#Article 311

[rightnewshindi]

पंजाब की ‘इंस्टा क्वीन’ कॉन्स्टेबल अमनदीप कौर हेरोइन के साथ गिरफ्तार, नौकरी से बर्खास्त

Insta Queen Amandeep Kaur Arrested: पंजाब पुलिस की एक महिला कॉन्स्टेबल, जिसे सोशल मीडिया पर ‘मेरी जान’ और ‘इंस्टा क्वीन’ के नाम से जाना जाता था, अब सुर्खियों में है, लेकिन गलत कारणों से। बठिंडा में एंटी-नारकोटिक्स टास्क फोर्स (ANTF) और पुलिस की संयुक्त टीम ने उसे 17.71 ग्राम हेरोइन के साथ रंगे हाथों पकड़ा। यह घटना पंजाब सरकार की नशे के खिलाफ चल रही मुहिम ‘युद्ध नशियां विरुद्ध’ के बीच हुई, जिसने…

[ankewehner]

The rail network in Germany is in so bad shape that they had to get a centenarian out of retirement. That is, a steam engine built in 1921 and retired in 1977.

But let's start at the beginning.

The rail network runs on electricity.

Sometimes when there's big time repairs being done, there can't be electricity around that spot.

To transport materials to a railway construction site without electricity, you need an engine that doesn't run on electricity, but carries its own fuel.

So you get one of the remaining diesel engines.

Unfortunately those are getting rare, and there are a lot of construction sites, so at one point a company doing construction took to contacting an organisation that keeps historic trains going for train lovers as sort of museums, and asked if they could borrow their diesel engine.

The diesel engine was not available, but the museum guys joked that they could offer a steam engine. And the construction company was so desperate they accepted.

That job went well, and people in the business were like "hey, the old girl still got it!" so the steam engine got rented for more jobs like that.

At least one time a fire brigade had to help out with upping the water supply, I guess becaue not every station is equipped to do that any more, but over all, well. She occasionally pulls freight trains instead of passenger trains full of fans of historic trains.

Sounce links - mind the article is German:

original source: https://bnn.de/karlsruhe/ettlingen/kurios-dampflok-58-311-aus-ettlingen-zieht-wieder-regulaere-gueterzuege

archive link: https://archive.ph/pQFrj#selection-739.22-739.28

[a-mythologynerd]

Alex Stern, Darlington, and Dante in Hell

DISCLAIMER: Okay so I'm realizing this post might have several parts as I'm only like half way through the Cantos and there are definitely more connections (i.e. Alex waking up on the second trip to Hell in the river of boiling blood and the 7th circle of Hell.) Also, people literally write whole ass academic articles about intertextuality and I do not have that much free time so if anyone is scholar of Dante please feel free to chime in. So. Also this is so long. I am both sorry and begging you to make the hours typing and looking into this worth it.

Okay, so as most folks know and probably connected, Dante's Inferno starts with:

"At one point midway on our path in life, I came around and found myself now searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost" -Inferno, Canto 1, lines 1-3

and when Team Murder awakes they find themselves in a similar orchard:

"She looked up and realized she was staring through the branches of a tree, many trees. She was in some kind of forest... no, an orchard, the branches black and glittering and heavily laden with fruit, its skin darkest purple." -Hell Bent, pg. 271

Now this is also connected to the Tree of Knowledge by Dawes (pg. 272) and of course we get some Hymn of Demeter like pomegranates from the orchard of Hades that Persephone eats.

But Leigh Bardugo in her many connections of cthonic stories (love Darlington's line about who is Dante, Virgil, Beatrice, Orpheus, and Eurydice) is of course pulling directly from the Inferno in more ways than the opening. In Dante's Inferno, of which I am no expert, as Dante is being guided through the underworld by Virgil he passes through several circles of hell each focused on the punishment of a certain sin and sinner.

Now Darlington is trapped in Hell after being eaten by the Hell Beast, specifically because he mercy killed his grandfather and is therefore a murderer. But here's the thing. He's not punished for murder. He's sent to Golgarot who is a demon prince of greed.

"Turner tapped the book he was reading. 'You thought Darlington got eaten, right? By Mammon?' 'Maybe,' Dawes said cautiously. 'There are a lot of demons associated with greed. Devils. Gods.' Greed is a sin in every language. That was what Darlington had said. Sandow's hunger for money. Darlington's desire for knowledge." -Hell Bent pg. 311

Darlington is ambitious. This goes as far as his Hell vision from Golgarot. He doesn't dream of tenure or just a filled house or feeling like the hero. My guy dreams of being able to know everything ever in a never ending symposium where he also has traveled the world and absorbed the wisdom of mystics and scholars by simply touching them. That's not just ambition that drives someone to train and hone himself for adventures to come, that's greed. And his mortal soul's punishment is tragic and narratively fitting surrounded by the ruins of a legacy he has barely been keeping afloat with odd jobs and his bare hands:

"He had a rock in his hands, and as they watched, he lugged it over to what might have been the beginning or end of a wall and laid it carefully atop the other stones...He didn't stop moving, didn't alter his gaze...Darlington didn't break his stride, but Alex could see his chest rising and falling as if he was fighting for air. 'Please,' he gritted out. 'Can't...stop.'" -Hell Bent pg. 277

Except it's more than just narratively fitting. It's quite similar punishment for greed and avarice Dante describes in the 4th circle of hell where the guilty push stones or weights (depending on the translation) over and over again and do not speak to Dante and Virgil, other souls guilty of anger and melancholy babble nonsense. The Canto begins with Plutus, the Greek and Roman god of riches, wealth, and abundance, speaking nonsense words to Virgil and Dante. Virgil, a great speaker himself, responds in telling him to be silent and calls him a wolf. The Commentary in my translation by Robin Kirkpatrick discusses how Dante equates greed and the pursuit of specifically money as a pervision of intelligence. The lack of speech and inability to speak in contrast to Virgil is as Kirkpatrick puts it,

"Dante combines an irrepressible linguistic inventiveness with a profound sense that corruptions of mind and sensibility are directly reflected in corrupted applications of language, or in the lessening of a capacity for coherent thought and word...Intelligence here is reduced to the rolling of boulders, a subjection of mind and energy to mere materiality."- Commentary and Notes, pg. 341-342

And um. Yeah.

