustration are equally part of the job, the consequence of institutional unwillingness to give time or recognition to work disproportionately performed by faculty of identities historically marginalized in academic life. Meanwhile, academia largely excludes the ever growing number of contingent instructors — the majority of teaching faculty at colleges today — from formal and informal support. This doesn’t prevent their students, who see no difference between them and tenure-track professors, from seeking their time and care. If, at some point, for some people, academic mentorship offered an archetype of the concept, as close as anyone outside a Homeric epic might get to godlike guidance, that day is long past.

And yet. The ideal of the good mentor persists. We reify the term even as it grows increasingly imprecise. Much like the 20th century ideal of the perfect spouse, the mentor in 2020 houses a seemingly endless and incompatible cluster of desires, everything from understanding to support, friendship, motivation, protection, advocacy, leadership, deference, generosity, power, nurturing, care, and collaboration. The mentor stands for the best version of who we want to be, while promising to see us as the best version of ourselves. As in the Odyssey passage Safire references, we might as well ask for a divine protector. Even in its originating appearance, the mentor is an impossible hybrid, as much a fantasy as a source of guidance.

Such desire speaks to another aspect of the mentor ideal: the potential for mutual fascination, as mentor and mentee find in one another both a reflection and an exemplar, sharing the charged pleasure of mutual recognition. Affect theorist Eve Sedgwick gets at this kind of exchange best in her description of the teacher-student relationship in Western appropriations of Tibetan Buddhism. Reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a popularization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead written largely for American readers by Sogyal Rinpoche, a charismatic Buddhist teacher, Sedgwick considers the distinctive phenomenology of reincarnation in descriptions of the teacher-student bond. As a young child, Rinpoche was identified as the reincarnation of a renowned Buddhist teacher by the man who would become his own “master,” Jamyang Khyentse. He was raised and taught by Khyentse, in the same way Khyentse had been raised and taught by him, in his prior life. In Rinpoche’s description, it’s a kind of teaching that, as Sedgwick suggests, “thrives on personality and intimate emotional relation,” even as it also “functions as a mysteriously powerful solvent of individual identity.” Here, temporal and interpersonal boundaries blur: One is always both teacher and student to an intimately connected other, who is also always one’s own teacher and student. A version of this interchange exists in the transactional language of mentoring today. Mentoring, we are often told, is a two-way street: The mentor stands to gain as much as the mentee, who should in turn consider themselves a mentor in training. Sedgwick reminds us of the emotional intimacy of such work. The will to mentor and to be mentored often comes from a sense of identification: This is who I was; this is who I want to be. It’s a relationship engaged with obligation and care, even as it’s not so much selfless as deeply, disorientingly self-entranced.

There is a coda to Sogyal Rinpoche’s story. In 2017, a quarter century after The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying became an international phenomenon, and nearly 15 years after Sedgwick wrote about it, decades of abuse suffered under Rinpoche came to light in Rigpa, the international Buddhist network he founded, along with evidence of a longstanding cover-up. In a public letter written by his former students, they describe physical, psychological, and sexual manipulation explained away as instruction, concealed by Rinpoche’s “public face” of “wisdom, kindness, humor, warmth and compassion.”

It’s a conclusion that today feels almost expected. Post #MeToo, the ability of powerful men who claimed to be mentors to exploit the trust that came with that role appears unnervingly commonplace. Looking back to Safire’s deeply sexist telling of Mary Cunningham’s experience, or to the many similar stories found in academia, there’s another account of mentorship to be told, one in which the role’s queasy combination of benevolence and power excuses manipulation and abuse. In this version of mentorship’s history, we might see its current association with inclusion and diversity as a kind of sea change, a way of shifting power away from those who have wielded it for too long. Here, the identificatory ideal of mentorship becomes relevant again, promising a way of retelling history, making wisdom from suffering, celebrating those who broke the paths we tread.

Or we could imagine different kinds of solidarity. As much as we might want to, it’s impossible to unwind contemporary mentorship from a worldview that blames individuals for their own subjugation and absolves the company and the state of the burdens of meaningful social change. Before the mentor’s rise, we had language for this. Maybe it’s time to reclaim it.

#mentoring #The Way We Live Now #metoo #professional culture #workplace culture #health care industry #career building #sociology #employment #corporate culture #labor

[tiip2ydoodles]

Take Me To Church, ch. 8

Of Demons, Real and Imagined

--It’s been almost a year since I uploaded a chapter of this holy shit--

Read HERE on AO3

The sound of church bells came from nowhere and everywhere, echoing in his head. Cronus took a jerking step forward, then another, and another. His legs felt filled with lead, his body moving on its own, compelled to move forward. Two large doors stood in front of him, massive oak structures carved with pictures of snakes and angels.

Without thinking, Cronus reached forward, brushing his hand along the carvings. The wood was warm, and seemed to beat with his own pulse.

The doors swung open. Inside was the church he’d seen so many times; glowing almost with the orange light filtering in through the windows, as if the sunset were setting the very rays of light on fire. Heat kissed his features, a heavy blanket of warmth settling over his body as he stepped inside. Row upon row of pews met his calloused hands; he barely noted the touch.

The saints painted on the windows all bore His face.

At the altar stood one lone figure, surrounded by red candles, humming softly. His voice echoed, bouncing off the high ceiling. His back was turned to Cronus; he only knew it was Him because of the soft waves of dark hair, shining brass in the light.

He was not the massive, godlike monolith He usually was. This time He was dressed in a simple robe of black cotton. He seemed relaxed; a candle in His hand as he lit the others, carrying their flame on and adding to the glow of the room. It was almost too bright for Cronus to look at, too hot for him to bear, and yet his legs kept moving him closer of their own accord.

His eyes watered. He wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or if he was crying.

“You’re late.” The boy’s soft voice sounded musical, a chorus of echoes joining him. Cronus’ heart raced.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered.

A soft sigh. “All will be forgiven in time.” He said, turning to face Cronus. His brown eyes shone brilliantly in the dusk light. The candles had vanished, but Cronus still felt their heat, heard the crackling roar of the flames. "Kneel.”

Cronus knelt before his God in worship.

The next day began with a lecture about finals.

The end of the year was fast approaching, every professor was warning them. If they hadn’t begun studying yet, now was the last few desperate moments they could cling to in hopes of studying enough to pass.

Cronus, as usual, couldn’t be fucked to pay attention. The lecture went completely over his head, as did most things in his classes. He’d been too half-asleep to care, dozing and having this odd sort of day-dream about fire and a church until-

“Ampora!”

Cronus snapped out of his nap with a stunned ‘whuh?’. The students around him snickered softly and Kankri shot him a cold look. What was that for?

“Did you hear anything I said?” The professor looked at him with a sharp glare and Cronus cringed back. Geez.

The professor sighed and shook her head in clear and stern disappointment. “I said, I’ll need you to see me after class. Mr. Vantas, as well, if you’d join me I would appreciate it.” She repeated herself. “And until then, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t treat my lecture as a time to catch up on sleep. We have beds at home for that reason, I’d much rather you play hooky than insult me.”

