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tenaciouspersonapost · 2 years ago

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A Step-by-Step Guide to louis vuitton outlet

My friend, have you heard abut The brand new Adidas 3D Mesh Bag faux? It's been buzzing close to my social circle like wildfire, and I wished you to be aware of all the main points. Properly, Firstly, the fabric of the distinct bag is out of the planet! It is not only your common polyester-sort material; It is really some thing further than that! The mesh is a single-of-a-variety, and it presents off a textured feel that you wouldn't get with other far more conventional resources.

What definitely amazed me is how the bag is designed with drainage holes and drag holes at The underside. This really is great for when I go ahead and take bag out for the swim or into the Seaside – no far more stressing about getting my possessions fully moist. Additionally, this design and style permits for maximum breathability which retains items you shop while in the bag shielded from The weather.

The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag also scores way earlier mentioned the rest in other places including style and portability. The overall appear from the bag is just excellent, and it comes in a variety of color combinations which add to its In general attraction. And Even with its cumbersome appearance, the adjustable shoulder straps allow it to be quite simple to hold all-around.

I'm guaranteed you wouldn't be surprised to are aware that the cost of the bag is very steep and you can find a million and one particular fakes on the market. Fake baggage usually have stitching mistakes, are created of lesser-excellent resources and do not search as sharp since the genuine ones. So, It is really Definitely vital to location a pretend in advance of acquire.

The good news is, there are some telltale symptoms which can help spot fakes. First of all, the bag ought to have the signature Adidas symbol that must have an indented lettering – clean edges signify that it's fake. Even more, the bag must have the exact same good quality stitching all around. If the fabric is definitely tearable or perhaps the stitching is off, it's going to most definitely be considered a phony. In addition to that, examining the tags for inconsistencies could also enable ascertain if a bag is fake.

It really is pretty a shame when people today try out to pull one over anyone and go off a pretend as an first. Fortunately, by utilizing the tips previously mentioned, it shouldn't be not easy to inform a phony from the true deal.

What's so Unique with regard to the Adidas 3D mesh bag bogus is the added protection it provides in all weather conditions. Rain or glow, your stuff is Protected and audio In this particular bag. Don't be concerned about your possessions acquiring moist or even the points within turning into destroyed resulting from weather conditions. The bag also doubles up as an awesome travel companion, with its adjustable straps making it quick to hold all-around. It is also created with additional air flow for practical airflow, so your things stays securely in place As you're on the go.

Furthermore, the bag options some nifty pockets and compartments for storing Necessities such as a laptop, publications, telephones, and various individual products. This is a fantastic aspect as it means you won't need to constantly rummage all-around within your bag in search of a thing. The pockets allow it to be so much simpler and trouble-totally free to find Necessities speedily.

Of course, when investing in a pricey bag like the Adidas 3D Mesh bag faux, it is vital to take care of it correctly. It is recommended that you don't set a lot of pressure on the fabric, as This might tear it apart finally. Also, never ever equipment clean the bag Until explicitly stated. Wiping it down which has a fabric is the best way to maintain the bag thoroughly clean and shining.

As of late, the industry is full of faux baggage that happen to be Virtually indistinguishable from authentic ones. They are more cost-effective And do not often include assures. Investing in a very good-high quality bag for lasting use is always a lot better than likely for the more affordable selection. Once more, having the ability to location a fake from an unique is essential if you do not need to acquire ripped off. The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag is a unique bag with its chopping-edge functions – perfectly truly worth the value! What is much more, It's going to remain in fantastic condition For some time with a bit standard care.

I am aware there are a lot of men and women out there that adore to maintain up with the most up-to-date vogue traits and sometimes, they don’t mind going to wonderful lengths and breaking the bank in order to get the latest ‘in’ point. But then, the knock-off items also exist and Virtually hold the exact same appearances with the original variations. This has been happening not long ago Along with the Adidas Bag. Folks have been inquiring me which a single to order - original or fake?

Very well, To become truthful, equally have their benefits and drawbacks. But I believe The easiest method to decide should be to make sure you know very well what to look for if you’re out searching. It can be always a good idea to do your exploration right before parting with all your tricky-acquired income.

Now, the original baggage have exceptional functions that considerably-out weigh Those people of fakes. Initially off, these normally arrive equipped with a bunch of beautiful finishes which include quilting, velvet, perforation, or crocodile-pores and skin. Along with that, it also offers superior content top quality in comparison to fakes. And Enable’s not forget about, it is actually produced by designers who have set in effort and time to craft it for appears to be like and luxury.

Although the real design higher than the phony, the latter have a number of pros heading for them. Namely, their cost. Naturally, it arrives at a much cheaper selling price than legitimate. Secondly, supplied The reality that the design stays rather precisely the same more than a few many years, we could Just about guarantee your folks will not manage to convey to which bag particularly is definitely the ‘real offer’.

Following that, analyzing any sneaky emblems is additionally vital. Most originals Have a very emblem within the corner or print while in the lining. That’s a lifeless giveaway, so ensure that you maintain your eyes peeled. Also, look for item numbers. Often, there’ll be a Extra fat sequence of numbers Within the lining, but Will probably be appreciably absent on fakes.

Moreover, you'll be able to generally depend on the provider made available from genuine outlets. The boutiques generally offer fantastic customer care and an Trade or return policy in the event you alter your mind. And also you won’t find anything like that in a counterfeit retail store.

As for which 1 to have, the choice remains with you. As for me, I am a big lover on the originals. You can find the nostalgia attached and each of the work replica handbags online that goes toward creating something Excellent. How about you?

#fake bags online

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heranchormaker · 2 years ago

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3 Common Reasons Why Your louis vuitton outlet Isn't Working (And How To Fix It)

My Pal, Have you ever read abut the new Adidas 3D Mesh Bag phony? It's been buzzing around my social circle like wildfire, and I required you to grasp all the details. Perfectly, First of all, The material of the individual bag is out of the earth! It's not only your regular polyester-type content; it's anything over and above that! The mesh is a person-of-a-type, and it provides off a textured feel that You would not get with other far more traditional products.

What seriously amazed me is how the bag is built with drainage holes and drag holes at The underside. This can be perfect for After i go ahead and take bag out for the swim or into the beach – no more worrying about getting my possessions absolutely damp. In addition, this layout lets for optimum breathability which keeps things you retail outlet from the bag shielded from the elements.

The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag also scores way earlier mentioned The remainder in other places like style and design and portability. The general search with the bag is simply terrific, and it comes in a variety of color mixtures which include to its Total charm. And despite its cumbersome look, the adjustable shoulder straps enable it to be rather effortless to hold around.

I am certain you wouldn't be surprised to realize that the price of the bag is quite steep and you can find 1,000,000 and one fakes in existence. Phony baggage generally have stitching errors, are created of lesser-high quality resources and don't search as sharp because the real ones. So, It is Certainly vital to location a phony ahead of acquire.

Fortunately, there are louis vuitton outlet a few telltale indications which can help location fakes. To start with, the bag should have the signature Adidas emblem that must have an indented lettering – sleek edges mean that it's faux. Even more, the bag must have exactly the same high-quality stitching throughout. If the fabric is easily tearable or perhaps the stitching is off, it will most unquestionably be considered a faux. Other than that, examining the tags for inconsistencies can also support establish if a bag is phony.

It can be quite a disgrace when people today test to tug 1 above an individual and go off a pretend as an primary. Thankfully, by utilizing the recommendations earlier mentioned, it really should not be tough to convey to a pretend from the actual deal.

What's so special concerning the Adidas 3D mesh bag fake would be the additional protection it provides in all climatic conditions. Rain or glow, your things is Protected and audio With this bag. Don't be concerned regarding your possessions receiving moist or maybe the factors within getting damaged due to weather conditions. The bag also doubles up as a terrific travel companion, with its adjustable straps making it easy to hold close to. It is also designed with included air flow for hassle-free airflow, so your stuff stays securely set up As you're on the move.

Also, the bag attributes some nifty pockets and compartments for storing essentials such as a notebook, books, phones, as well as other individual merchandise. This is a superb attribute as this means there's no need to often rummage about inside your bag looking for one thing. The pockets enable it to be so much simpler and stress-cost-free to locate essentials swiftly.

Not surprisingly, when buying a costly bag such as the Adidas 3D Mesh bag fake, it can be crucial to take care of it thoroughly. It is usually recommended that you do not place an excessive amount stress on The material, as This might tear it apart inevitably. Also, never machine clean the bag Except explicitly stated. Wiping it down using a fabric is The simplest way to preserve the bag thoroughly clean and shining.

These days, the marketplace is stuffed with faux bags that are Virtually indistinguishable from unique ones. They can be cheaper And do not often have guarantees. Buying a great-excellent bag for lasting use is often a lot better than going for your much less expensive alternative. All over again, having the ability to place a bogus from an unique is vital if you don't need to have ripped off. The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag is a singular bag with its slicing-edge functions – well value the value! What is actually extra, It will stay in excellent ailment For many years with a little bit common treatment.

I understand there are a lot of people to choose from that appreciate to maintain up with the newest style traits and occasionally, they don’t mind gonna terrific lengths and breaking the lender in order to get the most up-to-date ‘in’ thing. But then, the knock-off products also exist and Just about hold the very same appearances with the first variations. This continues to be taking place a short while ago While using the Adidas Bag. People have been inquiring me which one to purchase - original or faux?

Properly, To become honest, equally have their benefits and drawbacks. But I do think The ultimate way to come to a decision would be to be sure you understand what to look for when you’re out procuring. It can be often a smart idea to do your exploration before parting with your difficult-earned funds.

Now, the initial luggage have unique capabilities that considerably-out weigh All those of fakes. Initial off, these commonly come equipped with a bunch of desirable finishes for example quilting, velvet, perforation, or crocodile-pores and skin. On top of that, In addition it boasts top-quality substance top quality in comparison with fakes. And let’s not forget, it can be created by designers who've place in time and effort to craft it for appears and comfort.

Even though the genuine design and style earlier mentioned the bogus, the latter Have got a couple of advantages going for them. Namely, their rate. Naturally, it arrives at a much cheaper value than genuine. Next, provided The point that the look stays fairly precisely the same about a couple of a long time, we can easily Nearly assurance your mates won't be able to inform which bag accurately will be the ‘authentic deal’.

Following that, examining any sneaky emblems is likewise essential. Most originals Have got a brand while in the corner or print from the lining. That’s a useless giveaway, so make sure you maintain your eyes peeled. Also, look for product quantities. Often, there’ll be considered a Excess fat sequence of figures In the lining, but It's going to be appreciably absent on fakes.

Moreover, you could normally count on the provider made available from legitimate shops. The boutiques often present fantastic customer support and an exchange or return coverage just in case you alter your brain. And you also won’t discover some thing like that in a counterfeit retail outlet.

As for which one particular to obtain, the decision remains with you. As for me, I am a tremendous supporter of your originals. There is certainly the nostalgia attached and all the perform that goes toward building some thing Extraordinary. How about you?

#replica bags

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lovingmusicdaze · 2 years ago

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14 Businesses Doing a Great Job at replica handbags online

My Good friend, have you heard abut the new Adidas 3D Mesh Bag phony? It has been buzzing close to my social circle like wildfire, And that i wanted you to be aware of all the main points. Effectively, for starters, the fabric of the unique bag is out of the planet! It is really not merely your regular polyester-sort product; It can be a thing past that! The mesh is one-of-a-type, and it provides off a textured feel that you wouldn't get with other much more conventional resources.

What really amazed me is how the bag is developed with drainage holes and drag holes at The underside. This is certainly great for Once i take the bag out for the swim or to your beach – no a lot more worrying about finding my possessions fully moist. Furthermore, this style and design makes it possible for for optimum breathability which keeps things you keep while in the bag shielded from The weather.

The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag also scores way above the rest in other regions including layout and portability. The overall seem of your bag is simply wonderful, and it arrives in many different shade combinations which add to its Over-all appeal. And In spite of its bulky appearance, the adjustable shoulder straps allow it to be very quick to carry around.

I'm confident you wouldn't be surprised to know that the cost of the bag is fairly steep and you will discover 1,000,000 and a single fakes in existence. Pretend bags commonly have stitching mistakes, are created of lesser-high-quality elements and don't glance as sharp as being the legitimate types. So, It really is Completely necessary to spot a phony in advance of obtain.

The good news is, there are some telltale indications which can help spot fakes. To begin with, the bag must have the signature Adidas symbol that ought to have an indented lettering – sleek edges mean that it's fake. Further more, the bag should have a similar excellent stitching throughout. If the fabric is definitely tearable or even the stitching is off, it will eventually most unquestionably become a phony. Other than that, checking the tags for inconsistencies could also enable identify if a bag is faux.

It's pretty a shame when persons check out to drag just one in excess of another person and pass off a pretend being an original. Fortunately, by utilizing the strategies previously mentioned, it shouldn't be tough to explain to a phony from the real deal.

What's so Specific about the Adidas 3D mesh bag fake is the extra safety it offers in all weather conditions. Rain or glow, your stuff is safe and sound During this bag. Don't worry about your belongings having wet or even the things within getting harmed as a consequence of climatic conditions. The bag also doubles up as an incredible vacation companion, with its adjustable straps making it simple to carry close to. It is also developed with added ventilation for easy airflow, so your stuff stays securely set up while you're on the run.

Furthermore, the bag capabilities some nifty pockets and compartments for storing essentials such as a laptop computer, textbooks, telephones, along with other personal items. This is an excellent feature as this means you don't need to generally rummage all around inside your bag searching for some thing. replica handbags online The pockets enable it to be so less difficult and headache-free to discover Necessities quickly.

Naturally, when buying a pricey bag like the Adidas 3D Mesh bag fake, it's important to care for it thoroughly. It is suggested that you don't set an excessive amount stress on the fabric, as This may tear it apart eventually. Also, never equipment wash the bag unless explicitly stated. Wiping it down using a fabric is The easiest method to keep the bag clear and shining.

Nowadays, the industry is stuffed with faux luggage which can be Virtually indistinguishable from original kinds. They can be less costly And do not usually come with assures. Buying a very good-excellent bag for Long lasting use is often better than going for the less costly possibility. Once again, having the ability to spot a bogus from an first is crucial if you don't want to get ripped off. The Adidas 3D Mesh Bag is a novel bag with its chopping-edge features – perfectly worth the price! What is extra, it'll continue being in good problem for years with somewhat normal care.

I understand There are plenty of folks to choose from that love to keep up with the latest vogue trends and from time to time, they don’t mind going to excellent lengths and breaking the financial institution simply to get the latest ‘in’ issue. But then, the knock-off merchandise also exist and Virtually have the exact appearances with the first variations. This has become going on recently Using the Adidas Bag. People have been asking me which 1 to acquire - primary or fake?

Perfectly, To become sincere, the two have their benefits and drawbacks. But I do think The obvious way to come to a decision is always to ensure that you understand what to look for whenever you’re out searching. It really is often a smart idea to do your investigate prior to parting with your hard-attained money.

Now, the initial bags have exclusive features that considerably-out weigh Those people of fakes. Initial off, these ordinarily come equipped with lots of desirable finishes like quilting, velvet, perforation, or crocodile-skin. In addition to that, Additionally, it offers top-quality content top quality in comparison to fakes. And Permit’s not overlook, it is actually designed by designers who definitely have set in effort and time to craft it for appears and comfort.

Even though the real style and design higher than the faux, the latter have a several pros heading for them. Specifically, their price. Definitely, it comes in a much cheaper cost than genuine. Secondly, supplied The reality that the design stays fairly precisely the same around two or three decades, we can easily Just about promise your pals will never be capable of notify which bag just will be the ‘serious offer’.

After that, analyzing any sneaky emblems is additionally important. Most originals Possess a brand within the corner or print while in the lining. That’s a dead giveaway, so ensure you maintain your eyes peeled. Also, check for product or service quantities. Often, there’ll be described as a fat sequence of figures Within the lining, but It will probably be significantly absent on fakes.

What's more, you are able to always rely on the support made available from authentic stores. The boutiques constantly offer you great customer support and an Trade or return plan in case you alter your thoughts. And you simply received’t uncover one thing like that in a counterfeit retailer.

As for which one to obtain, the choice remains with you. As for me, I'm a tremendous supporter in the originals. You will find the nostalgia attached and each of the perform that goes in direction of developing a little something Fantastic. How about you?

#fake designer bags

1 note · View note

ethereousdelirious · 3 years ago

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Sicktember 2022: Day 3

Prompt: Painkillers

Fandom: B.lack B.utler

Wordcount: 2,003

Summary: W.ill has had a headcold for 2 weeks and counting, defying all G.rell's attempts to provide a remedy. She finds a way to get through to him anyway.

Comments: Historical accuracy < Rule of cool/sexy/funny/convenient for me personally

CW: None

It was one of those lovely spring days where the breeze blew cool and sweet with the scent of flowers, the sun shone merrily upon the picnicking couples in the fields and sparkled deceptively on the waters of the Thames, and absolutely nobody died. The death toll always dropped in spring; it was too warm for people to freeze to death and too cool for them to succumb to heat exhaustion or find themselves tempted by chill waters. Grell sighed and flipped through her notebook, her gloves making a quiet hushing sound across the paper. Nothing. Not one single soul on her to-die list.

There was nothing of interest on her desk, either. How could there be, when she spent so little time at it? It was virtually indistinguishable from every other desk on the floor, with a standard issue pen stand (boring), an array of stamps (boring), and a few sheets of letterhead for memos (boring).

Despite the lack of work, the floor was mostly deserted, the reason for which being the dark, closed door that had teased Grell for the better part of two weeks. The gold nameplate gleamed, engraved letters spelling out the name of her beloved in tidy capitals: William Spears. (Upper management had foregone the “T”). He’d kept himself locked away behind that door, shirking his duties as supervisor (hence the barren office), to avoid spreading around the nasty springtime cold he’d managed to catch. Another gift from upper management, if she had to guess, courtesy of their mandatory weekly meetings. Will appeared every hour or so to check his inbox, a muffler wrapped around his mouth. Grell had waited for him a few times just to indulge in his presence and maybe exchange a few words, but he was always quick to slip back behind his door.

