#which. is not at all true. if you actually look at the history of medicine there's some really incredible stuff!

[deathbxnny]

hi!! stellaron hunters + jing yuan with a teen!reader who has a past like collei?

they were used as an experiment from a very young age, thankfully [insert character](or elio in stellaron hunter scenerio) rescued them, they also took them in but they were still traumatized from their time as an experiment,they are chronically ill which makes them weak and are scared of being touched due to their time as an experiment subject

-----

A/N: Hello! As someone who loves Collei, I seriously love this request! I also apologise for taking eons to respond to this, but life sucks... anyways, I hope you enjoy this! Content: Small hints of past child abuse/experimentation, angst, hurt/comfort, some fluff, reader being a teen, found family, small mentions of chronical illness, sfw Reader has no mentioned pronouns! (Not proofread!!!)

-----

》Jing Yuan

Jing Yuan was aware of your story way before you arrived in his care. And he took every single detail very seriously. How could he not, when you looked so scared and weak, the day you first arrived at his doorstep? You were panicking and crying, afraid that history will repeat itself and that more agony was awaiting you in the mans grasp... yet none of that ever came. Instead, you were patched up carefully, clothed and fed with utmost care and love. He made sure that you had nothing to worry about, most of your wishes coming true with a dismissive wave of his hand.

He didn't need you to trust him fully immediately. In fact, he only made his presence known, once you came to find him first to thank him for his generosity, that you couldn't understand just yet. He made no move to push you into anything, simply going with whatever you were comfortable with speaking about or doing at the moment. You quickly learn to come to him with your worries, especially when it comes to your chronical pain. He has phenomenal doctors to help you, the most modern medicine at hand to quell even a small part of your physical agony.

He makes it clear, that your dark days are over under his wing and instead gives way for new light to pour into your heart.

-----

》Kafka

Kafka was observant and calm, when you first were given to her to be taken care of. She didn't protest, simply humming at Elio's request, before giving you an ominous smile. She was a mystery your anxious mind couldn't properly comprehend. She was unpredictable, noticed every movement and every flinch. At first, you were afraid of her as well, until she eventually showed you that there was no need to. She made sure you wore the best clothes and ate the best food at her side. She kept her distance to not set you off, tried to control her endless curiosity and need to know more. But thankfully, you were trusting her enough to share more of yourself, which ultimately made you share a bond.

Your pain came to an end with her around. She was too smart, noticed your discomfort the second you felt it too and took care of it accordinlgy. And whilst she couldn't take away all the agony, the underlying message was still clear.

There was nothing to fear anymore.

-----

》Blade

Blade was indifferent at first, perhaps even a little irritated. He didn't want to take in some randome kid, when he had so much to do, so much to finish. But alas, Elio didn't take no as an answer, which is how you ended up in his care. Things were rough at first, but not necessarily horrible. He gave you the basic things you needed to survive, including medication for your pain, as he claimed that he didn't want you holding him back. But other than that, he made no effort to bond with you or learn anything about your past. Or at least, he tried not to.

You came to him one night crying, quietly asking him to protect you whilst you slept, because you were afraid of the mere shadows in your room. He let out a sigh, yet obliged, calmly resting in a chair near your bed, as he sharpened and cleaned his sword absently, finding himself actually watching over you. After that night, he became somewhat more forgiving. Perhaps he was becoming weak, but he ultimately didn't find it in him to care, when you smiled at him for the first time.

-----

》Silver Wolf

Silver Wolf was also indifferent to you at first, but not because of any malicious reasons. instead, she believed your past was just a past, that should just be forgotten. Similar to a video game, you should just restart and lead a new life in hopes of having a better one next time. But she learned the hard way that real life was a little more difficult than that, when you freaked out for the first time after your arm brushing against hers on accident. It gave her near whiplash and became somewhat of a waking call to treat you more seriously. And so she did.

She researched and hacked into any possible data that surrounded you and your illness, not even slightly discouraged at the realisation that it was chronical. She'd find any possible way to help you, hoping that her company could heal you even a little bit. She shared her snacks with you, spoke with you everyday for hours on end, never allowed you to stray her side.

Life was difficult, but that didn't mean she couldn't try helping you lead a new, better one anyways.

-----

A/N: Alrighttt! I had some rare down time and was determined to at least post something today, so here it is! Thank you again for the request anon and I hope you liked it!<33

#honkai star rail #honkai star rail fanfic #honkai star rail x reader #honkai star rail x you #hsr x reader #hsr jing yuan x reader #hsr jing yuan #hsr blade #hsr blade x reader #hsr kafka #hsr kafka x reader #hsr silver wolf #hsr silver wolf x reader #hsr

[nomorefstogive]

But imagine creator reader talking with dottore about what he does and he asks why reader isn’t disturbed or against or even shocked and reader just replies with “well you haven’t done what joseph mangla or unit 731 has” and proceeds to tell him things that happened on the medical side of history

Oh hell I can actually picture Dottore being shocked when he hears about them lol.

While he may be a monster in regards to experimenting on people I feel that he does what he does out of a genuine desire to advance the human condition, not quite out of the same wanton cruelty and malice that 731 and 'The Angel of Death' did what they did. And on that same hand, he at the very least works towards a goal that will benefit all of humanity in the long run as opposed to the short sighted and destructive goals of these lunatics.

He wants to advance medicine and science, to usher in an age of enhanced humans who are beyond the fragility and limitations that humanity has been shackled by for so long, and the sad fact is that there comes a point in time where experimenting on people is the only way to advance medicines and science, particularly when ascending beyond limits is your goal.

He is cruel and monstrous in his actions, and yet it is cruelty and monstrousness born from a belief that this is the only way forward, a belief that his ends will more than justify the abhorrent means taken to reach them.

What are a few lives when in the end he may find a way to conquer death itself and ascend mankind to tower above even the gods? The road into hell is paved with good intentions after all, and so morals and ethics are the fuel in the forges of progress in which he hopes to forge the future.

And yet, look at what these people did. How much of their experiments were even remotely done in favor of scientific development and not out of a sense of cruel amusement and morbid curiosity? How much of what they did actually benefited anyone?

True 731's research into bio-weapons was useful enough to spare some of their miserable lives, but everything else? The vivisections on living and conscious prisoners? The tortures they inflicted? Where is the benefit to humanity in even half of what they did?

Nowhere at all. Save perhaps in their own twisted and perverse minds.

Josef Mengele, "The Angel of Death' of the 3rd Reich, his atrocities are as vast as they are varied and are matched but in scale by the scope of the stars above our heads. He deserved a worse death than what he got. A far worse death.

Perhaps he may see a darker and more depraved reflection of himself when he hears of the monster that was let do as he wished to the poor souls who were given to him. A reflection lacking any and all goals and aspirations of greatness beyond wanton cruelty and hedonistic sadism in the guise of aspirations of medical glory.

Perhaps the tales of their wanton sadism and cruelty will be enough to jolt the man, to instill in him some fear of walking down that same path, and lead to him adopting at least some form of ethics or at the very least restraint in regards to his own sadism lest he fall down into hell alongside of them.

While he may continue his human experiments perhaps he will leave it to those who volunteer for them, after all offer anyone enough money and the sky is the limit on what most will do, or perhaps pay a visit to the criminals and inmates who are already locked away and make them an offer, a lighter sentence for a few tests may be the best deal they will ever get.

And for those fated to the noose or the blade, perhaps they may find themselves under the Doctor's knife instead as penance for their own atrocities.

Who knows, maybe a glimpse into the horrors of our worlds medical and scientific atrocities may prevent him and countless more geniuses on Teyvat from following them down on that elevator to hell.

At the very least, these are my thoughts on the matter.

