#Experimental archaeology time perhaps?

[maureen-corpse]

I was reading a children’s book last night that featured experimental archaeology about Iron Age western Europe and chickens were mentioned* and I thought to myself, chickens are not native to Europe; could they have reached there by the Iron Age? When even was the Iron age? When did chickens get everywhere? This book is from the 90s; when did everyone figure out when chickens got everywhere?

Unfortunately now alongside my desire to read many Regency romances from many eras to see how the writing and attitudes evolve I also want to track down books about modern people being influenced by the Iron Age (or perhaps other times in the distant past!) in some way (whether setting a book there or doing history about it) and see what changes as people make discoveries.

*To be precise, the word “hens” was used and I think it would have to have gotten more specific if the birds were anything other than what a typical American middle schooler would think a domesticated hen was. So I’m assuming chickens and not guineas or something.

[theoldcurator]

Slave Species of the Gods

an Old Curator Special Report

💫 Are We the "Slave Species of the Gods"? Unraveling the Mysteries Welcome to a journey into the unknown. An expedition into an enigma that has intrigued humanity for centuries. The provocative and riveting narrative of the "Slave Species of the Gods". Sounds pretty dramatic, doesn't it? This story is no ordinary tale, but one that dances on the edge of reality and myth, science and faith. It's a tale woven with threads of ancient texts, archaeological discoveries, and extraterrestrial theories. A tale that questions the very essence of our existence. Are we, humans, truly the masters of our destiny? Or are we mere pawns in an intergalactic game played by otherworldly entities we've termed 'Gods'? This topic has been a hotbed of controversy, attracting both fervent believers and skeptical critics. It's a debate that has raged within the hallowed halls of science and in the mystical realms of spiritual circles. And in this newsletter, we dare delve deeper into this enigma. We'll explore ancient astronaut theories and genetic manipulation hypotheses. We'll decipher cryptic legends and scrutinize archaeological evidence. We'll question mainstream narratives and dare to look beyond the veil of accepted history. So fasten your seatbelts, dear reader. It's time to embark on a mind-bending exploration into the "Slave Species of the Gods". 👥 Decoding the Divine: Who Are These 'Gods'? Who, indeed, are these entities we refer to as 'Gods'? The term 'Gods' itself is shrouded in ambiguity and mystery. Spanning across cultures, epochs, and civilizations, interpretations of these divine beings have been as varied as they are numerous.

From omnipotent, ethereal entities in monotheistic beliefs to pantheons of gods with human-like flaws and virtues in polytheistic cultures, the concept of 'Gods' shifts like a kaleidoscope through the lens of different perspectives. Ancient texts, revered by civilizations of yore, paint vivid pictures of these 'Gods'. They were not just distant, divine spectators but active participants in human evolution. Creators, protectors, educators, destroyers - their roles were as multifaceted as their personalities.

Ancient Texts Yet, beneath the reverence and wonder, the subject of 'Gods' isn't without its controversies and debates. Who were they, really? Literal divine beings or metaphorical representations? Or perhaps, as some daring theories suggest, extraterrestrial visitors misinterpreted as 'Gods' due to their advanced technology?

Gods Debate As we journey through this newsletter, we'll delve deeper into these riveting questions. And perhaps, by the end, we'll have a fresher, more nuanced perspective on the 'Gods' of our ancient past. 🌍 Earth: The Divine Sandbox As we delve deeper into the intriguing mythos of the 'Gods', a myriad of theories arise about the pivotal role our home planet supposedly played in their grand scheme. From being an experimental lab to the birthplace of a new species, Earth's narrative transcends the mundane in these theories.

Earth from Space A popular belief suggests that these 'Gods' utilized Earth as their cosmic laboratory. Here, they purportedly engaged in an array of activities, from mining precious resources to manipulating the DNA of existing lifeforms.

Gods experimenting Mankind, as per these theories, was not merely a byproduct of evolution, but rather a designed species. Some even propose that humans were engineered to serve as labor for these divine beings.

Human creation This idea, as controversial as it may sound, does find potential backing in various archeological and historical pieces of evidence. Ancient structures like Egypt's Great Pyramids, Peru's Machu Picchu, or England's Stonehenge often defy conventional explanations of their construction.

Great Pyramid These grand structures, built with a precision and scale unimaginable for the time, lead many to the tantalizing prospect of divine intervention. The presence of these 'Gods' on Earth, as remote as it may seem, is a concept embedded in countless ancient cultures and civilizations. Perhaps, it's time we take a closer look. 👽 "From the Heavens They Came: Exploring the Ancient Astronaut Theory" Ever been gripped by midnight musings of cosmic voyagers from galaxies far, far away? If yes, then you're in for a treat. Let's dive into the fascinating realm of the Ancient Astronaut Theory and its intriguing propositions. The Ancient Astronaut Theory, as intriguing as it sounds, is a concept that has sent shockwaves through the corridors of conventional historical understanding.

Ancient Astronaut Theory This theory posits that extraterrestrial beings, referred to as 'Ancient Astronauts', visited our blue planet eons ago. But that’s not all; it further suggests that these celestial visitors significantly influenced human civilizations in their nascent stages. And the 'Gods' that our ancestors worshiped? According to this theory, they were not mythical beings, but real, flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials with advanced technology that was perceived as divine power by our ancestors.

Extraterrestrial gods Sounds like a sci-fi blockbuster plot, doesn't it? But hold on to your skepticism. This theory is not without its fair share of compelling arguments and intriguing evidences. Take, for instance, the unexplainably advanced architectural marvels of ancient civilizations, like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Stonehenge. Our ancestors, with their limited technology, supposedly built these? Or, the curious depictions of 'Gods' in ancient art, often shown with what seem to be high-tech devices, helmets or even spacecrafts. These are just snippets of the vast body of evidences that proponents of this theory point to. So, the next time you look up at the night sky, remember: we might just be living in the remnants of an ancient, cosmic crossroads. Extraterrestrial Gods, Ancient Astronauts? The evidence is out there, and the debate is far from over. 🧬 The Genesis Code: Gods as Genetic Engineers

Ancient DNA helix Sliding down the rabbit hole of the 'Slave Species of the Gods', we have come across a fascinating theory. A theory that could potentially redefine our understanding of divinity and creation. The theory of Genetic Manipulation. This theory postulates that these so-called ‘Gods’ were not just otherworldly visitors but were also pioneers in genetic alteration. They were scientists working on the biggest canvas possible - life itself. Researchers who support this theory suggest that these Gods had a purpose to their experiments. They needed workers. Beings capable enough to understand and execute orders but submissive enough not to question their masters. Sounds like a familiar scenario? Only this time, it wasn't human masters but Gods at the helm. Thus, they claim, was born the 'Slave Species', through a cocktail of divine and native DNA. Peculiar? Absolutely. Improbable? Not necessarily.

DNA double helix There are several scientific observations that lend a shred of credibility to this wild hypothesis. Take the human genome itself, for example - a marvel of biological computing. The ENCODE project conducted by scientists globally revealed that a vast portion of our DNA, previously labeled as 'junk DNA', is in fact functional and vital. Could this 'extra' DNA be the legacy of our supposed divine creators? Only time, and more research, will tell. Next time you marvel at a feat of human accomplishment, remember - we might all be part of an experiment conducted by ancient extraterrestrial geneticists. A chilling thought, isn't it? 📚 Old Scripts, New Insights: Unraveling Ancient Texts and Legends Over the centuries, numerous texts and legends have emerged, painting fascinating pictures of 'Gods' and what are dubbed as 'Slave Species'. A notable one is the Sumerian texts. These ancient tablets, originating in Mesopotamia, often speak of 'Anunnaki', believed to be 'Gods'. Intriguingly, they also mention 'lu-lu', a term some experts interpret as a reference to a primitive worker or 'Slave Species'.

Sumerian+tablets Similarly, Hindu scriptures like the Vedas and the Puranas describe 'Devas' and 'Asuras'. Researchers often draw parallels between these entities and the 'Gods' and 'Slave Species' narrative. But what do these interpretations really mean? Researchers dive deep into these symbolic narratives, trying to decipher the cryptic language. They use linguistic, archaeological, and even astronomical tools to piece together a narrative that could help uncover humanity's hidden past. The interpretations, however, are not without their controversies. While some scholars argue these texts are descriptions of real events masked in allegory, others contend they are purely mythological. Regardless of the debates, these interpretations have certainly shaken our understanding of human history.