With a sigh, Grell got up and perched herself on the edge of Ronald’s desk, tossing her hair over shoulder when he looked up to acknowledge her. “What’s the protocol if a Reaper dies of boredom?”

He chuckled and leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I don’t know; it’s not in the new employee handbook.”

“Well…” Grell shaped her lips into a pout and blew out a sigh that caused a few papers on Ronald’s desk to flutter. “What about if they die of a broken heart?”

“That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Ronald glanced at Will’s door, then back at Grell. “You’re not the one coughing fit to shake the walls down.”

“Is he still? My poor darling!” Grell slumped over, draping herself across Ronald’s desk. “No more details, I beg, or I shall simply perish from despair!” She had, of course, heard Will coughing, as even the thick wood of his door couldn’t completely muffle the sound of some of his nastier fits. It still hurt to hear about it. Will should have been at home in bed, with a certain comely redhead at his beck and call.

“Y’know,” said Ronald thoughtfully, “I’ve never heard of a cold lasting this long. It's been, what, 12, 13 days now? It's got to be overwork."

“You’re teasing me,” Grell whined, throwing her forearm over her eyes. “There’s got to be something I can do.”

“Well, what have you tried?”

“I brought him tea last week when this all started, and lozenges a few days after that, and then he started locking his door.”

Ronald laughed. “Tough luck! And you’re sure he’s the man of your dreams? Even that butler has a sort of, I dunno—” he waved a hand “—dash to him.”

“Of course he is!” Grell drew herself up again, clasping her hands over her heart. “That ice cold demeanor sends chills down my spine. I long to be the one to melt that frozen heart! If any—”

The sound of a door opening halted her speech and she vaulted off Ronald’s desk, hurried along by his whispers of “go, go, go!” Ronald’s desk was far closer to Will’s office than her own, and she was upon him in a few steps, sliding her arm between his chest and his inbox in the nick of time. His hand bumped her shoulder and then dropped, a congested sigh emanating from somewhere behind his muffler. “Yes, what is it?”

The low rasp of his voice sent tingles up and down her spine. She squirmed and bit her lip, staring up at him. Her poor darling! Even with half his face hidden, he was plainly miserable. His eyes were all red, tears brimming and spilling down his cheeks. “Well,” she said. Well, indeed. What was the plan? She glanced over at Ronald but he, that traitor, had his nose buried in some paperwork, innocent as a lamb. “Do you need anything?” she asked, facing Will again.

He glared down at her with dark-shadowed eyes, one eyebrow twitching in obvious irritation. “As a matter of fact, yes. Your report on the incident with the Hapgood family was d—” He broke off and buried his face in his sleeve, overtaken by a coughing fit that made her wince. He really didn’t sound any better despite having been ill for so long. He stopped after an agonizing moment and made a small noise of discomfort that left Grell’s chest burning and her palms aching from how tightly she had clenched her fists. Will slipped a hand under his glasses, knocking them slightly askew, and held it there for a moment, fingertips at his temples. “The report was due three days ago,” he said, and how terribly thin and strained his voice sounded!

“I can’t focus," Grell said. “Not with you like this, my dear.”

“I’m not your dear.” Will dropped his hand, his glasses sliding neatly back into place on the bridge of his nose. “Kindly get back to work or…” Whatever threat he was presumably going to make died at the feet of a short, clipped sneeze. “Just get back to work. Please.”

Grell slunk back to Ronald’s desk in abject defeat, feeling a little sick herself now. She braced her palms against the rounded corner of the dark wood and hung her head, tracing her tongue over the backs of her teeth.

“How’d it go?” Ronald asked. The brightness in his tone was noticeably strained.

“Oh, the usual,” said Grell. “He told me to get back to work. And…” She hesitated. The interaction had gone terribly and somehow relaying it to Ronald felt like a final knife in the gut. She prevailed. He was expecting her to, after all. And maybe he could still help. “He said ‘please.’”

Ronald hissed through his teeth. Grell looked up to find him wincing. “Poor sod must be feeling wretched. Can’t say I blame him, though. He looks like he has a nasty headache.”

“You think so?”

“Well, to be honest, I’d be more surprised if he didn’t.”

“Hm.” Grell shifted, perching once more on the corner of the desk. “What helps with a headache?”

“I dunno.” Ronald shrugged. “Ice? Peace and quiet? Rest?”

Grell ran a hand through her hair and groaned theatrically, her eyes glued to Will’s office door. “It’s not like I can force him to take a sick day.”

Ronald was quiet for a long moment, so long that Grell stopped staring at the door and looked to make sure he was alright. He sighed when she finally caught his eye and flashed his characteristic smile. “Alright, look.” She raised her eyebrows. “The girls down in Temporal Acquisitions have something, kind of an under-the-table situation, you understand.”

“Oh?” Who knew the Temporal Acquisitions department could be anything short of mind-numbingly dull?

“It’s a type of anodyne, technically hasn’t been invented yet. But it works on little aches and pains.”

Grell was already batting her eyelashes.

After a bit of negotiation, Grell tried the handle of Will’s door with her hip, a tea tray balanced on her palms. It opened, which was a relief, if not exactly reassuring. He really couldn’t have been feeling well if he had forgotten to lock his door. How was he even getting any work done in this state?

Grell paused in the doorway and sized him up. He glared at her over the tops of his glasses, then dropped his head again, scribbling away on a sheet of paper. “If it can’t go in my inbox, I don’t want to hear about it,” he snapped, congestion thickening his words.

“Is that anyway to speak to your savior?” Grell shut the door with her foot and set the tea tray down directly on top of Will’s paperwork.

“I don’t—” He sat back in his chair and started to cough. Looking furious, he covered his mouth with the back of his hand and cleared his throat forcefully. “I don’t care to know what you mean by that. Leave my office at once.”

“Just try the tea, won’t you?”

“I have work to do. As do you.” Will’s eyes fell shut for a moment, brow furrowing, and he took a few shallow breaths. The tea sloshed in its cup, a few droplets spilling onto the saucer. He was shaking.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Grell snapped. She hadn’t bargained away her next few days off for no reason, dammit. Ronald had surreptitiously passed her two reddish tablets in exchange. Whether they were effective once crushed up in hot black tea was anyone’s guess, but getting Will to drink that would be hard enough. If she wanted him to take the tablets on their own, she’d probably have to wrestle him into submission and force them down his throat. Hm, a wrestling match with Will. Now there was a pleasant little thought… Wait. She was supposed to be annoyed. She was annoyed. “I’m trying to help you.”

“If your tea is half as shoddy as your field work, I'm quite certain I don’t want it.” The insult came with none of the usual venom, almost as though Will was acting on reflex alone. The ensuing coughing fit left him slumped in his chair, eyes half lidded.

“Just drink it. It’s getting cold.”

“I told you, I don’t want—"

“Please. I really am worried about you. Ronald too. I haven’t spoken to the others, but I’m sure they are as well.”

“It’s against regulations for a manager to accept gifts from—”

Grell cut him off with a laugh. She couldn’t help it. It was really that simple? “It’s not a gift. It’s all from the break room. All I did was put it together and bring it.”

“Favors are also—”

“Goodness, Will, if it’s such an issue, I'll keep my mouth shut. And if I don’t, you can tell upper management that I’m lying. I have enough strikes on my record, they’ll surely believe you over me.”

He looked at her, somehow both sharp and bleary-eyed. There was no color in his cheeks. “Fine.”

“Really?” Her eyes flitted between his own and the cup. He sighed, spots of blood gleaming on his chapped lips, and took a sip. Perhaps she was only imagining it, but some of the tension seemed to leave his face. She beamed at him, placing her hands over her heart. “I hope it helps. I hope you’re never ill again and I hope you’re free this Saturday so we can have a picnic together.” She turned to go, that happy fantasy opening up before her. They could go midmorning and she could wear a red dress and he could wear a red cravat to match.

“Grell?”

She froze with her fingers on the door handle and turned over her shoulder to look at him. Still terribly pale, still breathing loud with congestion, still glassy-eyed and pink around the nose and upper lip. “Yes?”

He flushed up, red spilling into his cheeks. “I want that report on the Hapgoods by tomorrow morning at the latest.”

She smiled at him, warmth blooming in her chest. “Yes, my dear.” And she went out, shutting the door behind her.

#sicktember 2022 #ethereous writes

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years ago

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Doubting the Story of Exodus

By Teresa Watanabe Los Angeles Times religion writer April 13, 2001

It’s one of the greatest stories ever told: A baby is found in a basket adrift in the Egyptian Nile and is adopted into the pharaoh’s household. He grows up as Moses, rediscovers his roots and leads his enslaved Israelite brethren to freedom after God sends down 10 plagues against Egypt and parts the Red Sea to allow them to escape. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and, under the leadership of Joshua, conquer the land of Canaan to enter their promised land. For centuries, the biblical account of the Exodus has been revered as the founding story of the Jewish people, sacred scripture for three world religions and a universal symbol of freedom that has inspired liberation movements around the globe. But did the Exodus ever actually occur? On Passover last Sunday, Rabbi David Wolpe raised that provocative question before 2,200 faithful at Sinai Temple in Westwood. He minced no words. “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all,” Wolpe told his congregants. Wolpe’s startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua’s fabled military campaigns never occurred—archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible. Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan—modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel—whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites who took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt—explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges. “Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we’ve broken the news very gently,” said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America’s preeminent archeologists.

Dever’s view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but “no one would do that today,” he says. The old emphasis on trying to prove the Bible—often in excavations by amateur archeologists funded by religious groups—has given way to more objective professionals aiming to piece together the reality of ancient lifestyles. But the modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua’s conquests ever occurred. In the hottest controversy today, Herzog also argued that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described as grand and glorious in the Bible, was at best a small tribal kingdom. In a new book this year, “The Bible Unearthed,” Israeli archeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University and archeological journalist Neil Asher Silberman raised similar doubts and offered a new theory about the roots of the Exodus story. The authors argue that the story was written during the time of King Josia of Judah in the 7th century BC—600 years after the Exodus supposedly occurred in 1250 BC—as a political manifesto to unite Israelites against the rival Egyptian empire as both states sought to expand their territory. Dever argued that the Exodus story was produced for theological reasons: to give an origin and history to a people and distinguish them from others by claiming a divine destiny. Some scholars, of course, still maintain that the Exodus story is basically factual. Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research in Maryland, argued that the evidence falls into place if the story is dated back to 1450 BC. He said that indications of destruction around that time at Hazor, Jericho and a site he is excavating that he believes is the biblical city of Ai support accounts of Joshua’s conquests. He also cited the documented presence of “Asiatic” slaves in Egypt who could have been Israelites, and said they would not have left evidence of their wanderings because they were nomads with no material culture. But Wood said he can’t get his research published in serious archeological journals. “There’s a definite anti-Bible bias,” Wood said. The revisionist view, however, is not necessarily publicly popular. Herzog, Finklestein and others have been attacked for everything from faulty logic to pro-Palestinian political agendas that undermine Israel’s land claims. Dever, a former Protestant minister who converted to Judaism 12 years ago, says he gets “hissed and booed” when he speaks about the lack of evidence for the Exodus, and regularly receives letters and calls offering prayers or telling him he’s headed for hell.

At Sinai Temple, Sunday’s sermon—and a follow-up discussion at Monday’s service—provoked tremendous, and varied, response. Many praised Wolpe for his courage and vision. “It was the best sermon possible, because it is preparing the young generation to understand all the truth about religion,” said Eddia Mirharooni, a Beverly Hills fashion designer. A few said they were hurt—"I didn’t want to hear this,” one woman said—or even a bit angry. Others said the sermon did nothing to shake their faith that the Exodus story is true. “Science can always be proven wrong,” said Kalanit Benji, a UCLA undergraduate in psychobiology. Added Aman Massi, a 60-year-old Los Angeles businessman: “For sure it was true, 100%. If it were not true, how could we follow it for 3,300 years?” But most congregants, along with secular Jews and several rabbis interviewed, said that whether the Exodus is historically true or not is almost beside the point. The power of the sweeping epic lies in its profound and timeless message about freedom, they say. The story of liberation from bondage into a promised land has inspired the haunting spirituals of African American slaves, the emancipation and civil rights movements, Latin America’s liberation theology, peasant revolts in Germany, nationalist struggles in South Africa, the American Revolution, even Leninist politics, according to Michael Walzer in the book “Exodus and Revolution.” Many of Wolpe’s congregants said the story of the Exodus has been personally true for them even if the details are not factual: when they fled the Nazis during World War II, for instance, or, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Daniel Navid Rastein, an Encino medical professional, said he has always regarded the story as a metaphor for a greater truth: “We all have our own Egypts—we are prisoners of something, either alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, overeating. We have to use [the story] as a way to free ourselves from difficulty and make ourselves a better person.” Wolpe, Sinai Temple’s senior rabbi, said he decided to deliver the sermon to lead his congregation into a deeper understanding of their faith. On Sunday, he told his flock that questioning the Jewish people’s founding story could be justified for one reason alone: to honor the ancient rabbinical declaration that “You do not serve God if you do not seek truth.” “I think faith ought not rest on splitting seas,” Wolpe said in an interview. “For a Jew, it should rest on the wonder of God’s world, the marvel of the human soul and the miracle of this small people’s survival through the millennia.” Next year, the rabbi plans to teach a course on the Bible that he says will “pull no punches” in presenting the latest scholarship questioning the text’s historical basis. But he and others say that Judaism has also traditionally been more open to nonliteral interpretations of the text than, say, some conservative Christian traditions. “Among Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, there is a much greater willingness to see the Torah as an extended metaphor in which truth comes through story and law,” said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That’s when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University’s archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank. The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua’s conquests in the 13th century BC and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers. If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys’ final results were published three years ago. The settlement research marked the turning point in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed that Egypt’s voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 BC inscription did mention them in Canaan. Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries BC. Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of the pharaoh’s charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea. And some of the story’s features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at UC Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a “formulaic genre of catastrophe” found in other Near Eastern texts. Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. “People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections,” she said. “That wasn’t considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across.” Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would have meant there were a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, guarded by fortresses along the way. Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said “you’d have to be a bit crazy” to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a swift military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan. But Schiffman, chairman of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, still maintains that a significant number of Israelite slaves fled Egypt for Canaan. “I’m not arguing that archeology proves the Exodus,” he said. “I’m arguing that archeology allows you, in ambiguity, to reach whatever conclusion you want to.” Wood argued that the 600,000 figure was mistranslated and the real number amounted to a more plausible 20,000. He also said the early Israelite settlements and their similarity to Canaanite culture could be explained as the result of pastoralists with no material culture moving into a settled farming life and absorbing their neighbors’ pottery styles and other cultural forms. The scholarly consensus seems to be that the story is a brilliant mix of myth, cultural memories and kernels of historical truth. Perhaps, muses Hendel, a small group of Semites who escaped from Egypt became the “intellectual vanguard of a new nation that called itself Israel,” stressing social justice and freedom. Whatever the facts of the story, those core values have endured and inspired the world for more than three millenniums—and that, many say, is the point. “What are the Egypts I need to free myself from? How does the story inspire me in some way to work for the freedom of all?” asked Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades. “These are the things that matter—not whether we built the pyramids.”

Teresa Watanabe Teresa Watanabe covers education for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the Times in 1989, she has covered immigration, ethnic communities, religion, Pacific Rim business and served as Tokyo correspondent and bureau chief. She also covered Asia, national affairs and state government for the San Jose Mercury News and wrote editorials for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. A Seattle native, she graduated from USC in journalism and in East Asian languages and culture.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html

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Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua – there is no evidence any of them ever lived

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

Unearthing the True Origins of the Bible   – interview with Dr. Andrew Henry

#Exodus #Moses

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my-lady-knight · 4 years ago

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Favorite Reads of 2020

I take back everything I said last year about how 2019 was a comparatively bad reading year for me. 2020 was even worse. I only read 48 books, I could barely focus on reading even when I did find a book I liked, and, just like last year, I ended up with fewer favorites than usual. Starting in August I’ve been having trouble reading any written media that isn’t TOG fic. And some of my eagerly awaited releases by favorite authors ended up being disappointments (Deeplight by Frances Hardinge and Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee).

2020—the year that keeps on giving.

I sincerely hope 2021 will be a better year in all respects, including my reading habits, but, as with everything else, who knows.

Regardless, here’s my list of favorite reads of 2020, in chronological order of when I read them:

Network Effect by Martha Wells

I’d read the first four Murderbot Diaries novellas when they first came out and enjoyed them, but I didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with them. Maybe because they were novellas, and too short to get fully invested? Possibly. As it turns out, Network Effect is the novel-length fifth entry in the Murderbot Diaries that turned me into full-on squeeing fan—SecUnit, aka Murderbot, continues to be its delightfully acerbic, antisocial self, SPOILER makes another appearance and oh how I’d missed this character, the supporting cast is fun and endearing, and the novel-length story means there’s time and space for the brand-new corporate espionage/colonization/alien civilization murder mystery to unfold and spread its wings. (Sounds like a Sanctuary Moon plot tbh). SecUnit is possibly my favorite non-human fictional character atm, and I am now fully on-board for every and any new story in the series.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

When I first heard about this book and read the words “time travel romance”, I immediately went, “Nope, not gonna read.” I don’t like reading time travel stories, and honestly, I was imagining it to be something like The Time Traveler’s Wife, which granted I haven’t read but also sounds like it’d be the opposite of my cup of tea.

And then I went to a reading where Amal and Max took turns reading chapters – letters written by Red and Blue, enemy agents who repeatedly taunt and thwart the other’s plans to ensure their side is the one to win the time war and who can’t resist smugly outlining just how they’re staying one step ahead of the other – and the prose was witty and gorgeous and clever and intricate, and Red and Blue were snarky and arrogant and talented and fun. I had to read it. And I ended up loving it, this enemies-to-lovers story that is a meld of fantasy and science fiction such that they’re indistinguishable from the other, where the past is as equally fantastical and alien and imaginary as the future, where Red and Blue’s power play transforms into something different and scarier and more intimate than either of them imagined.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers has done it again, writing a gentle, hopeful story about humans working together out of a share a love and fascination for scientific exploration and wonder for all the possibilities the entirety of space can hold. With the advent of both space travel and technology that alters human physiology to allow them to survive otherwise inhospitable environments, a team of four astronauts and scientists have embarked on a mission to ecologically survey four distant planets and the life forms that inhabit them, from the microscopic to the multicellular—not to conquer, but to record and to learn and to share the gathered knowledge with the rest of Earth. In the meantime, lightyears away, Earth is going through decades without them, and the four of them must also contend with a planet that may have forgotten their existence—or that’s abandoned the entire space and scientific exploration program.