#genshin impact sagau #genshin sagau #genshin impact #sagau #Il Dottore #dottore #dottore sagau #genshin impact cult au

[kaeyapilled]

trying to put my (mostly) child kaeya headcanons in one spot. brace yourself this is gonna be so long

first i think he was around 8 years old when he was left in mondstadt.

before that he lived with his father always moving from place to place. or maybe... i dont know honestly. they didn't live in khaenri'ah (whatever's left of it) because i like the idea that kaeya is the last hope for a place he's only heard stories about. for people he has barely met. and he yearns for it all the same, enough to run away as a stowaway on a ship just for the slim chance he'll get to meet it, to return to a place he only knows through other people's memories... yeah it's a thought i like to entertain. so anyway i dont know where exactly kaeya lived before my headcanons for this are really vague lmao. im torn between making him be raised in some corner of teyvat, or somewhere very abyss touched, or... a secret third thing i dont yet know...

i think his mother died when he was so young he has barely any recollection of her and it haunts him a bit. he cant remember what she looked like. to have an idea he can just look in a mirror though. he's her spitting image.

unsure about siblings... i think he didnt have any

i dont think his father was abusive. neglectful maybe. he was really awful at the father job but mostly because of how emotionally distant he was. he never hit kaeya or went out of his way to be cruel to him, he was just very stern. kaeya was a child who didn't really know comfort. all his basic needs were met, but his father just wasn't the type to hug or say words of encouragement, to calm him down from nightmares, to soothe a fever beyond just bitter medicine and leaving kaeya laid down on the cot alone. i think the closest they ever got to that sort of connection was when he taught kaeya their clan's history, which we know he did from canon. that piece of paper where the handwriting shows an adult guiding a child's hand on the paper makes me. Feel Things. he was not a soft man or a good father by any means but. *gestures vaguely*

and you know what. i think he loved kaeya in his own way. which is to say that he loved kaeya more as a means to an end than as a son. or maybe not. maybe leaving kaeya was more difficult for him than i give him credit for. i cant really decide. either way 2/10 for effort his parenting sucked and left deep scars in this poor poor child BUT he was not a heartless asshole is what im trying to say

anyway kaeya has very bittersweet very mixed feelings about him. he left his own son all alone in an unfamiliar land for unclear reasons. placed a burden nobody should ever have to carry on the shoulders of a child. he never embraced him or told him he loved him. but at the same time we see kaeya in game trying to understand his father's motivations for abandoning him there. that maybe a happier life could have been a factor. his safety. assuming this is, like, true. i headcanon that it is. it's not the entire reason by far. but it could have been part of it. maybe that's called "wishful thinking". we'll find out one day i hope

i don't really know what to make of the entire "you're our last hope" thing. as in, what exactly does that entail. what did his father tell him. im just kinda waiting patiently for them to actually tell us what's up. i can tell you it was a ridiculous amount of pressure on kaeya though. he might have been mature for his age and forced to grow up faster than he should have but a lot of it was simply beyond his comprehension. like, that's an entire seven year old child. he shouldve been playing with toys. anyway. kaeya who has felt guilt as his standard everyday main emotion since he was little

i think kaeya's father taught him to speak, read and write in common, so kaeya could understand people pretty well when he was left in mondstadt and could read basic stuff

an extension of this headcanon: i think each region has their own language besides just common tongue, and that in general people can speak both, especially in the big cities, while in rural areas people will probably only speak the region's mother tongue. i read a mutual's headcanon like this once and it rewired my brain so i borrowed it. also common varies from place to place because there are different dialects from mixing with the nations' other languages. to make it fun!

so when kaeya gets to mondstadt he can't speak mondstadtian specifically but he can speak common and the ragnvindrs can all speak both. eventually as he stays there kaeya learns mondstadt's language and loses the accent (a very conscious effort from his part)

more on the accent: if you listen closely to him nowadays, some word or other still sounds odd, maybe too stiff, the way he rolls his tongue on certain letters- but it's very subtle

kaeya hasn't spoken his mother tongue in so long he inevitably has forgotten certain things, and he was so young when he stopped speaking it that there are things he simply never learned. i think this haunts kaeya sooo bad. he's someone who's always trying to keep little pieces of his past, of things that have a lot of emotional value for him; he's someone who values memories, in particular physical, tangible pieces of memories. and we see him do this with his roots, like adding khaenri'ahn symbols and motifs to his outfits, saving slips of paper written by his father about his family's story, etc..

so anyway the fact he's forgetting bits and pieces of his mother tongue makes him grasp desperately at whatever's still left of it in his memory. i wonder if he writes what he can om scraps of paper, or maybe an actual notebook; i wonder also if he did similar things as a child too? though it's something he'd have to keep insanely well hidden and the paranoia about someone finding it out would absolutely eat him alive

okay back to his childhood. when he's taken in by the ragnvindrs i think he's very quiet and only speaks when spoken to. he is so unfathomably scared and lonely and everything is terrifyingly unfamiliar but any genuine manifestation of fear and anxiety and homesickness is saved for the dead of night when everyone's asleep and won't see/hear him cry. he keeps to himself, acts very polite, doesn't bother anyone with asking for help or for anything beyond what he's already been offered.

diluc was very happy about having another kid his age living under the same roof and almost immediately saw him as a little brother and kaeya simply could not match the enthusiasm. they took it as him just being shy, and to an extent that was part of it, but also he simply did not want to be there at all. no matter how wonderfully kind those people were to him, kaeya missed his father and his mother and the homeland he didnt even know in person but that was his biggest responsibility. it was such an enormous change and he missed the familiarity so much it made him ill. like literally. i think he spent his first or second week with the ragnvindrs bedridden

im very fond of the hc that kaeya took ill easily as a child.

kaeya had nightmares often. i absolutely cannot see him asking for comfort in any direct way. most of the time he'd just hold his own hand through it. other times he'd slip out of bed and see there was still light coming from the study. he'd sit on an armchair next to crepus, who already knew kaeya would hardly ever speak about what was making him upset, and watch him work until he fell asleep again.

i think kaeya was a very scrawny kid who looked a bit younger than he actually was. next to diluc (who im always torn between making just seven months older than him, or a year and seven months older) he seemed even tinier. while diluc was the picture of a healthy boy, all full red cheeks and bright eyes, kaeya was too lean, eyes too tired, sometimes distant, like he's not entirely present, lost in thought. you could see a sadness in him sometimes that seemed deeper than anything a child his age should know. kaeya was quiet not just because he didn't speak a lot, but because he seemed to exist silently. if he disappeared to be alone for a while and didn't want you to find him, you would not find him.

and anyway. i like the idea of him slowly allowing himself to be louder as he becomes more comfortable with the ragnvindrs. and revealing his more sarcastic side lol. he's always been quick witted, he was just too timid at first

child kaeya who was such a weird kid. he spoke in a way that often lacked the childishness expected from someone who's yet to turn nine. said odd cryptic things with zero explanation. banned from sharing bedtime stories after scaring diluc with overly fucked up khaenri'ahn folk tales. normalest child alive. i think he bit into a crystalfly once

oh and kaeya absolutely came up with the whole "i come from a family of pirates" thing as a kid. i think he read about pirates in a book once and was completely enamored with the idea. and one side effect of being a secret agent pawn spy is the ability to spin wild tales on the spot. so anyway did he convince diluc he was toootally a pirate. yes. diluc believed him for way too long

no wonder he's so good at telling stories to kids nowadays. he's had practice

about the eyepatch: i can never settle on just one headcanon!! option one: his eye was fine as a kid and he only wore it sometimes for the pirate roleplay, then he started wearing it everyday after The Fight because diluc wounded him; option two: he always wore the eyepatch because there is something abyss/khaenri'ah related going on with his right eye (don't ask me what exactly. though im fond of the idea that it's connected to his father and it's basically what allows him to fulfill the spy role, in some nebulous way.) and during the fight diluc aimed for it on purpose; there's probably a secret third option im forgetting about. i lean more towards option one these days i think.

okay im out of headcanons for now. i bet that the moment i click post im gonna remember ten more. but its ok. i can make another post if needed. never forget that i can speak about kaeya for literal hours and that, if prompted, i will do so

#is anyone going to read this this is SO long #my posts #kaeyaposting #kaeya #kaeya alberich #there. it's alive

[minhosimthings]

Skz as Mythical creatures

Bang Chan - Werewolf. There's nothing to question here about this. Man literally gives so much wolf vibes that writers on Tumblr use wolf memes for his smaus. But also werewolves have been used throughout history to provide a sense of wisdom combined with misinterpretation. Wisdom, in the form of living and going through so much in their moon drunk lives. And like is that not Chan?

Lee Minho: A warlock. Warlocks are basically wizards who get their magic from evil sources. They conjure magic called 'blue magic' aka evil magic from shady sources and repay that debt with their own blood. They have been known to help people from time to time but only the people who need it the most, like a raped woman who no one believes. Oh also they are known to have cats as their companions! And they live very secluded lives usually in forests and grow mushrooms. My brain is dying thinking about evil warlock Minho cause my standards are so fucked up

Seo Changbin: A dragon. Listen LISTEN TO ME. I chose a dragon for Changbin, because they have many myths of false appearance. When I first got into skz, I really though our Binnie was the most serious person in this group. But then I saw how those hips moved, and I was like 'oh so he's Barbie and Shakira combined and put into one man'. Dragons are known as fierce creatures who protect the gold that they hoard and destroy villages, but how much of that is true? Mostly they do it to protect themselves and the gold which they have rightfully earned. Also they are extremely loyal and friendly once you understand them and don't harm their loved ones (yes even dragons have loved ones)

Hwang Hyunjin: Selkie. Selkies are basically mermaids, who originate from Scotish folk tales (trust me they are VERY popular here). They turn into seals in water and turn back into human if daylight or moonlight touches them, Aka if they come on land. They are very dual creatures, being pretty and kind to most humans, especially women, but they can also be the most savage beasts when it comes to men who have corrupted for their own pleasure. Their siren songs are very captivating and they are known to make art out of conch shells.