"Darlington had been frightening to the shades of the Veil and even to himself. It had been...If he was honest, it had been exhilarating. He had been a creature of the mind since he was a boy– languages, history, science. The rest of it, the training he'd put himself through–fighting, swordplay, even acrobatics– had all been in service to the future adventures he'd been sure he would have. But the great invitation had never come...And now? Was he human enough? He had been able to sit at the table and hold a conversation. He hadn't growled at anyone or broken any furniture, but it hadn't been easy. Demons were not thinking creatures. They operated on instinct, driven by their appetites. He had prided himself on being nothing like that. Never rash. Guided by reason. But now he wanted in a way he never had. He had been tempted to bury his face in his soup bowl and lap at it like a greedy animal. He wanted to place himself between Alex's legs now and do the same to her." -Hell Bent, pg. 414

and

"He had been prepared to speak, a quote from... His demon mind couldn't manage it. He remembered Alex with her book of poems. Hart Crane. He grasped at the words." -Hell Bent, pg. 465

But the connection doesn't stop there. Dante sees several beasts when he first enters the woods. They are warped versions of a leopard, a lion, and a wolf. One is a leopard who is often interpreted as a representation of lust, the other is lion for pride, and finally and most relevant to us, a wolf for greed. The wolf that Virgil calls Plutus. The wolves that guard Golgarot's realm that are not quite wolves. That chase our Team Murder and become their demons.

So. Long story short. Darlington and his demon form are not just a metaphor for beast like animal instincts of the inhuman. It's another reflection of greed and what in pursuing it and worshiping it, leaves one without human reason, speech, the mind. All things that define Darlington and he sees as integral to his personhood. Except his greed in pursuing those very things of knowledge and magic and wisdom and the unknown leave him with less than he started with. And its tragic and amazing and I need to read more analyses of Inferno and the rest of the Comedy and the third book needs to come out so we can see how else Leigh Bardugo combined the circles of hell and New Haven.

[xiao-qian]

“And she looks so pretty, drivin in your benz” Oneshot

A/N: I got inspired by that one line in “vigilante sh-t” by Taylor swift. I’m so sorry if this is trash; I don’t write fanfic, I just write because I need fanfic and can’t find any new ones

TW: light swearing; mainly from quoting the song

[this is set in an AU where Y/N is dating Tim but the press don’t know]

Word Count: 311

Spotify playlist

“And she looks so pretty, drivin in your benz, lately shes been dressin for revenge” the cold Gotham air blew against your face as you stuck your face out the open window. Late night drives with Tim were among your favourite things. 

After the drive, Tim dropped you off at your house. 

“Drive safe!” 

“Always do.” 

As you scrolled your phone, you got a notification from your Gotham Gazette App “Timothy Drake and Y/N L/N spotted driving late at night.” In the article was a picture of you and Tim in his car, with his license plate number blurred out. 

You hit the share button on the article. “Lmao” you captioned as you sent it to Tim. 

Tim Tam✨: those damn reporters

Y/N: real.

Tim Tam✨: what are we gonna do about it

Y/N: wait it out ig; the people don’t actually care if we’re dating

Tim Tam✨: you know the press, they like to drag headlines out over 2 weeks

Y/N: true. Anyway, wanna make fun of them on Twitter?

Tim Tam: you know it

First, you uploaded a picture to Instagram. It was blurry but you could make out that it was “vigilante sh-t” my Taylor swift playing on the radio with the caption “late night drives💜”. Then, you went to twitter where you reposted the article with the caption “lmao Gotham gazette, a girl can’t even take a drive with her friend anymore💀”

Tim reposted the article too, with the caption “@gothamgazette needs better journalists. Also, who tf spies on people at 2am in the morning?💀”

Most of the comments were shipping y’all but that wasn’t even the funniest part. It was that Gotham gazette didn’t understand your sarcasm.

“Breaking: Y/N and Tim Drake: are they dating? A deep dive” was the actual title of an article written by none other than vicki vale on 12pm that day.

[eesirachs]

For a school assignment, I'm assembling an anthology around the theme of queer divinity and desire, but I'm having a hard time finding a fitting essay/article (no access to real academic catalogues :/ ), do you know of any essays around this theme?

below are essays, and then books, on queer theory (in which 'queer' has a different connotation than in regular speech) in the hebrew bible/ancient near east. if there is a particular prophet you want more of, or a particular topic (ištar, or penetration, or appetites), or if you want a pdf of anything, please let me know.

essays: Boer, Roland. “Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or How to Organize a Prophetic Sausage-Fest.” TS 16, no. 1 (2010b): 95–108. Boer, Roland. “Yahweh as Top: A Lost Targum.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 75–105. JSOTSup 334. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001. Boyarin, Daniel. “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 333–55. Clines, David J. A. “He-Prophets: Masculinity as a Problem for the Hebrew Prophets and Their Interpreters.” In Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll, edited by Robert P. Carroll, Alastair G. Hunter, and Philip R. Davies, 311–27. JSOTSup 348. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Graybill, Rhiannon. “Yahweh as Maternal Vampire in Second Isaiah: Reading from Violence to Fluid Possibility with Luce Irigaray.” Journal of feminist studies in religion 33, no. 1 (2017): 9–25. Haddox, Susan E. “Engaging Images in the Prophets: Feminist Scholarship on the Book of the Twelve.” In Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. 1. Biblical Books, edited by Susanne Scholz, 170–91. RRBS 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013. Koch, Timothy R. “Cruising as Methodology: Homoeroticism and the Scriptures.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 169–80. JSOTSup 334. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001. Tigay, Jeffrey. “‘ Heavy of Mouth’ and ‘Heavy of Tongue’: On Moses’ Speech Difficulty.” BASOR, no. 231 (October 1978): 57–67.

books: Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Bauer-Levesque, Angela. Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist-Literary Reading. SiBL 5. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Black, Fiona C., and Jennifer L. Koosed, eds. Reading with Feeling : Affect Theory and the Bible. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2019. Brenner, Athalya. The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and “Sexuality” in the Hebrew Bible. BIS 26. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Camp, Claudia V. Wise, Strange, and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible. JSOTSup 320. Gender, Culture, Theory 9. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Chapman, Cynthia R. The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter. HSM 62. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004. Creangă, Ovidiu, ed. Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond. BMW 33. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010. Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Huber, Lynn R., and Rhiannon Graybill, eds. The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality : Critical Readings. London, UK ; T&T Clark, 2021. Guest, Deryn. When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics. London: SCM, 2005. Graybill, Rhiannon, Meredith Minister, and Beatrice J. W. Lawrence, eds. Rape Culture and Religious Studies : Critical and Pedagogical Engagements. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019. Graybill, Rhiannon. Are We Not Men? : Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA, 2016. Halperin, David J. Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Jennings, Theodore W. Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel. New York: Continuum, 2005. Macwilliam, Stuart. Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible. BibleWorld. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011. Maier, Christl. Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008. Mills, Mary E. Alterity, Pain, and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. LHB/OTS 479. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Stökl, Jonathan, and Corrine L. Carvalho. Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East. AIL 15. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2013. Stone, Ken. Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective. Queering Theology Series. London: T & T Clark International, 2004. Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. OBT. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[rexinasuperomnes]

Got a new theory about Solas and his identity, contains spoiler-ish stuff from the game informer article

So, I just reblogged a post by @arlathvhenan about solas being the Irish word for “light.” In Tevinter Nights, the story “Genitivi Dies at the End” by Lukas Kristjanson, Rasaan says, “The name given when [Solas] lied to us - and to your Inquisition - was chosen by a self-styled martyr. ‘Solas’ is also not true” (311).