More snickering. Cronus shrunk down in his seat, scowling. His cheeks burned; he hated being made a fool of, especially in public like this. It gave him half an urge to slink out of the class right now and give the prof the finger as he went. Glancing over at Kankri, he was surprised to see that the preacher’s son looked almost the same way, his cheeks flushed a bright red and a scowl on his pretty face. He looked none too pleased about having to stay after class, or about having been called out in the same breath as Cronus. If he had to venture a guess, Cronus would say it was the second reason more so than the first.

Well, that made two of them, at least, that didn’t appreciate the snickers and sly grins. Cronus sighed and sat back, tapping his pen on his paper idly. The prof sunk back into her lecture and once again Cronus paid no attention, merely focusing on trying to stay awake.

It wasn’t working too well. Soon enough his head was in his hand, eyes slipping shut.

"Kneel.”

Cronus knelt obediently. From this point of view the preacher’s boy was so much larger than life, so grandiose and immovable. He wondered if, if there was really a God and a Heaven, if this was what looking up at Him would feel like.

The boy’s hand cupped his face. So warm, and soft. Glowing embers made of silk on his skin. Cronus closed his eyes and leaned into it, a shuddering sigh leaving his lips as he raised his chin into the touch. He thought that the other wouldn’t do anything other than touch him, just like he’d always done, caress his face and croon out how worthless, how pitiful and pathetic he was, how undeserving, but no.

The preacher’s son slapped him. Hard. It felt cold, the wind whistling past his face, the pain so much sharper than the dream-haze he was used to. So much more real. He could feel the bruise on his face throbbing--

Wait.

Cronus groaned and rubbed his face. More laughter this time, subdued snickers and giggles from the students around him, and the disapproving face of the professor in front of him, scowling down with her hands on her shapely hips.

“Jesus, fuck, why dontcha just beat me to a pulp next time,” Cronus muttered, still half asleep. “That hurt. ”

“It wasn’t me, it was Kankri,” Her gaze flicked to the boy in question and Cronus looked as well. Kankri was scowling, a horrified, disgusted look pulling at the bridge of his nose as he stared Cronus down. Instantly Cronus could feel his cheeks burn - shit, was he talking in his sleep? No good. The prof was still talking and he had to strain to focus on her words. “...And if you fall asleep in my class one more time I’ll make sure your cheeks match. Understood, Ampora? I expect better from you. Now go on, head to the dormitories, if you’re that tired. Take Kankri with you. While I appreciate a good bit of slapstick, it’s not tolerated in my class.”

Cronus mumbled a ‘yes ma’am’ and grabbed his backpack. At least he’d remembered it this time. Kankri stood up beside him, not even waiting for Cronus to finish packing before he was out of his seat and marching to the door. The professor's words about some kinda early morning meeting slipped past Cronus' ears as he had to jog to catch up, grabbing a slip for both of them.

“That was one hell of a hit,” Cronus said once they were out the door and into the hallway. “Where’d you hide all that strength?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Kankri snapped. “My first reprimand, and all because you had the gall to fall asleep in class - what was I supposed to do, just sit there and listen to you snore the whole time? You’re lucky I didn’t push you off the chair, but I don’t want detention, too.”

It was just snoring. Cronus breathed a sigh of relief. “Listen, kid, it ain’t the end of the world--” he began, but Kankri cut him off again.

“ Don’t call me kid. ” He hissed. “And what did I just say? Don’t f-- don’t talk to me. Just leave me alone.” He was gripping the straps of his backpack so hard that Cronus was sure they were turning a sickly sort of white from the strain. His brows raised; he’d never heard Kankri swear before, not even hint at it.

“Geez, okay.” He said, then sighed. “Sorry, alright? I didn’t mean to get you in shit. I just didn’t sleep all that well last night, that’s all.”

That part at least was true; between nightmares, worrying about Eridan and sleeping on the world’s hardest cot he couldn’t have had more than four or five hours’ sleep. Not the worst by a long shot, but still just enough to have him shambling around like a zombie all day.

The apology at least seemed to soften Kankri up a bit. He rubbed his face, his hand drifting down to the front of his shirt, gripping it tightly. Not for the first time Cronus wondered why he did that; maybe it was some kinda self-soothing thing. Whatever it was, it was weird, that was for sure. But nobody could ever say that Kankri wasn’t weird, anyway.

“It’s fine.” Kankri muttered bitterly. “It’s not as if Father will see the reprimand note anyhow. As you said, not the end of the world. Just a pinprick in my record. Scouts will likely look at it and say, oh, a history of violence. This is fine.”

There was a sort of anxious laugh at the end that bordered on manic. Cronus’ brows raised. “You, uh…” He said, trying to parse his words. “You got a whole lot of neuroses goin on in that big old brain of yours, dontcha? I mean...hittin’ a guy once does not a history of violence make, ki--uh, Kankri.”

Kankri glanced at him. There was something appreciative in his eye, like he was glad Cronus didn’t pull the ‘kid’ nickname with him again. Bless him, Cronus was trying, at least. When he looked away, though, the frown was back and he glared at the floor.

“Not for you, perhaps,” Kankri murmured, “But for others it does. For me. Better schools will only take the highest achievers, the cleanest records. Keeping one’s nose clean and in the books is the key to getting into those schools.”

“You sound like you’re just repeatin’ back what someone else told you.” Cronus said bluntly.

“Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Not really.”

Kankri pursed his lips. “Oh, really? Then please, mister ruffian who clearly knows more about ivy league schools than me, please educate me on how precisely one gets into a prestigious school with a fight on their record.”

Cronus couldn’t help it. He tried, he really did, but the snickering words left him before he could rein in his filthy mouth.

“Suck the dean’s dick?”

“That’s disgusting! You - get BACK here! Cronus!”

He howled with laughter as Kankri’s cheeks went red, the preacher boy chasing him down the hall and outside, screeching the whole way.

Kankri stopped, however, when the laughter cut short. He had to skid to a halt to avoid bumping into Cronus - and Kurloz. The latter offered an oily smile to Kankri.

“Morning.” He said smoothly. “Best get on outta here, brother. Me and Cronus're gonna have a private conversation.”

#Homestuck #take me to church #cronkri #cronus ampora #kankri vantas #TMTC #My writing

[confrontingbabble-on]

When a manipulative writer or interpreter...wants to trigger a susceptible reader...the choice of the most effective trigger word...is critical...

The writer thinks...I don’t want to use “the absolutely top hypothetical, unprovable, undefinable fantasy thingy...”...but I want a word that means the same thing...Greatest Fairy?...Maybe...Pre-Eminent Genie?...Possibly...Grand Wizard?...Just dunno...

So he tried a few examples to see how it felt:

In the beginning the Greatest Fairy created the heavens and the earth...

In the beginning the Pre-Eminent Genie created the heavens and the earth...

In the beginning the Grand Wizard created the heavens and the earth...