Han Jisung: A shapeshifter. Han Jisung is truly a puzzle. Like man could be intense babygirling one moment and then two seconds later literally kill all of us with wavy hair, sweaty face and those fingers playing the guitar finger kink go brr. Jisung is more fitting to the shapeshifter brand when you realise that the humans who used to be good at doing everything and not crack under intense pressure were awarded this shapeshifting power by the Gods. So yeah our fourth gen ace would definetly be a shapeshifter.

Lee Felix: A fairy. Need I explain anything? Need I even write an entire essay about this? (Already wrote it but fine). He would definitely be a healing fairy. Like he would whip up medicines and hide them in his delicious brownies to trick unwilling children into taking them (MY HEART IS TOO WEAK FOR FELIX HANDING OUT BROWNIES). He would def live in the woods in like a tiny cottage, which is decorated with creepers and vines and soft moss, where he rests his pretty wings, excuse me I need to write something on this.

Kim Seungmin: A nymph. Nymphs are actually more powerful than they are portrayed nowadays. Many of them were sons and daughters of river or tree Gods and they used to possess the quality of being able to fic someone in a trance with their voices. LIKE HELLO? MR KIM SEUNGMIN WITH THAT GOLDEN VOICE? Also they were known to be mischievous, always teasing pixies and fairies and taunting beings older than them. (I am not making this up yet legit used to taunt old trees for being so old and wise because nymphs never used to age or they would age VERY slowly)

Yang Jeongin: A vampire. Alexa play Vampire by Olivia Rodrigo please. I mean dude's literally immortal I'm telling you. He looks LIKE THE SAME PERSON EVEN WHEN HE WAS A CHILD LIKE HOW? If y'all look at me, I look like a completely different person from when I was a kid. And also there's something about our baby bread that just screams vampire vibes. Like he would totally live in a castle all alone, drinking blood and having foxes as pets.

#skz #stray kids #skz headcanons #stray kids headcanons #Bang chan #lee know #changbin #hyunjin #han #felix #Seungmin #i.n #Bang Christopher Chan #lee minho #seo changbin #hwang hyunjin #han jisung #lee felix yongbok #kim Seungmin #yang jeongin #mythology #mythological creatures #i was bored so here ya go #my oneshots in the notes app are looking at me VERY angrily #I'LL WRITE THEM LATER OK? #bye bye now

[marzipanandminutiae]

Actually, the wise women/Cunning Folk system was Norse in origin and the rest of Europe had wise women replace their own ritualized medical systems (think sleeping at Asclepius's temple) because Europe was conquered by Danish tribes during the end of the Roman period.

No seriously, Scandinavians have (or had, it's dying out because of how good their healthcare system is) a long history of kloke folk that dates back to the pagan seidrmadrs.

Considering what the medical system was like back then, most of the wise women were in many ways a good deal less quackish than the men with MDs, considering they understood the wonders of antiseptics and MDs looked at the concept as some rustic superstition.

No, actually, I want wise women back because their services were free. I mean, yeah, they'd obviously charge a fee NOW, but Granny Weatherwax's comment that, "They didn't pay in cash, but rather in respect, which was cold hard currency" was actually a reality for these women, considering their communities protected them from the witchhunters.

Granted, the witch trials were a little more complicated, considering the word for witchcraft in Nordic countries was troldfolk (who were believed to send curses via illness), who were fought by the kloke folk. ("Sickness is curses sent by the Jotuns" is metaphorically true...) Wise women didn't get properly killed off until the Progressive Era, due to modern medicine finally being both effective, available, and doctors passing laws against "quacks".

Okay, so, by free admission, early modern Nordic history is VERY NOT my main area of expertise. This could all be entirely true for Scandianvian vernacular magic/folk healing practice. But I definitely now it wasn’t true for all practitioners termed “wise women” across Europe.

Just looking into the system of Scandinavian wise women superficially, though, it seems that they- like their British counterparts the cunning-folk, who I’m more familiar with -didn’t need community protection from witch hunters because they were seldom targeted by them. Based on the better sourced parts of the “cunning folk” Wiki page, a charge of “superstition” seems to have been brought against Scandinavian wise women more often, and they did get arrested and sentenced fairly frequently. But the sentence wasn’t usually capital, and for some of them it seems to have acted as good advertising.

(Also in Britain and British colonies, cunning-folk often acted as witch-hunters. So, sorry, granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn: you’re actually the granddaughters of the witches who threw innocent people under the bus to deflect suspicion. Or because they genuinely believed those people were evil. Or for the payout. Take your pick.)

I’m also not sure about the assertion that their services were free. In Britain, at least, cunning-folk definitely did not work for free as a rule- why would they, when this was their livelihood? They often received payment in trade rather than currency, but...they very much did expect payment of SOME sort, as I understand it. You have to eat somehow, after all, and I’m not sure one could run a totally self-sufficient farm and a folk medicine/magic practice at the same time.

And even if you could, still better to have Old Tom down the lane mend your fence in exchange for physicking his cow than do it yourself, right? Save yourself the work.

The assumption of total altruism is one of my big issues with this ask series, and the other is the idea that wise women knew Good Medicine and doctors did not. Obviously, yes, early medical doctors were often convinced that folk medicine practitioners had nothing to offer the field, and I’m sure some practices by some wise women/cunning-folk worked.

But.

Some of the latter were also, to put it bluntly, full of shit.

There WERE people, unfortunately, who used the title of “Wise Woman” or “Cunning-Man” or whatever to fleece their community out of resources in exchange for dodgy cures and ineffective charms. Because that’s just how humanity goes: some people are good, some people are evil, and some people are just out to make a buck (so to speak) however they can. I find it very hard to believe that all laws against Quackery(TM) were totally motivated by early modern doctors’ fragile egos, simply because bona fide quacks have been around forever. From my past research, it seems that that British cunning-folk at least seemed given to pronouncing illness that doctors could not diagnose, the result of curses or hexes. While many did practice herbalism, and some herbalism has medical value given that many medicinal chemicals now usually synthesized are found in plants...there was another side of it, too, that could frequently involve attributing medical problems to magical causes.

And I would be very surprised if that were a phenomenon exclusive to Britain and its colonies.

I understand the longing for a time of free, quality medical treatment from your local badass village wisewoman, protected by her reverential community from evil doctors and omnipresent witch-hunters. I really do. But it seems to me that, for a variety of reasons, that time never actually existed.

(Also I would definitely like a citation on the antiseptics thing. Just because they thought garlic could ward off evil or something doesn’t mean they understood that it had antiseptic properties, or advocated for using it in effective ways. And I can’t really blame doctors for questioning ideas like that- phrased that way, it does sound like rural superstition. If nobody knows the background logic behind why something works, and it only works some of the time, and the people saying it works are making that claim for reasons that fly in the face of then-current science...you might understandably think it doesn’t work at all.)

(It’s not like the cunning-folk were saying “use autoclaves for your surgical tools to avoid infection!” and the doctors shot back with “INFECTION IS A MYTH INVENTED BY SATAN!!!!” At least, not that I know of.)

#ask #anon #long post #history #medical history #sorry I just #I don't buy Burning Times or Burning Times-adjacent narratives anymore #The Bad Ignorant Doctor-Men Stamped Out The Skilled And Totally Selfless Wise Women Because Ego just seems #too easy and simple to jive with most of what I know about how complex humans and history are #(also a lot of doctors recognized the usefulness of herbal medicine too?) #I do believe in magic but. what's more likely if you have a stomach ache- that Pegleg Joan cursed you? #or that you're allergic to shellfish but nobody has a firm understanding of that yet?

[moonlightdancer26]

Super stan of Snape and Remus here:

You're going to hate me for one half of my two metas, but I have two metas that do the same subject matter: "Snape doesn't deserve all the hate he gets for Remus loosing his job" and "That being said, Remus didn't deserve to loose his job and I say this as a person who's tired of people demonizing the wrong person for Remus's loss of his job'

I say Snape doesn't deserve the hatred because Remus would've lost his job anyway, Snape or no Snape. Even if Snape wasn't there Remus would've lost his job, because of the curse.

Dumbledore is the one who really deserves the hate, because he could've given the werewolf who struggles to get any form of employment a stable job-which was available! Care of magical creatures-or even History because anyone would be better than Binns. Seriously, imagine Remus as a care of magical creatures teacher-he'd be awesome at it! Or History-imagine kids actually learning and enjoying the class. For years-not just one.

Dumbledore could've and should have found another teacher for the Defense class.