Historical+interpretation They pose thought-provoking questions: Could our ancestors have been more advanced than we assume? Is our history intertwined with beings from other worlds? Answers remain elusive. However, the exploration of these ancient texts and legends continues to offer intriguing insights, each one bringing us closer to understanding our own story on this blue planet. 🧐 Mythbusters: Dissecting the 'Slave Species of the Gods' Theory When it comes to theories as captivating and controversial as the 'Slave Species of the Gods', it's no surprise that a bunch of misconceptions find their way into the mix. Let's address a few of these myths head-on, shall we? Myth 1: The theory is purely fiction, with no scientific basis. While it's true that the theory ventures into the realm of the speculative, it's far from being baseless. There have been numerous archaeological discoveries and historical interpretations that support some aspects of this theory. Myth 2: Supporters of the theory reject all conventional explanations of human evolution. Not exactly. Most proponents of the 'Slave Species' theory appreciate established scientific theories. But they also believe in the possibility of our understanding being incomplete. They argue for an open-minded exploration of alternative theories that could add another layer to our understanding of human history.

Alternative theories Myth 3: The theory is based on wild interpretations of ancient texts and symbols. Interpretation is indeed a key aspect of this theory. But calling it 'wild' is a bit of a stretch. Many of these interpretations are backed by expert linguists and historians, and they often provide fascinating new perspectives on ancient texts and symbols. In the end, whether you subscribe to this theory or not, one thing is clear: the 'Slave Species of the Gods' theory stimulates thought, encourages questioning, and invites us to look at our history from a fresh perspective. So, keep an open mind. Let's not be afraid to dive into the depths of controversial theories and come out with a more enriched understanding of our past...and possibly, our future. 📣 The Final Word: Inviting Your Thoughts on the 'Slave Species' Conundrum Well, friends, we've certainly journeyed through a maze of theories, interpretations, and ancient enigmas today. From the mysterious 'Gods' and their potential role in shaping our Earth, through the labyrinth of the Ancient Astronaut Theory, to the controversial notion of genetic manipulation birthing a slave species. And let's not forget our delve into the myriad ancient texts and legends that have kept scholars guessing for ages.

Ancient Texts and Legends Remember, these theories and ideas are all pieces of a puzzle that we're trying to solve together. And the reality? Well, it could be all these theories combined, or none of them at all. That's the beauty—we're still searching for the truth. We encourage you to think critically about these ideas. Question the theories, scrutinize the evidence, and debate the possibilities. Formulate your own opinions because, in the end, your thoughts are what truly matter.

Think Critically We'd love to hear your views on the 'Slave Species of the Gods' theory. Join us on our social media platforms to engage in a healthy, open-minded debate about this fascinating topic. Who knows? Your insight might be the missing piece to this age-old puzzle. We can't wait to hear from you. Until our next exploration, keep wondering, keep questioning. Your curiosity is our greatest asset. Check out Slave Species of the Gods Read the full article

[meteoric-palace]

NEOLITHIC During archaeological excavations in 1936 in the plain of La Praille, remains of wooden huts from the Neolithic period were discovered. A loop of the Arve must have flowed along the present course of the Drize, thus justifying the presence of hooks, bows and a dugout canoe.

MIDDLE-AGES Since ancient times, the houses have been grouped together in the shelter of the hills of La Bâtie and Grand-Lancy. In the Middle Ages, the humid plain of La Praille, composed of meadows and willows, was exploited by the serfs and peasants of the surrounding seigneuries. The name "La Praille" comes from "pratalia" which means "set of meadows" in old French. The reclamation of the plain of La Praille has allowed cattle breeding. The market gardeners called the "plantaporrêts" cultivate mainly broad beans, cardoons, artichokes and beans. The area of the current Adret Pont-Rouge is ploughed in the shadow of the castle and the vineyards of the small village of Lancy. To the west, in the fortified house, also known as the "Maison de la Tour", lived the lords of Lancy since at least 1311. During the medieval period, the people of Lancy were mainly peasants or market gardeners who mainly cultivated cereals, which constituted the basis of their diet. At the beginning of the 15th century, we count 40 fires (i.e. households) of about 4-5 people, for a total of about 160 to 200 people in Lancy. These fertile lands a few leagues away from the city of Geneva were of great interest. The plain of La Praille became the experimental ground for agronomic studies of the patricians of Geneva. From the middle of the century on, Michel Lullin devoted himself to the study of crop rotations, which later defined the Agricultural Revolution. The torch was taken up again in the 1780s by Charles Pictet de Rochemond, following the principles of English agriculture. The following decade, with the strong ambition to develop a local wool industry, he specialized in the breeding of merinos, a breed of sheep imported from Spain, which he exported to the Russian Empire. Thus, Charles Pictet de Rochemont succeeded in setting up a shawl factory in Lancy based on the merino wool he produced. The meadows where the cattle graze have changed little over the centuries. However, this hamlet, which progressively takes the name of Pont-Rouge because of the color of the paint used to preserve the wood of a bridge that the authorities did not want to rebuild in stone, is progressively getting closer to Geneva. This hamlet still represents a privileged place for city dwellers to go for a walk in the countryside, who can still occasionally come across painters at work.

At the same time, the future Acacias district began a slow but certain urbanization and industrialization at the end of the century. This district develops considerably and the Acacias path is transformed into a road in 1878, the streetcar makes its appearance there from 1889, which makes the exchanges with the city easier.

The beginnings of the urbanization of Pont-Rouge began when Geneva defined new industrial zones on the outskirts of the city in 1925-26. This urban strategy made it possible to convert land in the city center into residential areas.

The Praille plain is now part of the PAV, Praille-Acacias-Vernets sector. The first manufacturing companies settled in 1963. The commune of Lancy experienced a demographic explosion, in particular when the population tripled in the 1970s to reach 20,000 inhabitants. Following the promulgation of the first HLM law in 1955, which responded to the housing crisis, various large complexes of apartment blocks were built rapidly, perhaps too rapidly in fact. 

[ritualpurposes]

I am slightly concerned that typing in the key words "Human Sacrifice" into my university’s library website yielded a self help book.

[blueiscoool]

1,000-Year-Old Ink Pen Found in Ireland

An archaeologist excavating at an 11th century ringfort in Ireland has unearthed the oldest ink pen ever discovered in Ireland. What’s unusual, is that this artifact was a secular work tool used for writing legal documents. It wasn’t used to create iconic medieval Christian works of art. Dating back 1,000 years, Ireland’s oldest known ink pen was unearthed by archaeologist Michelle Comber of the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. Dr Comber discovered the artifact within an 11th-century archaeological layer at the Caherconnell Cashel ringfort, County Clare, Ireland.

The ink pen features a hollowed bone barrel and a copper-alloy nib. Because ringforts were the homes of wealthy agriculturalist-rulers it is perhaps no surprise that this device would be found at such a site. But what’s unusual in this discovery, according to Dr Comber, is that the pen was found “in a secular setting,” rather than in a religious setting.

The discovery of the pen is the crown jewel of the Caherconnell Archaeology project . Over the last three years, a team of multi-disciplined researchers has field-surveyed the entire area between Kilfenora in the southwest to Carran in the northeast in Ireland.

First built in the late 10th century the Caherconnell Cashel ringfort was enhanced and rebuilt by local rulers until the early 17th century. The 140-foot-wide (140-meter-wide) superstructure had 13-feet (4-meter) high, 10-foot-thick (3-meter-thick) drystone walls. According to a report in the Clare Herald , the pen was discovered among “fine craftworking and metalwork tools , to items of trade, gaming and music” at the ringfort site in Ireland.

The pen stands out from the other artifacts recovered at the site because it was different from what is normally expected in terms of secular ringfort artifacts. Pens and other writing tools are usually unearthed at Irish religious sites where scribes copied older texts, like the highly illustrated 800-AD Book of Kells, which is a priceless example of mediaeval Irish calligraphy skills.

Dr Comber had experimental archaeologist, Adam Parsons, of Blueaxe Reproductions, fabricate a replica of the pen to determine if the artifact might have functioned as a writing tool, or more specifically a “dip pen,” like he suspected it would. Dip pens have no ink reservoir within the barrel, unlike the fountain pens and feather quills that were much more popular in the 11th century. Hence, the Caherconnell pen is unique in the way it functioned.