So what if Solas’s true name means light?

Solas himself says, “I was Solas first. Fen’Harel came later.” But what if Solas isn’t his original name?

The Game Informer article revealed that the Lighthouse is actually his home, near the Crossroads. The house of Light.

What if his true, original name is the elven word for light, which could also be translated as the sun?

In the codex entries about Elgar’nan and Mythal that we find in Origins, we learn a creation myth featuring those two, the Sun, and the Earth. Link Link

To summarize those, the Sun grew jealous of the Earth’s love and attention toward Elgar’nan, and destroyed everything the Earth had created for him. Elgar’nan threw down the Sun in a rage into the depths of the Earth. The heat of the Sun cracked the Earth, and her tears filled those cracks to become the ocean. (“Elgar’nan’s pride was great”) Mythal was created by her tears and was able to reason with Elgar’nan to release the Sun from his prison. Elgar’nan, “humbled,” agreed, and Mythal created a sphere to house the Sun so his power would never burn the Earth again.

In those codices, there’s also some fun wordplay with pride and humility, as well as direct mention of the Sun feeling remorse, with regret supposedly being a major theme in Veilguard.

Many people have theorized that Solas was a servant of Mythal in some fashion, based on his armor, the placement of wolf statues around her temple, comparison to Ghilan’nain and Andruil, and the fact that he had vallaslin at one point. What if his service to Mythal, or fealty or loyalty or whatever it was, started when she bound the Sun? What if the Lighthouse is what remains of the space Mythal created for him?

I would like to offer visual evidence as well. These images are from the 2022 trailer that gave us the name “Dreadwolf”

Look at how prominently the sun features in these images, framing him. In the image on the left, the sun is embedded in the Dread Wolf.

I know that the legends and stories we have learned are echoes, changed drastically over thousands of years, but the names have been correct so far. I’m so excited to learn more with Veilguard coming out.

[whencyclopedia]

The Tale of Sinuhe

The Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt (2000 BCE – 1700 BCE) saw the start of more formal writing which included religious scripts, administrative notes, and more in-depth fictional writing. One of the most iconic pieces of writing to come out of the Middle Kingdom was The Tale of Sinuhe. Sinuhe was a courier and assistant to the King of Egypt, Amenhotep I. He fled Egypt and joined a Bedouin tribe to the east and started a new life near Syria. Once he reached old age he returned and finished out his life in Egypt. The importance of this story goes beyond the structure and writing techniques of the text as it provides insight into the cultural differences between Egypt and the Near East. Philologists are still analysing the text and acquiring new insight into the text today. This 4,000-year-old tale provides insight into the world and mind of an Egyptian and is just another example of Egyptian brilliance.

Berlin 3022 & 10499 Papyri

The best-known copies of Sinuhe were from the 12th and 13th dynasties (1900-1700 BCE), and these manuscripts are labelled Berlin 3022 and 10499. The Berlin 10499 (Also known as Ramesseum papyrus 10499) has The Tale of Sinuhe and another story called The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant on the reverse side of the papyrus. Berlin 3022 is the most well-preserved and the best account for translation. The Berlin 3022 is missing the beginning of the tale with 311 total lines, and Berlin 10499 has the beginning, but only has 203 lines. Egyptologists today discuss the strategy of the scribe who created these papyri. They have created a modern replica of the papyrus roll which is five meters long and cut into fourteen sections. When we closely analyse the script we can observe the scribes attempt to clean off the papyri from previous writing and debris. The total word count in most English translations is 4,500 words.

The text on the papyrus is known as Hieratic. This form of writing is like cursive for Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs. This is not to say that Middle Egyptian Hieroglyph versions do not exist. Hieratic was a simpler and faster method for writing larger works of literature, administrative, and religious texts. Schools for scribes used this story as a model for practice, which created many incomplete copies of the story. The Berlin examples are of papyri, but the copies created by students who were training to be scribes used ostraca or limestone flakes. The story is one of the first forms of autobiographical storytelling and, although the author of the story is unknown, he is considered to be the Shakespeare of Middle Egypt. Egyptologists find this tale to be one of the finest pieces of literature to survive from Ancient Egypt. We see many examples in museums like the Berlin Museum, British Museum, and the Ashmolean Museum.

Continue reading...

[adarkrainbow]

Queering kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers" (A)

As I promised before, I will share with you some of the articles contained in the queer-reading study-book "Queering the Grimms". Due to the length of the articles and Tumblr's limitations, I will have to fragment them. Let's begin with an article from the Faux Feminities segment, called Queering Kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers", written by Jeana Jorgensen. (Illustrations provided by me)

The fairy tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children’s and Household Tales, compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are among the world’s most popular, yet they have also provoked discussion and debate regarding their authenticity, violent imagery, and restrictive gender roles. In this chapter I interpret the three versions published by the Grimm brothers of ATU 451, “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” focusing on constructions of family, femininity, and identity. I utilize the folkloristic methodology of allomotific analysis, integrating feminist and queer theories of kinship and gender roles. I follow Pauline Greenhill by taking a queer view of fairy tale texts from the Grimms’ collection, for her use of queer implies both “its older meaning as a type of destabilizing redirection, and its more recent sense as a reference to sexualities beyond the heterosexual.” This is appropriate for her reading of “Fitcher’s Bird” (ATU 311, “Rescue by the Sister”) as a story that “subverts patriarchy, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity alike” (2008, 147). I will similarly demonstrate that “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” only superficially conforms to the Grimms’ patriarchal, nationalizing agenda, for the tale rather subversively critiques the nuclear family and heterosexual marriage by revealing ambiguity and ambivalence. The tale also queers biology, illuminating transbiological connections between species and a critique of reproductive futurism. Thus, through the use of fantasy, this tale and fairy tales in general can question the status quo, addressing concepts such as self, other, and home.