Plus, Remus could very well have died or gotten injured because of the curse. Quirrell died, Lockhart got memory wiped. It's not like the other future teachers got much better-Mad Eye Moody was imprisoned, Fake Mad Eye Moody was had his soul sucked out, who knows what happened to Umbridge (I get the impression it was rather traumatic), Snape lost all his friends and basically painted a target on his back, and it seems the Carrows were tortured and imprisoned/killed.

And I say that Remus didn't deserve to loose his job because A) it was a genuinely innocent mistake-people forget things. Remus wasn't being deliberately careless or reckless. Just distracted.

B) If Remus deserves to loose his job for accidentally being dangerous so does literally every other teacher minus Binns and Snape.

C) I'm not really fond of the idea in general that someone deserves to be punished for something that could've gone really badly. No one was hurt. There should be more care to make sure that Remus takes his medicine, not kicking him out.

This has been in my inbox for a few days and I’ve been meaning to answer it but I forgot, and it’s the weekend now so I have some free time.

Anyway, I won’t respond to the first part of your ask because I think we both know I agree. The other part’s kinda where the problem starts lol

I don’t think Dumbledore is the one who deserves the hate. There were hardly any candidates for the DADA position (Snape: 🧍‍♀️) and Dumbles seemed to struggle to find one a lot of the time. And Dumbledore didn’t “knowingly put people in danger,” contrary to what others like to say. The position was not deadly in itself, the only thing he had to make sure of is that the person left before the end of the year so they would not run the risk of being harmed or killed. Dumbledore was not only grasping at straws for any potential candidates, but he also had to get someone who was competent when it came to DADA, especially after what happened with Lockhart (who was so blatantly horrible that it was plain comical). Plus, Albus was always kind to Remus when he was boy and we see that he liked and trusted him a lot when he was a professor. He even silenced Snape when he was implying Remus had something to do with Black’s entry of Hogwarts and looked sombre when Remus had to leave (“Goodbye, then, Remus,” said Dumbledore soberly). Doesn’t make sense that he would put someone innocent in danger for no reason (emphasis on “for no reason”) 🤷‍♀️

A) it was a genuinely innocent mistake-people forget things. Remus wasn't being deliberately careless or reckless. Just distracted.

I would’ve agreed with you.. if what you were saying was true. It was not an innocent mistake — some teensy accident that could’ve happened to anyone. I’m sure you’re referring to his forgetting the Wolfsbane potion, however, I think you’re forgetting that, for the entire year, Remus was well-aware of the fact that Sirius Black—who he (actually) believed was a mass-murderer who wanted to kill Harry—was an illegal Animagus and chose to keep it from Dumbles all year despite genuinely thinking Sirius could’ve killed Harry and the students and staff at Hogwarts. So sure, anon, maybe you think forgetting to take the one thing that stops you from turning into a bloodthirsty monster who could eat just about anyone is a simple mistake, but this definitely isn’t. It was a conscious decision that he made throughout the whole year, even after Sirius literally broke into the castle and stood over a teenage boy (Ron) with a 12 inch knife.

B) If Remus deserves to loose his job for accidentally being dangerous so does literally every other teacher minus Binns and Snape.

Who says they didn’t? All of the professors, including Snape tyvm, were a mess and shouldn’t have been teaching children. Hogwarts as a whole was a shitty school, but saying Remus “didn’t deserve to lose his job :((” after he damn well could’ve gotten the whole castle killed with his not telling Albus is rather ignorant.

C) I'm not really fond of the idea in general that someone deserves to be punished for something that could've gone really badly. No one was hurt. There should be more care to make sure that Remus takes his medicine, not kicking him out.

You’re entitled to your own opinion, anon. But when you work with children and forget to take the medicine that prevents you from murdering or infecting them, along with the fact that you were already endangering their lives by keeping vital information about a serial killer a secret, then I think that’s a pretty valid reason to not want that person to work there anymore (+ Dumbledore didn’t even fire Remus, he gave him the opportunity to resign himself).

#anti remus lupin #this tag hurts my soul #look what you made me do #(iykyk) #pro albus dumbledore #pro dumbledore #severus snape #pro snape #pro professor dumbledore #pro severus snape #snape #harry potter #hp #ask #asks

[creature-wizard]

The New Age concept of ascension - what is it?

The concept of ascension is central to New Age belief, so you'll hear New Agers talking about it a lot. So what is it?

New Agers essentially believe that it's humanity's destiny to undergo "spiritual evolution" to a next level of existence. At this point in time, the popular belief is that our DNA - or at least the DNA of those who "download" "DNA upgrades" from Source will "shift to 5D" in the near future.

Despite its name, "5D" has nothing to do with mathematical dimensions. Instead, New Agers believe that matter exists in varying states of density, and the fifth density is essentially more ethereal than "3D," or the third density, which we presently live in.

Ascension is functionally the Christian rapture with a eugenicist twist. Where Rapture-believing Christians believe that if you'll spontaneously be translated to spirit form if you convert to (the right kind of) Christianity, New Agers believe that you'll essentially be spontaneously translated to spirit form if you get close enough to God, or Source.

Some people believe that New Agers don't think they have to do any work to ascend - but this really isn't true. Most of them that I've seen believe that they have to "raise their vibrational frequency" so they can connect to Source energy and receive these "downloads." It's functionally the same idea that in order to go to Heaven, you have to get right with God.

So what are the problems?

First of all, it's spiritual eugenics. They effectively believe that people who practice their form of spirituality literally have superior genetics to those who don't. Many believe that it's just nature, fate, God's will, or whatever you want to call it, that those who don't or can't "upgrade" will essentially die off.

Because New Age doesn't have any central authority, beliefs surrounding this vary wildly, and there are relatively benign beliefs about what ascension will entail; EG, Earth will split into two timelines - one where the people who ascended get to live, and one where the people who didn't ascend get to keep reincarnating until they finally do get to ascend and join the other Earth.

Unfortunately, there are also those who believe that climate change is not a man-made phenomena, but rather is part of Earth's ascension process (they believe that Earth is going to ascend to 5D, too), and that related deaths are meant to purge the world of the unevolved.

Another concerning belief is that of "ascension symptoms," where symptoms that could potentially be very medically concerning are dismissed as a natural part of the ascension process. Couple this with a strong mistrust of actual medicine and real doctors (New Age is tied up in conspiracy theories of all kinds), and you've got a recipe for disaster.

One other thing the idea of ascension has in common with the Rapture is the number of times it's been supposed to happen, but failed to materialize. Lots of New Agers expected it to happen on December 21st, 2012. When it didn't, many rationalized it by saying that a consciousness shift had still taken place, and that this consciousness shift was important in preparing the world for actual ascension later on. Basically, it was pretty typical failed prophecy rationalization stuff.

New Agers continue to draw in people who are simply unaware of the movement's long, long history of failed predictions. The average person isn't going to go back and comb through 50+ years of New Age literature to see just how long they've been making extravagant predictions that just never manifest, let alone realize that all of these other failed predictions means the current predictions aren't all that likely to come true, either. If someone looks into it, there's a high chance they'll accept the rationalizations and believe that the predictions actually apply to their own near future, because "your generation is the special generation" is a powerful ego trap.

So yeah, in a nutshell, ascension is just the Rapture for people who believe in spiritual eugenics; and just like the regular Rapture, it has a long history of being involved in failed predictions.

#new age #ascension #5d #dna activation #spiritual eugenics

[roachleakage]

On Crackpots and Crack Theories

I'll be happy to admit, I didn't share most of the "supporting evidence" in The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria because I do not have the expertise to debunk many of the claims they're making. I'm not an occultist or a historian, I'm a guy who likes to read horror fiction. However, I do know a couple of things about sussing out crackpot theories, so I figured I would share some of the tells that let me know this book is full of shit.

1: Crackpots make extremely grandiose claims.

Most scientific theories are not what you'd call earth-shattering. Important, yes, but not the kind of thing that would upend your entire understanding of history, the universe, whathaveyou. When exceptions arise in actual science, they're met with surprise from everyone, often including the scientists who made the discovery in question.

Crackpots, on the other hand, are nearly always trying to start a revolution. They might claim to have discovered some heretofore unfamiliar (yet fantastically effective!) form of medicine, an incredible facet of history that will change how we understand civilization, whathaveyou. In the preface to The Secret of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, A.P. Sinnett claims that the idea of Atlantis is the missing key to understanding history; that, indeed, it is impossible to understand how humans spread and diversified if you don't take their information into account.

2: They are overconfident in their "findings".

As I said before, real science usually involves very few revolutions. So when an actual scientist makes a discovery that seems to Change Everything, the very first thing they are going to do is try to disprove it. And then, usually, try to disprove it again. Because if your results seem to upend everything that has been observed up to this point, the problem is most likely on your end.