They all just didn’t convey the gravitas desired...And just wouldn’t trigger the required reaction...

So the writer chose elohiym...But even that word would not work on European readers...so interpreters variously interpreted elohiym (Strong’s 0430)...God 2103, gods 205, God's 67, prophet 51, god 44, he 18, him 9, divine 7, Lord 6, his 4, judges 4, He 4, prophet's 4, Prophet 3, God-fearing 2, God-given 2, ephod 2, goddess 2, godlike 2, mighty 2, you 2, I 1, idols 1, prophetic 1, supernatural being 1, supernatural 1, shrine 1, Lord's 1, heavenly beings 1, enormous 1, has 1, heavenly assembly 1, desperate 1, changed 1, deity 1, ark 1 Count:2606...With the definition:1) (plural)  1a) rulers, judges   1b) divine ones  1c) angels  1d) gods 2) (plural intensive - singular meaning)  2a) god, goddess  2b) godlike one  2c) works or special possessions of God  2d) the (true) God    2e) God plural of 433; gods in the ordinary sense; but specifically used (in the plural thus, especially with the article) of the supreme God; occasionally applied by way of deference to magistrates; and sometimes as a superlative:-angels, X exceeding, God (gods)(-dess, -ly), X (very) great, judges, X mighty...

“Philosopher AC Grayling has made it his mission to show why people have as little reason to believe in a deity as they do in the Tooth Fairy. Justin Brierley meets the atheist professor who believes he has seen the future – and God’s not part of it.

According to AC Grayling, talking about God is the equivalent of talking about fairies or goblins. It’s the reason he doesn’t like to use the word ‘atheist’ to describe himself. ‘Call me an “a-fairyist” or an “a-goblinist”,’ he says, ‘because to me it’s the same argument.’

Grayling makes no apology for disparaging ‘fundamentalist’ forms of religion, which he describes as ‘mass immaturity’.

Grayling stops short of calling for an outright ban on evangelism, but he contends that religion often brainwashes the young before they have the opportunity to develop their own critical thinking.

So, would he like to see an end to religion? ‘In the ideal – yes,’ he responds candidly, ‘but one is pragmatic enough to realize that it will, at the very least, take a long time.’

If Grayling has faith of any sort it is probably most clearly illustrated in this optimism (which some might call naïve) that the world will, after ditching religion, be inclined to work together in a brotherhood-of-man style humanist enterprise.

...the philosopher himself believes that all arguments for God can be reduced to the logical absurdity of arguing for the existence of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

...where theologians invoke God, Grayling simply invokes ‘Fred’. It’s an intentionally absurd response. ‘You do nothing at all by postulating a necessary being,’ he insists. ‘I use the name Fred to show the explanatory nullity of it. We don’t know how the universe began. To go to the idea of a supreme artificer doesn’t explain anything.’

Similarly, when asked why there is anything at all, Grayling dismisses the question as meaningless. Our ingrained religious instincts are leading us down the wrong path, he explains. ‘It is a question that comes from our psychological yearning for narrative structure. Why can’t the universe be its own creator, its own explanation?’

Grayling offers an analogy for why things may look designed when in fact they are the result of a series of unplanned events. ‘It’s rather like the fact that my grandparents caught that train, went into that particular café and encountered each other. But I don’t assume that my grandparents were doing that to ensure that some years later I would be born.’

Grayling casts himself as the patient voice of wisdom, waiting for the immaturity of religious belief to inevitably surrender to the march of secular reason...”  https://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2014/June-2014/The-Sceptic-Why-God-is-a-fairy-tale

Also...

“The story of Cinderella is a very popular fairy tale. While a girl called Cinderella may have existed, the fairy in the story did not. The fairy is a fictional character, which was later added to the story in order to make it more appealing. That worked, and the story caught on.

For an atheist, religious stories (as recorded in the Bible or other scripture) are just the same. These stories were maybe based on some true events. They were then later embellished with miracles, spirits, and gods. The gods in these stories are just like the good fairy in the Cinderella tale: they are fictional additions to the story. They are magical characters invented by people, and added to historical tales. These stories have been passed on through the generations, and were recorded in books and oral traditions. However, that does not make these stories true. In particular, this does not pop the gods into existence — just like fairies, magic animals, unicorns and other products of human imagination do not exist in reality either.      

Let us make this more concrete: When we read the story of Cinderella, we are pulled into the story. We are eager to learn what happens, we feel with the main character, and we are excited when the good fairy steps in to give her the dress. However, when we close the book, the good fairy is gone. When we look around, there is no fairy. Only children believe that the fairy is really there.      

Atheists hold that it is the same with supernatural characters. Gods are heroes and sometimes villains in the books. The stories are inspiring, exciting, and sometimes enlightening. Yet, when we close the book, the characters are gone. They do not exist in reality. They are legendary beings. God is imaginary...” https://suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterGods.html

#atheist #agnostic #secular humanist #skeptic #Religion #Christianity #religious insanity

[iamcmims]

Hurricane — Jensen Ackles: Earth and Oceans.

MASTER POST

Tagging: @nanie5 @lullabylike

After the event at the library, Erin was determined to prove to him that life was scientific, that faith had no credibility. She prepared many books for him to read. Erin had six days to convince Jensen, and he had six to convert her. So she decided to put everything she knew and do some other researchers and put all of it in a notebook. Erin wondered why only six days, then Jensen told her that every Sunday, he would go to Church, so Erin agreed. One day or less meant nothing for Erin, she was going to convince him that it was science that had the correct explanation on how Earth was formed, on the Human evolution and more.

Every day after school they would go to the library and start talking about the topics Erin choose.

"What is the topic of today?" Erin gave him a notebook that has "How was the Earth formed?" written on it. "I think this is a good idea to start with this one." Erin had a slight grin, she enjoyed it, to be fair, so did Jensen. She was talking to him, and people stopped looking at her like she was an outcast. "Okay. Let's do it.", "Read this first, there isn't much to read, then tell me what you think about it.", "Fine."

"When it comes to how Earth was formed, forces that can only be described as ardent, chaotic, and indeed godlike, were involved. However, in the past few centuries, research and clarifications made in what is today known as Earth Sciences have allowed scientists to assemble a more empirical and scientific understanding of how our world was formed.

Basically, scientists have ascertained that several billion years ago our Solar System was nothing but a cloud of cold dust particles swirling through empty space. This cloud of gas and dust was disturbed, perhaps by the explosion of a nearby star (a supernova), and the cloud of gas and dust started to collapse as gravity pulled everything together, forming a solar nebula— a giant spinning record. As it spun, the disk separated into rings, and the furious motion made the particles while-hot.

The center of the record accreted to become the Sun, and the particles in the outer rings turned into large fiery balls of gas and molten-liquid that cooled and condensed to take on solid form. About 4.5 billion years ago, they began to turn into the planets that we know today as Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets.