The first volume of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ collection ap[1]peared in 1812, to be followed by six revisions during the brothers’ lifetimes (leading to a total of seven editions of the so-called large edition of their collection, while the so-called small edition was published in ten editions). The Grimm brothers published three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” in the 1812 edition of their collection, but the tales in that volume underwent some changes over time, as did most of the tales. This was partially in an effort to increase sales, and Wilhelm’s editorial changes in particular “tended to make the tales more proper and prudent for bourgeois audiences” (Zipes 2002b, xxxi). “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is one of the few tale types that the Grimms published multiply, each time giving titular focus to the brothers, as the versions are titled “The Twelve Brothers” (KHM 9), “The Seven Ravens” (KHM 25), and “The Six Swans” (KHM 49). However, both Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther, in their respective 1961 and 2004 revisions of the international tale type index, call the tale type “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” Indeed, Thompson discusses this tale in The Folktale under the category of faithfulness, par[1]ticularly faithful sisters, noting, “In spite of the minor variations . . . the tale-type is well-defined in all its major incidents” (1946, 110). Thompson also describes how the tale is found “in folktale collections from all parts of Europe” and forms the basis of three of the tales in the Grimm brothers’ collection (111).

In his Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Bengt Holbek classifies ATU 451 as a “feminine” tale, since its two main characters who wed at the end of the tale are a low-born young female and a high-born young male (the sister, though originally of noble birth in many versions, is cast out and essentially impoverished by the tale’s circumstances). Holbek notes that the role of a low-born young male in feminine tales is often filled by brothers: “The relationship between sister and brothers is characterized by love and help[1]fulness, even if fear and rivalry may also be an aspect in some tales (in AT 451, the girl is afraid of the twelve ravens; she sews shirts to disenchant them, however, and they save her from being burnt at the stake at the last moment)” (1987, 417). While Holbek conflates tale versions in this description, he is essentially correct about ATU 451; the siblings are devoted to one another, despite fearsome consequences.

The discrepancy between those titles that focus on the brothers and those that focus on the sister deserves further attention. Perhaps the Grimm brothers (and their informants?) were drawn to the more spectacular imagery of enchanted brothers. In Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known version of ATU 451, “The Wild Swans,” he too focuses on the brothers in the title. However, some scholars, including Thompson and myself, are more intrigued by the sister’s actions in the tale. Bethany Joy Bear, for instance, in her analysis of traditional and modern versions of ATU 451, concentrates on the agency of the silent sister-saviors, noting that the three versions in the Grimms’ collection “illustrate various ways of empowering the hero[1]ine. In ‘The Seven Ravens’ she saves her brothers through an active and courageous quest, while in ‘The Twelve Brothers’ and ‘The Six Swans’ her success requires redemptive silence” (2009, 45).

The three tales differ by more than just how the sister saves her brothers, though. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king and queen with twelve boys are about to have another child; the king swears to kill the boys if the newborn is a girl so that she can inherit the kingdom. The queen warns the boys and they run away, and the girl later seeks them. She inadvertently picks flowers that turn her brothers into ravens, and in order to disenchant them she must remain silent; she may not speak or laugh for seven years. During this time, she marries a king, but his mother slanders her, and when the seven years have elapsed, she is about to be burned at the stake. At that moment, her brothers are disenchanted and returned to human form. They redeem their sister, who lives happily with her husband and her brothers.

In “The Seven Ravens,” a father exclaims that his seven negligent sons should turn into ravens for failing to bring water to baptize their newborn sister. It is unclear whether the sister remains unbaptized, thus contributing to her more liminal status. When the sister grows up, she seeks her brothers, shunning the sun and moon but gaining help from the stars, who give her a bone to unlock the glass mountain where her brothers reside. Because she loses the bone, the girl cuts off her small finger, using it to gain access to the mountain. She disenchants her brothers by simply appearing, and they all return home to live together.

In “The Six Swans,” a king is coerced into marrying a witch’s daughter, who finds where the king has stashed his children to keep them safe. The sorceress enchants the boys, turning them into swans, and the girl seeks them. She must not speak or laugh for six years and she must sew shirts from asters for them. She marries a king, but the king’s mother steals each of the three children born to the couple, smearing the wife’s mouth with blood to implicate her as a cannibal. She finishes sewing the shirts just as she’s about to be burned at the stake; then her brothers are disenchanted and come to live with the royal couple and their returned children. However, the sleeve of one shirt remained unfinished, so the littlest brother is stuck with a wing instead of an arm.

The main episodes of the tale type follow Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s structural sequence for fairy-tale plots: the tale begins with a villainy, the banishing and enchantment of the brothers, sometimes resulting from an interdiction that has been violated. The sister must perform a task in addition to going on a quest, and the tale ends with the formation of a new family through marriage. As Alan Dundes observes, “If Propp’s formula is valid, then the major task in fairy tales is to replace one’s original family through marriage” (1993, 124; see also Lüthi 1982). This observation holds true for heteronormative structures (such as the nuclear family), which exist in order to replicate themselves. In many fairy tales, the original nuclear family is discarded due to circumstance or choice. However, the sister in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” has not abandoned or been removed from her old family, unlike Cinderella, who ditches her nasty stepmother and stepsisters, or Rapunzel, who is taken from her birth parents, and so on. Although, admittedly, “The Seven Ravens” does not end in marriage, I do not plan to disqualify it from analysis simply because it doesn’t fit the dominant model, as Bengt Holbek does when comparing Danish versions of “King Wivern” (ATU 433B, “King Lindorm”).1 The fact that one of the tales does not end in marriage actually supports my interpretation of the tales as transgressive, a point to which I will return later.

Dundes’s (2007) notion of allomotif helps make sense of the kinship dynamics in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.” In order to decipher the symbolic code of folktales, Dundes proposes that any motif that could fill the same slot in a particular tale’s plot should be designated an allomotif. Further, if motif A and motif B fulfill the same purpose in moving along the tale’s plot, then they are considered mutually substitutable, thus equivalent symbolically. What this assertion means for my analysis is that all the methods by which the brothers are enchanted and subsequently disenchanted can be treated as meaningful in relation to one another. One of the advantages of comparing allomotifs rather than motifs is that we can be assured that we are analyzing not random details but significant plot components. So in “The Six Swans” and “The Seven Ravens,” we see the parental curse causing both the banishment and the enchantment of the brothers, whereas in “The Twelve Brothers,” the brothers are banished and enchanted in separate moves. Even though the brothers’ exile and enchantment happen in a different sequence in the different texts, we must view their causes as functionally parallel. Thus the ire of a father concerned for his newborn daughter, the jealous rage of a stepmother, the homicidal desire of a father to give his daughter everything, and the innocent flower gathering of a sister can all be seen as threatening to the brothers. All of these actions lead to the dispersal and enchantment of the brothers, though not all are malicious, for the sister in “The Twelve Brothers” accidentally turns her brothers into ravens by picking flowers that consequently enchant them.