Reading Becky Chambers is the literary equivalent of sitting down with a warm mug of my favorite tea on a bad day – I always feel better at the end and like I can imagine a future where humanity does all the wonderful things we’re capable of doing.

A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

I started reading this book right as NYC was gearing up to go into lockdown, which should have made this a terrible choice to continue reading since part of the premise is that a combo of multiple stochastic terror attacks and a brand-new, deadly plague upend the world as everyone knows it by causing the U.S. to pass laws that keep people physically apart in public for their own safety and make concerts, theatre, and any other kind of artistic gathering obsolete.

But that’s largely just the set-up, and the real story is that of Luce Cannon, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who played the last major concert in the before times who twenty years later performs in illegal underground concerts, and Rosemary, a younger music-lover who’s only lived in the after-times, and who’s taken a new job scouting out talent to add to the premier virtual entertainment company’s roster of simulated concerts.

It’s a love letter to live music and what it feels like to connect and build community via music in unusual and strange and scary times, the energy involved in making music for yourself, for an audience, exploring the world around you, imagining and advocating for a better tomorrow, and embracing the fear, the possibility, and the power of change, both good and bad. This was the book I needed to read at the beginning of the pandemic, and I’m thankful I ended up doing so.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edited by John Joseph Adams and Carmen Maria Machado

When I end up loving half of the stories in an anthology and greatly enjoying all but two of the rest, that’s the equivalent of a literary blue moon for me. My favorites included the following;

"Pitcher Plant" by Adam-Troy Castro

"Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women" by Theodore McCombs

"Variations on a Theme from Turandot" by Ada Hoffmann

"Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good" by LaShawn M. Wanak

"The Kite Maker" by Brenda Peynado

"The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" by P. Djèlí Clark

"Dead Air" by Nino Cipri

"Skinned" by Lesley Nneka Arimah

"Godmeat" by Martin Cahill

"On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

No one is more surprised than me that Harrow is on this list, given that I am one of approximately three people in the universe who did not unequivocally love Gideon the Ninth.

And yet the sequel worked for me.

Maybe because this time I already knew and was used to the way the world and the Houses worked, and I knew to not take anything I read for granted because I could be guaranteed to have the rug pulled out from under me without even realizing. Maybe Harrow’s countdown/amnesia mystery worked better for me than Gideon’s locked room mystery. Maybe the cast of characters was more manageable and fewer of them were getting murdered left and right before I got a chance to get used to them (and some of them even came back!) Maybe it’s that Harrow blew open the potential and possibilities Gideon hinted at and capitalized on just how fucking weird and mind-blowing the whole premise is in a way that felt incredibly and viscerally satisfying.

Also SPOILER happens three-quarters of the way through. That was pretty fucking awesome.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

P. Djélí Clark is a master of melding history and fantasy in ways that are in turn imaginative and clever (his fantastical alternate-history, early 20th-century Egyptian novel A Master of Djinn is one of the books I’m most looking forward to in 2021), while also using fantasy to be frank and incisive about the history of American antiblack racism (as in the above linked story in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019). Ring Shout combines the late-nineteenth and early 20th-century history of the rise and normalization of the KKK with Lovecraftian supernatural horror, in which the release of The Birth of a Nation summoned literal monsters (called Ku Kluxes) that became part of the KKK’s ranks. Maryse Boudreaux is a Black woman who’s part of a grassroots organization hunting both the monsters and the human members in order to keep the Klan at bay. However, there’s soon to be another summoning ritual atop Stone Mountain that will unleash even more Ku Kluxes into the world, and Maryse and her friends are running out of time to prevent it from happening.

Maryse is a fantastic character, as are her two friends—brash, unapologetic Sadie and WWI veteran, weapons expert Chef—her mentor and leader of the Ring Shout group Nana Jean, and all the other members of the group who work and fight together as a team and a family. Maryse’s past and the journey she goes on in the book to uncover the truth and stop the summoning is harrowing and heart-stopping, the supernatural elements are both horrific in and of themselves while also undergirding the real-life horror of the KKK and the hatred they engender. It’s smart, it’s fun, it’s eye-opening, and it’s also being turned into a TV show starring KiKi Layne. It’s really, really good.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

“Stick to the brief.” This is the maxim given to Dietz and all the other soldiers who join the war against Mars, where soldiers are broken down into light to travel to and from their assigned battlefields instantaneously. Only Dietz isn’t experiencing the jumps like everyone else – Dietz, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, has become unstuck in time and is experiencing all the battles in the mission briefs out of chronological order, to the point that Dietz starts to build a picture of a war and a reality that’s been sold to Dietz and everyone else on Earth as pure fiction.

I’ve always appreciated Kameron Hurley’s stories, but this is the first book where she fully succeeded at writing the book she set out to write—it’s fast-paced science fiction thriller in the form of a loaded gun that takes brutal aim at late-stage capitalism, modern military warfare and the dehumanization of everyone involved on all sides, the greed of ungovernable governing corporations, nationalistic and military propaganda, the mythology of citizenship and inalienable rights, and it’s viscerally bloody and violent without being grotesque in the way all of Kameron Hurley’s books are. Especially important for me, I loved that Dietz went through the entire book not being gendered in any way, shape, or form (those last five pages didn’t exist, what are you talking about), and I love in general that Kameron Hurley is committed to writing non-male characters who aren’t less violent or fucked-up or morally superior to men just because they’re not men.

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Middle grade is a hard sell for me these days, as are books in verse, and I wouldn’t have known this book existed if it weren’t for the Ignyte Award nomination list earlier this year. As it turns out, this book, the story of Jude, a pre-teen girl who wants to be an actress who leaves Syria and the encroaching civil war with her mom to go live in the U.S. with her uncle and his white wife and their daughter while her dad and older brother stay behind, is full of beauty, curiosity, humor, confusion, grief, pain, and joy, and the poetic prose is both lyrical, nuanced, and perfectly fitted to Jude’s voice. I devoured this book in one day, which is the quickest amount of time it took me to read any book this year, including novellas.

Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram

The first book Darius the Great Is Not Okay was one of my favorite books in 2018, and I’m ecstatic that the sequel is equally as amazing.

It’s been approximately half a year since Darius went to Iran, met his maternal grandparents in person for the first time, and found his best friend in Sohrab, and in that time he’s come out as gay, joined the soccer team, got an internship at his favorite tea shop, and started dating for the first time. Darius is also working through some things though—when and if he wants to have sex with his boyfriend, his grandfather’s worsening illness, his dad’s recent depressive episode, his emotionally distant paternal grandmothers on his coming for an extended stay, the fact that he’s getting to know and growing closer with one of his teammates who’s best friends with Darius’s years-long bully, and a bunch else.

Darius the Great Deserves Better has the same tender and vulnerable emotional intimacy as the first book, more conversations over tea, new instances involving the mortifying ordeal of being a cis guy with a penis, even more Star Trek metaphors, and so much growth for Darius as he works through a lot of hard situations and feelings, and strengthens his relationships with all of the people in his life he loves and cares about. I can’t think of any other book that’s like these two books, and I love and treasure them dearly.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

I had zero awareness of this book until a bunch of SFF authors started praising it on Twitter a couple months before the release date, and I was intrigued enough to get a copy from the library. I loved this book. I happened to be reading it right at the time of the presidential election, and it phenomenally served the purpose of desperately-needed distraction from the agony of waiting out the ballot counts.

It’s book about the power behind borders, citizenship, exploitation, and imperialism, set in a late-late-stage capitalist future, in which a prodigy invented the means to access and travel to slightly divergent parallel universes to grab resources and data – but only if the other universe’s version of “you” isn’t there. It’s the story of a woman named Cara – poor, brown, born in the wastelands outside the shelter, security, and citizenship privileges of Wiley City – who’s comfortably employed to travel to all the parallel worlds no one else can visit, because all her counterparts in those worlds are dead from one of the myriad ways Cara herself could have died growing up. It’s the story of Cara traversing the muddied boundaries between her old life and her new one, the similarities and differences between her own life and that of her counterparts, as well as the figures of power who defined and shaped her and her counterparts’ existences, and solving a mystery involving the unexplained deaths of several of her counterparts and the man who invented multiverse technology.

It’s a story of the permeability of selfhood and self-determination, and complexity of power dynamics of all kinds – interpersonal, familial, collegial, intimate – and the interplay between violence and stability and identity, and how one can be both powerful and powerless in the same dynamic. It’s a story with literary sensibilities that is unequivocally science fiction, written with laser-precise prose that flays Cara open and puts her back together again.

I worry this description makes this book sound dry and removed when reading this book made me feel like I was coming alive every time I delved back into it. This is a book I cannot wait to reread again to experience the brilliance and skill and thoughtfulness and emotion of Micaiah Johnson’s writing. I have no clue what, if anything, she’s writing next, but I have a new favorite author.

Honorable Mentions

Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Stormsong by C. L. Polk

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (I feel bad putting it here and not in the first list – it is undeniably a modern classic and a brilliantly crafted book! But I had zero interest in any of the Italy chapters, and I found the way he finally figured out how to access fairy magic by essentially making himself mad to be both disappointing and narratively unsatisfying.)

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

For my yearly stats on books written by POC authors, in 2020 I read a total of 24 books (one of which was co-authored by a white author), which is fewer than last year (30). However, because I also read fewer books this year overall, this is the first year ever that I achieved exactly 50-50 parity between books written by POC and white authors. I honestly wasn’t expecting this to happen, as I stopped paying deliberate attention somewhere around April or May. Looking over my Goodreads, the month of September ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting, since that’s when I read several books by POC authors in a row for the Ignyte Award nomination period. But also, it does look like the five or so years of purposefully aiming for 50-50 parity have materially affected my reading habits, by which I mean even when I’m not keeping my year’s count in mind, I’m still more likely to pick up a book by a POC author than I was five years ago when I had never kept track at all. My goal for next year is to once again achieve 50-50 parity and to not backslide.

#long post #book recommendations #book recs #favorite books of 2020

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al-mayriti · 6 years ago

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SPANISH ACCENTS

First of all, thanks to @geetalkstv for the suggestion, you are amazing :)

So, as you all know, Spanish is spoken all around the world (2nd most spoken language behind Chinese), and, of course, that means it has a lot of accents. What I’m gonna do, is go through each accent I can identify, although I tend to mix some Latin American ones, so bear with me, I’m trying. Also, to avoid confusion, I’ll name the Spanish spoken in Spain “Castilian”, because well, that’s how we usually call the language here, to not belittle the other languages spoken in Spain.

I’ll start with the different accents found in Spain, and then I’ll jump to Latin America. I’ll try to find examples of all of them so all of you non-Spanish speakers can try and identify all the accents :)

SPAIN’S ACCENTS:

- Gallego (Galician): One of my favourite accents, it is commonly found in Galicia and some parts of Asturias. It is characterized by sounding really musical and also kinda relaxing. They always stress the final part of the phrase, so, as I said, their way of speaking is very melodic. As an example, I’ll introduce you to Sabela Ramil, one of OT 2018 contestants (I’m gonna put a lot of OT contestants here, I’m sorry), from As Pontes (A Coruña) (by the way if you are interested in OT and you don’t understand Spanish, here is a Youtube channel with compilations that have English subs). As long as grammar and words go, they tend to do diminutives in -iño / -iña (we use diminutives a lot, they don’t necessarily mean something is smaller, they have various meanings depending on the context) and they tend to not use durative verb tenses; like for example, when they want to say “today I was at the park”, in Spanish we would use the “recent past”, so “hoy he estado en el parque”, but a Galician would say “hoy estuve en el parque”. Argentinians are also like this.

-Vasco (Basque / Euskera): Basque, no shocker, is an accent found in the Basque Country and parts of Navarra / Navarre. It sounds kinda “rough” and it doesn’t help the stereotype of Basques being really rugged. Here is Karra Elejalde, an actor and probably the most basque person that exists. In this video he is talking about probably the biggest Spanish film of the decade, “Ocho Apellidos Vascos” (”Eight Basque Surnames”), excellent in depicting stereotypes, prejudices and cultural differences between Euskadi and Andalusia. It is amazing, I recommend it 100%. About grammar and stuff, there’s not really much to comment, they sometimes use Basque words, but the same could be said with Galicians and Catalan-speaking peoples. Basques also tend to swear more than your average Spaniard.

-Catalan: This is the accent found in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands (although I can distinguish people from the province of Alicante, they kinda speak like they had a sore voice, here is an example of another OT contestant, runner-up Alba Reche; I don’t put it in its separate accent because it is really specific, and I might be able to distinguish it bc my father’s from Alicante, but it’s not really that distinguishable). About the Catalan accent, it is really nasal-like, that’s the most accurate description I can give it. Just really nasal. Here is Àngel Llacer (the three people in the video are Catalonian, so you can see the different degrees of the accent, Àngel is the interviewed), a TV personality (and a theatrical actor, I saw him a month ago in La Cage Aux Folles!) with the heaviest Catalan accent I know of. Again, they tend to mix some Catalan words with normal speaking, and something they tend to do is “pronominalize” the names, like you do in French and Catalan. Like, for example, when saying “I told everything to Mireia” a Spaniard would say “Le dije todo a Mireia”, while a Catalan-speaking person would say “Le dije todo a la Mireia”. They also emphasise a lot the letter “l”, and actually distinguish between the sounds “ll” and “y”, virtually indistinguishable in Castilian, and, similar to the Galician accent, tend to accentuate the end of the phrase, although it’s less melodical.

-Aragonés (Aragonese): Spoken in Aragón, it is kinda like the love-child between the Basque accent and the Manchego accent I’ll speak about later. Their diminutives are -ico / -ica, just like in Manchego, and it sounds rough and rural, just like Basque and Manchego. Here is the most Aragonese or “maño” looking person I know, Miki Nadal, a TV personality and comedian.

-Madrileño: My accent! I’ve already talked about this accent previously, but it doesn’t hurt to revise how it sounds and stuff. For me it sounds kinda “ghettoish”, like really urban and a bit rough. We like to emphasize a lot the letter “j” (pronounced like a very hard “h” or a “kh”), from there we have one of our signature words, “ejque” instead of “es que” (”the thing is”). Our other signature word is “mazo”, which means “a lot” and we use for everything. I feel we also use a lot of synonyms for “dude” like “macho”, “chaval”, “tronco”, etc. We also tend to just don’t say a lot of sounds, just to “economize” the language, just like Andalusians and Manchegos. As an example, here is Cristina Pedroche, you’ve already seen her in the Miki Nadal clip. She’s from the district of Vallecas, here in Madrid, and she is really madrileña (the Rayo Vallecano is the football team of Vallecas). The way she speaks reminds me a lot of Hajar Brown from Skam España, note that nearly everyone in the show speak in madrileño accent.

-Manchego: Partly my accent! (I speak in a mix between madrileño and manchego bc my family has heavy manchego accents although I’m from Madrid). Manchego accent is basically used to mock rural people, it is the classic kinda “redneck” accent, you know what I’m talking about. It is actually similar to Madrileño in its cadence, but the accent thrives in diminutives with “-ico” / “-ica” (which is how I make diminutives btw), those are the staple of manchego accent. Here is manchego comedian José Mota doing one of his skits. Note that the accent here is exaggerated, although I’ve met some irl manchegos that sound (and act) really similar to him. José Mota himself is manchego, from Montiel, a city in the province of Ciudad Real. Like madrileños, manchegos also tend to “economise” the words, for example, instead of pronouncing “todos” (”everyone” / “all”) they would pronounce “tós” (this is a really common thing to happen in all the southern part of Spain, from Madrid down). Another thing, that also happens in the madrileño accent, is the omission of the preposition “de” (”of”). An example of this is the title of the series of skits like the one in the link, about the manchego superhero called “El Tío la Vara”, (”The Dude of the Stick”). In “normal” Castilian it would be “El Tío de la Vara”.

- Andaluz (Andalusian): Andalusian is one of the most important accent, as it is used by the most populous Autonomous Community in Spain, Andalucía. It even has its own script, here is the Twitter page of the organization that wants to make it official. It is probably the most distinct accent, characterized by its own cadence, economizing the language more than Madrileño or Manchego accents, and seseo, present also in all of Latin America. Basically, the soft c and the z are pronounced in Castilian like the English “th”, but in Andalusia, other parts of Spain I’ll talk about later and all of Latin America, they are pronounced like an “s”. Andalusians also make the diminutives in “-illo”, and sometimes change the “l” with “r” at the end of the word, for example, in saying “the van”, instead of pronouncing “el camión”, they would pronounce “er camió”. They have a lot of words endemic to Andalusia, but probably the most used one is the “illo”, used as “dude” or something like that. They also use a lot the English “h” sound, normally in substitution for the Spanish “j”. Finally, keep in mind within Andalucía they distinguish various accents, I can’t but Andalusians can. I only know that in some parts they do ceceo, the opposite from seseo, i.e., pronouncing “s” like the “th”. There are a lot of famous Andalusians (you might know Antonio Banderas for example), but I’m going back to OT to show you Julia Medina, from San Fernando, in Cádiz (she sometimes changes into her character “Julia de Pozuelo”, and she does a preppy madrileño accent, try to spot it!)