The first era in which the Earth existed is what known as the Haden Eon, which refers to the condition of the planet at the time. This consisted of the Earth's surface being under a continuous bombardment by meteorites and intense volcanism, which is believed to have been severe due to the large heat flow and geothermal gradient dated in this era.

Outgassing and volcanic activity produced the primordial atmosphere, and evidence exists that liquid water existed at this time, despite the conditions on the surface. Condensing water vapor, augmented by ice delivered by comets, accumulated in the atmosphere and cooled the molten exterior of the planet to form a solid crust and produced  the oceans."

"I'm going to be honest with you, Erin. This is really interesting." Erin smiled a sincere smile, this time. "I know. What do you think about it?", "Well, it certainly shows that there is something way bigger than us, no matter what is our point of view.", "I agree.", "I'm not going to lie, though, there are some words that I didn't understand.", "Well, when you come back home, you should look into them.", "Yes, ma'am. Erin, what is the next subject?", "It's about oceans, 'Why do we have oceans?' I find it interesting, and as you liked this one about Earth, I think you will like the one about Oceans.", "That could be interesting. Can I ask you a question?", "Sure.", "Why did you moved in in the middle of the school year?" Erin sighed. "This is not a part of the deal, Jensen." Erin stood up and left the library.

Next day at school Erin avoided Jensen. At ten Erin had History class. She found a place to sit in the third row, in the middle of the famous group of girls. The beginning of the class went well, until Carly Gribben, the favorite girl smiled, looked at her friends and started to make fun of Erin. "Looks like Jensen dumped the new girl." The professor looked at the class who was laughing at the previous comment. Erin looked at her notebook, and draw something on it, making herself look busy. "I don't see what he found in her anyway." Said another classmate, one of Carly's best friends. It went like this the whole hour, Erin didn't follow anything that the professor said, when the bell rang that it was the end of the third period, Erin waited for everyone to leave the class before her, to be sure no one would try to talk to her or insult her. When she stood up, the professor looked at her, "Miss Ortega. Can you please wait?" Erin looked at him, "I want you to know that I hear what they say and I'm sorry for it. It will pass do not worry, though. If you ever have any problem just come to me.", "Why?" Asked Erin, "you didn't do anything when they started to insult me, you just turned around and wrote on your board. Stick to what you know." Erin knew she would end up having trouble, but she didn't care.

At the end of the day, she went to the library anyway. She was hoping that Jensen would show up, what the girls said earlier made her doubt. She enjoyed being with Jensen, he was the closest she had to a friend. The only one who would acknowledge her. When she saw Jensen arriving with a smile on his face, she couldn't help but smile too. "Hey.", "Hi." Jensen sat down and looked at Erin, not just with his eyes, Erin felt as if he was reading her. "What happened? You have been avoiding me today, if this is about what I asked yesterday, I'm sorry.", "I know, I'm sorry. We arrived here in the middle of the year because my parents divorced.", "You don't have to talk about if you don't feel comfortable with. Also, don't listen to what people say at school. Especially from Carly. Even if you don't consider me as your friend, you're my friend, and I won't let anything happen to you. Now. You said today was about oceans, right?" Erin nodded, "Here.", "Thanks." Jensen smiled, Erin was thankful for Jensen's friendship and his patience.

Jensen began to read what Erin wrote in the notebook.

"Over vast periods of time, our first oceans formed. Water remained a gas until the earth cooled below 212 degrees Fahrenheit. At this time, about 3.8 billion years ago, the water condensed into rain which filled the basins that are now our oceans."

Jensen turned the page to see if there was something else. "Wait, that's all?" Erin nodded, "I can give you more details if you have questions.", "I mean, I don't know, what do scientists say about this?", "Most scientists agree that the atmosphere and the oceans accumulated gradually over millions and millions of years with the continual 'degassing' of the Earth's interior.", "When you say most it means that some scientists don't agree?", "Yeah. According to this theory, the ocean formed from the escape of water and other gases from the molten rocks of the Earth to the atmosphere surrounding the cooling planet. After the Earth's surface had cooled to a temperature below the boiling point of water, rain began to fall — and continued to fall for centuries. As the water drained into the great hollows in the Earth's surface, the first ocean came into existence. The forces of gravity prevented the water from leaving the planet.", "How do you know all of this stuff?", "I like to know what concerns me, what happened before me, what might happen after me. I'm very curious.", "What is the next subject?", "Hurricanes."

#Jensen Ackles #jensen and danneel #jensen x misha #Jensen x Danneel #misha x jensen #jensen ackles imagines #jensen chloe #jensen x ofc #Jensen x You #jensen x reader #jensen x y/n #dean winchester #dean x castiel #dean x sam #dean x reader #dean x donna #dean x you #sam and dean #dean and chloe #dean and sam #SPNFamily #spn fanfic #supernatural fanfiction #hurricane #jensen ackles fanfiction #spn x reader #spn x Y/N #spn x you #Jared Padalecki

[polyhaikyuu]

Ask and you shall receive! Could I get a scenario for MatsuHana and their s/o who's really stressed out from college and neglecting to take care of themselves so they decide to pamper them the entire evening? Lots of cuddles with a side of fluff please! Good luck with all the requests!!! (oh and could you use "you"? tyvm)

“I’m back…”

You chuck off your shoes at the doorway and slump almost lifelessly against the entryway. It’s eight o'clock already, and you’d usually already be getting ready to snuggle into bed with your boys at this hour. But tonight you’d spent four extra hours at school because of a goddamned research paper where you’d done everything. The only thing your groupmates had helped on was the title. Your fingers hovered over the keyboard, mere millimeters away from your four favorite letters; very tempted to just write fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck for the entire conclusion. 

“Welcome home!”

You hear Hanamaki’s low but cheerful voice, and look up at him to smile. You feel guilty at the way his face fell when he looked at you; you must have looked as terrible as you felt. You’d been worn out, up and about since 6am, working yourself to exhaustion. He takes your bag and tucks it away before helping you up.

“How about go for a shower and then we’ll cuddle you better?” he offers. You nod your head as enthusiastically as you can in your tired state. Hanamaki presses a kiss on your forehead, whispers “good,” before helping you out of your clothes. There is nothing sexual about it, and you’re thankful about being able to just sit there. Your brain’s as fried anyway. You’re just about only in your underwear when Matsukawa pops into the bedroom.

“Hey baby,” he says. “Strong enough for a shower?”

“If I get a massage later, then yeah.”

Hanamaki and Matsukawa share a look. Then they nod. “Sure. Head on in, water’s warm enough,” Matsukawa says.

As you slip into the shower, you try to drone out your thoughts with the sound of rushing water. But there’s too much to worry about. College is tough. Heck, there was a point in your life you figured college wasn’t for you. Who wants another extra four years of sitting in a freezing classroom with sleeping classmates and a professor who drones on and on and then gives an exam that came right out of hell’s asshole. But you said, “fuck it,” and decided to give it a try.

It was a try you were now currently regretting.