I interpret this equivalence as a metaphorical statement—threats to a family’s cohesion come in all forms, from well-intentioned actions to openly malevolent curses. The father’s misdirected love for his sole daughter in two versions (“The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens”) translates to danger to his sons. This danger is allomotifically paralleled by how the sister, without even knowing it, causes her brothers to become enchanted, either by picking flowers in “The Twelve Brothers” or through the mere incident of her birth in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Seven Ravens.” The fact that a father would prioritize his sole daughter over numerous sons is strange and reminiscent of tales in which a father explicitly expresses romantic de[1]sire for his daughter, as in “Allerleirauh” (ATU 510B), discussed in chapter 4 by Margaret Yocom. Even in “The Six Swans,” where a stepmother with magical powers enchants the sons, the father is implicated; he did not love his children well enough to protect them from his new spouse, and once the boys had been changed into swans and fled, the father tries to take his daughter with him back to his castle (where the stepmother would likely be waiting to dispose of the daughter as well), not knowing that by asserting control over her, he would be endangering her. The father’s implied ownership of the daughter in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” and the linking of inheritance with danger emphasize the conflicts that threaten the nuclear family. Both material and emotional resources are in limited supply in these tales, with disastrous consequences for the nuclear family, which fragments, as it does in all fairy tales (see Propp 1968).

Holbek reaches a similar conclusion in his allomotific analysis of ATU 451, though he focuses on Danish versions collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in the late nineteenth century. Holbek notes that the heroine is the actual “cause of her brothers’ expulsion in all cases, either—innocently—through being born or—inadvertently—through some act of hers” (1987, 550). The true indication of the heroine’s role in condemning her brothers is her role in saving them, despite the fact that other characters may superficially be blamed: “The heroine’s guilt is nevertheless to be deduced from the fact that only an act of hers can save her brothers.” However, Holbek reads the tale as revolving around the theme of sibling rivalry, which is more relevant to the cultural context in which Danish versions of ATU 451 were set, since the initial family situation in the tale was not always said to be royal or noble, and Holbek views the tales as reflecting the actual concerns and conditions of their peasant tellers (550; see also 406–9).2 Holbek also discusses the lack of resources that might lead to sibling rivalry, identifying physical scarcity and emotional love as two factors that could inspire tension between siblings.

The initial situation in the Grimms’ versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is also a comment on the arbitrary power that parents have over their children, the ability to withhold love or resources or both. The helplessness of children before the strong feelings of their parents is cor[1]roborated in another Grimms’ tale, “The Lazy One and the Industrious One” (Zipes 2002b, 638).3 In this tale, which Jack Zipes translated among the “omitted tales” that did not make it into any of the published editions of the KHM, a father curses his sons for insulting him, causing them to turn into ravens until a beautiful maiden kisses them. Essentially, the fam[1]ily is a site of danger, yet it is a structure that will be replicated in the tale’s conclusion . . . almost.

But first, the sister seeks her brothers and disenchants them. The symbolic equation links, in each of the three tales, the sister’s silence (neither speaking nor laughing) for six years while sewing six shirts from asters, her seven years of silence (neither speaking nor laughing), and her cutting off her finger and using it to gain entry to the glass palace where she disenchants her brothers merely by being present. The theme unifying these allomotifs is sacrifice. The sister’s loss of her finger, equivalent to the loss of her voice, is a symbolic disempowerment. One loss is a physical mutilation, which might not impair the heroine terribly much; the choice not to use her voice is arguably more drastic, since her inability to speak for herself nearly causes her death in the tales.4 Both losses could be seen as equivalent to castration.5 However, losing her ability to speak and her ability to manipulate the world around her while at the same time displaying domestic competence in sewing equates powerlessness with feminine pursuits. Bear notes that versions by both the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen envision “a distinctly feminine savior whose work is symbolized by her spindle, an ancient emblem of women’s work” (2009, 46). Ruth Bottigheimer (1986) points out in her essay “Silenced Women in Grimms’ Tales” that the heroines in “The Twelve Brothers” and “The Six Swans” are forced to accept conditions of muteness that disempower them, which is part of a larger silencing that occurs in the tales; women both are explicitly forbidden to speak, and they have fewer declarative and interrogative speech acts attributed to them within the whole body of the Grimms’ texts.

Ironically, in performing subservient femininity, the sister fails to perform adequately as wife or mother, since the children she bears in one version (“The Six Swans”) are stolen from her. When the sister is married to the king, she gives birth to three children in succession, but each time, the king’s mother takes away the infant and smears the queen’s mouth with blood while she sleeps (Zipes 2002b, 170). Finally, the heroine is sentenced to death by a court but is unable to protest her innocence since she must not speak in order to disenchant her brothers. In being a faithful sister, the heroine cannot be a good mother and is condemned to die for it. This aspect of the tale could represent a deeply coded feminist voice.6 A tale collected and published by men might contain an implicitly coded feminist message, since the critique of patriarchal institutions such as the family would have to be buried so deeply as to not even be recognizable as a message in order to avoid detection and censorship (Radner and Lanser 1993, 6–9). The sis[1]ter in “The Six Swans” cannot perform all of the feminine duties required of her, and because she ostensibly allows her children to die, she could be accused of infanticide. Similarly, in the contemporary legend “The Inept Mother,” collected and analyzed by Janet Langlois, an overwhelmed mother’s incompetence indirectly kills one or all of her children.7 Langlois reads this legend as a coded expression of women’s frustrations at being isolated at home with too many responsibilities, a coded demand for more support than is usually given to mothers in patriarchal institutions. Essentially, the story is “complex thinking about the thinkable—protecting the child who must leave you—and about the unthinkable—being a woman not defined in relation to motherhood” (Langlois 1993, 93). The heroine in “The Six Swans” also occupies an ambiguous position, navigating different expectations of femininity, forced to choose between giving care and nurturance to some and withholding it from others.