-Murciano (Murcian): Murciano is my favourite accent ever even though I don’t understand what they are saying half of the time. Anyways, this accent is used in Murcia, and also, for what I have seen (during summer I go to a murcian-speaking place) also in the province of Almería, in Andalusia, and other near places. It is also called “panocho”, and it has its own dictionary. It is kinda like the evolution of Andaluz, to the point that, as I can say, without practice it can sound inintelligible. It is really similar to Andaluz, but it tends to end words with an open vowel sound like “a” or “e” or something in between, and never notes plurals. Also, their diminutives are done with -ico. For example, if you wanted to say “the youngsters”, in Castilian you would say “los muchachos”, but in Murcian you would pronounce it something similar to “loh mushashicæ”. Their signature phrase is “hostia pijo”, “acho pijo”, or just “pijo” / “acho”, they use it for everything. Xuso Jones is a Murcian singer, he doesn’t have as thick as an accent, but here is another video I found with common people from the city of Lorca speaking about their accent (the beginning is an ad, I don’t know why either).

-Canario (Canarian): And we get to what I like to call “the bridge between Spain and Latin America”. The Canarian, spoken in the Canary Islands, is the closest latin-american accent you can get in Spain. In fact, I have sometimes mistaken a Canarian for a Latin-American and viceversa. It has seseo, the cadence present in Latin-American countries, and also use voseo, the other characteristic of Latin-American accent. Voseo is a little complicated to explain, but I’ll try. In Castilian we have two second person pronouns, tú / vosotros, and usted / ustedes. We use the first ones always, while the second ones are only reserved for talking to authority figures and elders, it sounds kinda old-fashion. Well, in the Canary Islands and Latin-America, they almost always use “usted” and “ustedes”. The thing is, that means the verb forms also change, as “usted” and “ustedes” have the same declension as the 3º person verbs. So, for example, the translation of “are you (in plural) gonna finish that cake?” in Castilian would be: “¿Vosotros os vais a terminar la tarta?”, but in Canarian and Latin-American it would be: “¿Ustedes van a terminarse la tarta?”. So yeah, it gets a bit complicated. In the Canary Islands, the voseo is generally only used in plural, but they do have some pronouns in singular that are changed. They also tend to use a lot the English “h” sound. Apart from that, Canarians have words with “guanche” origins, that is, words that come from the pre-hispanic inhabitants of the islands, being the most famous Canarian word “guagua” (”bus”). Amongst the Canarians, let me introduce you OT contestant Marilia Monzón, from Gáldar, in Gran Canaria island.

LATIN-AMERICAN ACCENTS:

Before I start, I’ve said it before, but I can’t distinguish all of them. I know there are different accents even within the different countries (I’m aware of the “paisa” accent although I can’t distinguish it) but here I will only talk about the ones I can clearly or kinda distinguish. I’m sorry, I’m just a dumb Spaniard :(

-General Latin-American: This encompasses basically all the other countries I won’t talk about individually because I can’t differentiate their accents. I know every country has specific words they use, for example in Peru they have a lot of Quechua words implemented in their language, same with Bolivia and Aymara. Also, the two distinct characteristics of latin-american accent for me, apart from the cadence, is the seseo and the voseo I’ve talked about. They also have some Andalusian characteristics, especially the economizing the language part. As an example of this accent, here is Boris Izaguirre, Venezuelan, and Shakira, Colombian.

-Mexicano (Mexican): This accent, found in Mexico and also in the majority of latino community in the USA, although depending of the origin of the family it might traces of other accents, is often referred to as “Neutral Spanish” because, well, it really is the most neutral accent. It was used as the universal Spanish dub before they started making a Castilian dub and a Latin-American dub (I’ll talk about dubbing at the end of the post), and it is probably the most approachable for new learners. They have all the latin-american accent characteristics, although their cadence is less “musical”, and they use words like “wey”, probably their most characteristic word, that can mean anything. I also know that here and other Latin-American countries, “coger” doesn’t mean “to pick up / catch” as in Castilian, but “fuck”. So yeah, a bit tricky there. Even though there are two dubs for films nowadays, there has been exceptions, like the pixar film Coco, only dubbed in Mexican Spanish for obvious reasons. Here is the trailer from the film in Spanish.

-Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican): This Spanish accent is similar to the one found in mainland USA, kinda like the lovechild between English and the Cuban Accent, being similar to Cuban, but with a lot of English mixed in, sounding kinda like afro-american English if that makes sense, like the equivalent in Spanish, using a lot of “brother” and stuff like that. Here is Residente from the rap band Calle 13 so you can see what I’m referring to.

-Cubano (Cuban): Really similar to Puerto Rican, they use a lot of “brother” and tend to mix up the “l” and the “r”, giving to their most well-known phrase, “mi amol”, “my love”, in “normal” Spanish it would be “mi amor”. I present you Lucrecia, a Cuban singer famous here in Spain as her feature in the children’s show “Los Lunnis” (kinda like the Spanish Sesame Street).

-Chileno (Chilean); Chilean is weird, because I feel like it’s kinda the lovechild between the standard Latin-American accent and the Argentinian, much less musical than the standard accent, but not as distinct as the Argentinian. It is known as the fastest accent and the least-comprehensible one in all of the Hispanic world, and also they tend to use the word “wea” in, like, everything. Practically the only Chilean I know is the youtuber HolaSoyGermán, whose videos I used to watch a lot when I was little. Now it just gives me so much cringe I couldn’t get pass the intro I’m sorry.

-Argentino (Argentinian): Aaand, finally, we get to probably the most distinct accent in all of the Hispanic World. I’m pretty sure every Hispanic recognizes this accent in a whim. As all of the Argentinian culture does, it has an Italian cadence and tone to it, and it also has some special characteristics. First of all, here voseo is shown its is maximal use, using even the word “vos” for you, a word we don’t use in Spain since like the 1700s or so. Some verbal forms also change, especially when it comes to accentuation, for example, an Argentinian instead of pronouncing “párate” (”stop”) would pronounce “paráte”. Again with the voseo, for example the phrase “You don’t love me”, that in Castilian and I think almost all of Latin-American would be “Tú no me quieres”, in Argentinian is “Vos no me querés”. Another characteristic is that they pronounce the “ll” and “y” sound (the English “j”) like an “sh”, so for example, “take me to the zoo” would sound like “sheváme al zoo” instead of “llévame al zoo”. They also have a lot of distinctive words, like the insult “boludo / boluda” (the Argentinians have the best and most creative insults istg), “ché”, that they use for everything, and others. I know, for example, than “concha”, while in Castilian means “shell”, in Argentinian means “pussy”. One popular Argentinian insult is “la concha de tu madre” (”your mother’s pussy”). So yeah, they are amazing. Of course, in Skam España Joana has this accent, but her mother has actually the heaviest Argentinian accent in all of the cast. Apart from there, here is a clip from a Argentinian telenovela they used to air on Disney Channel when I was about 12 that is now regarded as iconic, Patito Feo (also bonus, the most iconic song ever done is this one, Las Divinas).

So, to end this post, about dubbing. There’s kinda a war between Latin-America and Spain in that regard, everybody thinks their accent is best and the other one’s shit. I’m gonna live some examples from Disney films so you can see the two versions and identify the differences and whatnot:

-Let it go: “Libre Soy” (LA) vs “Suéltalo” (SP)

-Spanish Buzz Lightyear scene in Toy Story 3: In Castilian (he speaks in Andalusian, where Flamenco is from) vs in Latin American (he speaks in a norman Castillian accent)

-I won’t say I’m in love: “No Hablaré de mi Amor” (LA) vs “No Diré que es Amor” (SP)

-Hellfire: “Fuego de Infierno” (LA) vs “Fuego Infernal” (SP)

I hope you liked the post, it was a lot of hard work hehe

Also, if you are Latin-American, please feel free to add accents you can identify!

#spanish accents #accents #typicalspanish #skam españa

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oceandetail06 · 5 years ago

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Next Year Innovative developments by Apple

Apple is considered to be the most innovative company in the world at present. It’s the business to which nearly all others search for guidance. When ever Apple reveals a forward thinking new design language or launches a new product, it generates ripples throughout the marketplace. Suddenly, the whole industry is crafting items in Apple’s look and feel. Nevertheless to state Apple is merely a trend-setter understates the organization’s position as arguably the figurehead of invention in customer technology. Apple isn’t just setting technology trends; Apple’s vision units precedents and starts movements that allow the developments to exist to begin with. As wonderful since it must feel to be Apple in this scenario - and as humbling as it must experience to be the many businesses copying Apple at every change - it’s not absolutely all sunshine and rainbows. Most people can claw the right path to the top of a mountain, but there’s not a lot of stable surface up there. One incorrect step and your toppling back down the mountain, undoing years of the hard work needed to get right up there. I actually don’t want to lower price Apple’s successes in 2018: Apple Pencil program for ipad tablet was a beautiful addition; iOS 12 has provided new life to iPhones as old as the 5S; Apple Watch Series 4 generally is conserving lives; and that’s just a few highlights. Looking back, though, 2018 was a fairly tough year for Apple as certain missteps ended up impacting the company’s bottom line. Among Apple’s most questionable moves in 2018, there’s one I wanted to identify for an important reason: Without second-generation iPhone SE around the corner, it seems Apple has exited the budget flagship market. In fact, I will consider it one step further: I’m certain Apple won’t be delivering any more budget iPhones, and here’s why. Apple’s products portfolio is varied. The business generates revenue from services like iTunes and Apple Music to accessories like AirPods and the Magic Key pad, from home entertainment gadgets like Apple TV 4K to personal processing devices just like the MacBook Pro. Nevertheless product sales for most of these are not that impressive (though Apple’s income unquestionably are). It is definitely the iPhone that accounts for the majority of Apple’s income. Since its debut in 2007, iPhone has pushed Apple’s income to such incredible heights that the business has become the first trillion-dollar firm ever sold. With so a lot of Apple’s revenue riding on the game-changing device, you can wager there would be a significant drop in Apple’s income if people beginning buying less iPhones. And that’s precisely what we’re discovering. After a modest 4th quarter, income for Q12019 - which, to be very clear, is made up of October, November, and December, covering the vacation shopping season - was much lower than Apple actually expected. With the cost of fresh iPhones rising, income would’ve increased also if unit sales experienced only remained constant, but there have been fewer iPhone units sold during the period. The implication is normally that demand offers waned, or it’s feasible there wasn’t very much demand for Apple’s costly new iPhones to begin with. The earliest indicator of trouble was in 2017, the year iPhone X premiered. At a starting price 50 percent greater than the prior year’s baseline model, iPhone X unit sales were reportedly flat although Apple’s income increased. How? Because even though Apple sold approximately the same quantity of products as the year before, the common cost of an iPhone had elevated. When you sell the same number of products but tag up the price, you still visit a bump in revenue. Of course, it’s not just the iPhone that’s gotten more expensive. Apple has elevated selling prices across virtually all of the company’s portfolio. But with the iPhone driving revenue, the implication is this: Whenever iPhone sales and profits remain flat or start to fall, Apple will need to keep raising the price of the iPhone every year to maintain year-over-year income gains. As you can plainly see, it’s not really a coincidence Apple has decided to stop reporting iPhone unit sales publicly. Actually if 2017 was an outlier, the release of new iPhones in the fall is meant to give Apple a shot of income adrenaline in the final stretch, enabling for a solid finish as the business crosses the economic finish line. But also for the second yr in a row, that did not happen. Doesn’t it appear possible, if not likely, that increasing the costs for brand-new iPhones has led to lower demand? In regards to a week ago, Apple CEO sent a document to shareholders. You can browse the document for yourself on Apple’s webpage, but it warns traders that Apple’s 1Q2019 revenue will be $9 billion less than was originally projected. The letter mainly blames China’s overall economy for almost all the year-over-year iPhone income decline while also indicating that individuals remain adapting to the termination of carrier financial assistance. In a recent interview Cook explained many of the same reasons to describe lower-than-anticipated iPhone sales. Beyond slowed development in developing marketplaces and the lack of subsidized pricing through carriers, Cook pointed to iOS 12 and the $29 battery substitute plan seeing that having encouraged users to hold their old iPhones rather than ordering new ones. As you may recall, Apple launched the battery alternative program in late 2017 in wish of masking the stench of the battery controversy, which had garnered allegations of designed obsolescence. According to Cook, many with old iPhones didn't upgrade since they could get brand-new batteries for inexpensive. This would take away the efficiency caps that Apple got imposed to them, restoring their iPhones to their previous glory, especially when paired with iOS 12. In fact, Apple visited lengths to ensure that iOS 12 would make older iPhones faster, so Cook is likely right in hoping the electric battery substitute program and iOS 12 factored in to the weaker sales of 2018 iPhones. Nevertheless, Cook mentioned that complicated trade relations between the US and China was eventually the biggest factor. China represents a huge amount of untapped sales prospect of Apple, so there’s most likely some truth to that, too. You can view the full interview in the video below if you want to hear more of what Cook has to say about it. In the mean time, critics and analysts possess suggested poor iPhone sales are a indication of marketplace saturation; at this stage, most people who would like an iPhone already have one, and that’s a hard hurdle to overcome, specifically with buyers modernizing much less frequently. It’s even certainly possible that Apple valued the 2018 iPhones from the developing markets the company claims to be targeting. After all, if you reside in China and need it a new smartphone, are you going to buy an iPhone XS for $1,000 (¥6800) or more, or are you going to get the most recent Vivo or Xiaomi Android smartphone that’s produced locally and can do essentially nearly anything iPhone XS can do at a portion of the price? And in addition, Cook largely sidestepped this issue of ballooning iPhone prices - an obstacle that we have found across the majority of Apple’s products for that matter - which has been among the primary criticisms of latest iPhones. Latest Asking Price Increases Price boosts for the iPhone used to end up being pretty rare. In fact, after carriers stopped offering subsidized prices on smartphones, forcing us to start paying complete MSRP if we wished to buy brand-new iPhones, we're able to at least count on a constant starting price from calendar year to year. That starting cost used to be $649. With the launch of iPhone 8 in 2017, it leapt to $699, a unsatisfying increase, but it was not too surprising. It had been only a $50 increase after generations of a constant price, a lot of people gave Apple a pass. And, actually at the higher price, iPhone 8 seemed really cheap compared to the $999 price tag on the brand new iPhone X. However apparently, the purchase price increase for iPhone 7 set a precedent because in 2018, the price jumped again. Matching the enhance from iPhone 7 to iPhone 8, the 2018 iPhone lineup began at $749 for iPhone XR. You may argue that iPhone XR is a much better device than iPhone 7 and justifies the excess $100, but value is subjective. While some might say iPhone XR will probably be worth its $749 starting price, especially compared to Apple’s more premium models, many customers will fixate on how each new era of iPhone is more costly than the one before. And at this time, can you blame them? To make matters worse yet, as iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR were being unveiled in stage during Apple’s fall 2018 event, iPhone SE was being discontinued. So not only are iPhones getting a lot more expensive, but Apple has now eliminated the only budget option we had. So if you’re looking to get a fresh iPhone in 2019, there’s very little choice anymore. Buyers are mainly having to simply accept Apple’s higher beginning price in the absence of a true budget iPhone. Naturally, consumers and critics as well are getting more vocal within their demands an iPhone SE successor. Overwhelming Unforeseen Value Apple revealed the iPhone SE , which means Particular Edition, in March 2016 at a particular spring event. Both for consumers and the industry at large, iPhone SE was a very un-Apple device for Apple to release. The iPhone 6 had simply jumped in proportions and received a completely new style from the previous generation. Then iPhone SE was released, featuring a smaller, compact type with its design virtually indistinguishable from the previous-generation iPhone 5. Even more surprising was the fact that iPhone SE remarkably featured the majority of Apple’s up-to-date, front runner-level technologies in spite of the reduced starting price; for $399, you got the same custom A9 processor as iPhone 6S in addition to a 12 MP camera with 4K video recording and a bigger battery. In fact, the just significant compromises were the lack of 3D Touch and the usage of first-generation TouchID instead of the faster second generation. But, again, considering its low starting price (which eventually settled to $349), the iPhone SE provided uncharacteristically great value for a product made by Apple. The challenge was that iPhone SE didn’t turn into a top-selling iPhone. In the course of its lifetime, its defining characteristic was that it provided an affordable point of access to the iOS ecosystem although it eventually gained relatively of a cult pursuing among particular Apple fans. Obviously, after iPhone SE had been the baseline of the iPhone lineup for two years, potential customers were prepared for the customary refresh. Though iPhone SE offered an excellent cost-to-performance relation in 2016, a refresh would connect the overall performance gap that developed as iPhone SE’s A9 processor chip was succeeded and replaced, first by the A10 Fusion chip in iPhone 7, on the other hand by the A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X . Patiently Waiting for Apple's Latest Launches Affirmed, we heard that Apple was working on a fresh version of the spending budget iPhone. Details varied, but the iPhone SE successor - alleged to be called possibly iPhone SE 2 or iPhone X SE (with suffix and modifiers very carefully arranged)- appeared to have the same purpose as the initial, which was to become a compact, low-cost iPhone offering great performance and most of the latest features. Much of the disagreement encircling the naming theme for the iPhone SE 2 was due to unclear stories concerning whether the gadget might retain its iPhone 5-era style or whether it could embrace the new iPhone X visual. Some insisted (or possibly hoped?) iPhone SE 2 would appear to be an iPhone X from the front with a almost bezel-less, edge-to-edge display. These stories were mainly informed by supposed styles for display protectors and cases; if legitimate, the implication was that iPhone SE 2 would have a bezel-much less, notched display equivalent to iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. Of training course, the notch would become among the defining characteristics for 2018 cell phones overall as its was imitated by almost every smartphone manufacturer following the iPhone X debuted in late 2017; nevertheless, for Apple’s purposes, the notch just exists to house biometric sensors for Apple’s proprietary FaceID. Therefore the implication was that iPhone SE 2 would feature FaceID although the high price of FaceID components made it an unlikely inclusion in virtually any budget iPhone. Following these reports, renders were made to show how the device might appear if it turned out to be real. Assuming the case styles and resulting renders were accurate, iPhone SE 2 would’ve been a truly fascinating gadget, the lovechild of the bygone iPhone 5 and the more futuristic iPhone X. Provided Apple could keep creation costs and, by extension, the MSRP down, iPhone SE 2 could’ve easily outsold the original iPhone SE, possibly learning to be a top seller like the original iPhone SE never could. These weren’t simply the pipe dreams of iPhone SE enthusiasts and anyone who wanted cheaper iPhones; reviews from Apple’s own suppliers all but confirmed programs for iPhone SE 2, supplying estimates for possible production schedules and ship dates. In early August 2017, Wistron Corp. - a low-volume manufacturer located in Taiwan that Apple recruits when iPhone demand can be high - was working on expanding its creation base to accommodate a fresh compact Apple smartphone, which many presumed to end up being an updated iPhone SE. After that came a tentative ship day: In late November 2017, Economic Daily News in Taiwan reported Apple had been eyeing a release date in the first half of 2018 for the iPhone SE 2, which would’ve been consistent with the spring release of the initial iPhone SE. January 2018 brought another report of iPhone SE 2 launching in 2018. Shortly thereafter, there was a rumor iPhone SE 2 would include a glass back panel, suggesting the addition of the wireless charging features that the iPhone has had since 2017. Just as rumors pointed to Apple gearing up for the release of a next-generation iPhone SE, Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst with KGI Securities who is known for predicting Apple’s products with uncanny accuracy, planted among the 1st seeds of doubt. In late January 2018, Kuo reported iPhone SE 2 had hardly any chance of being released because Apple had exhausted its assets on the three flagship versions to be released in 2018. Of course, those three models finished up being iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. Nevertheless, rumors persisted - though at a slower pace - in spite of Kuo’s doubt. For instance, there have been specifications and other information on the iPhone SE 2 reported in April 2018. Relating to these leaks, Apple intended to keep creation costs (and, by expansion, the eventual retail price) down by omitting the 3.5mm headphone jack and using iPhone 7’s A10 Fusion chip rather than the A11 Bionic chip found in iPhone 8 and iPhone X. For all intents and reasons, the axe was decisively dropped in July 2018 as BlueFin Research told MacRumors that Apple had nixed all programs to proceed with iPhone SE 2. We’ll probably never know for sure whether iPhone SE 2 was ever actually in the pipeline; however, also if it was planned originally, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an iPhone SE 2 at all. It’s been four a few months since the release of the 2018 iPhones, an event that coincided with iPhone SE being removed from Apple’s lineup, which, in and of itself, allegedly happened because Apple retired its A9 processor chip. So aside from Apple quickly unloading the last iPhone SE units at a discounted $249 price, which took only 24 hours, iPhone SE is gone from Apple’s catalog, and anyone waiting for a next-generation iPhone SE has little cause for hope. In the event that you ask me, the composing is on the wall structure: Apple won’t be making another budget iPhone. No More Budget iPhone? Spending budget smartphones, or smartphones that price roughly $300 or less, are pretty common today. In some cases, these budget devices offer great value for your money. Some of the more recent notable examples include the Moto G6 for $240, LG Stylo 4 for $250, Huawei Mate 20 Lite for $290, and, of course, the amazing Pocophone F1 for $299. If you have a tad more to spend, you can find a used or refurbished Samsung Galaxy S8 for barely over $300. Or you may get the new Nokia 7.1, an Android One gadget with the design and nearly all of the features that top-shelf Android flagships possess for the discount price of $350. I’m not sure where in fact the phrase originated, but I completely agree: “Good cell phones are receiving cheap, and cheap mobile phones are getting good.” Of program, you might’ve noticed that the smartphones mentioned above are Android smartphones. How about iPhones? When carriers did aside with subsidizing smartphones, we had to start paying full retail cost for new smartphones. So Apple’s decision to create the iPhone SE was extremely timely: Instead of paying $649 or more, you could buy an iPhone for under $400 without producing a huge amount of compromises. Suddenly, individuals who favored iOS to Android had their personal Pocophone. From September 2016 to its discontinuation in September 2018, iPhone SE was never a top-selling iPhones. Even at its peak, iPhone SE hardly ever accounted for more than 11 percent of iPhone sales as the third-best-selling iPhone, and only by a thin margin. Meanwhile, both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus almost tripled the product sales of iPhone SE during that period, accounting for 28.5 percent and 29.5 percent of iPhone sales, respectively. After September 2017, iPhone SE sales dropped substantially, remaining somewhere within 5.5 percent and 8 percent until the device was taken in fall 2018. Suppose you’re Tim Cook seeking at these numbers. Everybody has been asking for a second-generation budget iPhone, but sales numbers display that whenever a lower-cost option is available, the majority of customers keep buying the more expensive iPhones. If customers are willing to pay even more for high-end iPhones, does it make sense to make a cheaper device that, at best, no more than one in ten customers will be interested in buying? With some context, positioning the iPhone more as a luxury item starts to create sense. Like voting on a ballot, Apple’s consumers have already been casting their votes on higher-end iPhones, therefore we can’t actually blame Apple for leaving budget smartphones that do not sell well. If you’re miffed about the loss of life of iPhone SE 2, there are, actually, cheaper iPhones available for individuals on a budget. But you’re not going to discover them in retail stores. Current Market Conditions Apple gave customers the lower-cost iPhone they’d long been asking for, but most of them decided not to buy it. So if you’re Apple, do you produce a second era knowing the first era didn’t sell well, or perform you ditch the budget-iPhone idea altogether? It seems Apple chose the latter. However, it doesn’t eliminate from the actual fact that spending budget iPhones are already available, not to mention plentiful. Specifically, I’m talking about used iPhones on the market. The gray market refers to the investing of used iPhones on the secondhand marketplace. It’s comprised of the countless people selling their utilized gadgets after upgrading, which essentially creates an unofficial marketplace of budget iPhones. Therefore all those listings for iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPhone 8 on eBay, the Amazon Marketplace, providers like Swappa, and yard-sale applications like LetGo are the gray market for iPhones. Apple doesn’t have to spend money on R&D, sourcing parts, production, and distribution for a budget iPhone because we curently have access to all the discounted iPhones we're able to ever want in the secondhand market. And every year when new iPhones are released, millions more iPhones will revitalize the secondhand marketplace as users who upgrade to brand-new iPhones sell their old ones. Plus, any post-2016 iPhone models in the gray market could have better specifications than iPhone SE, and some of these used iPhones would be cheaper than investing in a new iPhone SE from Apple for $349. Basically, Apple doesn’t have to sell a budget iPhone since the current-generation iPhones purchased at complete retail cost today become budget iPhones as consumers utilize them and eventually sell them to on the gray market if they upgrade. And even more devices are shown on the gray marketplace every day, so as long as Apple is offering smartphones, the gray market is a renewable resource for budget iPhones. Of training course, the gray market isn’t the only method to get an iPhone on the inexpensive. Depending about how you consider it, Apple actually offers new spending budget iPhone options every year. With the state unveiling of new iPhones each year, the MSRP of each preceding generation still in creation is decreased. For example, when iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X were announced in the fall of 2017, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus became previous-generation products, which warranted price cuts.