And now, finals was quickly approaching. That meant many things, but the most important part is that you have to study everything from all of your subjects from start to finish, while also juggling the rest of the extra groupwork from said subjects. It wasn’t helping that your groupmates were basically non-existent. You sigh sadly before getting the shower over with.

You step out after some scrub and rinse, making sure to wash your face and brush your teeth before you head out to the room in your towel and the oversized shirt Mattsun had lent you and you were never returning. When you open the door, Hanamaki is already sprawled in bed reading a book while Mattsun was grabbing some bottles of oil from the shelf.

“Hey, just in time,” Hanamaki says, as you plop down next to him. He snuggles against you as close as he can. “Want to talk about it?”

“Rather not,” you said with a grumble. “Someone soothe my shoulders, it’s dying.”

“I’m on it,” Mattsun says. He positions himself next to you before warming down your shoulders for a massage. You groan at the first touch, to which Makki chuckles. The pink-haired boy grabs your hand in his and squeezes.

“Love you,” he murmurs against your shoulder. “Let’s wind down tonight and just work hard again tomorrow.”

The idea of not doing anything for the rest of the night is very relaxing, but the work for tomorrow already seems so daunting. Matsukawa feels you tense up just at the idea of it and he soothes you with a hum and a kiss to the forehead.

Slowly, your shoulders loosen up, and so does your back, and you feel like jelly underneath Matsukawa’s godlike massage skills. You make a sound of contentment before tapping on Matsukawa’s arm; he gets off of you and you turn around to be cuddled by the two. You curl around the two of them like a cat seeking warmth. Hanamaki wraps an arm around your waist, and Mattsun gently massages your scalp and strokes your hair.

In a half-asleep state, you mumble out, “Can we just… stay like this? Forever?”

Matsukawa kisses your forehead, and Hanamaki hums in agreement.

“If that’s what you wish for.”

bonus:

“so you mean… we gotta stay here… even if I gotta pee?”

“Taka, that’s not what they–”

“I gotta pee on the people I love?”

“Can we… can we just sleep… please…”

#matsukawa issei #hanamaki takahiro #haikyuu #request #haikyu #haikyu!! #hq #hq!! #ハイキュー #ハイキュー！！ #haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu scenarios #hq headcanons #hq scenarios #ship: hanamatsu

[vraiesmeufs]

Farah

Saint Placide, 16h.

Je vais chercher Farah à la sortie des cours. Je la vois au loin, souriante, elle me propose d’aller faire un tour au jardin du Luxembourg qui se trouve juste à côté. On marche, il fait chaud, on se pose sur un banc.

Farah est en L2 droit et sciences politiques à l’institut catholique de Paris. “Je m’y sens bien parce qu’on n’est pas une pormo monstrueuse de 500/600 personnes, on est tout juste 150 donc c’est cool pour débattre en amphi entre étudiants ou avec le prof. Après je suis dans un institut privé et je suis maghrébine, donc par moment c’est un peu difficile de ne pas sauter sur les premiers qui déblatèrent des absurdités. Plusieurs fois, en cours, je me suis retrouvée face à des profs tenant des propos limites, sur la colonisation algérienne par exemple ou sur la femme.”

J’en profite pour lui demander ce qu’elle a pensé de ces élections. “C’était un peu n’importe quoi. Entre la banalisation du FN, les gens qui critiquent fort en rabaissant ceux qui votent Macron, on s’y perdait. Sans te mentir, je ne me suis retrouvée dans aucun des candidats et j’ai trouvé ça dommage pour les premières présidentielles où je pouvais voter. J’ai trouvé cette période très insupportable à voir les beaux grands penseurs de ce monde sur les réseaux écrire des pavés ou édicter une sorte de parole divine de la politique alors qu’ils ne savent pas de quoi ils parlent. Moi même au bout de 2 ans de droit et de sciences politiques, je ne comprends pas tous les rouages, c’est bien plus compliqué que ce que l'on pense.

On parle ensuite de son idée dans la représentation de la femme aujourd’hui. “C’est un énorme bazar. Entre les filles qui insultent les autres filles de putes à tout va où à l’extrême celles qui se mettent à poil sur la voie publique pour se faire entendre, on s’y retrouve mal. Les réseaux sociaux impactent beaucoup notre image : je vois beaucoup de mecs insulter de putes des filles, mes copines ou parfois moi-même sous une photo où on peut apercevoir nos formes. Mais pourquoi ? Des filles mêmes vont s”insulter ? Il y a un slutshame perpétuel qui se base sur l’apparence. Et je ne parle même pas des “une fille qui couche c’est une pute”, “si t’as couché avec plus de 3 mecs, t’es une pute”…. A écouter les réseaux, une fille bien ne boit pas, ne fume pas, ne sort pas, ne parle à aucun gars, n’a jamais eu de relations sexuelles. Aujourd’hui, se faire mentionner pour se manger des “salopes”, “chiennes” sur Twitter c’est devenu banal. Un jour, suite à un “débat” sur le viol, sujet sur lequel, en principe, il y a 0 débat, un mec m’a dit “toi vu ta photo de profil, je te viole” et ça m’avait choqué de lire ça.”

La discussion porte ensuite sur les différences entre notre génération et la génération juste en dessous. On parle de cette nouvelle génération, biberonnée aux réseaux sociaux et sexualisée dès le plus jeune âge, qui grandit peut être trop vite. “Aujourd’hui des filles qui sont super jeunes vont être très sexualisées, de par les photos qu’elles peuvent poster où des choses qu’elles peuvent dire. Je ne dis pas qu’il faut s’habiller de telle ou telle manière mais je trouve qu'il faut une certaine maturité pour “survivre” aux réseaux sociaux. Internet regorge de malades, de mauvaises personnes et ce n’est pas pour rien que bon nombre de filles et de garçons se sont foutus en l’air pour des réseaux sociaux et qu’on a ce qu’on appelle le cyberbullying. Personnellement, quand je suis née, Internet n’existait pas, puis plus tard ado, mes parents me contrôlaient pas mal : à 21h, ils me prenaient mon téléphone… Je les trouvais lourds mais aujourd’hui je suis bien contente. L’apparition de Snapchat a changé beaucoup de choses, il y a quelque chose de très malsain avec les nudes. Combien de filles se sont retrouvées humiliées car elles ont envoyé des nudes à des mecs en qui elles avaient confiance et que ces derniers les ont publiées ? Après, je ne crache pas sur les réseaux sociaux, moi même je les utilise très souvent, c’est ma petite addiction, mais je pense qu’il faut être conscient.”

On parle ensuite de son rapport au maquillage : “Au collège, je n’avais pas le droit au make up sauf pour les sorties mais j’en mettais très peu. Je suis bien contente car comme je ne mettais pas de vraiment de produit pour le teint, j’ai pu laisser longtemps ma peau respirer et grandir et je n’en mets d’ailleurs toujours pas aujourd’hui. J’ai vraiment commencé à me maquiller au lycée, je mets des trucs de base (mascara, blush, poudre…). Je me passionne à mes heures perdues pour le maquillage des yeux, j’adore y aller sur les jolies couleurs et j’aime bien quand ça brille, mais je n’en fais pas vraiment une priorité. Je peux être facilement agacée par les filles qui disent “moi je ne peux pas sortir sans mettre ceci cela…”, je trouve ça tellement dommage de fixer son identité à travers son make up. Démaquillée, je suis Farah et maquillée, je suis Farah.”