Crackpots do not want to disprove their theories. They don't even want to test them, and avoid actual peer review like a vampire avoids sunlight. Instead, they release their ideas through avenues that they know won't earn them too many questions, such as ordinary book publishers, non-scientific magazines, or TV and radio. They might claim that they were forced to these outlets by mainstream science trying to "suppress" their theories - which is a sure clue that their ideas don't stand up to scrutiny.

3: Their "mountains of evidence" are piles of straw.

As you might imagine, building evidence to support a theory can be tough work. It usually involves a lot of experiments, studies, peer review, more studies, and of course, cross-referencing your findings with fellow scientists to rule out other explanations for what you've seen. And the bigger your theory, the more work and rigor it's going to take.

Crackpots skip all that, and instead scavenge the work of other scientists for any bit of information they think serves their purpose, no matter how disparate or irrelevant. For example, W. Scott-Elliot has pointed to the discovery of underwater volcanoes and significant volcanic activity in the Atlantic as evidence that a continent existed there and was destroyed by calamity, despite the fact that the presence of volcanoes does not prove a continent any more than the presence of dog shit proves there is grass underneath. Similarly, the (supposed) existence of portraits of Black people in Central America does not prove that those people were Atlantean, as the book claims.

He also points to several alleged parallels between different cultures around the globe. While I cannot speak to the extent that any of these may be true, what I did notice is that they are all divorced from any surrounding context that might explain the similarities or reveal them to be less close than Scott-Elliot is claiming. Of course it sounds impressive when you claim that several Central American cultures have practices that neatly echo Christianity, but even if we assume that much is true, what did these practices actually look like? Did they really serve the same exact purpose as similar Christian practices? We are never given the details that might answer these questions, just the vague claim that they are totally the same, you guys.

Additionally, many of the similarities they cite occur between completely different sets of cultures - raising the question of whether they should even be viewed as related in the first place.

4: They frequently appeal to ignorance and speculation.

Crackpots love to use supposed gaps in current knowledge as evidence that their theory is correct. For example, Scott-Elliot claims that we don't know how people successfully brought bananas from the Old World to Central America, and points to a German botanist (notably not an archaeologist or other expert on the subject of human travel) who concluded that they must have been transported prior to the current Ice Age by "civilized man".

The thing is, the existence of a mystery that your theory might potentially solve isn't proof that your theory is correct, especially when it is so elaborately detailed (the claims of "root races" and so forth) and covers such a broad swath of alleged history that it can easily take credit for any random coincidence in the world. Additionally, the idle speculation of one racist botanist does not prove in any sense that there is no other way bananas could have traveled.

5: One or more of their major tenets has already been disproven.

Even if 99% of the claims in this book were correct as written, there is no possible way that it could prove that a continent called Atlantis really existed between America and Europe. Why?

Firstly, because Plato made Atlantis up. He explicitly said as much in the story where he introduced the concept. It was never real, it was an elaborate metaphor created for the sake of a thought experiment.

And secondly, because geological records have already shown us how the continents got to their current shapes and positions - and it makes much more sense than the placement of an entire continent between Europe and America that was sunk into the ocean by natural disasters, especially when you factor into the shit that the Atlantis theory doesn't explain. Now, in all fairness to Scott-Elliot, the concept of Pangaea wouldn't be formed for nearly 20 years after this was published, but now that we do have that information, we can safely consider the sunken continent hypothesis to be bunk.

So that, in a nutshell, is how to debunk crackpots when you have no idea what the fuck they're talking about. You're generally going to run into at least a couple of these red flags, but it also pays to just keep your critical thinking hat on and ask yourself if the claims you're reading really sound all that reasonable compared to anything you might already know about the subject in question. Research helps too, but in this case, since the text handily disproved itself, I couldn't be assed.

That's all, see you later!

#critical thinking #crackpotism #atlantis #theosophy #occultism #pseudoscience

[erikalentz]

Pokemon Half Moon - True Colors

A deep silence surrounds Emmet. The man finds it strange... His hearing is sharp, so he tends to wake up easily when there's a distinctive sound like a falling object, a voice or a crowd like in the Diamond Clan. In addition, he felt the right side of his body resting on a hard ground, unlike the softness of his and his mentees' tent. When the Subway Master managed to open his eyes after some struggle, he realized why there wasn't any sound around him: he wasn't in the Diamond Clan, but in front of a huge temple. Given the design of the pillars, the cold wind swirling around the area and the symbols of Arceus in front of the shrine’s entrance, it didn't take Emmet long to figure out where he was: the Temple of Sinnoh, the original form of the Spear Pillars in his time.

Once fully awake, the Ice Hero noticed that his hands were tied behind his back with a rope. He stood up almost immediately from the shock... How did this happen? Someone kidnapped him? For what purpose? Aside from these questions, his first thoughts went to his Pokemon and stuff. Luckily, he still felt his saddlebag behind him and his Pokeballs inside, which means that whoever ambushed him didn't steal anything from him. The badge on his cape was missing, though. After he calmed down, he was about to reach for his bag and ask his Garchomp to free his hands when he heard footsteps coming down the stairs of the temple.

"It seems you’re awake at last." A man’s voice says.

Volo appeared in front of Emmet, having dropped his Gingko guild uniform to a white, golden and green outfit reminiscing of an ancient people, as well as a hairstyle similar to Arceus’ head. He smiled politely to the Ice Hero, visibly unfazed by the Subway Master’s defiant look towards him.

"This sleeping medicine created by the Pearl clan is actually pretty effective. I didn’t expect it to work for that long. Well, it allowed you to sleep well until we arrived here."

A sleeping medicine… Emmet understood now how Volo managed to took him to Mt. Coronet without him noticing a thing. He probably used the same trick to his Pokemon so as to freely act as he wanted. The Subway Master stayed quiet and glared at the blond man, his face showing his silent anger against him.

"You may wonder if your mentees are in the same situation as you… Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything to them. We’re all alone in the temple, Silver." Volo paused for a few seconds. "Or maybe you want to be called by your real name instead… Emmet, is that right?"

The Ice Hero remained still and impassive, but he felt a cold shiver ran down his spin. The only time he told his real name to anyone in Hisui was in a night conversation with Adaman… And Volo overheard them from afar.

"Have no fear, I kept this information only to myself." Volo calmly says. "I may not look like it, but I’m quite good at keeping secrets."

A silence settled down for a few minutes, with the two men staring at each other: one with quiet fury and the other with a fake affable smile. Volo then looked up at the sky, his arms crossed and his expression more serious.

"… You know, it’s not that strange that outsiders come from the sea. After all, not everyone in Hisui is a native, so I didn’t find anything unusual about you and your mentees washing up here after a boat sank. Since you're from another land with a different history and customs, it’s only natural that your experiences and knowledge are also different from here, whether as individuals or as Pokemon Wielders."

Volo paused for a few moments, looking back at Emmet.

"That said, the more I saw you, the more some details unconsciously intrigued me. Your appearance, your mannerisms, your way of speaking, your way of fighting with your Pokemon… I found it both familiar and different at the same time, as if I already saw it before. Since my goal was to get Rei to find Arceus' plates, I didn't think much about it at first… But then I remembered that there was someone who shared similar traits as you; Pearl Warden Ingo."

The Subway Master clenched his fists.

"When I took the time to think about it, it answered why you reminded me of something: you’re like a younger Warden Ingo. That man appeared in Whiteout Valley a year and a half ago without remembering anything about his life except his name, and the Pearl clan who lived in that part of Hisui took him in to keep him from freezing there. To this day, no one knows where he really comes from, not even him."

Volo then turned his back to Emmet, to the Ice Hero’s surprise.

"Well, it makes sense… Because I’m the only one who knows that he fell from the sky, just like Rei eight months ago."

Emmet’s eyes widened a bit from what he’d heard.

"I admit I was surprised to see him fall from one of the first rifts Giratina created to test our shared contract. I understood for sure that Warden Ingo came from somewhere else, but I wasn’t sure if it was from a different dimension or a different time. That is… Until I heard that you are his younger brother. Given this information, your physical resemblances, the way you share the same way of speaking and the fact that you and your mentees adapted so quickly to Hisui, its particularities and dangers, without ever being here before, it allowed me to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle. You, Hilbert, Hilda and Ingo are unovans, that’s the truth… But not the Unova of this time. You are from the future. I guess Rei is from your time too since you know him, even though he doesn’t remember it because of his amnesia."

Silence. The wind continued to blow around the Temple of Sinnoh. The Subway Master could feel his blood boiling… Since the blond man discovered the true identities of the Unova Dragons and the Fallers, then there’s no need to keep up any facade anymore. After long minutes, Emmet looked at Volo with a dark stare and talked for the first time since his awakening, his voice terrifyingly composed and cold.

"… I knew it. You’re the culprit who caused this space-time mess in the future."

Volo turned again towards Emmet, a dark smile on his face.

"That’s right. I am the one in control of the space-time rifts."