The iPhone SE was still in production when iPhone 7 got its lessen price, so if you wanted a fresh iPhone but didn’t want to invest $699 or more for iPhone 8 or iPhone X, you could choose iPhone SE from $349, iPhone 6S from $449, or iPhone 7 from $549. Though $349 isn’t exactly chump change, it’s certainly more palatable than iPhone X’s thousand-dollar starting price. With iPhone SE discontinued, the least expensive iPhone available is iPhone 7 for $449, meaning the cheapest iPhone available today is $100 a lot more than last year. To be fair, iPhone 7 was a great device at release, and it’s still a compelling option today, specifically for the price. Though it was divisive as Apple’s 1st iPhone without the apparently requisite 3.5mm headphone jack, iPhone 7 is otherwise a full-presented flagship. But if you’re searching for a new iPhone on a spending budget, which would you rather buy: a 2016 iPhone for $449 or an iPhone SE 2 with the latest A12 Bionic processor chip for $100 less? Regarding iPhone SE 2 not materializing, maybe knowing what could’ve been is what makes this thus disappointing for some. Even though the info suggests a restricted audience for spending budget iPhones, there will always be situations in which a low-cost iPhone with current-generation efficiency hits the sweet spot. Where Should Apple Go From Here? It’s a great time to become a lover of tech, particularly cell tech as spending budget and mid-range flagships are slaying in the Android smartphone market. Though priced higher than a $349 iPhone, the OnePlus 6T is usually a primary example of how exactly to offer flagship-level specs, design, and performance at a reduced cost. For better or worse, Apple appears to have evacuated the budget smartphone sector after just one single attempt. Granted, Apple hasn't actually catered to budget-minded customers with almost all the company’s equipment starting at $1,000 or more and a shrinking amount of products, like iPods and iPads, priced lower than that. That is why it was so unusual for Apple to make a budget iPhone to begin with. The problem is that it seems Apple is now trying to close a door that probably the business never should’ve opened to begin with. After all, when you’re offering this inexpensive iPhone on the lineup, all of the flagship iPhones seem that a lot more expensive by comparison. Whether or not there’s a fresh iPhone SE in the future, the prices attached to Apple’s products are climbing. In many markets, Apple is coming dangerously close to pricing the iPhone as well as most of Apple’s other items out of reach. For customers who can’t (or don’t need to) pay such exorbitant prices, the actual fact that Apple offered inexpensive options previously but no longer offers those options now will undoubtedly leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, nearly like biting into a rotten apple. Honestly, I hope I’m wrong concerning this, but if Apple really wants to curb the decline in iPhone demand and for product sales to resume an upward trajectory, 1 of 2 things will need to happen, and sooner instead of later. Apple needs to either lower the margins on iPhones to make them less expensive (or even just less costly), or there needs to be a fresh budget option so consumers in least have the illusion of choice. Because as the figures show, most buyers go for the premium iPhones in any case, but if Apple puts a budget model up for grabs, at least they won’t feel like they’re being forced to pay the ever-growing Apple tax. Apple’s current pricing structure gives consumers only high- and higher-priced models to pick from. But it appears buyers are starting to understand there’s still one other option, which is to save themselves the trouble, and possibly some buyer’s remorse, by not buying new iPhones at all.

#cellphones

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bagelpyjama19 · 5 years ago

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Apple Revenue Approach for Next Season