Several copper-alloy pen nibs have been discovered dating to the Roman Britain era, and many more from between the 13th and 16th centuries AD. However, Dr Comber told the MailOnline that the bone-and-metal Caherconnell pen is the “earliest complete example of a composite pen ever discovered in the British Isles.” And the archaeologist was clear that this pen wasn't used for medieval Irish religious arts, but for recording family lineages and trade information.

Calligrapher and historian Tim O’Neill told the MailOnline that the design of the Caherconnell pen “would have lent it well for use on fine work - perhaps even the drawing of fine lines.” He added that because the copper nib pen was dipped in ink it would have worked well for “ruling straight lines to form, for instance, a frame for a page.”

It can be argued that the creation of the ink pen was a monumental step in the formation of human civilization, for with writing we can create new ideas, share old ones, and learn in structured ways. The oldest ink writing ever discovered was penned onto papyrus around 2600 BC in Egypt.

Hollow, tubular, bamboo plant reeds were filled with ink and squeezed gently to maintain a constant ink flow when writing. Over time, grasses and reeds were replaced with bird feathers. Between the 7th and 19th century AD, Europeans preferred the stiff thick feathers of swans, turkeys, and geese.

Wherever Ancient Origins’ writers see a chance to generate an “Ah, so that’s where it came from” moment for readers, we grab it. According to Journal Shop’s brief history of pens, medieval Brits carefully removed any natural oils that may have contaminated the ink before they shaped the feather with a sharpened knife. The quality of the sharp end of the pen greatly determined the resolution of the final writing, thus, it was always said that a writer should have a good quality “pen-knife.”

By Ashley Cowie.

[justforbooks]

Demetrios ("Dimitris") Pikionis was born on 26 January 1887. He was a Greek architect, and also painter, of the 20th century who had a considerable influence on modern Greek architecture. He was a founding member of the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA-Hellas, International Association of Art Critics. His oeuvre includes buildings and urban planning in Athens and the entirety of Greece—including several schools and a playground in Filothei, Athens.

He was born in Piraeus. He inherited his talent in painting from his father, who was had an aptitude in the arts. In 1906, he became the first student of Konstantinos Parthenis, a distinguished Greek painter, while he was studying at the National Technical University of Athens civil engineering, graduating in 1908.

He then continued his studies in Paris and Munich, in sculpture and drawing. In Paris, he attended architecture classes at Ecole des Beaux Arts (Paris). Pikionis was back then introduced to the work of Paul Cézanne and became friends with Giorgio de Chirico. Some Greek painters of the time, such as Georgios Bouzianis and Periklis Giannopoulos, were influential figures during these formative years.

He returned to Greece and after the Balkan Wars, he started studying and working in architecture during which period, he began shifting his focus on the study of the modern Greek architecture. In 1921, he undertook a lecturer position at the 'Morphology' department at the National Technical University of Athens where he stayed until 1923. In 1925, he received a permanent position in the department of decoration as a professor.

Between 1930-1935, he co-published with his good friend, the painter Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas the magazine '3ο Μάτι' (translated as '3rd Eye') where he published many of his texts. The magazine collaborated with many artists and academics, such as Stratis Doukas, Takis Papatsonis, Sokratis Karantinos and others.

His first important work was Moraitis house in Tzitzifies (1921-1923). In 1932, upon the completion of the Elementary School in Pefkakia of Lykavittos, he came to the realisation that his works were not satisfactory and changed his aesthetic perceptions. All of his subsequent architectural works were based on the idea of bridging universalism with regionalism. In the 1940s and 1950s, his architectural creation was limited to designs for graves. However, in the following period, from 1951 to 1957, he was involved in many projects. Among them is the formation of the archaeological site around the Acropolis and Philopappou hill, perhaps his most important work, and the tourist pavilion of St. Demetrios Loubardiaris, seeking its ideal. In 1958, after 35 years of NTUA as a professor, he retired. In 1966 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Athens.

He has been often described as a critical regionalist and sometimes as a European modernist. In 1933, Pikionis with other Greek architects signed the Athens Charter, a manifesto of the modernist movement which published later by Le Corbusier. However he didn't embrace completely the new movement. The leitmotif in his work has been, according to architecture historians, the epiphany, the contrast between bleached marble and sodden soil.

Notable works

Lycabettus School

Moraitis House, Tzitzifies, 1921-1923

Kotopouli Theatre, 1932

Primary School of Pefkakia, 1932

Experimental School of Thessaloniki, 1933

Landscaping of the Acropolis of Athens surrounding area, 1954–57

Filothei playground, 1961–64

Hotel Xenia, Delphi

City Hall of Volos, Volos

Pourris House, Athens view

Although he actually built few buildings, Pikionis is revered for the landscaping work in pedestrian areas around the Acropolis of Athens, a work done in the 1950s. Utilizing rough-finished marble in various shapes that appear irregular, yet are strictly geometric, and incorporating expertly chosen local fora on his terraces and steps, Pikionis' work has astounded visitors to the area and remains highly thought of ever since. He utilized similar techniques in creating the children's playground of the municipality of Filothei, an affluent Athens suburban area.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[lichenthrope9]

Artist’s statement: Ys, or, Borrowed from the Sea

A shortcut to mushrooms

My interest in alternate worlds was piqued when I first read The Hobbit, and the first two volumes of Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. The maps, the histories, the biographical information and allusions to genealogies, the languages and cultures and very real, lived-in countries, the sense of geography in that the story took place as much between points of interest as it did within points of interest, simulating the time it took to travel between cities – all of these factors hooked me as much as the story had. It is from the world of Middle Earth and the history and accidents of its construction that I derived much of my inspiration for this project.

However, as we must with all our favorite creators, I returned to the Lord of the Rings with a more critical eye years later. After coming out as transgender, going through a long health crisis, beginning to critique my own whiteness, and reading a lot more about philosophy and social science theories, I had more tools and lenses through which to critique the premises on which Tolkien wrote the darling of English fantasy literature.

It seemed Middle Earth was a project born out of Tolkien’s devout Catholicism, and the cosmology of Middle Earth heavily reflected Tolkien’s own interpretation of Catholic teachings. There were angels and fallen angels, and a battle between them on the physical world that took it off track from the plans of the all-knowing Eru Ilúvatar (Tolkien‘s analogy for the Father). This would all be well and good in theory, if Tolkien hadn‘t taken a step further and made ”Good“ and ”Evil“ sentient races, created by individual angels with certain aesthetics and moral philosophies in mind that would irrevocably be tied to the bloodline of each of these races. This already has problematic implications for Tolkien‘s racial frame, but to make matters worse, he based certain fantasy races on certain groups of humans on Earth.

So, with these pitfalls in mind, I put my initial worldbuilding efforts not into creating languages and cultures, but rather creating a planet that they could live on, that could feasibly exist in our galaxy. I didn‘t include magic in its formation, I didn‘t use a mythic structure at first. I didn‘t even know if I wanted to populate my world until I had an entire solar system. I knew things like the luminosity, age, and mass of the star, the distance between the star and planet, the length of the year and day, the axial tilt of the habitable planet, how all of that would affect the seasons and climate, and how far away the moon was and what it would look like from sea level on my planet. I knew how deep the oceans were and I even had some speculative biology plotted out for how life would come to be on this planet. My idea was, I wanted to make a hard scifi world (within reason – I‘m not Andy Weir) and then drape a cloak of high fantasy on it, almost a bit more like Dune by Frank Herbert than Lord of the Rings.

My readiness to populate my planet with peoples and histories neatly coincided with the beginning of my Purchase career. I was no geologist, geographer, meteorologist or astronomer. Though I was certainly interested in how ores were distributed in my planet‘s crust, how coastlines and climates developed, and how the sky would appear from the surface from my world, the central focus had always been and would always be how these things would all affect my fictional societies and their growth. What would it be like to grow up on a world where the moon appears so much larger than the sun? A world where the solar year is just a bit over 639 Earth days? Would it be possible, given different historical circumstances, to achieve a Type 1 or 2 Kardashev civilization? How would such a civilization come about politically?