#submas #subway masters #subway bosses #subway boss emmet #emmet #kudari #ginkgo guild member volo #pokemon volo #volo #pokemon diamond and pearl #pokemon black and white #pokemon legends arceus #half moon au

[alphaman99]

No, it's not "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." It lacks the scope, the erudition, and the majestic prose. But this short 2019 essay from Alyssa Ahlgren, whom I'd never heard of until this morning, is nevertheless worth the read. It traffics in familiarities, to be sure, but the thing about familiarities is that they're easy to lose sight of. You need to be reminded to notice them: If you're living in the US in the 21st century, whatever victimhood descriptors you cling to, you've already won the lottery. (Via Wesley Wynne)

THOUGHTS FROM A HIPSTER COFFEE SHOP

I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.

Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”

Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Now, I’m not attributing Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s words to outright dishonesty. I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Let me lay down some universal truths really quick. The United States of America has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. Not only that but our citizenry continually breaks world records with charitable donations, the rags to riches story is not only possible in America but not uncommon, we have the strongest purchasing power on earth, and we encompass 25% of the world’s GDP. The list goes on. However, these universal truths don’t matter. We are told that income inequality is an existential crisis (even though this is not an indicator of prosperity, some of the poorest countries in the world have low-income inequality), we are told that we are oppressed by capitalism (even though it’s brought about more freedom and wealth to the most people than any other system in world history), we are told that the only way we will acquire the benefits of true prosperity is through socialism and centralization of federal power (even though history has proven time and again this only brings tyranny and suffering).

Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why? The answer is this, my generation has ONLY seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.

With the current political climate giving rise to the misguided idea of a socialist utopia, will we see the light? Or will we have to lose it all to realize that what we have now is true prosperity? Destroying the free market will undo what millions of people have died to achieve.

My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

--Alyssa Ahlgren

[makorays]

Why are the red people winning?

Australia has gone fully labor party (conservative) and now anyone you talk to from Australia is anti LGBTQIA+

The east Is against LGBTQIA+

America is being converted rapidly to anti LGBTQIA+

Online if your struggling with gender or masculinity or non binary or any of those things your more likely to have someone tell you to "suck it up" or "do some pushups get a 6 pack" then actually tell you about new stuff

Femboys are now seen as evil for some reason

When ever I do anything remotely against the masculine code of conduct I get people calling me slurs and telling me to kill myself or yelling haram at me

Even long time people who were supportive now have converted

And I see no future for people like myself in a world like this

I know our generate will likely see the end of the world but THIS? Why does everyone hate progress all of a sudden?

Last month there was an incident in our school where a group of boys attacked a group of gay kids and the teachers took the side of "they shouldn't flaunt their sexuality" but they weren't flaunting anything

You know about politics mako pls explain?

pessimism is a cuck's mindset. what are you, a bottom? you're just gonna sit there and SUBMIT to your perception of the tides of history? the world is probably not going to end in our lifetime, and even if it does, humanity will probably find a way to keep going through the ashes.

i don't think you truly grasp just how fucking AWFUL things used to be for people like us. you think it's bad now because conservatives are rallying super hard all of a sudden, but imagine being gay or trans back when openly admitting to either of those things could get you straight-up arrested. and those people existed just as much back then; they just had to suck it up because they were cursed to be born in a time in which open hostility to them was such a norm that they couldn't even THINK of living as their true selves. trans people throughout all of human history have had to endure incurable body dysphoria because the medicine wasn't there to help them. things are SO much better now. (and for the record, everyone back then thought the world was gonna end too; ask any old-enough american what living in the cold war was like.)

that is not to say things aren't looking scary right now. conservatives had a wake-up call and realized they're losing harder than they've ever lost before, so they're lashing out and trying to do everything they can to push us back into the dark ages. it is important to be vigilant, to vote them out, to do what you can to make sure their mind virus infects as few people as possible. but their ideology is entirely based around losing. they're literally openly and proudly anti-progress, which is self-evidently fucking stupid, and the conservative party has spent its entire existence taking L after L after L as we gain more civil rights.

they're doing some serious damage right now, a lot of peoples' lives are going to be worse for a while. but it's a downward spike in an overall upward trend. do you really think they're gonna win this time after they lost the previous 99 times? even the nazis ended up ultimately losing after they "won".

this is all from an american perspective, of course; a lot of other countries still have a long way to go. 99% of human history has been spent with minority groups not having basic human rights, and america has only just recently begun clawing its way out of that tribalism and into something actually civilized. i think countries like china and russia are gonna remain fucked for quite some time, unfortunately. but they'll probably get there too, one day. once the progress has been made, all you can do to go backwards is flail like an infant and complain about the woke mob being too compassionate towards their fellow man. not super effective at causing lasting damage.

oh also you need to either develop some keen debate skills to convert your friends or find better ones because that shit cannot be good for you

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

Your literacy blogging is fascinating (/alarming) - as someone who first learned English in a country with a non-alphabet based language, we absolutely had to start explicitly with phonics and grammar (even when I was only 6). Both of these are full of rules AND exceptions and are a pain in the ass - we do end up having to hard-memorize many words - but I can't imagine understanding ANYTHING if we didn't do them at all. How was it typically taught in the US prior to this balanced literacy stuff?

so, here's the thing. some people will be like, "before whole language/balanced literacy, we taught Phonics, so people could actually Read," but i do actually think that claim is somewhere between untrue and overstated, because the truest answer to "how has [anything] been typically taught in the US" is: badly. it is important to remember that "school" as we understand it is a very new idea. the first state to pass compulsory education laws was massachusetts, in 1852 - 170 years ago, which is really not that long in the grand scheme of things. and it was not, like, an immediate and overwhelming phenomenon. can't remember where i read this and am too lazy to look it up but a fact that i think is VERY rich for what it says about american history is that on the eve of the civil war, not a single confederate state had a public education system of any kind. age-graded classrooms did not become a thing iirc till the early 20th century - we're talking half a century where the norm is closer to a one-room schoolhouse than a contemporary public school. teaching (and the legacy of this is very clearly still with us today) was not seen as a true profession like law or medicine - it was a job girls did before they got married. through the first couple decades of the twentieth century it was common to fire teachers when they got pregnant - hard to build up a culture of expertise in those norms lol.

also, while i find that diehard progressive educators over-internalize & misapply the theories of jean piaget to turn "constructivism" from a theory of how children learn (what piaget said) to a theory of how we should teach (what they do with this, including to abstract academic subjects wildly unlike the natural physical learning described by piaget's most famous experiments - learning to read is not the same as figuring out over time that the amount of water stays the same even if the shape of the container changes and the fact tat most teachers can't tell the difference says a lot!) - he is probably the second most influential psychologist of all time after freud and his fundamental insight that we can't assume that we know qualitatively how children think by extrapolating from how adults think and just assuming they do the same thing but less well - i do think remains sound, is important to be aware of if you have children or professionally deal with children, and didn't start to emerge until the 1920s.

i could go on - this isn't even getting into things like the changing nature of literacy requirements for like personal needs / full adult participation in society, or the fact that it wasn't until sometime around WWII that a majority of american adults had a high school diploma (not like, an overwhelming majority - like that's when it crossed the 50% threshold - millennials talk about how boomers had much better job prospects with just a high school diploma and that's true, but a huge percentage of the parents of boomers didn't even have that), etc. ed research is also notoriously hard to conduct / isolate takeaways from due to things like ethics issues, logistical challenges in longterm studies (always an expensive and difficult prospect but with ed specifically, like, kids move all the time, and unlike a longterm study of, say, a medication, changing schools potentially means you are no longer in whatever group the researchers want to study), and the enormous amount of confounding variables - both on the kids, but also, like - it's hard to separate if a particular module (or whatever) was effective or if it just was taught by a really good teacher. and it's hard to definitively claim that a curriculum sucks rather than it has been implemented poorly.

that last one gets at the heart i think of some of the reading wars stuff, in a couple different ways. first is that balanced literacy people can always say that their programs work if you do them right and if they don't work, well, you weren't doing them right. i find this infuriating because i have been in classrooms where everyone would agree the teachers (including me lol) were doing a good job, but i personally saw that there were kids who had struggles that our curriculum gave me no way to meaningfully address. and also because of basic logic: NOT to inappropriately throw around the term gaslighting, but i spent SEVERAL YEARS feeling really insane because reading workshop advocates are like, "yes, it's super possible to meaningfully improve kids' reading in giving them each, at most, a 10-minute one-on-one conference twice a week" - and that "at most" is doing a lot of work there because the curricular materials put out by TCRWP always say that your conferences should be 5-7 minutes max. like... i just don't believe that's a thing that can work. but, you know, i have no way to "prove" that the issue was the program, and not that i just sucked at conferencing.