Apple is considered to be the most innovative business enterprise in the globe now. It is the company to which nearly all others search for direction. When Apple reveals an innovative new design language or launches a fresh product, it generates ripples throughout the market. Quickly, the entire industry is manufacturing items in Apple’s image. However to state Apple is merely a trend-setter undermines the business’s position as probably the figurehead of creativity in consumer technology. Apple isn’t simply setting technology tendencies; Apple’s vision models precedents and begins actions that allow the styles to exist in the first place. As great as it must feel to be Apple in this scenario - and as humbling since it must experience to be the many businesses copying Apple at every change - it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Most people can claw your way to the very best of a mountain, but there’s not a lot of stable ground up there. One incorrect step and your toppling back off the mountain, undoing years of the hard work needed to get up there. We do not want to discount Apple’s successes in 2018: Apple Pencil program for iPad was a good addition; iOS 12 has given new life to iPhones as aged as the 5S; Apple Watch Series 4 is literally conserving lives; and that’s simply a few highlights. Looking back again, though, 2018 was a pretty tough year for Apple as certain missteps finished up impacting the company’s important thing. Between Apple’s most questionable movements in 2018, there’s one I wanted to focus on for an essential purpose: Without second-generation iPhone SE in sight, it seems Apple has exited the spending budget flagship market. The fact is, I’ll consider it one step further: I am certain Apple would not be delivering any more budget iPhones, and here’s why. Apple’s product portfolio is usually varied. The company generates revenue from providers like iTunes and Apple Music to accessories like AirPods and the Magic Key pad, from home entertainment devices like Apple TV 4K to personal processing devices like the MacBook Pro. However product sales for the majority of these aren’t that impressive (though Apple’s profit margins absolutely are). It’s in fact the iPhone that accounts for the majority of Apple’s revenue. Since its debut in 2007, iPhone has pushed Apple’s earnings to such amazing heights that the business is just about the first trillion-dollar firm ever sold. With so much of Apple’s revenue riding on the game-changing gadget, you can wager there would be a significant drop in Apple’s revenue if people beginning buying less iPhones. And that is exactly what we are witnessing. Following a moderate fourth quarter, income for Q12019 - which, to be clear, is comprised of October, November, and December, encompassing the holiday shopping season - was lower than Apple originally expected. With the price of brand-new iPhones rising, revenue would’ve increased also if unit sales experienced only remained regular, but there have been fewer iPhone units sold during the period. The implication is normally that demand has waned, or it’s possible there wasn’t much demand for Apple’s expensive new iPhones to begin with. The initial hint of problems was in 2017, the entire year iPhone X premiered. At a starting cost 50 percent greater than the previous year’s baseline model, iPhone X unit product sales were reportedly flat although Apple’s income increased. Just how? Because even though Apple sold roughly the same number of units as the year before, the average cost of an iPhone had elevated. When you sell the same quantity of products but mark up the price, you still see a bump in product sales. Of course, it’s not only the iPhone that is gotten more expensive. Apple has elevated selling prices across virtually all of the enterprise’s stock portfolio. But with the iPhone driving profits, the implication can be this: Whenever iPhone product sales continue to be smooth or start to fall, Apple will need to keep raising the price of the iPhone each year to maintain year-over-year income gains. As you can plainly see, it’s not really a coincidence Apple has decided to stop reporting iPhone unit sales publicly. Also if 2017 was an outlier, the release of new iPhones in the fall is meant to give Apple a go of revenue adrenaline in the ultimate stretch out, enabling for a strong finish as the company crosses the fiscal finish line. But for the second calendar year in a row, that did not come up. Doesn’t it appear plausible, if not likely, that increasing the costs for fresh iPhones has led to lower demand? About a week ago, Apple CEO delivered a document to shareholders. You can read the letter for yourself on Apple’s website, but it warns investors that Apple’s 1Q2019 income will end up being $9 billion less than was originally projected. The letter mainly blames China’s industry for almost all the year-over-year iPhone income decline even while also indicating that individuals are still adapting to the extinction of carrier subsidies. In a recent interview Cook explained most of the same reasons to clarify lower-than-anticipated iPhone revenue. Besides slowed growth in developing marketplaces and having less subsidized prices through service providers, Cook suggested to iOS 12 and the $29 battery replacement plan seeing that having encouraged users to hold their current iPhones rather than looking for new ones. As you might remember, Apple started the battery alternative program in late 2017 in wish of hiding the smell of the battery hot debate, which had earned concerns of planned obsolescence. As outlined by Cook, many with older iPhones decided not to upgrade since they could get fresh batteries for inexpensive. This would remove the efficiency caps that Apple had imposed to them, repairing their iPhones with their former glory, specially when paired with iOS 12. In fact, Apple visited lengths to make sure that iOS 12 would make older iPhones faster, so Make is probably right in assuming the battery substitute program and iOS 12 factored into the weaker sales of 2018 iPhones. On the other hand, Cook declared that challenging trade relations between the US and China was ultimately the largest factor. China represents a ton of untapped sales prospect of Apple, so there’s most likely some truth compared to that, too. You can observe the full interview in the video below if you want to hear more of what Make must say about it. Meanwhile, critics and analysts have suggested poor iPhone sales certainly are a indication of market saturation; at this stage, most people who want an iPhone curently have one, and that’s a hard hurdle to overcome, specifically with customers stepping up less frequently. It is also truly feasible that Apple priced the 2018 iPhones out of the developing markets the business claims to be targeting. After all, if you reside in China and need it a new cell phone, will you buy an iPhone XS for $1,000 (¥6800) or even more, or are you going to get the most recent Vivo or Xiaomi Android mobile phone that’s manufactured locally and may do pretty much whatever iPhone XS can do at a portion of the price? Not surprisingly, Cook mainly sidestepped the topic of ballooning iPhone prices - a concern that we’ve noticed across most of Apple’s products for that matter - which has been one of the main criticisms of latest iPhones. Latest Price Increases Price increases for the iPhone used to end up being pretty rare. Actually, after carriers stopped providing subsidized prices on mobile phones, forcing us to start paying complete MSRP if we wanted to buy fresh iPhones, we could at least depend on a constant starting price from season to year. That starting price used to be $649. With the launch of iPhone 8 in 2017, it jumped to $699, a disappointing gain, but it wasn’t too surprising. It was only a $50 boost after generations of a constant price, so many people gave Apple a pass. And, also at the higher price, iPhone 8 seemed definitely inexpensive when compared to $999 price tag on the new iPhone X. However apparently, the price increase for iPhone 7 set a precedent because in 2018, the purchase price jumped again. Matching the increase from iPhone 7 to iPhone 8, the 2018 iPhone line-up started at $749 for iPhone XR. You would argue that iPhone XR is a much better device than iPhone 7 and justifies the extra $100, but value is subjective. Although some might say iPhone XR will probably be worth its $749 starting price, especially compared to Apple’s more high quality versions, many customers will fixate on how each new era of iPhone is more costly than the one before. And at this time, can you blame them? To create matters worse yet, as iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR were getting unveiled in stage during Apple’s fall 2018 event, iPhone SE was being discontinued. So not only are iPhones getting a lot more expensive, but Apple has now eliminated the only spending budget option we had. So if you’re looking to get a new iPhone in 2019, there’s not much choice anymore. Purchasers are effectively having to accept Apple’s higher beginning price in the lack of a true budget iPhone. Naturally, customers and critics as well are receiving more vocal in their calls for an iPhone SE successor. Significant Unexpected Value Apple revealed the iPhone SE , which stands for Particular Edition, in March 2016 in a special spring event. Both for customers and the industry most importantly, iPhone SE was a very un-Apple device for Apple to release. The iPhone 6 had just jumped in size and received a completely new design from the prior generation. Then iPhone SE was released, having a smaller, compact type with its design virtually indistinguishable from the previous-generation iPhone 5. Even more surprising was the actual fact that iPhone SE remarkably featured most of Apple’s up-to-date, flagship-level engineering regardless of the low starting price; for $399, you got the same custom made A9 processor as iPhone 6S in addition to a 12 MP camera with 4K video recording and a bigger electric battery. The fact is, the only significant short-cuts were the lack of 3D Touch and the use of first-generation TouchID instead of the faster second generation. But, again, taking into consideration its low starting cost (which ultimately settled to $349), the iPhone SE provided uncharacteristically great worth for a product made by Apple. The challenge was that iPhone SE did not become a top-selling iPhone. Throughout its life-span, its defining characteristic was that it provided an inexpensive point of entry to the iOS ecosystem though it eventually gained relatively of a cult following among certain Apple fans. Obviously, after iPhone SE had been the baseline of the iPhone lineup for a couple of years, consumers were ready for the obligatory refresh. While iPhone SE offered an excellent cost-to-performance rate in 2016, a refresh could bridge the efficiency gap that grew as iPhone SE’s A9 processor was succeeded and changed, first by the A10 Fusion chip in iPhone 7, then again by the A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X . Patiently Looking forward to Apple's Latest Product launches Affirmed, we heard through the grapevine that Apple was focusing on a new version of the spending budget iPhone. Details varied, however the iPhone SE successor - alleged to be named either iPhone SE 2 or iPhone X SE (with suffix and modifiers meticulously arranged)- seemed to have the same purpose as the original, which was to be a compact, low-cost iPhone offering great efficiency and most of the latest features. A lot of the difference surrounding the naming theme for the iPhone SE 2 was because of unclear accounts concerning whether the gadget will keep its iPhone 5-era style or whether it would embrace the new iPhone X visual. Some customers insisted (or possibly hoped?) iPhone SE 2 would appear to be an iPhone X from leading with a almost bezel-less, edge-to-edge screen. These accounts were mainly informed by supposed designs for screen protectors and cases; if reputable, the implication was that iPhone SE 2 could have a bezel-much less, notched display identical to iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. Of program, the notch would become among the defining features for 2018 mobile phones overall as its was imitated by almost every smartphone manufacturer after the iPhone X debuted in late 2017; nevertheless, for Apple’s purposes, the notch only exists to house biometric sensors for Apple’s proprietary FaceID. So the implication was that iPhone SE 2 would feature FaceID although the high cost of FaceID components managed to get an unlikely inclusion in any budget iPhone. Following these reports, renders were designed to show the way the device might look if it turned out to be real. Assuming the case designs and resulting renders had been accurate, iPhone SE 2 would’ve been a truly fascinating gadget, the lovechild of the bygone iPhone 5 and the more futuristic iPhone X. Provided Apple could keep production costs and, by extension, the MSRP straight down, iPhone SE 2 could’ve easily outsold the original iPhone SE, possibly learning to be a top seller just like the original iPhone SE never could. These weren’t just the pipe dreams of iPhone SE fans and anyone who wanted cheaper iPhones; reports from Apple’s personal suppliers all but verified programs for iPhone SE 2, giving estimates for possible production schedules and ship dates. In early August 2017, Wistron Corp. - a low-volume manufacturer located in Taiwan that Apple recruits when iPhone demand is definitely high - was working on expanding its creation base to accommodate a new compact Apple smartphone, which many presumed to become an updated iPhone SE. After that came a tentative ship day: In late November 2017, Economic Daily Information in Taiwan reported Apple had been eyeing a release time in the first half of 2018 for the iPhone SE 2, which would’ve been consistent with the spring release of the initial iPhone SE. January 2018 brought another report of iPhone SE 2 launching in 2018. Shortly thereafter, there is a rumor iPhone SE 2 would include a glass rear panel, suggesting the addition of the wireless charging capabilities that the iPhone has already established since 2017. Just simply because rumors pointed to Apple gearing up for the release of a next-generation iPhone SE, Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst with KGI Securities who is known for predicting Apple’s products with uncanny accuracy, planted one of the initial seeds of doubt. In late January 2018, Kuo reported iPhone SE 2 had hardly any chance of being released because Apple had exhausted its assets on the three flagship models to be released in 2018. Of training course, those three models finished up being iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. However, rumors persisted - though at a slower pace - in spite of Kuo’s question. For instance, there have been specifications and other details of the iPhone SE 2 reported in April 2018. According to these leaks, Apple designed to keep production costs (and, by extension, the eventual retail price) down by omitting the 3.5mm headphone jack and using iPhone 7’s A10 Fusion chip instead of the A11 Bionic chip used in iPhone 8 and iPhone X. For all intents and reasons, the axe was decisively dropped in July 2018 as BlueFin Research told MacRumors that Apple had nixed all plans to proceed with iPhone SE 2. We’ll probably never find out for certain whether iPhone SE 2 was ever actually in the offing; however, even if it was planned originally, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an iPhone SE 2 at all. It’s been four a few months since the start of the 2018 iPhones, an event that coincided with iPhone SE being taken off Apple’s lineup, which, in and of itself, allegedly happened because Apple retired its A9 processor chip. So aside from Apple quickly unloading the last iPhone SE products at a discounted $249 price, which took only a day, iPhone SE is gone from Apple’s catalog, and anyone looking forward to a next-generation iPhone SE has little cause for hope. In the event that you ask me, the writing is on the wall: Apple won’t be building another budget iPhone. No More Budget iPhone? Spending budget smartphones, or smartphones that price roughly $300 or less, are pretty common today. In some instances, these budget devices present great value for your money. Some of the more recent notable for example the Moto G6 for $240, LG Stylo 4 for $250, Huawei Mate 20 Lite for $290, and, of course, the amazing Pocophone F1 for $299. For those who have a tad more to invest, you can find a used or refurbished Samsung Galaxy S8 for barely over $300. Or you may get the brand new Nokia 7.1, an Android One device with the design and nearly all of the features that top-shelf Android flagships possess for the bargain price of $350. I’m not sure where the term originated, but I completely agree: “Good cell phones are getting cheap, and cheap phones are getting good.” Of training course, you might’ve noticed that the smartphones mentioned previously are Android smartphones. What about iPhones? When carriers did aside with subsidizing smartphones, we had to begin paying full retail cost for new smartphones. Therefore Apple’s decision to create the iPhone SE was very timely: Instead of paying $649 or even more, you could buy an iPhone for under $400 without making a huge amount of compromises. Suddenly, people who preferred iOS to Android had their personal Pocophone. From September 2016 to its discontinuation in September 2018, iPhone SE was never a top-selling iPhones. Also at its peak, iPhone SE under no circumstances accounted for more than 11 percent of iPhone sales as the third-best-selling iPhone, and just by a slender margin. Meanwhile, both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus almost tripled the product sales of iPhone SE during that period, accounting for 28.5 percent and 29.5 percent of iPhone sales, respectively. After September 2017, iPhone SE sales dropped substantially, remaining somewhere between 5.5 percent and 8 percent until the device was taken in fall 2018. Suppose you’re Tim Cook looking at these amounts. Everybody has been requesting a second-generation budget iPhone, but sales numbers present that when a lower-cost option is available, the majority of customers keep purchasing the more expensive iPhones. If customers are willing to pay even more for high-end iPhones, does it seem sensible to produce a cheaper device that, at best, no more than one in ten customers would be interested in buying? With some context, positioning the iPhone more as a luxury item starts to make sense. Like voting on a ballot, Apple’s customers have been casting their votes on higher-end iPhones, therefore we can’t really blame Apple for moving away from budget smartphones that don’t sell well. If you’re miffed about the loss of life of iPhone SE 2, there are, in fact, cheaper iPhones obtainable for people on a budget. But you’re not going to find them in shops. Current Market Conditions Apple gave customers the lower-cost iPhone they’d always been asking for, but most of them decided not to buy it. Therefore if you’re Apple, do you create a second generation knowing the first generation didn’t sell well, or perform you ditch the budget-iPhone idea altogether? It seems Apple find the latter. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take away from the fact that spending budget iPhones are already available, not forgetting plentiful. Specifically, I’m discussing used iPhones in the marketplace. The gray market identifies the buying and selling of used iPhones on the secondhand market. It’s comprised of the many people selling their used gadgets after upgrading, which essentially creates an unofficial marketplace of budget iPhones. Therefore those listings for iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPhone 8 on eBay, the Amazon Marketplace, providers like Swappa, and yard-sale apps like LetGo will be the gray market for iPhones. Apple doesn’t need to invest in R&D, sourcing parts, production, and distribution for a budget iPhone because we already have access to all the discounted iPhones we could ever need in the secondhand marketplace. And each year when brand-new iPhones are released, millions even more iPhones will revitalize the secondhand market as users who upgrade to new iPhones sell their older ones. Plus, any post-2016 iPhone models in the gray market will have better specifications than iPhone SE, and some of these used iPhones will be cheaper than buying a new iPhone SE from Apple for $349. Put simply, Apple doesn’t need to sell a budget iPhone because the current-generation iPhones purchased at full retail cost today become budget iPhones as consumers use them and eventually sell them to on the gray market when they upgrade. And even more devices are shown on the gray marketplace every day, in order long as Apple is offering smartphones, the gray marketplace is a renewable resource for budget iPhones. Of program, the gray marketplace isn’t the only way to get an iPhone on the cheap. Depending about how you consider it, Apple actually offers new budget iPhone options each year. With the official unveiling of new iPhones each year, the MSRP of every preceding generation still in creation is decreased. For instance, when iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X were announced in nov 2017, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus became previous-generation products, which warranted cost cuts. The iPhone SE was still in production when iPhone 7 got its lessen price, if you wanted a new iPhone but didn’t want to spend $699 or even more for iPhone 8 or iPhone X, you could choose iPhone SE from $349, iPhone 6S from $449, or iPhone 7 from $549. Though $349 isn’t specifically chump transformation, it’s certainly even more palatable than iPhone X’s thousand-dollar starting cost. With iPhone SE discontinued, the least expensive iPhone available is iPhone 7 for $449, meaning the cheapest iPhone available today is $100 a lot more than last year. To be fair, iPhone 7 was an excellent device at launch, and it’s still a compelling option today, especially for the price. Though it had been divisive as Apple’s initial iPhone without the apparently requisite 3.5mm headphone jack, iPhone 7 is in any other case a full-presented flagship. But if you’re searching for a fresh iPhone on a spending budget, which would you rather purchase: a 2016 iPhone for $449 or an iPhone SE 2 with the latest A12 Bionic processor chip for $100 less? Regarding iPhone SE 2 not materializing, maybe understanding what could’ve been is normally what makes this thus disappointing for some. Even though the data suggests a limited audience for budget iPhones, there will always be situations where a low-cost iPhone with current-generation efficiency hits the sweet spot. Where Should Apple Go From Here? It’s an enjoyable experience to be a lover of tech, particularly cell tech as budget and mid-range flagships are slaying in the Android smartphone market. Though priced greater than a $349 iPhone, the OnePlus 6T is certainly a primary example of how to offer flagship-level specs, design, and efficiency at a lower life expectancy cost. For better or worse, Apple seems to have evacuated the budget smartphone sector after just one single attempt. Granted, Apple hasn't really catered to budget-minded consumers with almost all the company’s equipment starting at $1,000 or even more and a shrinking amount of products, like iPods and iPads, priced lower than that. That is why it was so unusual for Apple to produce a budget iPhone to begin with. The problem is that it appears Apple is currently trying to close a door that probably the business never should’ve opened to begin with. In the end, when you’re offering this inexpensive iPhone on the lineup, all the flagship iPhones appear that much more expensive by comparison. Whether there’s a new iPhone SE in the future, the prices mounted on Apple’s items are climbing. In many markets, Apple is coming dangerously near to pricing the iPhone as well as the majority of Apple’s other products out of reach. For customers who can’t (or don’t need to) pay out such exorbitant prices, the actual fact that Apple offered inexpensive options during the past but no longer offers those options now will undoubtedly leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, almost like biting into a rotten apple. Honestly, I am hoping I’m wrong about this, but if Apple really wants to curb the decline in iPhone demand and for product sales to resume an upward trajectory, one of two things will have to happen, and sooner rather than later. Apple needs to either lower the margins on iPhones to create them more affordable (or even just less costly), or there needs to be a fresh budget option so consumers in least have the illusion of preference. Because as the numbers show, most buyers go for the premium iPhones in any case, but if Apple puts a budget model on the table, at least they won’t feel like they’re being forced to pay the ever-growing Apple tax. Apple’s current pricing structure gives consumers only high- and higher-priced models to pick from. But it seems buyers are beginning to understand there’s still an added option, which can be to save themselves the difficulty, and possibly some buyer’s remorse, by not buying brand-new iPhones at all.

#news

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jeidafei · 6 years ago

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D.Gray-Man Chapter 231 Translation Notes

Hi DGMers! jeidafei from Kougeki Scans here. I’m a total newbie to scanlation and I’ve never made my own note before. However, I’ve read all THREE versions of the DGM translation for reference, (This just goes to show this fandom’s undying love for the subject matter) and noticed some discrepancies between scan groups...

Not to say who is wrong or right, as translators are also humans (unless AI got over its Google Translate phase and take over our jobs someday!) with different experiences and backgrounds, and as such there is no such thing as right or wrong in a translation.

So, in addition to my translation, I would also like to give readers the opportunity to interpret things freely without the language barrier as well, and maybe share some of my knowledge regarding Japan and the Japanese language accumulated from over a decade of learning Japanese (mostly through D.Gray-Man and Ghibli animes XD) and around three years of living, studying and working full-time in Japan.

1. “生々流転” (seiseiruten or shoujouruten)

The cover art is mind-blowingly beautiful this time. So much so that I’ve been secretly wondering whether Hoshino-sensei spent even more time on the cover than the actual content itself and that’s why we have 20 instead of, like, 40 pages.

Anyway, it also gives us this little conundrum...

@panthaleia has already done a marvelous analysis here and you should check it out! so I won’t be going into details much; I would just like to give you a definition and leave it to your imagination. I admit I’m pretty much stumped by this as it isn’t clear what exactly Hoshino-sensei is referring to by this concept.

Japanese culture and language takes heavy influence from Chinese since ancient times, and there are plenty of these four-letter Chinese idioms in daily use, called 四字熟語 (Yojijukugo), some of which can be challenging for non-native learnersーand even the Japanese themselvesーto fully grasp its concept, considering the wealth of yojijukugo-themed dictionaries and games published in Japan.

The Japanese definition of 生々流転 goes as follows:

すべての物は絶えず生まれては変化し、移り変わっていくこと。▽「生生」は物が次々と生まれ育つこと。「流転」は物事が止まることなく移り変わっていく意。「生生」は「しょうじょう」とも読む�� (source)

A compilative translation of the above and other versions in the source would be nothing is unchanging; all existence is born, constantly changes (and dies) in a cycle that repeats itself endlessly. The emphasis seems to be put on the term of “constant change” and the “neverending cycle” of all existence, rather than the birth and death of living beings, however, and thus I believe my own and Mangastream’s translation of it as “Circle of Life” may not be comprehensive of what Hoshino-sensei is trying to convey.

In my opinion, it could either be interpreted literally to mean the cycle and flow of energy and soul-force that Past!Allen had mentioned to Nea all those years ago, or considering the plot of the current chapter it can also refer to the story coming full circle and returning to the point of its birth, by taking Allen back to Eddystone...Edinston...Edinburgh...Edinsーargh dammit I give upーwhere his story began with his meeting with Mana Walker.

Speaking of which...

2. The Town Where Allen Began

Mangastream called it Eddingston. Starbuds called it Edinston. The D.Gray Wikia adopted Edinstown and that’s what I decided to go with for now.

However, the actual Japanese text is エディンストン, phonetically E-din-su-ton. Thus, the most phonetically accurate would probably be Starbuds’ Edinston. Edinstown can be transliterated back into Japanese as エディンスタウン, whereas Eddingston would probably be エッディングストン to the Japanese folk (I’ve highlighted the difference in spelling).

There you go! Now y’all can call it whichever way you want!

3. Why is Allen so alarmed?

Right after Mana said that he draws all those little “I am here”s like a street graffiti punk so God would be able to find him, Allen looked as if he had recalled something significant. Seeing as Allen is about to tell the tale of his beginnings, this would probably be clarified in the next chapter. However, in my opinion, Mana saying “so he would be able to find me” is reminiscent of this sentence back in Reverse: Lost Fragment of Snow:

Back when he still remembers Nea and his purpose of searching for him, Mana was taking every measure to make sure Nea recognizes him, as he now looks different from his 17-year-old self. Sure, Mana might actually be referring to God this time as he said it; we’d never know until the next chapter at the least, but the memory of Mana’s words back at the circus must have been what shook Allen to the core.

4. はじまり

The term はじまり (hajimari) or “the beginning” seems to be the central theme in this chapter; appearing on the cover page, the first page and the last page of last chapter, emphasizing the fact that both Allen and the plot has now come full circle and returned to where “Allen” began.

This cliffhanger freaks me out though, as I couldn’t see how Hoshino-sensei could tell Allen’s story without repeating Reverse: Lost Fragment of Snow, as that is stated to be the story of how Allen came to be:

Anyway, my fear and frustration of waiting-six-months-for-new-developments aside, hajimari is a very popular to the point of cliched concept in Japan, in my opinion. If you go to karaoke in Japan and type in hajimari in the machine, it would come up with a SH*T TON of songs containing hajimari in the song name, with hajimari no uta (The song of beginnings) and hajimari no basho (The place where it all began, which is also mentioned in this chapter) being some of the most repetitive.

As much as the cherry blossoms are a symbol of Japanese culture, the Japanese people themselves regard the month when the cherry blossoms bloom, April, and the season of Spring, as the marker of new beginnings, of significant turning points in life. The start of school term, start of fiscal year, start of working life and end of childhood, Your Lie in April , etc. all happen in April.

This phenomenon is especially remarkable in Japan. Being the country of uniformity, virtually every school and workplace throughout the country would start their activities in April.

In my experience, Japanese aesthetics revolve around the changing seasons and times a lot, and countless pop songs that are released around March-April would sing of the blooming cherry blossoms swaying to the wind and new beginnings for students graduating from high school or university. In the same manner, songs coming out in Winter would feature slower melodies and the distinctive, ringing, Christmas-ey chime from the likes of music boxes, glockenspiels, triangles or celestas, and songs released in Summer would usually be quicker, livelier with lyrics retelling a fun trip to the beach, firework shows and sunshine (－and bikinis, if you’re listening to AKB48!).

To someone who came from a tropical country with three pretty much indistinguishable, unpleasant seasons (Damn-you-Summer, Damn-you-Summer-with-Rain-and-Floods and Damn-you-Summer-with-Three-Days-of-Winter), the beauty of the Japanese seasons and how the Japanese culture and lifestyle intertwine so closely with it has always fascinated and charmed me.