Worldbuilding as anthropological exploration

After learning of my passion for worldbuilding, a professor suggested I take a look at the 2015 presidential address to the AAA by Monica Heller, called ”Dr. Esperanto, or Anthropology as Alternative Worlds.“ In it, Heller outlines the history of perhaps the most famous constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto, and maps its positionalities, along with those of its creator, L. L. Zamenhof, within the scope of highly anthropological inquiry. Zamenhof was situated at the precipice of many different identities; he was a Jew from Bialystok, a multilingual city which in his lifetime lived under Russian and Polish-Russian rule. His interest in creating an international auxiliary language was one of diplomacy and peacemaking in the years preceding World War I, a time where international tensions and the influences of global industrialization and capitalism were all growing ever stronger and more binding. Esperanto‘s goals have since changed slightly; on a sticker on the back of a Paris street sign in 2013, it was hailed as ”La langue internationale équitable,” marking Esperanto as the “equitable” opponent to the specifically capitalist problem of income inequality. One can only conclude that not only the language itself, but also the act of its creation by Zamenhof, was a highly political project. Heller then touches upon other forms of constructed language, ones whose purposes lie in artistic expression and exploration such as Dothraki and Sindarin. The article taught me that “the act of transportation [to an alternative world] might have unexpected consequences. But the whole endeavor will be transformative, teaching us things we would never have learned otherwise” (Heller 2015: 21).

Since finishing this article, I have embarked on a journey to ground my project in social theory. My goal began as less utopic and more experimental. It was not yet apparent to me how my politics would manifest in the work, but I still wanted to play the game: with a number of minor changes to a habitable world from Earth, and a number of restrictions in how I depict the cultures, can I keep my civilizations alive and, more importantly, ”breathing“ (that is, relatably and realistically complex enough to feel lived-in), until they reach Kardashev Type 2 status? (That is, until they can technologically harness as much energy from their home star for use as they like.) What would stories look like set in this universe, perhaps stories set in the same star system but separated by hundreds or thousands of years? And how do I responsibly depict these people without falling prey to the same ideological traps that Tolkien and Herbert did?

This new phase of my project also coincided with my renewed interest in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. A:tLA stood out as a shining example of how to write a complex, colonially-charged political history between societies without directly making any one society analogous to Western Europe or Euro-American whiteness. I devoured Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness, which taught me that even tiny changes to human cultural frameworks (such as, what if there were no gender as such, and what if everybody on a planet were asexual except for a predictable period of sexual arousal and attraction?) can have vast implications for that society‘s history (Le Guin theorized that on such a planet, there would be no concept of war); and The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics (Le Guin‘s own term for the supposed study of animal language) which taught me that the lenses of imagination can be focused just as strongly on our nearest neighbors in the dirt as they can be on the distant stars.

I therefore decided to take a hybridized Tolkien / Le Guin – ian approach to writing the stories. I committed to ”translating“ every character‘s pronouns into the English feminine, and only gendering them at all as feminine when necessary. I also committed to writing a world history where no one ethnic group was directly analogous to Euro-American whiteness, à la AtLA. I would of course need to loosely base groups located in geoclimatic zones on similarly-located groups on Earth, or else have altogether too much work to do (deciding how much of the culture‘s development might be affected by the geography and climate; deciding on a model of anthropology on which to base my analysis of each culture, be it structural, evolutionist, structural-functional, etc.; building each cultural good, artifact, and practice in relation to every other; conducting a simulated ethnography of each of my major ethnic groups).

So, I decided to base some of my cultures on recent ethnographies and archaeological studies of geoclimatically analogous Earth ethnicities. The first of these was a master‘s thesis by Meghan Walley, ”Examining precontact Inuit gender complexity and its discursive potential for LGBTQ2S+ and decolonization movements.“ In it, Walley complicates the gendered narratives of pre-contact Inuit history by critically analyzing remains and gender-specific tool usage, and conducting interviews with living queer Inuit and their families. Walley found that Inuit-specific definitions of Two-spirit gender and sexual nonconformity had existed since long before contact with Europeans, and that queer archaeological practices were necessary if the living traditions of extant Two-spirit and queer Inuit were to be given their appropriate ontological priority over colonial narratives. I decided to use this thesis as a springboard for reading more current histories of the Inuit and other people of the far North, to embark on my project of constructing plausible cultures for the people living near my planet‘s South Pole.

The magic of semiotics

Then: a type of breakthough. Last summer I found myself reading book after book, including Tao Te Ching, the foundational text for Taoism, and How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Eduardo Kohn‘s posthuman ethnography of a Runa group located near Ávila in Ecuador. In it, Kohn tries to apply the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce to human groups living in rainforest settings to construct and analyze a broader, more current, postcolonial cosmology for this Runa group and its implications for other groups’ cosmologies. It was my first encounter with Peircean semiotics. Oddly, How Forests Think referred in passing to the very chapter of Tao Te Ching that had resonated with me strongest: Chapter 11, in which Laozi talks about constitutive absence, the anti-structures that permeate structure and make structure functional (the examples he gives include the empty hub of a wheel, the space inside a clay pot, and the emptiness enclosed by a room’s four walls). Kohn applies this anti-structure model to the semiotic, saying that Peirce’s types of signs can only signify when they represent things that are not present. A child buzzing their lips to imitate an airplane will only remind you of an airplane if you forget the differences between the child’s imitation and the sound it is meant to represent.

From How Forests Think and Tao Te Ching, I derived six major tenets that I would literally incorporate into my text’s lore as an ancient religion. But more than that, it got me thinking about how language and signification was a type of magic, in many ways. So, I re-incorporated magic into my story. I based the initial rules of my magic system on the postulate that this universe was not ours, in fact, but had grown out of a knowable Universal Field that could be at least partially described with a type of grammar. This Syntaxelium (designated as such both to distance it from concepts like Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and innateness hypothesis, and also to connect it more closely to ideas of networking and fungal semiosis) could be harnessed in languages that contained its features to “negotiate” with the universe. That is, if you speak a language that uses a lot of features of the Syntaxelium in a short amount of time, you are “persuading” the universe to change some of its rules, at least for enough time to grant you a wish. I decided to make this language too complex to be conservative; that is, it would evolve and diverge very quickly from any one set of rules as people used it and streamlined it. There was a constructed language I knew of that might serve perfectly: the language Ithkuil, completed by John Quijada in 2011 and so complex that nobody, not even Quijada himself, is yet fluent in it as of this writing.

Ithkuil is a philosophical-engineered language whose design goals are to be as semantically condensed and specific as possible. There is a single “formant,” or word, in Ithkuil that can be translated as “...being hard to believe, after allegedly trying to go back to repeatedly inspiring fear using rag-tag groups of suspicious-looking clowns, despite resistance” (the word itself is /qhûl-lyai’svukšei’arpîptó’ks). Quijada has offered that Ithkuil is too complex to be a natural spoken language – rather, that it is a useful tool to think about how quickly and reliably information can be condensed into linguistic frameworks. Its philosophy of meaning is (as the author himself admits) relatively Enlightenment-based – that is, there is a one-to-one correspondence of conceptual representation to some Platonic prototype of what an Ithkuil formant might mean, which is not exactly in line with the language’s design goals – but Quijada here threw up his hands: “A more careful and rigourous construction for Ithkuil’s lexico-semantics, given the author’s stated design goals…would not assume such a theory of meaning, but would rather incorporate more recent findings of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to reflect embodied meaning and metaphor-based conceptualization. However, pursuing such a foundation for the lexico-semantics of the language would, in the author’s opinion, be extremely time-consuming (on the order of many additional years, perhaps decades, to construct)” (2011: 270-271).

I found this thoughtfully constructed masterpiece of a language perfect for my purposes and set about creating daughter languages that may have evolved from its natural use in my world. I imagined that a group of priests of the Moon Queen had created Ithkuil in-world as an attempt to access the power of the Syntaxelium and communicate with the Goddesses. These priests partially succeeded, in that their new language granted them magical powers. They did not become all-powerful, however. These new Wizard-Queens attempted to conquer the world with their magic, and largely succeeded – but once they had spread out, Ithkuil almost immediately diverged into daughter languages due to its complexity, each of these languages preserving different features of the Syntaxelium. After a few generations, the language with the most expansionist, imperial-minded speakers would conquer the world once again and spread their language into every corner of the globe. The language would diverge again, and the cycle of colonization and genocide would continue until a group of marginalized people led a revolution against their contemporary empire and broke the chain.