Enfin je lui demande qu’est ce qu’une vraie meuf pour elle. “Une meuf qui s’assume sans chercher à répondre à un modèle précis, hors du moule qu’on essaie de nous ériger sans cesse avec les Kylie Jenner etc. Une vraie meuf, c’est une fille qui n’a pas de clones ou de copies conformes.”

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ENGLISH VERSION (translated by Elea)

Saint Placide, 4pm.

I picked up Farah after her lectures. I her see away, smiling, offering me to go walk in jardin du Luxembourg who is just a foot by. We walk, the weather is hot, we sit on a bench.

Farah is in second year of law and political science at the catholic institute in Paris. « I feel good there because we are not a class of 500/600 students, we are just 150 so it’s really nice to talk over in the classrooms with the other students or the professor himself. I am in a private institution and I am Maghrebi, so sometimes it’s hard not to jump onto the first one who says nonsense. Sometimes, in class, I had to face my own professors saying things a little bit out of border on the Algerian colonisation for example or on women. »

I also asks her what did she think about the elections. « It was really nonsense. With the banalisation of the FN and people that were abasing the one’s who were voting for Macron, I was loosing myself. Without lying, I didn’t identify to one of the candidates and I found that shameful because these were the first presidential’s elections where I could vote. I found that amount of time unbearable seeing the big minds of this world writing books on social medias or pretend to have a godlike opinion even though they don’t even know what they are talking about. Even after 2 years of law and political sciences, I don’t understand every part of it, it’s more complicated than it seems. »

We discuss after of her idea of the representation of the women today. « It’s a big mess. Between girls that insults other girls of whores for nothing or girls that are almost bare on public way to express themselves, I can’t find myself. Social medias have a big impact on our image : I see a lot of guys saying to girls that they are whores, my friends or even sometimes on a picture where we can see our curves. But why ? Even girls go offend others ? There’s a constant slutshaming based on appearance. And don’t even start me on the « A girl who has sex is a slut », « If you had sex with more than 3 guys you’re a slut ». Following social medias, a nice girl doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t go out, doesn’t talk to any guy and never had sex. Today, being mentioned on Twitter to be treated of « sluts », « bitch » is kind of normal. One day, after a debate on rape, normally there’s actually no debate on this subject, a guy told me « Since I saw your profile picture, I’d rape you » and reading this really left me speechless. »

The discussion then drifts with the differences between our generation and the generation just after ours. We tale about this new generation, into social medias since birth and sexualized since the youngest age, that grows up a little too fast. « Today very young girls are going to be sexualized, by the photos that they can post or even by things they could say. I’m not saying you have to dress this or another way but I think that you need an pretty big amount of maturity to « survive » to social medias. Internet is overcrowding with weirdoes, really bad people and it’s not for nothing that a big amount of boys and girls took their lives for social medias and also what we call cyberbullying exists. Personally, when I was born, Internet didn’t even exist, but later when I was a teen, my parents managed me a lot with this : At 9pm, they use to take my phone… I used to find them really annoying but today I’m glad they did it. Snapchat’s emergence changed a lot of things, there’s something I find really unhealthy with what we call nudes. How many girls were humiliated because guys they trusted posted these nudes ? I’m not disowning social medias, I use them a lot, it’s my small addiction, but I think we need to be aware of this. »

We then talk about her relationship with makeup : « In middle school, I wasn’t aloud to wear any makeup except for when i was going out but I didn’t put much of it. And I’m glad I didn’t because I didn’t put anything on my face, I left my skin bare breathing and blossoming for a long time and I still don’t put anything on today. I really started wearing makeup in highschool, I put basic stuff (mascara, blush, powder… ). I spend my time off doing eye makeup, I love doing nice colors and I like it when it sparkles, but I don’t use it as a priority. I can easily be annoyed by girls that say « I can’t even go out without putting this or that… », I think it’s such a shame to determine your identity through makeup. Without makeup, I am Farah and with makeup, I am Farah. »

I finally ask her what is being a vraie meuf (real girl) to her. « A girl that assumes herself without trying to fit into a specific mould, when you stand out we constantly try to control us with Kylie Jenners etc. A real girl is a girl who doesn’t have any clones or copies. »

#farah #vraiesmeufs

[cakandivali]

Why tech CEOs are in love with doomsayers

Latest Updates - M. N. & Associates - By Nellie BowlesFuturist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”But lately, Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley CEOs love him so?“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”When Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Harari tied together knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than 8 million copies and made Harari a celebrity intellectual.He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshipped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational ReadingHarari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.At the Alphabet talk, Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less-free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Harari said.Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”Dinner, With a Side of Medically Engineered ImmortalityCEO testimonials to Harari’s acumen are indeed not hard to come by. “I’m drawn to Yuval for his clarity of thought,” Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, going on to praise a particular chapter on meditation.And Hastings wrote: “Yuval’s the anti-Silicon Valley persona — he doesn’t carry a phone and he spends a lot of time contemplating while off the grid. We see in him who we wish we were.” He added, “His thinking on AI and biotech in his new book pushes our understanding of the dramas to unfold.”At the dinner Hastings co-hosted, academics and industry leaders debated the dangers of data collection, and to what degree longevity therapies will extend the human life span. (Harari has written that the ruling class will vastly outlive the useless.) “That evening was small, but could be magnified to symbolize his impact in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert who pushed internally at Google to keep secret the company’s efforts to process military drone footage for the Pentagon. “His book has that ability to bring these people together at a table, and that is his contribution.”A few nights earlier, Harari spoke to a sold-out theater of 3,500 in San Francisco. One ticket-holder walking in, an older man, told me it was brave and honest for Harari to use the term “useless class.”The author was paired for discussion with the prolific intellectual Sam Harris, who strode onstage in a gray suit and well-starched white button-down. Harari was less at ease, in a loose suit that crumpled around him, his hands clasped in his lap as he sat deep in his chair. But as he spoke about meditation — Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Harari’s devotion confers hero status.He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.This, Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize ... that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”‘OK, So Maybe Humankind Is Going to Disappear’Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager, rented a small house in Mountain View for their visit, and one morning I found them there making oatmeal. Harari observed that as his celebrity in Silicon Valley has risen, tech fans have focused on his lifestyle.“Silicon Valley was already kind of a hotbed for meditation and yoga and all these things,” he said. “And one of the things that made me kind of more popular and palatable is that I also have this bedrock.” He was wearing an old sweatshirt and denim track pants. His voice was quiet, but he gestured widely, waving his hands, hitting a jar of spatulas.Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa, and his father worked in the arms industry. His mother, who worked in office administration, now volunteers for her son handling his mail; he gets about 1,000 messages a week. Yahav’s mother is their accountant.Most days, Harari doesn’t use an alarm clock, and wakes up between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., then meditates and has a cup of tea. He works until 4 or 5 p.m., then does another hour of meditation, followed by an hourlong walk, maybe a swim, and then TV with Yahav.The two met 16 years ago through the dating site Check Me Out. “We are not big believers in falling in love,” Harari said. “It was more a rational choice.”“We met each other and we thought, ‘OK, we’re — OK, let’s move in with each other,’ ” Yahav said.Yahav became Harari’s manager. During the period when English-language publishers were cool on the commercial viability of “Sapiens” — thinking it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for the scholars — Yahav persisted, eventually landing the Jerusalem-based agent Deborah Harris. One day when Harari was away meditating, Yahav and Harris finally sold it at auction to Random House in London.Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Harari’s projects. Director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.Yahav used to meditate, but has recently stopped. “It was too hectic,” he said while folding laundry. “I couldn’t get this kind of huge success and a regular practice.” Harari remains dedicated.“If it were only up to him, he would be a monk in a cave, writing things and never getting his hair cut,” Yahav said, looking at his husband. “Can I tell that story?”Harari said no.“On our first meeting,” Yahav said, “he had cut his hair by himself. And it was a very bad job.”The couple are vegan, and Harari is particularly sensitive to animals. He identified the sweatshirt he was wearing as one he got just before one of his dogs died. Yahav cut in to ask if he could tell another story; Harari seemed to know exactly what he meant, and said absolutely not.“In the middle of the night,” Yahav said, “when there is a mosquito, he will catch him and take him out.”Being gay, Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said.“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Harari added. “OK, so maybe humankind is going to disappear — OK, let’s just observe.”For fun, the couple watches TV. It is their primary hobby and topic of conversation, and Yahav said it was the only thing from which Harari is not detached.They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”Harari left Silicon Valley the next weekend. Soon, in December, he will enter an ashram outside Mumbai, India, for another 60 days of silence. Chartered Accountant For consultng. Contact Us: http://bit.ly/bombay-ca