5. The Gratitude Dilemma

In addition to the seiseiruten conundrum, this chapter also throws up some more challenges for translators. One notable example for me being how to accurately capture the essence of this panel:

Both Starbuds and Mangastream worded this bubble very differently, and I won’t say who is the most accurate, but I will explain my choice of wording the best I can (with a few tips to weary Japanese learners along the way, hopefully). The actual Japanese raw is below:

My atrocious highlighting skills aside, we can clearly see the emphasis given to the suffix てあげよう (te-ageyou) here.

Allen didn’t say it straight out that he’s pitying Kanda or the like, but he’s using the te-ageru form, which means “ [doing something] for your sake” .

The concept of gratitude is important in a strict, seniority-based society like Japan, and accordingly there are two verb suffixes just to show gratitude: when someone else does a favor for us: te-kureru, and when we receive a favor from someone else: te-morau.

Yes, there’s a difference. And this is one of the most troublesome head-scratchers and trick-question-subjects for intermediate learners of Japanese taking the JLPT test (and translators of Japanese songs and manga as well), as to make things worse the Japanese usually omits the subject and/or object of the sentence.

My tip for making sense of this is for te-kureru, the other person must be the subject of the sentence, whereas for te-morau, I/me must be the subject.

Starting to see now why so many of my classmates gave up on Japanese and why so many anime subs/manga translations are sometimes inaccurate?

We also get another instance here:

(watashi ha kami ni) mitsukete-moraeru you ni would literally mean something along the lines of so (I) could be found by (God) for my sake. I put parentheses here to show you how both the subject and object of this sentence is omitted, and why we must be extremely careful in cases when it is less clear than this who is doing what for whom. To learners, you MUST pay attention to the conjunctions.

For the sake of convenience and more natural speech I just used so God would be able to find me.

Back to Black Allen, te-ageru or its more casual/demeaning form te-yaru, on the other hand, is used for when we’re doing a favor for someone’s sake and should be used sparingly/carefully to people of the same status or lower, as it could sound patronizing depending on context. So Allen using it to Kanda is meant to be very cheeky and infuriating, as if he’s trying to emphasize that his giving up is more out of pity/sympathy for Kanda’s hapless persistence than his own being tired of or incapable of escaping.

Because in reality it is just as he personally admitted in the earlier page: he’s got no money and cannot elude the Order without Kanda’s help, and decided to just twiddle his thumbs and wait around for now.

But food and a man’s pride are everything to Allen...

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed our translations. See you in three months, fellow DGMers!

#dgm #dgm 231 #d gray man #analysis

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jessicasimpsonsource · 6 years ago

Text

Bio Of Jessica

Hundreds of hopefuls make their way to Nashville every year, looking to stake their own claim to fame in country music. Some arrive with nothing more than a guitar and lyric-filled notebook under their arm, everything they own packed in the bed of a rundown truck. Some, discovered in a honky-tonk or roadhouse in their home town, ride in on the promise of a publishing deal or recording contract, visions of gold records and tricked-out tour busses dancing in their heads.

Very few however arrive in Music City with as much baggage as Jessica Simpson. Not since 1970 when Hank Williams, Jr. signed the biggest recording contract in MGM history has so much doubt and criticism faced a young artist. Unlike Williams who was burdened by the ghost of his legendary father, the shadow Simpson is trying to escape is largely her own. Preconceptions based on her tremendously successful career as a pop singer, a brief marriage on display in a reality program, the subsequent post-marital tumult, headline generating relationships and awkward professional stumbles have woven a tapestry of misconceptions around her.

Early Life + Career

The news last year that Simpson planned to come to Nashville to make a country record was met with a resounding scoff by a chorus of naysayers, many of them members of the very industry she was hoping to join. And that was the polite response.

The quietest voice amid all the din has been that of Jessica Simpson herself. But with the release of Do You Know, her first album on Epic/Columbia Nashville, the doe-eyed Texas beauty makes it perfectly clear she not only has a voice, but a point of view colored by life experience beyond her years, and plenty to say. She hopes to not only quiet her critics, but give the country music industry and audience something else to talk about—her undeniable talent and gift as a country singer/songwriter.

“There is a perception of who I am out there that has little to do with me,” she says quietly but with conviction. “I appreciate the fact that there are skeptics out there, that people may be doubtful and may not trust this effort. But what I want people to know and understand is I don’t have one foot in pop and one foot in country. I have made the commitment to country music. I look forward to reviews, no matter what they are. I look at it as constructive criticism. If anything, it just pushes me to do better the next time.”

Simpson has been pushing herself her entire life, frequently through devastating disappointment and heartbreak. While it is clichéd to tag failure as the starting point for success, the public would be surprised to know how many times the girl who seems to have it all was left empty-handed. Through it all, her family and faith have provided a rock solid base from which she draws strength and inspiration.

Like many country singers, her first musical exposure and singing experience was in church. “My father was a minister and evangelist, so growing up, I was surrounded by gospel music. Living in Texas, we also had a lot of country music. In our home, there were records by Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson, and records by CeCe Winans and Amy Grant. When I was little, I would sing at the places where my dad spoke, we were a duo!”

As time went on, she found herself seeking the spotlight. “As I got older, I started to feel like I didn’t want to be in the choir, I wanted to sing louder than everyone else. If I was in a musical, I hogged the microphone!”

Her early focus was on dance and she was on the competition circuit, which also included vocal contests. When her dance instructor noticed that her pupil had an affinity for singing, she encouraged her to enter a competition, and in her first stab at it, she won. When word came of a chance to audition for the new Mickey Mouse Club, the 12-year-old jumped at it. “I did a dance to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and an a cappella version of ‘Amazing Grace.’ There were 50,000 kids who auditioned and I got to go to Florida with the final eight.”

She was crushed when she received a letter from Disney saying she hadn’t made it, particularly when so many people she knew did: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell. “My mom told me not to worry, that I would see those kids again somewhere down the road. Even though I didn’t make the show, I think it was then that my parents realized maybe they weren’t being just proud parents, that maybe there was something there within me.”

Not long afterwards, Simpson was invited to contribute to an album recorded with a gospel choir in New Jersey, which led to recording her first solo album—also gospel, in Nashville. Like her Mickey Mouse Club rejection, it was another setback for the 15-year-old. “I was telling my friends and people at my school that I was making a record that would be on the radio. But the label folded right before the record was to be pressed. When you’re that young and someone promises you something, you believe them. I was so disappointed.”

Her grandmother ended up paying for the record to be pressed, and the Simpsons sold it as they toured the Christian music circuit. It was one of those recordings that eventually caught the ear of mega music biz mogul Tommy Mottola who signed her to a pop music deal with Columbia Records and released her label debut, Sweet Kisses, in 1999.

Fast forward through a lightning-fast rise to the top of the pop charts: double-platinum certification for Sweet Kisses, its breakthrough hit “I Wanna Love You Forever”; the 2002 follow-up CD Irresistible which crossed over to four different charts.

It was in making her third album that she was first introduced to the Nashville songwriting community. “I wanted to do some writing for the record and my A&R person at the time pointed me to Nashville, where some of her favorite writers were. I loved it, but the label thought what I was writing with them was too country, and they had signed me to sing pop. I would listen to those demos over the years and knew I would go back to Nashville one day.”

But meanwhile, the whirlwind of her increasingly successful professional life and increasingly public personal life took on a virtual life of its own, with the line between the two becoming nearly indistinguishable. Almost simultaneous with the release of In This Skin in 2003 was the launch of the massively successful reality show documenting every moment of her marriage to new husband Nick Lachey, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. Though the program—which ran for 41 episodes until March 30, 2005—ratcheted up both album sales and Simpson’s star quotient, it also contributed to the public’s perception of the blonde bombshell as ditzy and dimwitted, an assessment that family and friends knew to be inaccurate and hurtful.

Far more hurtful was the unhappiness within the marriage that led to its disintegration and very public dissolution. It was during that period that the label was pressing her to make and release another record. Barely two months after her divorce was finalized on June 30, 2006, A Public Affair was released. “It was incredibly hard to promote that record. I wasn’t in a place where I could be honest, and I wasn’t able to be strong enough for the world.”

Though it would be a year before Joe Simpson told People magazine that his daughter was thinking of “returning to her roots” and recording a country record, the journey back to Nashville had begun well before that.

“I took the long way around to get back to where I came from,” she says. “Back where I belong. I think to be able to sing country music honestly, you have to experience life. There is so much honesty in the music, and if you are not honest, the fans will know it. Fans are the absolute lifeblood of country music, and they won’t respond to you unless they believe you.”

The first step was believing in herself and trusting her co-writers. She went to Nashville in 2007 to begin. “The process started with sitting down with these amazing songwriters and forcing myself to be vulnerable. I was so paranoid at the time, so overwhelmed by the tabloids. I wasn’t even living my own life. The first time I sat down to write was with Brett James and Hillary Lindsey. I write things in my Blackberry, and I was telling them some of my thoughts and ideas and they were writing them down. They were respectful of what I was sharing. At that moment, it felt right. I knew that we were partners and I didn’t have to be afraid that they would pick up the phone, call the tabloids and say, ‘Guess what Jessica Simpson is going through?’ I shared so much with my writers. They know me so well now; they know my sadness and my joy, my hurt and my happiness, my disappointments and my hopes. They are some of my closest friends.

“In order to do this record, I had to be vulnerable and I had to trust. After writing sessions, Cacee [Cobb, who did A&R for album] and I would go back to the house we were renting and I would be so emotionally drained. Writing sessions were like therapy. It was hard to go through, but afterwards, you’ve let it go, and you feel so much lighter. The weight of denial is very hard to live with. Writing this record was so freeing to me.”

If the writing—which resulted in her name on eight of eleven cuts—was freeing, the time spent in studios with producers Brett James and John Shanks recording those songs was exhilarating.

“The first day in the studio we cut three songs: ‘Come On Over,’ ‘Might As Well Be Making Love’ and ‘Sipping On History.’ I had been living with the demos for so long, it just happened. With music, when it’s right, it happens so quickly and so easily. It felt so good! I felt like I was back to who I really am.”

Perhaps the last song cut for the record was the most meaningful to Simpson, representing a remarkable gift of grace and redemption from one of her most humiliating public moments. In December 2006, while participating in a tribute to one of her all-time idols Dolly Parton at the Kennedy Center Awards, Simpson botched the lyrics to the song, in front of an audience that included President Bush, and of course Parton herself. “I should never have been on that stage at that time. I had gone through a break-up the night before and I had not been on stage in a year and a half. My heart was there, and I so much wanted to honor Dolly. But my mind was not with it. That night was really the lowest of the low. I apologized to Dolly and she was so kind to me. She said, ‘I wrote the song and I forget the words! Don’t you worry about it.’ In the months after, she would send me little notes of encouragement; she reminded me that we are who we are born to be. She took me under her wing and brought me to another level of faith.

“When we were recording this record I knew I wanted one of her songs. She gave me a batch of 12 songs to listen to, then called and said she didn’t think any of them were right and was sending over some more. ‘Do You Know’ was the first song of that bunch and I knew it was right. I loved it. We cut it and sent it to her and she was so supportive and flattering. Then she offered to sing on it and ‘Dollyize it.’ I just couldn’t believe it. Our voices blended so well together. Listening to that song now just makes me smile. The experience at the Kennedy Center ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

After a lengthy absence, Simpson is back where she feels happy and comfortable, on stage in front of a live audience. Each performance, she previews each of the songs with a story, sharing with the audience the truth behind the song. “It’s like a live listening party every night. What is so great about this record and these songs is that I don’t have to embellish them. They don’t need a pyro display to get the point across and I don’t have to learn a bunch of choreography. I can just get up there and sing my music, and the songs speak for themselves.

“Coming to Nashville and to country music was both a test and a leap of faith for me. But in this place of honesty and trust and hope, I’ve discovered so many things I left behind along the way. I’ve come back to who I was growing up. I believe if you follow your heart and be quiet, you will find the answers, you will find yourself. I found myself in this record. ‘Do You Know’ is a song and a metaphor for my life right now. Do you know who I really am?”

With the release of Do You Know, the world will receive the most honest understanding yet of who Jessica Simpson really is.

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justforbooks · 7 years ago

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Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85

Philip Roth, the prolific, protean and often blackly comic novelist whose creations included David Kepesh, an academic who turns into an exquisitely sensitive 155-pound female breast, and Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous that he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner, died on Tuesday. He was 85 and lived in New York and Connecticut.

His death was confirmed by Judith Thurman, a close friend.

Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.

“Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,” Mr. Roth once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”

The Nobel Prize eluded Mr. Roth, but he won most of the other top honors: two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.

In his 60s, an age when many writers are winding down, he produced an exceptional sequence of historical novels — “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and “I Married a Communist” — a product of his personal re-engagement with America and American themes. And starting with “Everyman” in 2006, when he was 73, he kept up a relentless book-a-year pace, publishing works that while not necessarily major were nevertheless fiercely intelligent and sharply observed. Their theme in one way or another was the ravages of age and mortality itself, and in publishing them Mr. Roth seemed to be defiantly staving off his own decline.

Mr. Roth was often lumped together with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx of American letters,” but he resisted the label. “The epithet American-Jewish writer has no meaning for me,” he said. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.”

And yet, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. He returned often, especially in his later work, to the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where he grew up and which became in his writing a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality, diligence and aspiration.

It was a place where no one was unaware “of the power to intimidate that emanated from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America,” he wrote, and yet where being Jewish and being American were practically indistinguishable. Speaking of his father in “The Facts,” an autobiography, Mr. Roth said: “His repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.”

Mr. Roth’s favorite vehicle for exploring this repertory was himself, or rather one of several fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and fiction. Nine of Mr. Roth’s novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly academic who shares some of Mr. Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes Mr. Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether — or seemed to.

The protagonist of “Operation Shylock” is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character, who has stolen Roth’s identity. At the center of “The Plot Against America,” a book that invents an America where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election and initiates a secret pogrom against Jews, is a New Jersey family named Roth that resembles the author’s in every particular.

“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,” Mr. Roth told Hermione Lee in a 1984 interview in The Paris Review. “There has to be some pleasure in this life, and that’s it.”

Occasionally, as in “Deception,” a slender 1990 novel about a writer named Philip who is writing about a writer having an affair with one of his made-up characters, this sleight of hand feels stuntlike and a little dizzying. More often, and especially in “The Counterlife” (1986), Mr. Roth’s masterpiece in this vein, what results is a profound investigation into the competing and overlapping claims of fiction and reality, in which each aspires to the condition of the other and the very idea of a self becomes a fabrication at once heroic and treacherous.

Mr. Roth’s other great theme was sex, or male lust, which in his books is both a life force and a principle of rage and disorder. It is sex, the uncontrollable need to have it, that torments poor, guilt-ridden Portnoy, probably Mr. Roth’s most famous character, who desperately wants to “be bad — and to enjoy it.” And Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of “Sabbath’s Theater,” one of Mr. Roth’s major late-career novels, is in many ways Portnoy grown old but still in the grip of lust and longing, raging against the indignity of old age and yet saved from suicidal impulses by the realization that there are too many people he loves to hate.

In public Mr. Roth, tall and good-looking, was gracious and charming but with little use for small talk. In private he was a gifted mimic and comedian. Friends used to say that if his writing career had ever fizzled he could have made a nice living doing stand-up. But there was about his person, as about his writing, a kind of simmering intensity, an impatience with art that didn’t take itself seriously.

Some writers “pretend to be more lovable than they are and some pretend to be less,” he told Ms. Lee. “Beside the point. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark on March 19, 1933, the younger of two sons. (His brother, Sandy, a commercial artist, died in 2009.) His father, Herman, was an insurance manager for Metropolitan Life who felt that his career had been thwarted by the gentile executives who ran the company. Mr. Roth once described him as a cross between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. His mother, the former Bess Finkel, was a secretary before she married and then became a housekeeper of the heroic old school — the kind, he once suggested, who raised cleaning to an art form.

The family lived in a five-room apartment on Summit Avenue within which were only three books when he was growing up — given as presents when someone was ill, Mr. Roth said. He went to Weequahic High, where he was a good student but not good enough to win a scholarship to Rutgers, as he had hoped. In 1951 he enrolled as a pre-law student at the Newark branch of Rutgers, with vague notions of becoming “a lawyer for the underdog.”

But he yearned to live away from home, and the following year he transferred to Bucknell College in Lewisburg, Pa., a place about which he knew almost nothing except that a Newark neighbor seemed to have thrived there. Inspired by one of his professors, Mildred Martin, with whom he remained a lasting friend, Mr. Roth switched his interests from law to literature. He helped found a campus literary magazine, where in an early burst of his satiric power he published a parody of the college newspaper so devastating that it earned him an admonition from the dean.

Mr. Roth graduated from Bucknell, magna cum laude, in 1954 and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1955. That same year, rather than wait for the draft, he enlisted in the Army but suffered a back injury during basic training and received a medical discharge. In 1956 he returned to Chicago to study for a Ph.D. in English but dropped out after one term.

Mr. Roth had begun to write and publish short stories by then, and in 1959 he won a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship to publish what became his first collection, “Goodbye, Columbus.” It won the National Book Award in 1960 but was denounced — in an inkling of trouble to come — by some influential rabbis, who objected to the portrayal of the worldly, assimilated Patimkin family in the title novella, and even more to the story “Defender of the Faith,” about a Jewish Army sergeant plagued by goldbricking draftees of his own faith.

In 1962, while appearing on a panel at Yeshiva University, Mr. Roth was so denounced, for that story especially, that he resolved never to write about Jews again. He quickly changed his mind.

“My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents — indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start — was the luckiest break I could have had,” he later wrote. “I was branded.”

Mr. Roth later called his first two novels “apprentice work.” “Letting Go,” published in 1962, was derived in about equal parts from Bellow and Henry James. “When She Was Good,” which came out in 1967, is the most un-Rothian of his books, a Theodore Dreiser- or Sherwood Anderson-like story set in the WASP Midwest in the 1940s.