The politics of translation

But, at this point I was too invested in this project to continue in my experimental, non-utopic design philosophy. I needed to introduce my polemic into the work, or else it might carry messages contrary to my values (it may regardless, but at least I can try and make my intent as clear as possible). I needed my writing to reflect a strong opposition to, or at least complication of, Enlightenment ideals. I would also paint a picture of the post-revolutionary society I dreamed for my characters, which meant I needed to refine my anarchist sensibilities with a deep dive into ethics and anarchist theory.

I decided to illustrate the conflicts between more Enlightenment, classical logic-based arguments and more post-Enlightenment, posthuman arguments in a contest between two translators trying to render the same text into English. I therefore refined the six tenets of my constructed religion, translated them into Ithkuil, then rendered them back into English in two competing and slightly different ways:

1.       tʼal-lrëikțatf orêtfiáss arkʼarț

[tʼal.lɾəɪkθatf ɔˌɾeːtfɪ.ˈas.s ˌaɾkʼˈaɾθ]

 similarity.p1s3.IFL-MLT.N-MNF-HAB-EPI thought.p2s1.FML-MLT.N-v2ss/9-GEN source.p1s1.FML-AGG.N

 “It is known: some reminder is the source of any thought.” – Eloquences

“So it is that all thought’s source is a likeness.” – Violet

 2.       okleomdh âkláʼdh tʼal-lriočʰaț atvufq oráʼtf

[ɔklɛ.ɔmð ˌakˈlăð tʼal.lɾɪ.ɔt͡ʃʰaθ atvʊfq ˌɔˈɾătf]

 river.p2s1.IFL-COH.N.PRX-ASI river.p3s1.FML-N.PRX-MED organize.p3s3.IFL-DYN-HAB-EPI.N self.p1s1.IFL-MLT.A-IND thought.p2s1.FML-MLT.N-MED

 “It is known: as a current from the channel, so selfhood organizes itself out of any thought.” – Eloquences

“So it is that as the whirlpool from the stream, selfhood knits itself from strands of thought.” – Violet

 3.       ôcneoț îcnêț atvațoaxiarň tʼal-lrëigadhoaqʼ

[ot͡snɛɔθ iːt͡sneːθ atvaθɔ.axɪ.aɾŋ tʼal.lɾəɪgaðɔ.aqʼ]

 spore.p3s3.IFL-N-ASI fungus.p2s3.IFL-N-GEN self.p1s1-IFL-N-v2x/2-v2rň/9 component.p1s3.IFL.MNF-HAB-EPI-N-v2q’/2

 “It is known: as the fruiting body of the fungus, the crucial, tiny self is the visible component.” – Eloquences

“So it is: the smallest self is the most crucial visible component, as the spore of the fungus.” – Violet

 4.       tʼal-lreijjaçoak ekraxiuk amvouț tʼal-lrükrațíukiss

[tʼal-lɾɛ.ɪʒ.ʒaçɔ.ak ɛkɾaxɪ.ʊk amvɔ.ʊθ tʼal.ˌlɾuːkraˈθɪ.ʊkɪs.s]

 motion-in-situ.p1s3.IFL-v2k/2-ASO.N.PRX-DYN.EPI.HAB tool.p1s2.IFL-ASO.N-v2k/1 center.p11.IFL-N.NAV tool.p1s2.IFL-N-v2k/1-v2ss/1-MNF.HAB.EPI-framed

 “It is known: a good wheel spins right about the hub, where there is no wheel.” – Eloquences

“So all wheels spin ever toward their wheel-less centers.” – Violet

 5.       öpatf uizát tʼal-lripšasúemzeoj ékëuʼady tʼal-lreisásiull

[øpatf ʊ.ˌɪˈzaθ tʼal.ˌlɾɪpʃaˈsʊ.ɛmzɛ.ɔʒ ˈɛkəʊ̆ʔadʲ tʼal.ˌlɾɛ.ɪˈsasɪ.ʊl.l]

 carrier.p22.IFL-MLT.N mind.p1s1.FML-N-MNF happen.p1s1.FML.DYN.HAB.EPI-PRX-framed-v3mz/9-v2j/6 path.p1s2.FML-A.PRX.PRV-ABL-framed deviate.p1s3.IFL-DYN.HAB.EPI-framed-v2ll/1

 “It is known: a ‘thing’ is a self which acts automatically as expected, and never deviates from its predetermined path.” – Eloquences

 “So inanimate is the self which obeys only habit, and never strays from destiny.” – Violet

 6.       tʼal-lriokápps oratfiáss âkțîʼatf

[tʼal.ˌlɾɪ.ɔˈkap.ps ɔɾatfɪ.ˈas.s ɑkθiːʔatf]

 path-oriented translative motion.p3s3.FML-A.TRM-DYN.HAB.EPI thought.p2s1.FML-N.MLT-v2ss/9 similarity.p1s3.IFL-ALL-MLT.N

 “It is known: finishes, arrives, any and all thought at a type of reminder.” – Eloquences

“So the destination of a thought is a likeness.” – Violet

 As I mentioned, these six tenets were adapted from the Tao Te Ching as interpreted through Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic philosophy. They have to do with the origins and ecologies of the self, the necessity and inevitability of communication, and the structure of thought. Why did I create two different translations of the same text in-world? I wanted to show how political of a project translation can be. For example, the less rigorous Violet Text translates the epistemic-habitual modal affixes of the main verbs as “so it is,” whereas Eloquences uses “it is known;” I did this because though they might not seem such different phrases,  “so it is” distances the knowledge from a knower – it poses the knowledge as an immutable state of reality, rather than an interpretation derived by an observer. As I learned from readings of Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud and Roland Barthes, such mythologizations are processes of naturalizing the events of a narrative until they lose their historicity, and seem to follow simply from common sense. Mythology transmutes history into a string of isolated, politically vacuous events that could never have happened any other way.

Further examples of the differences between these hermeneutic exercises are in the translation of “similarity.p1s3” in Tenets 1 and 6. Eloquences renders this as “reminder;” the Violet Text, as “likeness.” Why is “reminder” any more nuanced? Why might “likeness” lead the reader astray? To me, “likeness” implies literal similarity; a sort of facsimile relationship between an “original” and “copy.” I took these tenets from Kohn and Peirce directly: Kohn says that all thought begins and ends with an “icon.” “…[A]ll semiosis ultimately relies on the transformation of more complex signs into icons” (Peirce CP 2.278 cited in Kohn 2013: 51). By an icon, Kohn and Peirce mean a type of sign that stands in representationally for another in a very literal sense, like an onomatopoeic sound-image or a drawing of a smiley face. These icons aren’t supposed to be technical, detailed imitations, but rather empty stand-ins to quickly communicate a desired connotation. Therefore, a “reminder” suffices as a translation of “similarity.p1s3,” because the relationship between the sign and the referent is not always one of literal similarity.

The limitations of magic

Or, other magics that do just as much

If we take from Mauss that magic is highly grammatical, that it follows closely to linguistic processes, then my equally linguistic magic system’s limitations must lie in the exclusive capabilities of non-linguistic systems, or perhaps even non-semiotic systems. We must turn to the affect theorists. Is the magical self truly nothing more than a set of interpretants, signaling to each other through eternity? What would the implications of this be for free will and the power of the individual vs. the community? This takes me to my current readings of Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, and Massumi’s own Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual. These books challenge the idea that the self can be reduced to its linguistic processes, and posit that the “emptiness” at the hub of Laozi’s wheel, the constitutive absence at the heart of these semiotics, can actually be filled with direction, with velocity – a sort of perpetual growth into excess meaning that’s difficult to pin down in definition or interpretation.

Massumi takes from Bergson that any space, including the political geography upon which poststructuralism maps identities in their “positionalities,” is formed retrospectively from the completion or frustration of dynamic, unmediated processes of movement and sensation in the body. For Massumi, there is an incorporeal element of The Body – its movement through spacetime – that is ontologically privileged before the formation of The Discursive Subject. “Another way of putting it is that positionality is an emergent quality of movement,��� says Massumi (2002: 8).