Here, I find it productive to draw a parallel to Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus. Antigone defies the orders of her uncle Creon in order to bury her brother Polyneices and faces a death sentence as a result. Antigone’s fidelity to her blood family costs her not only her life but also her future as a productive and reproductive member of society. As Judith Butler (2000) clarifies in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Antigone transgresses both gender and kinship norms in her actions and her speech acts. Her love for her brother borders on the incestuous and exposes the incest taboo at the heart of kinship structure. Antigone’s perverse death drive for the sake of her brother, Butler asserts, is all the more monstrous because it establishes aberration at the heart of the norm (in this case the incest taboo). I see a similar logic operating in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” because according to allomotific equivalences, the heroine is condemned to die only in one version (“The Six Swans”) because she allegedly ate her children. In the other version that contains the marriage episode (“The Twelve Brothers”), the king’s mother slanders her, calling the maiden “godless,” and accuses her of wicked things until the king agrees to sentence her to death (Zipes 2002b, 35). As allomotific analysis reveals, in the three versions, the heroine is punished for being excessively devoted to her brothers, which is functionally the same as cannibalism and as being generally wicked (the accusation of the king’s mother in two of the versions).

In a sense, the heroine’s disproportionate devotion to her brothers kills her chance at marriage and kills her children, which from a queer stance is a comment on the performativity of sexuality and gender. According to Butler, gender performativity demonstrates “that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” ([1990] 1999, xv). This illusion, that gender and sexuality are a “being” rather than a “doing,” is constantly at risk of exposure. When sexuality is exposed as constructed rather than natural, thus threatening the whole social-sexual system of identity formation, the threat must be eliminated.

One aspect of this system particularly threatened in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is reproductive futurism, one form of compulsory teleological heterosexuality, “the epitome of heteronormativity’s desire to reach self-fulfillment by endlessly recycling itself through the figure of the Child” (Giffney 2008, 56; see also Edelman 2004). Reproductive futurism mandates that politics and identities be placed in service of the future and future children, utilizing the rhetoric of an idealized childhood. In his book on reproductive futurism, Lee Edelman links queerness and the death drive, stating, “The death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (2004, 9). According to this logic, to prioritize anything other than one’s reproductive future is to refuse social viability and heteronormativity—this is what the heroine in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” does. Her excessive emotional ties to her brothers disfigure her future, aligning her with the queer, the unlivable, and hence the ungrievable. Refusing the linear narrative of reproductive futurism registers as “unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4), words that could very well be used to describe a mother who is thought to be eating her babies and who cannot or will not speak to defend herself.

The heroine’s marriage to the king in two versions of the tale can also be examined from a queer perspective. Like the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” which queers marriage by “showing male-female [marital] relationships as clearly fraught with danger and evil from their onset,” the Grimms’ two versions of ATU 451 that feature marriage call into question its sanctity and safety (Greenhill 2008, 150, emphasis in original). Marriage, though the ultimate goal of many fairy tales, does not provide the heroine with a supportive or nurturing environment. Bear comments that in versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” wherein a king discovers and marries the heroine, “the king’s discovery brings the sister into a community that both facilitates and threatens her work. The sister’s discovery brings her into a home, foreshadowing the hoped-for happy ending, but it is a false home, determined by the king’s desire rather than by the sister’s creation of a stable and complete community” (2009, 50)

[blossomnom]

🌸 "It's just fiction"

"It's just fiction" "it doesn't affect reality" "it's not real"

Did you know that the production, distribution and engagement of pornography made of fictional children is actually a very illegal offense in multiple places around the world and if breached you are likely to be subjected to fines, jail time, public predator recording, and are likely to be refused employment?

In Australia, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and France the creation and usage of virtual child pornography (whether fictional characters or real life children) is very, very illegal and is going to be treated the same as filmed child pornography.

Throughout the United States of America and other parts of Europe and Asia, the legal stance is mixed. However, the ones who have illegalized it also have very similar punishments.

If you live in those places and get reported to the police for doing this, you shouldn't be mad at people online because they are legally required to report you if you are in that region.

"Freedom of speech though" freedom of speech is only a major concept and law in the USA, you guys have it in your first amendment and it only extends to the government not interfering with your political expressions online or outside. It does not protect you from criticism online, and it is not protecting you under the law if you guys get caught making fictional child porn.

Here are the references where it says that fictional child pornography is a criminal and punishable offense:

Australia -

Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth)

Section 473.1 – Definition of “child abuse material” (includes fictional depictions)

Section 474.22 – Using a carriage service to access/transmit child abuse material

Section 474.25 – Possession or control of child abuse material

Canada -

Criminal Code of CanadaSection 163.1 –

> (a)(i) a visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, that shows a person who is or appears to be under the age of eighteen years and is engaged in or depicted as engaging in explicit sexual activity.

UK -

Coroners and Justice Act 2009Section 62 – Possession of prohibited images of children

New Zealand -

Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993

Section 3 – Defines objectionable publications > “...a visual image that depicts a person who is, or is depicted as being, under the age of 18 years engaging in sexual conduct, whether or not the person is real.”

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/latest/DLM312895.html

Korea -

Act on the Protection of Children and Juveniles from Sexual Abuse

Article 2 (Definitions) – Covers child sexual exploitation, including virtual images.

Article 11 – Criminalises possession and production of child sexual content, even if the child is fictional or drawn.

Germany -

German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB)

Section 184b – Distribution, acquisition, and possession of child pornography

France -

French Penal Code (Code pénal)

Article 227-23 – Prohibits the representation of minors in pornographic content.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000006417347

Netherlands -

Dutch Criminal Code (Wetboek van Strafrecht)

Article 240b – Criminalises possession and distribution of child pornography, including drawings and animations.

Norway -

Penal Code (Straffeloven)

Section 311 – Child pornography laws apply to fictional and cartoon depictions as well.

Sweden -

Swedish Penal Code (Brottsbalken)

Chapter 16, Section 10a – Possession of pornographic depictions of children, including fictional or cartoon representations.

China -

Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China

Articles 363–367 – Ban on obscene materials involving minors.

And that is all! I couldn't find very much on the states in the USA that have illegalised fictional child pornography, but if you can get your hands on that please reblog!

Thank you, and take care 🌸

[tittytania]

🚨PLEASE HELP SAVE LUCKY THE CAT FROM HEARTBREAKING ABUSE AND NEGLECT, AND STOP A MAJOR PUBLICATION FROM PROFITING OFF OF ANIMAL ABUSE🚨

Back in August, The Cut (@thecut), an online division of New York Mag (@nymag), published a story by an anonymous woman who, after giving birth to her baby, started to despise her cat Lucky and chose to abuse her, including starving her and leaving her to live in filth.

Some selections about Lucky from the article:

Obviously, openly admitting to chilling animal abuse did not go over well with The Cut's readers. People were rightfully outraged at both the anonymous writer and the magazine for publishing the article and profiting off of animal abuse. After the predictable backlash, The Cut put the article behind a paywall and added an editor's note to the beginning, claiming that they confirmed the welfare of the cat prior to publication. (Here is an archived version without the paywall. Look at a more recent capture to see the note that was added.) The magazine also made a post to their Instagram about the situation, reiterating their claim of confirming Lucky's safety and health. They are limiting comments on their socials to remove comments that relate to the backlash about Lucky's abuse, and they are blocking accounts that comment on it. A screenshot of the Instagram post is below.