[headlines-twentyfour]

By Nellie BowlesFuturist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”But lately, Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley CEOs love him so?“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”When Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Harari tied together knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than 8 million copies and made Harari a celebrity intellectual.He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshipped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational ReadingHarari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.At the Alphabet talk, Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less-free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Harari said.Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”Dinner, With a Side of Medically Engineered ImmortalityCEO testimonials to Harari’s acumen are indeed not hard to come by. “I’m drawn to Yuval for his clarity of thought,” Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, going on to praise a particular chapter on meditation.And Hastings wrote: “Yuval’s the anti-Silicon Valley persona — he doesn’t carry a phone and he spends a lot of time contemplating while off the grid. We see in him who we wish we were.” He added, “His thinking on AI and biotech in his new book pushes our understanding of the dramas to unfold.”At the dinner Hastings co-hosted, academics and industry leaders debated the dangers of data collection, and to what degree longevity therapies will extend the human life span. (Harari has written that the ruling class will vastly outlive the useless.) “That evening was small, but could be magnified to symbolize his impact in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert who pushed internally at Google to keep secret the company’s efforts to process military drone footage for the Pentagon. “His book has that ability to bring these people together at a table, and that is his contribution.”A few nights earlier, Harari spoke to a sold-out theater of 3,500 in San Francisco. One ticket-holder walking in, an older man, told me it was brave and honest for Harari to use the term “useless class.”The author was paired for discussion with the prolific intellectual Sam Harris, who strode onstage in a gray suit and well-starched white button-down. Harari was less at ease, in a loose suit that crumpled around him, his hands clasped in his lap as he sat deep in his chair. But as he spoke about meditation — Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Harari’s devotion confers hero status.He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.This, Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize ... that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”‘OK, So Maybe Humankind Is Going to Disappear’Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager, rented a small house in Mountain View for their visit, and one morning I found them there making oatmeal. Harari observed that as his celebrity in Silicon Valley has risen, tech fans have focused on his lifestyle.“Silicon Valley was already kind of a hotbed for meditation and yoga and all these things,” he said. “And one of the things that made me kind of more popular and palatable is that I also have this bedrock.” He was wearing an old sweatshirt and denim track pants. His voice was quiet, but he gestured widely, waving his hands, hitting a jar of spatulas.Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa, and his father worked in the arms industry. His mother, who worked in office administration, now volunteers for her son handling his mail; he gets about 1,000 messages a week. Yahav’s mother is their accountant.Most days, Harari doesn’t use an alarm clock, and wakes up between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., then meditates and has a cup of tea. He works until 4 or 5 p.m., then does another hour of meditation, followed by an hourlong walk, maybe a swim, and then TV with Yahav.The two met 16 years ago through the dating site Check Me Out. “We are not big believers in falling in love,” Harari said. “It was more a rational choice.”“We met each other and we thought, ‘OK, we’re — OK, let’s move in with each other,’ ” Yahav said.Yahav became Harari’s manager. During the period when English-language publishers were cool on the commercial viability of “Sapiens” — thinking it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for the scholars — Yahav persisted, eventually landing the Jerusalem-based agent Deborah Harris. One day when Harari was away meditating, Yahav and Harris finally sold it at auction to Random House in London.Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Harari’s projects. Director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.Yahav used to meditate, but has recently stopped. “It was too hectic,” he said while folding laundry. “I couldn’t get this kind of huge success and a regular practice.” Harari remains dedicated.“If it were only up to him, he would be a monk in a cave, writing things and never getting his hair cut,” Yahav said, looking at his husband. “Can I tell that story?”Harari said no.“On our first meeting,” Yahav said, “he had cut his hair by himself. And it was a very bad job.”The couple are vegan, and Harari is particularly sensitive to animals. He identified the sweatshirt he was wearing as one he got just before one of his dogs died. Yahav cut in to ask if he could tell another story; Harari seemed to know exactly what he meant, and said absolutely not.“In the middle of the night,” Yahav said, “when there is a mosquito, he will catch him and take him out.”Being gay, Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said.“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Harari added. “OK, so maybe humankind is going to disappear — OK, let’s just observe.”For fun, the couple watches TV. It is their primary hobby and topic of conversation, and Yahav said it was the only thing from which Harari is not detached.They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”Harari left Silicon Valley the next weekend. Soon, in December, he will enter an ashram outside Mumbai, India, for another 60 days of silence. from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2z4MbsC

#Blogger

[thanagariansnarebeast]

Top 15 Superheroes part 3

First off some honorable mentions (not nearly enough though): Hulk, Iron Man, Wasp, Batman, Martian Manhunter, Supergirl, Black Panther, Vision, Beast, Professor X, Cyborg, Starfire, Firestorm, Groot, She-Hulk, Doctor Strange, Spawn, Hellboy, Rorschach.