Emergence is another effect that I address in my Tenets; Tenet 2 deals with selfhood as an emergent property of interacting thoughts, as per Kohn and Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic often grapples with the problem of continuity vs. description, creating almost a Heisenberg paradox of its own wherein a thought can only be described precisely as a positional snapshot, or as a “nondecomposable…dynamic unity” (Massumi 2002: 6). Peirce formulated his three types of signs as emergent properties of each other; indices are emergent properties of the relationships between icons, and symbols are emergent from analogous interactions between indices, or indices and icons. So selfhood, language, and magic all organize themselves from the simplest signs, which is why Peirce and Kohn say all thought begins and ends with an icon. It seems there are parallels within these genealogies of thought, between the Deleuzian affect theorist Massumi and the semiotic of Peirce as it applies to posthumanism. Can the analogy be drawn further to say that if space is an emergent property of movement as selfhood is of thought, then movement and affect is its own kind of non-semiotic magic that must have an effect on spacetime?

[auntarctica]

Can I ask what your writing process looks like? How do you find a story idea and nurture it into what you post eventually? Do you have any tips or tricks or recommendations?

Hey! Sorry it took me a moment to reply, but I had a weird and disjointed week full of asinine obligations and I didn’t want to phone in a response - I wanted to give this the attention it deserved.

This was such a rad question, because it actually caused me to sit back, have a French 75 and analyze the shape of what I tend to think of as an innate, inborn, organic process. Which is what invariably happens when a collection of personal discoveries become habitual over time - they’re so engrained and automatic, you begin to think they were always there.

But the truth is that, through a constant process of repetition and experimentation, every writer ultimately comes up with a set of practices that work for them.

With that in mind, and since you kindly asked, here are mine. My philosophy on writing comes down to these two guiding, driving principles:

I write what I would like to read.

I write to create what should exist, but doesn’t.

For fan-writing, I would also add, “I write to augment and unearth.”

There is an archaeological component to all writing, but never more so than in fanfiction, where you’re ultimately digging into existing narratives to find tantalizing clues and veins of possibility, in order to expand, enhance, reimagine and/or subvert those mother narratives. There may be an entire underground tomb full of gold waiting to be discovered beneath one sentence or throwaway part of a scene, but it will never be realized until someone excavates that avenue. Michaelangelo famously claimed that he did not sculpt—merely revealed what was already present in a block of marble.

If you have passionate feelings about anything in an artistic property, then you have ideas. You cannot help but have them.

And ultimately, this is where ideas come from: an exchange between two characters that suggests a history, and prompts you to wonder what transpired between them before, or inspires you to reference that moment in a story set in their future. A curiosity about the unspoken moments, those missing interludes and gaps in canon that are left unresolved, and are so ripe for fleshing out.

Or perhaps you like the general cut of a character’s jib, as presented, but find them under-developed, and want to give them more weight and presence and purpose. Or maybe you just think it just be would be hot if a couple of them hooked up. Or you want to fix something that bothers you, that you feel failed in the original work. Reconcile bitter enemies into passionate lovers. Redeem a villain and give him dimension. Re-mint a reputation, or tarnish a hero. Or anything, really. Anything that strikes you.

Once it strikes you, of course, the question is execution.

In my experience, there are two types of writers:

The first are like painters, who splash a lot of words down fast, dash off a full draft and then revise their overall vision in subsequent passes.

The second are more like sculptors. They edit as they go, carve sentences with care, craft the shape of the overall narrative, and search for the right word the first time.

Both are equally valid approaches, and I’m sure many people are a hybrid. Both have virtues, and drawbacks. The danger for the first one, of course, is if they never rewrite or revise. The danger for the second is that they get the dreaded “perfectionist paralysis”, and never finish.

I tend to be the second type. But regardless of what your natural approach and inclination is, I think certain things can be useful.

Once you have an idea about who and what you want to write about, your mind will start to work on those thoughts. It will begin with a sort of jumbled white noise that feels hopelessly inchoate. Be patient: things will start to emerge from the static. Scenes will start to coalesce, snippets and lines and exchanges of dialogue.

And when they come to you, it does not matter what point these need to occur in the narrative: write them. Strike while they’re hot and set them down. Even if it’s just a note to yourself about your eventual intentions, even if you fully intend to tweak them later, because you’re not sure about the context. Keep these snippets in a loose affiliation at the bottom of your doc, or in a separate snippets doc. (If you happen to use Scrivener, you can actually view any doc side by side with your main doc, which is incredibly helpful when harvesting those gems for inclusion).

The reason is this: if you write the scenes and sections and snippets you are fairly sure about wanting (even in a rudimentary form, or as a note), you automatically set up tentpoles, and a scaffold—a skeleton of thematic waypoints that your mind will use to fill in the lacunae and build a narrative arc. Your subconscious will work on this, even while you’re doing other things, and will be re-primed to work on them again every time you read them over.

Even if you’re hopelessly stuck, or have an unproductive day and don’t get any writing done, read over what you have before you shelve it for the day. Your mind will make connections, remove obstacles, and explore options, allowing you to sit down and compose words the next day.

Which leads me to this: most of the real work of writing happens off-page, and away from your computer. Once you set a piece in progress, your mind is always engaged and actively working on completing it. Writing anything – a story, a novel, a script, what-have-you—is like being in labor for days, or even years. Even when you’re not actively pushing, it’s happening. It’s a state you come to tolerate.

Pursuant to this, another tip: if words aren’t coming or you reach a difficult patch of prose or aren’t sure how to handle something, get up and do something mindlessly kinetic. Wash dishes, sweep, exercise, take a shower, cook some food. Engaging one part of your mind in something banal seems to free up the subconscious. It’s often shocking how quickly the answer will come to you, like a bolt from the blue.

In my experience, narratives want to be realized. Themes want to reveal themselves, and repeat meaningfully. What starts out nebulous and daunting will slowly winnow down and lick into shape. There’s a magnetism to words and ideas. It’s often a process of moving the pieces around until you feel a pull in some direction.I will sometimes begin a piece from the beginning, if I am struck with an undeniable opening sentence, but more often than not, I find myself writing out of order. This may not work for everyone, but by having these buoys and checkpoints in place, I feel like it gives a more comprehensive view of the overall shape of the developing narrative.

Full disclosure: I’m not sure if any of this is too rudimentary, or if I even addressed what you wanted to know, but if you have more specific questions, I’ll happily try to answer those too!

[rebelsofshield]

Panels Far, Far Away: A Week in Star Wars Comics 6/19/19

The rebels may be warriors for justice and galactic revolution, but that can’t always be the case, right? Three different Star Wars comics from Marvel explore the gray areas of galactic war this week.

Star Wars #67 written by Kieron Gillen and art by Angel Unzueta

After nearly thirty issues and four years of story, Kieron Gillen’s wild run on Star Wars comes to a close with the climactic finale to “The Scourging of Sho-Torun.” 

With Queen Trios dead and the partisans having turned Leia’s tactical strike into a potential worldwide cataclysm, our band of heroes desperately attempts to escape with their lives and prevent disaster.

Gillen and artist Angel Unzueta aim for fun and excitement here and the results undeniably deliver. After a run that at times tread rather close to being somber and tragic, it is a bit jarring to see Star Wars make a marked turn towards the lighter and playful here at the end of its latest incarnation, but the creative team here operates at such a fast story telling clip that it’s hard not to get caught up in it all. Whether its TIE fighter chases through the depths of Sho-Torun or surprising acts of heroism by unexpected characters, Gillen keeps the creative twists and turns flying.

The result does end up feeling a tad anticlimactic and thematically confused though. While Gillen does write some great interactions between him and Han, Benthic Two Tubes and his partisans end up being the largest problem here. When their involvement in Leia’s strike on Sho-Torun predictably turned into a mission of vengeance, Benthic became an entertaining wild card to an already complex story. Unfortunately though, Gillen pivots maybe too hard to making Benthic’s revenge responsible for the mission’s hiccups and takes away from the intriguing character study of Leia that this arc originally seemed set upon. Leia does get to put the pieces back together of her mission, but any message that was trying to be said about her flirtations with darkness feels lost in the midst of all the chasing and escaping.

Angel Unzueta’s potential final issue of Star Wars proves to be one of his strongest. Although his detailed and expressive faces at times still feels a little uncanny or separate from their bodies, this action heavy issue feels dynamic and energetic. The explosive collapse of Sho-Torun feels suitably apocalyptic and scenes of the Falcon diving through molten magma and collapsing super structures are a visual treat.