(note: I cannot confirm or deny the claims of racism and misogyny. I have not seen anything like that myself, but someone on reddit claimed they saw a person call the anonymous woman's behavior "white woman bullshit." That is the extent of what I have heard on that. I also cannot comment on the claims of abuse and threats towards the staff).

Clearly, The Cut's claims about Lucky's welfare are bullshit. The resolution of the article ends with the author saying simply "I haven't fallen back in love with Lucky, but it could still happen. I'll shut the windows til then." According to the article itself, Lucky is still in the home with an owner who is abusing her, an owner who has, and I quote, "an unwillingness... to change anything about (the abuse)." By definition, this means Lucky's welfare is not being probably cared for. You cannot claim that Lucky is ok when her owner already said that she is abusing her and is unwilling to stop the abuse. New York Mag is hiding behind activism buzzwords to protect an animal abuser and shelter themselves from the justified backlash to their publication's choices so they can continue to profit off of animal abuse.

Please please please help to get a real update about Lucky's condition.

What can I do?

There is a change.org petition requesting a real update about her, which as of writing has over 17,000 signatures. You can also reach out to the magazines' staff and demand a real update from them. Their emails are listed below:

swati.sharma@voxmedia.com | bill.carey@voxmedia.com | lauren.starke@voxmedia.com | priyanka.mantha@voxmedia.com | amani.orr@voxmedia.com | lindsay.peoples@nymag.com | rachel.bashein@nymag.com | jen.ortiz@nymag.com | marisa.carroll@nymag.com | evan.murray@voxmedia.com

The email of Jim Bankoff, the Chairman and CEO of vox media (which owns New York Mag) is bankoff@gmail.com

Here is an email template that you can follow.

You can also report online animal abuse to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) here.

If you are in New York, you can contact the 311 website or call 1-800-577-TIPS (1-800-577-8477) to report ongoing online animal abuse or neglect.

The Instagram account @lucilletherescuecat has a story highlight where she has posted several resources in addition to the ones mentioned here.

My heart deeply aches for poor Lucky, who cannot understand why the human she loves has changed so drastically. Why her life changed from daily brushies and pillow snuggles to being ignored and starved. She used to have her own space heater, and now she doesn't even have water. I'm devastated at the thought of how heartbroken and miserable she must be. Her owner even admitted that she would be in jail if she did this to a person. While I doubt this will result in a jail sentence, we can at least make sure that Lucky is rehomed to place where she is properly cared for.

Please share and encourage others to do the same, using the #SAVELUCKYTHECAT hashtag. Thank you so much for reading.

[ktownshizzle]

https://m.entertain.naver.com/article/311/0001843651

It says that BigHit announced that Yoongi and J-Hope donated money to help with the wildfire damage in Korea. 🥹

My angel 🤍

[abubblingcandle]

Illusion, ask, replace, and/or help!

I love your work btw

Thank you my dear anon!! Slowly working through these

Illusion - God Forbid You Leave Me Ch3

The space that Richmond and the cosiness of the Higgins House afforded him was merely an illusion. He was going to need to go home in a month and face his father’s wrath and the judgement of the Man City faithful. Hiding was a cowards game. He was feeling pretty cowardly now though. Jamie switched his phone off and tossed it into his bag before levering himself up off the mattress. Even if he wasn’t facing his past, he had a morning to get to and couldn’t spend all day up here covering himself with the warm duvet and his self pity. Higgins would probably let him but that wasn’t Jamie Tartt. He needed to be up and moving as much as he could despite the injury.

For this sprint I wrote 336 words

Replace - Star Player In A Twisted Game Ch3

“They replaced me,” Jamie sat, head rocking backwards onto the wooden bench behind him. “Of course they did Jam. They replaced you with Dani didn’t they? That’s how football works,” Simon settled onto the bench, letting Jamie’s head fall to lean against his knee. “But that was Dani. It was different. He was good, better than good, but he wasn’t me. This idiot,” Jamie gestured up to the large DEVON emblazoned on the blue background where he had become so accustomed to seeing TARTT, “is me.” “In what way?” Simon asked, forcing a scoff out of Jamie. How could Simon not see it? They had found Jamie Tartt light instead of giving the real article another chance. He felt disposable, and he hated it.

For this sprint I wrote 236 words

Ask - When You Get What You Want Ch3

Sam was watching the clock now more than he had been in the build up to the catalyst friend date. That night Sam was nervous but the bone deep wariness and cloud of confusion was much more pressing. Now this night felt important. Sam was building towards something and if he fucked it up it wasn’t just Sam that would get hurt; it would hurt the team and it would also hurt Jamie, which was something that Sam had never thought he would care about. He shouldn’t have asked Jamie over. This was too soon. The ringing of the doorbell startled him so much that the spatula in his hand went fluing and spattered the floor with the deep red sauce, staining the cool white tile like blood. He was lucky he was only holding a spatula and nothing else. Cooking while a thrumming ball of anxiety maybe wasn’t his best plan. How had Jamie managed this the first time round?

For this sprint I wrote 294 words

Help - There's No Place Like Home Ch4

He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to that hotel room and face the consequences of running out on his dad. He wasn’t even wearing real shoes, he didn’t have any money or his phone, he was beaten black and blue. He was a fucking mess. He was hopeless and weak and a disaster. Hiccups heaved out of his chest and somehow there were more tears to cry. He couldn’t go back and apologise for his very existence. He deserved better than that; despite everything he had done and everyone he had hurt, Jamie Tartt deserved to exist. He needed help.

For this sprint I wrote 311 words

[farewelltoautumn]

24.12.24 | things done today:

📚 English

/

📚 Spanish

read Diarios Completos de Sylvia Plath (p.306-311)

📚 French:

read an article | biographie de evelyn glennie

📚 German

babadum

📌 Extra activities

Women Who Run With The Wolves | ch. 9

📖: Siberian Education by Nicolai Lilin

[frameacloud]

"When the physical and astral bodies are in perfect congruence, they look very much alike in shape, form, and essence. Transgendered individuals almost all have an astral body that reflects some aspect of their internal conception of their gender, although it may be more or less hermaphroditic than their internal conception. This is one of the few types of inherent dissimilarity. (Other inherent dissimilarities involve being not-quite-entirely human, and that is beyond the scope of this article.)"