“When She Was Good” was based in part on the life and family of Margaret Martinson Williams, with whom Mr. Roth had entered a calamitous relationship in 1959. Ms. Williams, who was divorced and had a daughter, met Mr. Roth while she was waiting tables in Chicago, and she tricked him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. He was “enslaved” to her own sense of victimization, he wrote. They separated in 1963, but Ms. Williams refused to divorce, and she remained a vexatious presence in his life until she died in a car crash in 1968. (She appears as Josie Jensen in “The Facts” and, more or less undisguised, as the exasperating Margaret Tarnopol in Mr. Roth’s novel “My Life as a Man.”)

After the separation, Mr. Roth moved back East and began work on “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the novel for which he may be best known and which surely set a record for most masturbation scenes per page. It was a breakthrough not just for Mr. Roth but for American letters, which had never known anything like it: an extended, unhinged monologue, at once filthy and hilarious, by a neurotic young Jewish man trying to break free of his suffocating parents and tormented by a longing to have sex with gentile women, shiksas.

The book was “an experiment in verbal exuberance,” Mr. Roth said, and it deliberately broke all the rules.

The novel, published in 1969, became a best seller but received mixed reviews. Josh Greenfeld, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “the very novel that every American-Jewish writer has been trying to write in one guise or another since the end of World War II.” On the other hand, Irving Howe (on whom Mr. Roth later modeled the pompous, stuffy critic Milton Appel in “The Anatomy Lesson”) wrote in a lengthy takedown in 1972, “The cruelest thing anyone can do with ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ is read it twice.”

And once again the rabbis complained. Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, declared that the book was more harmful to Jews than “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Mr. Roth’s autobiographical phase began in 1974 with “My Life as a Man,” which he said was probably the least factually altered of his books, and continued with the Zuckerman trilogy — “The Ghost Writer” (1979), “Zuckerman Unbound” (1981) and “The Anatomy Lesson” (1983) — which examined the authorial vocation and even the nature of writing itself.

Zuckerman reappeared in “The Counterlife” (1986), where he seems to die of a heart attack and is then resurrected. “Operation Shylock” (1993), which Mr. Roth pretended was a “confession,” not a novel (though in the very last sentence he says, “This confession is false”), involved two Roths, one real and one phony, and the real one claims to have been a spy for the Mossad. The book, with its sense of shifting reality and unstable identity, partly stemmed from a near-breakdown Mr. Roth experienced when he became addicted to the sleeping pill Halcion after knee surgery in 1983 and from severe depression he suffered after emergency bypass surgery in 1989.

For much of this time Mr. Roth had been spending half the year in London with the actress Claire Bloom, with whom he began living in 1976. They married in 1990 but divorced four years later. In 1996, Ms. Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving the Doll’s House,” in which she depicted him as a misogynist and control freak, so self-involved that he refused to let her daughter, from her marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, live with them because she bored him.

Never fond of attention, Mr. Roth became even more private after this accusation and never publicly replied to it, though some critics found unflattering parallels to Ms. Bloom and her daughter in the characters Eve Frame and her daughter, Sylphid, in “I Married a Communist.”

The marriage over, Mr. Roth moved permanently back to the United States and began what proved to be the third major phase of his career. He returned, he said, because he felt out of touch: “It was really my rediscovering America as a writer.”

“Sabbath’s Theater,” which came out in 1995 and won the National Book Award, is about neither Roth nor Zuckerman but rather Morris Sabbath, known as Mickey, an ex-puppeteer in his 60s. His voice is nothing if not American: an angry, comic, lustful harangue.

“In this new book life is represented as anarchic horniness on the rampage against death and its harbingers, old age and impotence,” Frank Kermode wrote in The New York Review of Books, adding, “There is really only one way for him to tell the story — defiantly with outraged phallic energy.”

Like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “Sabbath’s Theater” seemed to liberate its author, and yet the work that followed — what Mr. Roth called his American trilogy: “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” — is less about sex than about history or traumatic moments in American culture. Zuckerman returns as the narrator of all three novels, but he is in his 60s now, impotent and suffering from prostate cancer. His prose is plainer, crisper, less show-offy, and he is less an actor than an observer and interpreter.

The books are full of dense reportorial detail — about such seemingly un-Rothian subjects as glove making and ice fishing — as they tell Job-like stories. There is Swede Lvov, a seemingly gilded Newark businessman, a gifted athlete married to Miss New Jersey of 1949, whose life is destroyed in the 1960s when his teenage daughter becomes an antiwar terrorist and plants a bomb that kills an innocent bystander. Ira Ringold is a star of a radio serial during the McCarthy era who is blacklisted and becomes the subject of an exposé published by his own wife. And Coleman Silk, a black classics professor passing as white, commits an innocent classroom gaffe while the Clinton impeachment is taking place and finds himself mercilessly hounded by the politically correct.

These books are not without their comic moments, but history here is no joke; it is more nearly a tragedy. In 2007, Mr. Roth killed Zuckerman off in the sad and affecting “Exit Ghost,” a novel that cleverly echoes and inverts the themes of “The Ghost Writer,” the first of the Zuckerman novels. Meanwhile he had begun writing a series of shorter novels that, after the publication of “Nemesis” in 2010, he began calling “Nemeses.” The sequence began in 2005 with “Everyman,” which starts in a graveyard and ends on an operating table.

That work set the tone for the rest: “Indignation” (2008), a ghost story of sorts about a young student unfairly expelled from college and sent off to fight in the Korean War; “The Humbling” (2009), about an actor who has lost his powers; and “Nemesis,” about the polio epidemic of the 1950s. The prose became even sparer and, in the case of “Nemesis,” deliberately matter-of-fact and unliterary, and though the books have plenty of sexual moments, they are haunted by something darker and bleaker.

Yet the very existence of these books, coming reliably almost one every year, seemed to belie their message. “Time doesn’t prey on my mind. It should, but it doesn’t,” Mr. Roth told David Remnick. He added: “I don’t know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there’s no stopping. All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right.”

Increasingly, Mr. Roth spent most of his time alone in his 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse, returning to New York mostly in the winter when he grew so stir-crazy he found himself talking to woodchucks. He worked, read in the evenings (nonfiction mostly) and occasionally listened to a ballgame. In some ways he came to resemble his own creation, Nathan Zuckerman, who asks at the end of a chapter in “Exit Ghost,” “Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen?”

“Not for some,” he goes on. “For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”

In 2010, right after “Nemesis,” Mr. Roth decided to quit writing. He didn’t tell anyone at first, because, as he said, he didn’t want to be like Frank Sinatra, announcing his retirement one minute and making a comeback the next. But he stuck with his plan and in 2012, he officially announced that he was done. A Post-it note on his computer said, “The struggle with writing is done.”

He had been famous for putting in endless days at his stand-up desk, throwing out more pages than he kept, and in a 2018 interview he said he was worn out. “I was by this time no longer in possession of the mental vitality or the physical fitness needed to mount and sustain a large creative attack of any duration.” He settled into the contented life of an Upper West Side retiree, seeing friends, going to concerts.

He was in frequent communication with his appointed biographer, Blake Bailey, whom he sometimes flooded with notes, and he was also at pains to straighten out an erroneous Wikipedia account of his life. Mostly, he read — nonfiction by preference, but he made exception for the occasional novel. One of the last he read was “Asymmetry,” by Lisa Halliday, a book about a young woman who has a romance with an aging novelist who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Mr. Roth — funny, kind, acerbic, passionate, immensely well-read, a devotee of Zabar’s and old movies. In an interview, Mr. Roth acknowledged that he and Ms. Halliday had been friends, and added: “She got me.”

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A TALE OF TWO CITIES KINGDOMS, PT 1/4

The next surah involves a long and very weird story about King Solomon, so I think this is a good time to dive into some sweet-ass Biblical history, like we did with Moses way back when. Specifically, this series of posts is going to cover the Kingdom of Israel and its southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah.

If you were raised Muslim, the distinction between Israel and Judah was probably lost on you. It was for me, at least, and it seems like it was lost on Mohammed, too. David and Solomon are presented in Islam as “kings of Israel” and then the story skips ahead quite far, bypassing virtually the history of Israel and Judah as covered in the Biblical books of Kings and Chronicles. And so you may have missed the fact that the stories of the Bible are, substantially, propaganda against Israel by their southern neighbors in Judah.

The Biblical history of the Jewish people starts with Abraham arriving in Canaan, goes through the years in Egypt and the return to/conquest of the “promised land”, then enters the period of the statehood of Israel in the time of King Saul.

Saul is described as the first king of Israel, living around 1000 BC, and he is succeeded by David, who is followed by his son Solomon, both of whom have roots in Judah. The kingdom at the time is given as a very large, very wealthy territory, with Jerusalem being its major city.

That part is familiar to most people, Muslims included. What happens next is less familiar. According to the Bible, Solomon’s habit of acquiring a zillion foreign wives greatly displeased YHWH, and he vowed to take the kingdom away from his lineage.

Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, “Because you have done this, and have not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant. Nevertheless I will not do it in your days, for the sake of your father David; I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However I will not tear away the whole kingdom; I will give one tribe to your son for the sake of My servant David, and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen.”

The son in question was named Rehoboam. The Bible says that Rehoboam was a bit of a dick and the northern half of the country was sick of his shit, declaring its independence from him and establishing a new kingdom. The newly-independent north was called the Kingdom of Israel, while Rehoboam’s descendants got stuck with the southern part, the Kingdom of Judah. The two were never reunited.

Archeology and historical records show that Israel was by far the more populous, developed neighbor, and remained that way right until its fall to the Assyrians centuries later. As we’ve seen, the Bible completely writes off the people of Israel after this point, describing them as foreigners imported by the Assyrians, with the original inhabitants of the land being deported to Assyrian provinces and becoming the “lost tribes”.

So how much of what the Bible says about all this is true?

The good news (if you care about this sort of thing) is that David was a historical person, or at the very least the idea of someone named David being a historical person is very old. This is called the Tel Dan Stele, an Aramaic block commemorating the victories of the King of Aram:

It’s broken, but one key phrase is not broken: The “House of David”, described as the ruling house of Judah. Israel is also mentioned in the stele, but their rulers are not described as “of the House of David”. The stele dates to the 800s BC. So Judah, at least, was in fact ruled by kings who claimed descent from this David fellow. What was Judah like in this era, and what was Israel like? Let’s start all the way at the beginning.

The first leader of any territory in Judah mentioned in historical sources is a guy named Abdi-Heba, who was in charge of the area around and including Jerusalem when the region was under Egyptian control in the 1300s BC. Abdi-Heba’s letters to the Egyptian pharaoh mention various other local chieftains in both the future lands of Judah and Israel, including one named Labayu, who ruled a region in what is now the West Bank. These men do not seem to have ruled large or particularly well-developed areas; they were local, tribal leaders, largely indistinguishable from other Canaanite chieftains. They often fought against each other in petty squabbles.

I’m gonna quote some parts of The Bible Unearthed by the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein here. The Tell el-Amarna tablets describe Abdi-Heba’s domain as:

a thinly-settled highland region, loosely supervised from the royal citadel in Jerusalem. … isolated from the main trade routes … Its economy was concentrated around the self-sufficient production of the individual farming community or pastoral group. [Abdi Heba] controlled the highlands from … Bethel in the north to … Hebron in the south

Abdi-Heba’s domain was less prosperous and significant even compared to those of his neighbors, and in their letters to the pharaoh, neighboring chieftains accuse him of infringing upon their territory to expand his own. Abdi-Heba’s own letters are mostly concerned with his petty conflicts with regional rivals and trouble with roving bands of bandits and mercenaries. What happened to Abdi-Heba or any other ruler between him and the time of David is unknown, but many changes were afoot in the region about a century later. The entire eastern Mediterranean faced challenges from a new threat:

Mysterious and violent groups named the Sea Peoples, migrants who came by land and sea from the west and devastated everything that stood in their way … [a text] frantically describes how “enemy boats have arrived, the enemy has set fire to the cities and wrought havoc … the country has been left to its own devices”

Prosperous settlements were burned to the ground; others were deserted and turned into ruins upon the advance of the invaders. The “Sea Peoples” weren’t just one group, but many of them were people from the Greek isles, apparently intent upon wrecking shit. Egyptian depictions make it look like they were also really into tacky headgear (and yes the women were apparently bare-chested, they don’t seem to have seen breasts as sexual body parts).

Whoever the many “Sea Peoples” were, they caused a whole lot of damage in the 1300s and 1200s BC. Egypt held them off for a while, but the warfare, along with political instability at home, meant that they no longer had the resources or energy necessary to maintain full control of the Levant region. And so new civilizations sprang up to grab whatever power they could get their hands on. One such civilization was the Philistines--most likely Greek “Sea People”--who established colonies to the southwest of Judah. The entire map of the region had changed in a very short amount of time.

Not all of the changes were disastrous. In the highland regions of what is now Israel, nomads began settling into sedentary lifestyles:

a dramatic social transformation had taken place in the central hill country of Canaan around 1200 BC. There was no sign of violent invasion or even the infiltration of a clearly defined ethnic group. Instead it seemed to be a revolution in lifestyle … about 250 hilltop communities suddenly sprang up.

A large proportion of the first Israelites were once pastoral nomads. But they were pastoral nomads undergoing … the presumed shift from the earlier tent encampments to villages of similar layout in stone.

The communities involved small, basic dwellings of around 100 each, providing for themselves by growing food and raising animals. By 1100 BC the population was barely 50,000 spread out across the entire area, but that still reflected a huge change from the predominantly nomadic system of the region just a century or so earlier.

The villages in this early era do not seem to have worshiped different gods or spoken a different language compared to other Canaanites. They were unfortified settlements and there are no archeological signs of any serious conflict with their neighbors. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes these proto-Israelites from other Canaanites is.... they didn’t seem to raise pigs. Whether that was because of their particular religious customs or was retroactively explained by them, who knows.

The layout of their early villages was in the shape of an oval, with living quarters encircling a courtyard containing animals. This same layout has been found all the way from the Sinai to Jordan, and seems to reflect a region-wide settling of nomads. They plopped their tents down in the traditional manner, built basic houses where they sat, and kept their animals in the middle.

It's probable that this process was prompted by the collapse of Egyptian rule after the 1200s BC--and the stability it offered. Before, nomads provided settled peoples with meat and settled peoples provided nomads with grain and produce. But due to the aforementioned wrecking of shit, there were far fewer agricultural settlements remaining in the region. So nomads could no longer rely upon settled people for grain and produce... and they had to begin growing them themselves.

This was all far more noticeable in what would become Israel than in what would become Judah, which at the time was:

rocky and covered with dense scrub and forest … A mere handful of permanent villages were established there at the time of the Israelite settlement … Judah remained relatively empty

The difference in environment was the main reason. The land that would become Israel was simply more fit for small agricultural settlements than the future Judah was. Israel was also in closer contact with the many Canaanite cities to the north and east, which were slowly reviving themselves. It took nearly 200 years, but the huge economic and social blow to the region was slowly fading.

By the 11th century BC the Philistines, who had previously settled along the southern coast, consolidated the power of their cities. The Phoenician successors of the coastal Canaanites occupied the maritime ports of the north. … after a few decades of abandonment even the major sites were reoccupied, apparently by the same population … the most important Canaanite centers were rejuvenated

And so the future Israel began to slowly integrate itself into the newly-revived regional economy. Now we’re finally getting close to the presumed time of Saul, David, and Solomon. The stage seems pretty set for a united kingdom to develop, right? People are settling down, the nomadic way of life is ending, the economy is developing. But we have a couple of problems here. One: Judah is still essentially hicktown, even as Israel takes the first steps towards development. Jerusalem won’t be noted as an important city in any records for a very long time. Two: there are zero signs of any united kingdom. The “House of David” is solely mentioned in connection with leaders of Judah in all of the historical evidence we have. The leaders of Israel were separate people living a quite separate existence, with nothing clearly in common with Judah beyond the two having YHWH as part of their polytheistic pantheon (and as we’ve already seen, YHWH was worshiped in some other Canaanite city-states too).

It’s possible (even likely!) that some guy named David did exist as the early ruler of some part of Judah. But the reality is that neither he nor any of his successors are mentioned in any historical sources. And the sources that mention their alleged later descendants never suggest that there was ever a time in which Israel and Judah were united and ruled by one dynasty of Judean origins. In fact, for the next several centuries, it was Israel, not Judah, which would play the historically important role in Levantine history.

It began in the mid-900s BC with a bang, involving foreign invaders yet again wrecking shit. This time, the invaders were more familiar.

The northern cities would be destroyed by violence and fire … they never recovered from the shock. This was Canaan’s last gasp.

Egypt … was at last ready to reassert its power … the pharaoh Shishak, founder of the 22nd Dynasty … launched an aggressive raid northward. This Egyptian invasion is mentioned in the Bible [1 Kings 14:25-26]. .. Shishak struck at the developing network of early Israelite villages in the highlands as well. But Shishak’s campaign did not result in lasting Egyptian control of the highlands … yet the blow struck at the revived Canaanite cities … was terminal. This had enormous implications, since the destruction of the last vestiges of the Canaanite city-state system opened a window of opportunity for the people of [Israel].

The cities of northern Canaan were violently conquered by the new Egyptian pharaoh, who thought that now would be a good time to reclaim his ancestors’ old vassal states. This pharaoh was Shoshenq, who recorded his victories on the walls of a temple. This pharaoh, called Shishak in the Bible, is only mentioned there as having conquered Jerusalem in the time of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. But the Egyptian records say nothing of Jerusalem. They do mention plenty of places in the Canaanite cities, and in Israel. It seems that Jerusalem, and Judah as a whole, just wasn’t considered a place worth gloating about at the time, no matter how hard the Bible’s authors try to insert it into the record.

Regardless, the total collapse of the northern Canaanites gave Israel an opportunity. They had a fairly large settled population now, and a climate that was able to produce olive oil and wine, two luxury items. With their local competitors indisposed for the moment, they suddenly became important in regional trade. And with that came an influx of money, and with an influx of money came a need to establish some bureaucracy.

It was around this time that one of the most important Biblical dynasties was founded. ...I am referring, of course, to the House of Omri!!

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