At the end of it all, it will be sad to see this creative team go even if “The Scourging of Sho-Torun” proved to not be the strongest story they would produce. Gillen in particular proved to be one of the most influential and inventive voices in the new canon and its hard to undersell how important some of the creative choices he made on Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra have shaped not only the Marvel line but the franchise as a whole. I would be happy to see him back someday.

Score: B

Star Wars Doctor Aphra #33 written by Simon Spurrier and art by Wilton Santos, Caspar Wijngaard, and Andrea Broccardo

Conceptually, “Unspeakable Rebel Superweapon” is shaping up to be one of the strongest story arcs that Simon Spurrier has envisioned for this series to date. It’s premise blends elements of Rogue One, Indiana Jones, and Killing Eve style spy thrillers into a strange and colorful character piece that feels up the series’ alley and fits Spurriers particular sense for the weird side of the galaxy.

Turns out that magic Jedi gun that Aphra snatched last issue is more than just a valuable artifact. It may contain the design blue prints to an off the books rebel superweapon that may be useful in assassinating Emperor Palpatine. Also turns out that stealing this artifact combined with her recent actions on Milvayne landed her on the Empire’s most wanted list. Also turns out that Aphra’s ex-Imperial lover, whom she brain washed with a telepathic squid, is now a member of one of the rebellion’s most ruthless espionage units. Combine that all with some thematic throughlines about morality and motherhood, we are on track for another rich arc of Doctor Aphra.

Throwing Aphra into a sect of the rebellion that not only makes use of the archaeological plot points of her career but also stretches traditional ethics is a great move by Spurrier. While the flashback sequences with Aphra and her mother may lay it on a bit thick, making Aphra (and the reader) enter into a morally sticky faction of normally heroic characters is fruitful playing ground for writer and character. If past arcs of Spurrier’s run were about reinforcing Aphra’s chaotic and dangerous character, maybe the future of her story is finding out how that character may still be used to do some good.

Making Tolvan a prickly rebel spy is also a great twist and it’s nice to see her evolve as a character outside of being the object of love and misfortune for Aphra’s latest schemes.

Unfortunately, “Unspeakable Rebel Supreweapon” is still struggling visually. Wilton Santos, Caspar Wijngaard, and Andrea Broccardo all take on pencil duties here with Chris O’Halloran and Stephane Paitreau doing colors. That’s a lot of hands in the visual pot and the result is rather underwhelming. Of the three main pencilers, Wijngaard is again the most successful. While there is little apparent editorial logic to who draws what, Wijngaard handles most of the flashbacks and expository panels and these are often the most striking and fun images of the book. Whether it’s Jedi Apostate Oo’ob striding a starfighter and shouldering his experimental weapon or Tolvan and her team of spies letting loose on a group of hapless Imperials, Wijngaard’s moments in the spotlight are stellar. Santos struggles however. In particular, his decidedly sparse and underdetailed environments, which are done no favors by the coloring, lack the diverse and lived in aesthetic that one would expect from Star Wars or even past arcs of this title. It’s disappointing as the script for this story is so strong that its underwhelming visuals become all the more of a letdown.

Score: B

Star Wars TIE Fighter #3 written by Jody Houser and art by Roge Antonio and Geraldo Borges

Last week saw the release of Del Rey’s latest Star Wars novel, Alexander Freed’s Alphabet Squadron, which harkens back to the military procedurals of the 90’s X-Wing series. I’m only about 100 pages into the book, but so far Freed has managed to bring to life rebel aces in a way that hasn’t been felt in sometime with characters that are exciting but also heartbreakingly human. Jody Houser has a much shorter and very different mandate with TIE Fighter, but so far the book and comic are managing to be fitting pairs.

Perhaps Houser’s biggest success so far is making us naturally root for “the bad guys.” It may help that that the forces Shadow Wing are fighting are mostly other Imperials, but this makes one of the few pieces of current canon with Imperial leads that doesn’t actively feature defectors among its protagonists. Shadow Wing are loyal to the Empire, but Houser so far has done a decent job of setting up these five pilots as relatable “everymen.” They aren’t necessarily blameless individuals, but they are understandable as people and it makes them engaging protagonists all the same.

This third issue of TIE Fighter explodes the central conflict and as a result Houser and artist Roge Antonio really get to let loose with well-crafted dogfight set pieces. Antonio captures the chaos of starfighters chasing each other through space with the appropriate intensity, but also thankfully, never loses sight of the central cast. Action scenes are clear, intense, and exciting.

That being said, there are some emotional beats here that TIE Fighter fails to fully sell. Whether it is the suddenness that they happen or that Houser hasn’t yet earned the emotion for these moments, there are beats that should sting or surprise but instead slip by quickly and passively. Maybe TIE Fighter would have benefited with just a bit more downtime for its cast before throwing them into this chaos? Who knows, but it’s hard not to leave this issue without feeling kind of hollow.

Score: B-

[wtf-hollywood]

My first post is a repost. Deal with it.

I wrote this months ago after seeing The Mummy. It was on my main, and I recently have been thinking about other movie rewrites and shit, so, hey, yet another blog.

Lets start with the mummy movie. The antagonist is fucking strong, but the protagonists are lame.

So we’re going to do better. We start by getting a restraining order against Tom Cruise, and a costumer who can do “Sexy, but empowering” for our Egyptian Princess. Then we strike out all references to Set, and instead use Apep, who is basically the evil god of ancient Egypt that these movies keep wanting. We spill some exposition in the mummification scene about how mummification was the ideal method of burial in ancient Egypt, and Ahmanet’s deal was specifically not mummification, but ritual execution and imprisonment, possibly handwaving historical inaccuracy in the law and order part by making it explicit that this whole “bound alive in bandages, put in a sealed sarcophagus, and submerged in mercury” thing was him basically taking his best guess at how to make it as hard as possible for her to come back.

Next, we make our protagonist an awesome archaeologist who isn’t a cis male. Like, maybe we go Lara Croft, but less “tomb raider” and more “properly trained archaeologist who does things by the book but cannot fucking wait to learn shit.” So she finds this site in Egypt, or we can keep the “why the hell is there Egyptian stuff all the fucking way out here!?” thing, whatever, but she finds the site and says “Ho-ly shit, this is a big fuck all prison for someone they didn’t want getting up. I cannot wait to crack it open and see who was such a big bad!” And we get a very speedy montage of her doing basic archaeology, then cut to her cracking open the sarcophagus with a notebook full of drawings and notes about the site next to her.

And I mean, otherwise, we can follow the majority of the 2017 movie outline. We just don’t bring in Prodigium, and we have better characters. And we have actors for any Egyptian characters that are at least vaguely ethnically correct.

Side benefit- we can have some seriously empowering ho yay between the archaeologist protag and the Egyptian princess. Maybe Ahmanet can take a living disguise for a limited time and uses that to try to get close to Archaeologist Chick and we get some very sweet GALS BEING PALS scenes before its revealed that this awesome person is actually the Egyptian princess who wants to unleash Apep on Earth. But would also really like to do that with said Archaeologist chick by her side.

Oh, and we finish up with Prodigium coming in during a mid-credits scene, because lets not fucking pretend we’re not trying to pull a Marvel deal. We could use Dorian Gray instead of Dr. Jekyll, too, because getting some canon bi representation on screen would be kinda cool. So, end of the Mummy, Ahmanet is dealt with, definitely sealed back up and not killed, because we’re establishing an antagonist-based franchise, here, and Archaeology Chick is aware of, but not part of, Prodigium.

Alternatively, we could kick the “Ambition is Evil” trope to the gutter, and let archaeology chick redeem Ahmanet through the power of “Look at this cool new world you could have power over without slaughtering people.” And lesbian cuddles.

For the second movie, we could go with a Creature From The Black Lagoon movie. I mean, Shape of Water just came out, and is essentially an iteration of that creature, but it’s Fox, not Universal, so whatever.

We’re going to keep the Brazilian setting of the ‘54 movie, but we’re going to make a concerted effort to have a primarily Latinx cast. In this version, however, Gillman is some manner of eldritch god. Worshipped by an indigenous tribe centuries ago, but left starved for faith since then. Hell, we’ll throw Western Europe under the bus they oh-so-richly-deserve-to-be-hit-by and say that European conquerors killed the tribe. So the god has been left in a semi-submerged temple for centuries. Alone. And bored.