- Excerpt from the essay "Body Congruence," by Joshua Tenpenny, printed in Raven Kaldera's book Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook (Hubbardston, MA: Asphodel Press, 2008), page 312.

Some language notes: Seeing "transgendered" and "hermaphrodite" as less than ideal word choices was an idea that took time to catch on. In this book's particular time period and LGBTQI social circles, the writers saw these as acceptable words. By "astral body," the author means a spiritual counterpart of the body (p. 311).

[orthodoxydaily]

Saints&Reading: Saturday, March 23, 2024

march 10_march 23

THE HOLY MARTYR THEODORE OF TYRE (306)

(movable feast on Saturday of the 1st week of the Great Lent).

The Holy Great Martyr Theodore the Recruit1 was a soldier in the city of Amáseia in Pontus (Asia Minor) on the coast of the Euxine (Black) Sea, under the command of the Praepositus (regimental commander) Brincus. Saint Theodore was ordered to offer sacrifice to idols, but he proclaimed his faith in Christ the Savior in a loud voice. Brincus gave him a few days to think it over, during which time the Saint prayed.

Theodore was accused of setting a pagan temple on fire and destroying the idol of Rhea, and so he was thrown into prison to be starved to death. The Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him there, comforting and encouraging him. When he was brought before the Governor Publius, Theodore boldly confessed his faith, for which he was subjected to new torments and condemned to be burnt alive. The Great Martyr Theodore mounted an enormous pyre, and after he made the Sign of the Cross, the wood was lit, but the Holy Spirit cooled the flames. Saint Theodore stood in the flames, praising and glorifying God. Then he gave his holy soul into God's hands, and the onlookers saw his soul ascending to Heaven, according to the author of his Life, who was also an eyewitness.

This occurred in about the year 306 under the Roman Emperor Galerius (305-311). Unharmed by the fire, Saint Theodore's body was buried under a widow's house in the city of Eukháϊta, not far from Amáseia. Later, his relics were transferred to Constantinople, to the church which bears his name. His head is in the city of Gaeto, Italy.

Fifty years after the Saint Theodore's martyrdom, Emperor Julian the Apostate (reigned 361-363), planned to commit an outrage upon the Christians during the first week of Great Lent. He ordered the city magistrate of Constantinople to sprinkle all the food in the marketplaces with blood which had been offered to idols. Saint Theodore appeared to Archbishop Eudoxios in a dream, and told him to inform all the Christians that no one should buy anything in the marketplaces, but to eat boiled wheat with honey (kolyva) instead.

In remembrance of this occurrence, the Orthodox Church commemorates the holy Great Martyr Theodore the Recruit each year on the first Saturday of Great Lent. On Friday evening, at the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, after the prayer at the Ambo, the Canon to the Holy Great Martyr Theodore, composed by Saint John of Damascus, is sung. After this, kolyva is blessed and distributed to the faithful. The celebration of the Great Martyr Theodore on the first Saturday of Great Lent was established by Patriarch Nektarios of Constantinople (381-397).

The Troparion to Saint Theodore is very similar to the Troparion for the Prophet Daniel and the Three Holy Youths (on the Sunday Before the Nativity of the Lord). The Kontakion to Saint Theodore, who suffered martyrdom by fire, reminds us that he also had faith as his breastplate (see I Thessalonians 5:8).

In iconography, Saint Theodore the Recruit is depicted in four different ways: either alone in military garb, battling a large snake, or together with Saint Theodore the Commander, standing upright or riding horses. He always wears his military uniform.

We pray to Saint Theodore the Recruit for the recovery of stolen articles.

VENERABLE ANASTASIA, NUN THE PATRICIAN OF CONSTANTINOPLE (567)

Saint Anastasia the Patrician of Alexandria lived in Constantinople and was descended from an aristocratic family. She was an image of virtue and enjoyed the great esteem of the emperor Justinian (527-565). Widowed at a young age, Anastasia decided to leave the world and save her soul far from the bustle of the capital. She secretly left Constantinople and went to Alexandria. She founded a small monastery not far from the city and devoted herself entirely to God.

Several years later, the emperor Justinian was widowed and decided to search for Anastasia and marry her. As soon as she learned of this, Saint Anastasia journeyed to a remote skete to ask Abba Daniel (March 18) for help.

In order to safeguard Anastasia, the Elder dressed her in a man’s monastic garb and called her the eunuch Anastasius. Having settled her in one of the very remote caves, the Elder gave her a Rule of prayer and ordered her never to leave the cave and to receive no one. Only one monk knew of this place. His obedience was to bring a small portion of bread and a pitcher of water to the cave once a week, leaving it at the entrance. The nun Anastasia dwelt in seclusion for twenty-eight years. Everyone believed that it was the eunuch Anastasius who lived in the cave.

The Lord revealed to her the day of her death. Having learned of her approaching death, she wrote several words for Abba Daniel on a potsherd and placed it at the entrance to the cave. The Elder came quickly and brought everything necessary for her burial. He found the holy ascetic still alive, and he confessed and communed her with the Holy Mysteries. At Abba Daniel’s request, Saint Anastasia blessed him and the monk accompanying him. With the words: “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” the saint died in peace (ca. 567-568).

When the grave was prepared, the Elder gave his disciple his outer garment and ordered him to dress the deceased “brother” in it. As he was putting on the rassa, the monk noticed that she was a woman, but he did not dare to say anything. However, when they returned to the monastery after they buried the nun, the disciple asked Abba Daniel whether he knew the “brother” was a woman, and the Elder related to the young monk the life of Saint Anastasia. Later, the abba’s narrative was written down and received wide acclaim.

The relics of Saint Anastasia were transferred to Constantinople in 1200 and placed not far from the church of Hagia Sophia.

HEBREWS 1:1-12

1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, 2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; 3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4 having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. 5 To which of the angels did He ever say: "You are My Son, Today I have begotten You"? And again: "I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son"? 6 But when He brings the firstborn into the world, He says: "Let all the angels of God worship Him." 7 And of the angels He says: "Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire." 8 But to the Son He says: "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom. 9 You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions." 10 And: "You, LORD, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. 11 They will perish, but You remain; And they will all grow old like a garment; 12 Like a cloak You will fold them up, And they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will not fail."

JOHN 15:17-16:2

17 These things I command you, that you love one another. 18 If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. 19 If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. 20 Remember what I said to you, 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. 21 But all these things they will do to you for My name's sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. 22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 He who hates Me hates My Father also. 24 If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. 25 But this happened that the word might be fulfilled in their law, 'They hated Me without a cause.' 26 But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. 27 And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.

1 These things I have spoken to you, that you should not be made to stumble. 2 They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service.