3. Green Arrow (Oliver Queen)

I fucking love this guy and many people’s exposure to him is from the CW show Arrow, and while that show is (mostly) fantastic, it isn’t an accurate representation of the character. In the comics and other media he is much more lighthearted and cracking jokes constantly. He is sometimes accused of being too similar to Batman which I completely disagree with as Oliver knows how to have fun, and his origin story involves him being stripped of everything and having to survive on his own. I love every second of him and Black Canary being together and as I said earlier they are my favorite superhero couple. Oliver is a lot more left wing than many of his fellow heroes and he adds a different perspective on what is right and wrong, for example Batman might just beat up a drug addict and Superman might just throw him in jail where as Green Arrow would try to help them with their addiction. In fact Green Arrow and Green Lantern were some of the first to deal with drugs in the crossover comics they had running at the time, dealing with Green Arrow’s sidekick having a heroin addiction. For great Green Arrow stuff check out the animated feature DC Showcase: Green Arrow, Justice League: Unlimited, and for comics Green Arrow: Rebirth, and the Injustice: Gods Among Us comics.

2. Superman

The first comic book superhero and the one that every other superhero has taken inspiration from in some way, the Man of Tomorrow has survived publisher shake ups, retcons, accusations of being part of the moral decay of society (Fredric Wertham was an idiot), copyright law almost splitting him in two, and an ever changing pop culture and remains one of the most popular characters in all of fiction. He takes on everything from universe destroying beings, planet destroying aliens, giant robots, evil billionaires, and slum lords;  no problem is too big for him to tackle or too small to be beneath him. The Man of Steel may have godlike power, but while some say that makes him uninteresting I say that is part of what makes him such a great character; his struggle to always remain moral and a beacon of hope to all of us. Superman is who everyone in the DC universe looks up to for a moral compass. He is the person we all look up to, striving to be better people and always do the right thing. For great Superman stuff watch The Death of Superman (2018), Allstar Superman, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. For some of his best comics read All-Star Superman, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and Superman/Batman” Public Enemies.

1. Spider-Man (Peter Parker)

Yeah super shocking based on my header and icon right? Superman is the moral symbol of hope we all look up to and wish to be, but Spider-Man is the flawed, self-conscious, awkward person we all are. He is still moral and striving to do the right thing, but he struggles and makes mistakes along the way. He’s been my favorite fictional character from as far back as I can remember and I have never identified with a character more. His quips and one-liners kill me, and I’m so glad the newer films allow him to be funny. He is nerdy, and awkward, and struggles to pay rent, and keep relationships, and he just does the best he can; which all anyone can do. He’s funny, charming, intelligent, goofy, and incredibly self-sacrificing. He’s one of the characters in comics that’s been allowed to grow most, from his awkward teenage start to his college years where he could never balance his life, then a short lived carrier as a college professor and now to head of Parker Industries and a mentor to a new Spider-Man, Peter has been through a lot and grown so much. I also love his many different costume changes, though his first is such an amazing design that its been pretty much unchanged for over 55 years. His best stories aren’t him just being stronger than some villain of the weak and beating them up, but getting his ass kicked, going home and figuring out some scientific or emotional way to defeat his enemy and coming back from it learning something about himself. Most of his villains have some personal connection with him, some kind of friend or mentor usually and I love the emotional heart that brings to his stories, characters like the Lizard where he doesn’t want to hurt him because he knows there is still a good man inside that monster that needs to be saved. The black suit arcs are some of my favorite because of his struggle with his dark side and not just some bland “oh he’s evil because he’s mad” crap; but frustration at his life, work, money, superhero life, and not using his powers for personal gain; all leading to the creation of one of my all time favorite villains who eventually grew and became a hero in his own right, though Venom struggles a lot more than Spider-Man with that. I think if more people lived up to Spidey’s philosophy of responsibility and not giving in to greed or ego, the world would be a much better place. For spectacular Spider-Man reading check out: The Death of Captain Stacy, Spider-Man No More, Spider-Man: Blue, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, Spider-Verse, and Spider-Men (there are a lot more but this list is getting long)For superior Spider-Man stories in animation check out the 90′s Spider-Man series, Spectacular Spider-Man and the Into the Spiderverse movie coming out soon

I made this list first because these are characters that have shaped who I am as a person the most, influenced me and who I want to be as a person. I’ve grown up with these characters and the stories told about them have helped influence almost every aspect of who I am, from my taste in music, writing, tv, film, to the decisions I make in my every day life, to who I strive to be as a person. I created this blog to share my love of these and other characters, and if just one person can look at something in these posts and go “wow that looks interesting, I should read/watch that” I think my time and effort will be worth it.

#Superheroes #Marvel #DC #my posts #lists #long post #personal

[healthandfitnessrecipes-blog]

Time Travel to the Stars

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=9590

C.S. Lewis's novel of Malacandra, Out of the Silent Planet, describes a journey in a spaceship to another planet by three humans - one driven by greed, one by darker ambitions to make humans the predatory master species in the universe, the third a thoughtful, attractive adventurer called Ransom, who is a professor of philology. They enter a world quite unlike the Earth, where three quite different intelligent species are able to coexist without conflict, and everything is ordered by the benign rule of a godlike being called Oyarsa, whose messengers and assistants are the radiant eldila. 

     In Malacandra, we learn that Earth is known as "the silent planet". Contact between Earth and other planets has been cut off because Earth has fallen under the sway of the Bent One, a dark overlord. Unknown to humans, the eldils still travel to Earth, but it's become a dangerous journey and they go down like warrior angels, concealed from the perception of most humans.

     Lewis adds a postcript to the novel that purports to be a letter to the author from "the original of Dr Ransom", an acquaintance on whom the Ransom character is based. Supposedly their friendship began when Lewis - a medievalist - found a twelfth century account of a voyage through the heavens that introduced a being there called Oyarses, "the intelligence or tutelary spirit of a planet".In a nonfiction book, The Discarded Image, that Lewis published late in life, he discusses the 12th century Platonist, Bernardus Silvestris - "Bernard of the Woods" - who wrote about a journey out of this world and planetary gods he called Oyarses.

     There are more clues to Lewis' evolving thinking about how we can open and maintain communication with the intelligences of other star systems in the partial draft of a late novel he did not intend to publish. Lewis's former secretary narrowly managed to save this from a bonfire on which the author's brother was burning his manuscripts shortly after his death. This unfinished novel, titled "The Dark Tower" by the editor, involves time travel. The editor suggests it is the true sequel to Out of the Silent Planet.l

     In the postcript to Out of the Silent Planet Lewis made the fascinating suggestion that time travel will be the key to travel to intelligent life on other planets.The last sentence in that postscript reads as follows: "The way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-traveling, it will have to be time-traveling as well."           The heart of the matter (as Lewis also came to believe) is that given the Cloaking of Earth, the best and safest way to reopen communication with benign intelligences on other planets and in other dimensions may be to go across time and take off from a past - or future - location. After leading many group journeys by flights of intrepid shamanic dream travelers (following the "Sirius" script I published in Dreamgates, and others) I believe he was correct.

Credits: Original Content Source