but the other side of that is that i absolutely believe there ARE schools and teachers who saw improvements after they implemented balanced literacy, because whatever the fuck they were doing before sucked so bad. explicit phonics instruction is key but it also is harder than it looks to do well, and i think the trend i keep seeing of people not actually knowing what "phonics" is but clearly thinking they do is proof of that. the guy that was like, "we don't use phonics for [list of words that are all either 100% phonetically decodable or decodable except for one sound]" is someone who probably grew up getting taught "phonics" but obviously never learned, for example, about r-controlled vowels. lucy calkins claims that her programs have phonics but someone on twitter posted a classroom poster in her program's familiar font of a list of strategies for words you don't know and one of them was "use phonics, and if phonics doesn't work, break it up!" breaking it up IS phonics, but i believe that lucy is dumb enough not to know that. the one that really got me and that i think most illustrates what i'm getting at here was a response i saw to the jessica winters new yorker article about balanced literacy where someone was like "yeah, i'm dyslexic and phonics didn't work for me at all. being told 'sound it out' was the worst." like, on the one hand: the idea that dyslexic kids don't benefit from phonics is the opposite of true, and hanford has spoken about how her interest in reading pedagogy grew out of a story/documentary she reported on kid with dyslexia specifically, which led her to connecting with dyslexic parent groups who have been beating the drum on phonics for ages and who also have been pointing out that what dyslexic kids is NOT radically different from what all kids need or at least benefit from to become strong readers - thorough, explicit, systematic phonics instruction. but the thing is - "sound it out" is not phonics instruction. it worked pretty well for me, because i am in the percentage of the population that will pretty much teach themselves to read once you give them the alphabet, some books, and a grown-up around to answer questions - i was a kid who could sound out "t-h" as two letters, be told by my mom it's actually "th," and incorporate that forever, and could intuit my way through less common vowel pronunciations and exceptions. but if you're not in that ~30%, you need more than that. i mean - i remember being taught in first grade "when two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking" - which is only true a narrow majority of the time. we didn't cover specific vowel teams or any shit like that. and it didn't bother me, a kid who was reading baby-sitters club books by the start of first grade. but if you're in the majority that does need that higher level of specificity, explicit instruction, & directed practice - then yeah, phonics doesn't look so hot.

(starting to do some syllable division work with some kids who are having decoding issues has been really interesting for me from this perspective. we probably did some of this when i was a kid but like i said i was an early reader so my memories of literacy instruction are mostly nonexistent, lol - but i do think that if you're on the more natural-reader end of the spectrum, it seems like "sounding it out" would naturally lead you to breaking words into small chunks as you go left to right. but i think that's actually NOT intuitive to many beginning readers - the visual information is too overwhelming, and it's harder than it looks for students who need more structure to develop reading proficiency. like i think actually maybe early readers ARE inclined to view words as they would view like, chinese characters or pictograms, and training their brains to see them as sequences of letters is part of the challenge. but i'm just speculating.)

and if you're a teacher who's seen kids try and struggle and fail with "sounding it out," partly because you have never been taught the full extent of the information about how english as a written language actually works that you would need in order to scaffold them through a phonetic progression - then yeah you're gonna be like, "phonics doesn't work and makes kids miserable." and a kid getting more words right when you teach them to use context clues for decoding (instead of solely for meaning, where they're appropriate) is logically going to look to you like a kid who is doing better reading, especially since you aren't going to see them in older grades when suddenly the fact that they're guessing a lot of the time will become an issue as texts get more complex and less guessable.

i mean, i have a lot of personal grudges on this topic and it makes me upset for that reason, lol. and i think it's borderline criminal that when i went to ed school in the mid 2010s i was taught some of the things i was taught there, and i think that this all also reflects the fact that teachers are absolutely NOT trained to engage meaningfully with research of any kind. but like if i force myself to be reasonable, this all did not in fact come out of nowhere. it's not like america was doing an amazing job in literacy education and then balanced literacy ruined it. we sucked before and we suck now. the difference is that i do think sucking is built into the inherent character of balanced literacy/whole language in a way it wasn't before. but like, hanford even says in one of her documentaries that when whole language came onto the scene, we had no idea, really, what the fuck was happening when people read or learned to read. this stuff often does sound on its face insane to outsiders, but, like, people do learn to read in non-phonetic writing systems - it's not ultimately the most insane hypothesis that reading works basically the same regardless of what kind of writing you're reading, that english speakers approach words the same way that speakers of mandarin approach characters [NB: i don't know anything at all about mandarin so if there's like actually some phonetically related logic to it never mind.] and, also, like, this stuff will be good enough for a lot of kids to get them through first grade, or second grade, or elementary school - and since it's elementary educators who are having these conversations, they see a kid hitting benchmarks and they don't stop to think if the methods the kid is using to read that book have an expiration date. i was having questions about common classroom practices like independent reading before this (but not until after a couple years in the classroom), but going from first grade to third grade and spotting a set of kids who had obvious reading problems but had never presented as being below grade level was a major turning point for me - although, like, i say "turning point," but what i mean is i was worried about these kids and also confused, and it took several months of that for me to get to a place where i also was really confronting how helpless i felt to do anything for them despite my master's degree (dual track in special ed!!!). and during this whole time absolutely no one i was working with would have said i was doing anything but a good job in this regard. which is, like, a problem. but i guess at this point i'm just saying like, i do think this situation is explicable through a number of extremely common fallacies/thinking traps/etc., that everyone is prone to. it sucks that they are converging on such a high stakes subject and also the teacher martyrdom complex around this is unbelievably offensive to me. but it's not, like, unprecedented behavior. unfortunately. lol.

it's funny that you mention grammar tho because absolutely fucking no one in any camp is riding for grammar these days, except maybe the catholics. lmao.

#fwiw the evidence on grammar instruction improving reading/writing skills is not really there #which i find counterintuitive and it makes me wonder about study design etc. #plus also like: maybe they're just doing it badly #but last i heard that is in fact where things stand #i don't like actively follow research tho so i could be wrong #askbox

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why do you continually insist that a particular random street preacher didn't exist when you have no interest in archeology or knowledge of how historical documentation works before the age of the printing press?

Two reasons:

Firstly, you can't tell me anything about him that isn't in the bible, a book with a man made from dirt, a woman made from a rib, a magical fruit, a talking donkey, a talking snake, a magical zoo boat, demons, witches and other literal magic, and justifies them with absolutely nothing. Jesus is said to have been seen by over 500 people after his death... but can't name them, say what they saw, how they knew what it was, and all of them were believers anyway.

This is literally the entirety of what it says:

1 Corinthians 15:6

After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.

This is not how history works.

The bible is not a historical document, which is even stated so at times by the authors. Paul, for example, openly states that he lies - he becomes like one of whomever he wants to convince. The author of John, in a section literally called “The Purpose of John’s Gospel,” claims to have written it so "that you may believe," not to state reliably what happened.

Philippians 1:18

But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.

Secondly, I can concede some Jewish preacher roaming about the region roaming about the land preaching about one thing or another without any discomfort. Hell, spend the day walking around the streets of any decently sized city and you'll find dozens of street preachers doing exactly that. Exactly the same thing.

But that's not what you're supposed to be doing, is it? The bible is specific about what it says happens. What you're doing is intellectually dishonest. It's called "playing tennis without a net."

This one relates to the existence of a god, but it's the same principle. You're aiming to get the ball over a net on the far left. Instead of "Timeless first mover" it's labelled "particular random street preacher." You're welcome to get your ball over that net, but you're supposed to be getting it over the one at the far right end.

You need to show that your Jesus/Yeshua existed as described in the bible, in the real world. That he defied physics, history, medicine and death, as described in the bible.

Neil Patrick Harris appears in "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," drugged out of his brain and looking for "poontang" (his word). H&K Neil Patrick Harris is a fictional version of the real Neil Patrick Harris. H&K NPH doesn't exist, and never did those things. Pointing to a real world Yeshua-equivalent - and none of you can actually find him, let's be clear about that - does nothing, literally nothing, to substantiate the specific claims in the bible. We know NPH exists, so the logic you're using actually means that H&K is more historical than the bible.

It's up to you to prove your thing. The whole thing, as described. And I know you can't. Because it's full of holes, contradictory and claims things that never happened. The crucifixion, for example, is historically inaccurate, and the crucified were left up to rot as a warning.

“When we crucify criminals the most frequented roads are chosen, where the greatest number of people can look and be seized by this fear. For every punishment has less to do with the offence than with the example.”

– Quintilian, Declamations, 274.13, English translation in Quintilian: The Lesser Declamations, 2 vols; ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey; Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1:259.

The Romans would never have been concerned with Jewish sensibilities, and Jesus’ carcass would have rotted on the crucifix just like those of everyone who was ever crucified. The entire entombment is ahistorical.

The Cleansing of the Temple violated an important rite of Jewish worship - it allowed pilgrims traveling from afar to buy an animal locally for sacrifice from their own currency, rather than having to drag one all the way from where they came - and was profoundly antisemitic, and would have been as scandalous among the Jews of the time as Harvey Weinstein or Jan 6. And yet it's written nowhere else. No one else noticed this gross, public - and let’s not forget, theatrical - violation of Jewish practices; essentially a hate crime.

Nobody ever heard of or wrote about the bible character while he was alive. And that's the problem you have to solve, not "particular random street preacher."

It's funny how much we do know about everything else prior to the printing press, though, as well as how we came to know it and what evidence we have for it.

#ask #jesus christ #christianity #religion #historical jesus #historicity of jesus #playing tennis without a net #tennis without a net #religion is a mental illness

[agentnico]

Amsterdam (2022) Review

Kind of weird seeing Chris Rock in something after, well, you know. At least he’s not on a stage. Poor fella. 

Plot: In the 1930s, three friends witness a murder, are framed for it, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history. The events are inspired by a 1933 political conspiracy in which wealthy American businessmen and bankers plotted a military coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist veterans' organization headed by U.S. Marine Corps Major General.

More like AmsterDAMN look at this cast! Like literally everyone is in this movie. Here’s the roll call *deep breath* Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Robert de Niro and Taylor Swift (though the latter is in the film, dare I say, very swiftly). It’s a ridiculously stacked cast, and might as well point out the main positive of this movie - its the cast. Christian Bale is wonderfully quirky and provides one of the more likeable and innocent personas in his filmography. Rami Malek is as eloquent as always, Chris Rock throws around one-liners that really slapped (still too soon?), Mike Myers basically brings back his Inglorious Basterds character, Robert de Niro is smoothly cool... Everyone is great in this, no matter how major or small their roles are. And the movie itself is very muddled and messy, so the one thing that really engages the viewer here are all these actors evidently having a great time. Well I say that, however recently the allegations have resurfaced about director David O. Russell bullying his actors on set of his films, so maybe they aren’t having that great of a time, but their performances are solid sauce.

As for the movie itself, yep, its a mess. There’s like 20 different plot-lines and all the possible genres all mixed in one. It’s a whole lotta movie! From one point it tries to be a political commentary on the idea of history repeating itself, as here we had WW1 end, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And evidently that wasn’t the case, as history is repeated by those who forget it. Some deep stuff, however on the other side the movie is this slapstick over-the-top comedy with caricatured characters, then it’s also about friendship of the central trio, and then there’s the title of Amsterdam, which a reference to the one good place where the trio found true happiness. And how everyone in their hearts has a place like Amsterdam. And again brings us the the idea of history repeating itself, there are good parts and bad, war and peace and all that jazz. Oh, and then there is also a murder mystery too. And also the progression of medicine and painkillers. The movie just keeps jumping from tragedy to comedy to history to politics to satire to Chris Rock popping in for a one-liner to a little action....again, it’s a whole lotta movie. Does it all work? Nope, as the movie ends up being overly convoluted, especially in the way it mixes flashbacks with present day events, yet also the movie evidently thinks it’s cleverer than it actually is. Let’s take the murder mystery aspect. The reveal is pretty obvious, yet the movie evidently doesn’t think the audience is clever, as the end of the movie we spend a good 10 minutes just being walked through every single step as if we’re children, with every smallest detail explained, and I’m just there like “listen movie, I got it 30 minutes ago”. And overall as I said, the movie is over bloated with stuff, and as such it does drag with pacing issues and a lot of unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. 

That being said, I actually enjoyed Amsterdam for what it was. As I said the cast are all very game, and in fact the chances of you enjoying this movie is sorely reliable on if you like these actors or not. I for one do, so I enjoyed watching them get up to their debauchery and shenanigans. There’s also an easy vibe to the whole thing. For all the high political concepts its actually a pretty light watch, and weren’t it for the long run-time this movie would have zoomed by as swiftly as Taylor Swift’s appearance. Yep, don’t could on much from her here, she does get the brunt of the deal. But overall the movie is very forgettable. Enjoyable for what it is, some good moments are funny ones too, but not something I’ll remember in a week’s time.

Overall score: 5/10

#amsterdam #david o russell #amsterdam review #amsterdam movie #2022 #2022 in film #2022 films #film #movie #movie reviews #film reviews #history #drama #comedy #christian bale #margot robbie #john david washington #taylor swift #robert de niro #rami malek #anya taylor-joy #michael shannon #mike myers #zoe saldana #chris rock #timothy olyphant #andrea riseborough #matthias schoenaerts #cinema #amsterdam 2022

[typhoidmeri]

I posted 2,948 times in 2022

That's 458 more posts than 2021!

91 posts created (3%)

2,857 posts reblogged (97%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@hxans

@callmebliss

@danimydear

@absentlyabbie

@blackestglass

I tagged 2,932 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

#things that amuse me - 240 posts

#cats - 113 posts

#star trek strange new worlds - 84 posts

#art - 78 posts

#chris evans - 76 posts

#steve rogers - 74 posts

#star trek - 65 posts

#darcy lewis - 59 posts

#history - 58 posts

#leverage - 51 posts

Longest Tag: 129 characters

#’oh no no. you need to trap the ones from the place they call ‘uhmerika’. the poor little humans there live in terrible condition

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Tumblr censoring their own ad could not be more perfect.

54 notes - Posted July 19, 2022

#4

Last night I dreamt that I was in an episode of House MD, which fair enough I had been mainlining the show the last few weeks. Except it had a supernatural bent, House was a satyr though still disabled and walking with a cane. Foreman and Wilson were both human, Chase had some sort of fair folk blood (pointed ears and glamour). I was a witch, with a talent for curse breaking and research.

The patient was a little werewolf child, or a child with dormant werewolf genes. Everything was about the puzzle of what was going on within the patient but there was the additional difficulty of magic and creature genetics. As well as curses or occasional benevolent spells gone amuck.

Sometimes curses could be broken but through the generations a curse or fragment of a curse could pop up again later. Which can be fine until the curse ends up interacting with a spell, medicine, or injury.

The most important part, for me, was looking into the patient to see what potential magic was laying in them besides whatever their species was. I think Chase could do surgery without actually cutting a patient? I can’t recall what the name for that trick is.

54 notes - Posted October 7, 2022

#3

Watching the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and it has more heart than most of the Star Trek shows combined. You know how it’s said that Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie? While that is very true, Strange New Worlds feels like it’s be made from the bones of OST and the blood of every person that dreams in fandom from the very start of fandom. It feels like the essence of what Star Trek was meant to be, when the writers and producers forgot.

58 notes - Posted June 27, 2022

#2

It’s dangerous to go alone, take this bisexuali-bee with you.

I was commissioned to crochet a bi bee and a rainbow bee, but im low on yarns. Tomorrow I’m going to order some red, green, and light grey yarn (maybe some brown too) , as I’ve used all the yarn that have in those colours.

On the hook now is the start of a trans flag bee as I have some pale pink and blue bits of yarn and a desperate need to crochet while watching films of somewhat dubious quality.

59 notes - Posted June 5, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

See the full post

97 notes - Posted January 19, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

[mousieta]

Review: The Red Sleeve

Year: 2022

Country: Korea

Platform: Netflix

The Red Sleeve is exactly what I look for in a Sageuk. I did a partial review of it at the end of last year but wanted to revisit it again now that I have completed the whole thing. In drama-land nothing is certain. The trajectory of a show always has the capacity to take a hard turn and what was once spectacular leaves you with a bad taste in y our mouth. So, it is with pleasure that I can say The Red Sleeve does not suffer from this affliction. Junho and Lee Se Young are both two solid, enjoyable actors who keenly understand their characters.

As a Sageuk tied strongly to the actual history of King Jeongjo the show also benefits from being an adaptation of a novel. This breaths a strong characterization into both leads who are skilled enough to not just understand the assignment but put in extra credit.

We get to see why these characters love one another (always a big point for me as I want to believe two characters love one another because of who they are rather than the actor’s billing). They are charming and sweet in just the right amount to then build up their steadfast dedication to one another.

Because the audience is expected to know the history – and if one doesn’t it is readily searchable – this story is much more about the journey towards its resolution than actually getting there. And drawing on what is historically understood to be an actual love match, the show takes pain to believeably build that love in both its writing and the chemistry of its leads.

While dramas often vere into melodrama – ratcheting up the angst for its own sake – the real life couple had more than their fair share of tragedies.

I could roll my eyes at it except it never felt overwrought as much as just the reality of existence before the advent of modern medicine.

That said, the show manages to find a poignant, romantic ending in the midst of its tragedy – which on the one hand is fitting as inevitably all couples will face the specter – separation – of death. The show gives us that in a way that feels loving and true.

#the red sleeve #mousie watches kdrama #reviews 2022