Now some asshole American has showed up, paying locals to aid their expedition, looking for “aztec gold.” (Plenty of people tell them that Aztecs lived in Central America, and proceed to list off tribes that were located in what became Brazil until they realize the asshole isn’t listening.)

They find this previously completely unknown temple, and the American strides right the fuck in, while the locals are all talking about how important it is, and that they should call the local college, and so on. Then realize that if they don’t do something, Asshole American will strip the place of anything that might be valuable, and destroyed the rest through negligence, by the time archaeologists get there. We could put in a “Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-It” shout out to Asskicking Archaeologist Chick from The Mummy here for a bit of arc welding.

So the locals rush in to look for Asshole American. They carefully shuffle around, and eventually find him.

Or his corpse.

He’s in an obviously ceremonially important basin, with giant fucking gashes in him.

The locals of course decide that there’s some kind of dangerous animal in the temple, and they need to get out. And probably call someone.

This is where they find they are completely unable to find the exit, even though it didn’t seem that big, or that labyrinthine going in.

The movie then plays out like a bit of a slasher, a bit Aliens, a bit Haunted House, while the bored god makes sport of them. Maybe there could be a sort of Saw-like deal, where mostly they’re put in death traps that have an out. Those outs could be various things that strengthen the god, and maybe there’s one big one towards the end where the locals have managed to reunite, and the out is for them to worship the god.

You could even get some Designated Asshole Victims here, maybe through a B Plot about corporate exploitation of nature, or some cartel fucks. This allows the locals to be put in positions where someone has to die, but it doesn’t have to be them. The god doesn’t care who dies, they care that someone kills someone else in a ritual dedicated to him. Maybe one of the locals buys in early because they’re sympathetic to the god’s concerns about the natural world, and a bit radical, and it doesn’t take much for the god to goad them into slitting some corporate exec’s throat.

End of the movie, the locals escape. It’s a personal win. It’s the thing they care about, that they live. The god isn’t dealt with in anything even approaching a permanent fashion, but he’s not powerful enough to be anything more than a monster that haunts that temple. For now.

We could get a mid-credits scene that shows Prodigium monitoring the temple, but taking a “wait and see” approach to it. Maybe they actually care about the lives of the people who live around there and not ravaging the wilderness, and mention that going in would risk undue collateral damage.

There’s no reason you couldn’t make a good, faithful, adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I mean, you’d want to skip the part where Frankenstein’s Monster immolates himself after killing Victor, but otherwise, you could just do a straight adaptation.

But, lets say you want a new take.

Why not make it a love story?

Replace Ambitious Asshole Victor Frankenstein with a med student who flunked out after the death of their beloved. Med Student was already into some pretty experimental shit that the admins frowned upon, and Deceased Lover donated their body to science. Maybe Med Student’s friend sees Deceased Lover being brought in, and slips Med Student in to say their last good byes.

But Med Student has other ideas.

They steal Deceased Lover’s body, or at least their head, or brain, and maybe some stuff for the experimental gene therapy and tissue rejuvenation stuff they were looking at before flunking out.

Or hell, maybe Med Student convinces Friend to help. Actually, that’d be pretty cool, especially if Friend’s name is something that is just similar enough to Igor.

Anyway, they make off with Deceased Lover, and they start the work of applying Experimental Gene and Tissue Rejuvenation Tech to Deceased Lover.

And it works.

Mostly.

There are some complications, and Deceased Lover doesn’t recognize Med Student, or Friend, and isn’t too rational, or controlled, upon waking up. Maybe Deceased Lover’s groaning and such draws attention, and between Deceased Lover seeming to have Come Back Wrong, and Someone Coming, Med Student and Friend flee. Deceased Lover lashes out in instinct at the person who investigated, killing them with inhuman strength, and Deceased Lover is alone. They slowly come to full consciousness, and slowly begin to realize that Med Student left them. They brought them back, and then left them, but not before showing an expression of horror and disgust.

Deceased Lover tries to find old friends and family, but is rebuffed in horror by the people who last knew them to be dead.

Then Prodigium gets involved, because someone reported a person apparently coming back from the dead. They attack Deceased Lover on sight.

Overall, the movie plays out similarly to Frankenstein, except, perhaps, in timescale. At the end, Prodigium decides to let Deceased Lover be, provided they don’t become a threat. Prodigium has Med Student’s research, but so does Deceased Lover, and Deceased Lover has realized that there is something about them that makes the living fear them. Deceased Lover’s best shot at not living alone until they kill themselves is to 1) find other monsters, 2) create more of themselves, or 3) join Prodigium.

I personally like the idea that they decide to create their own society, creating a third faction that can oppose both the monsters and Prodigium in the franchise. This could be presented in the mid-credits scene.

The complication with this route for the Frankenstein movie is that you can’t really use the name Frankenstein, because it’s just corny unless you’re doing a direct adaptation. But you could just call it Promethean or something similar, it’s fine.

This is probably a good point to bring in Dracula, and it could be the Dark Universe’s Period Piece to mirror Captain America. We’ll set it in the early 1900s instead of the late 1800s, though, because I forgot about this as I writing, and cars were decently available in the early 1900s, but almost completely unavailable in the late 1800s. Early 1900s still works quite well.

We start with a narrator who is dictating a report on a case handled by  Dr. Van Helsing. It’s a “How We Got Here” intro. The narrator’s voice is feminine, so audiences may expect Van Helsing to be getting a gender lift in this version, but the narrator never speaks in the first person.

We’re going to embrace some parts of various versions of Dracula, and kind of weld them together. We start by making up some history, saying that a Wallachian prince set out in a deranged, and desperate mission to establish a hold on what would become the British Isles. He managed to build a castle there, but was lost to history otherwise. The reason he wanted to do this is not given particularly straight, but we use some bad christian eschatology, and have it be some kind of religious quest, because we’re totally going to embrace the whole blood drinking/eternal life thing from Christian tradition as an impetus for Dracula’s origin.

So, Prince Dracula is some mad Wallachian prince, maybe he’s actually exiled, and he goes and builds a castle in the British Isles on a shaky religious justification. We get a very bare cliff notes version of this in the intro, and it really just sets up why in our next scene we see a British real estate agent walking up to a castle in bad disrepair, on a small island in the middle of a lake. Hell, we’re going to go super symbolic, and make it a caldera lake. I honestly don’t know how likely it is for a caldera to exist on the British Isles, but, eh, fuck it.

So, the real estate agent is writing to their fiance over breakfast in their B&B, explaining that the castle was owned by some super private individual, and pretty much completely unknown to the outside world until recently, when said owner was committed to an institution and his property liquidated. So now the agent’s firm has acquired the land, and they’ve been sent to determine whether it’s a better investment to tear the castle down, or repair it.

Deep inside the castle, they find a very odd chapel. It looks normal enough at first glance, but a closer look reveals that every saint has a monstrous face, and angels and demons have traded places.

Also, there’s the altar, which seems to be hollow.

The Agent who is completely untrained in archaeology cuts themselves while looking the scene over, deeming it “creepy as fuck,” and making a note of it before moving on. There’s a close up of the blood dripping through a crack in the altar, and a sound that Agent dismisses as just the settling of an old building.

As it gets dark, Agent calls it a night, and heads back to their B&B, where they get various ominous warnings about that island. One of which is that its known for having vicious wolves who only come out at night. Which Agent dismisses as ludicrous, because wolves have been extinct in Britain for a decade at least. The person who mentioned it just gives a knowing look and walks away.

Agent goes back the next day to continue their work. They note that things are slightly different in the chapel, but doesn’t think much of it. Figures a bird knocked shit over, or something.

Time gets away from Agent, and they find themselves walking back to their car after the sun has dropped below the trees of the surrounding forest. And they hear a howl. They dismiss it. Must be hearing things. Then there are more. They hurry back to their car.

It starts to rain. Hard. And the road goes through winding forests, and there are those howls, getting closer. There’s a quick shadow bolting across the road, making them lose control for a harrowing trip across the bridge from the island to the ring, and a sudden peal of thunder distracts Agent just as they make it across, causing them to crash into a tree. They call a tow, but wind up having to walk to the B&B in the rain when told that the area has no drivers on the road and he’ll have to wait til morning.

Next day, he gets a cab, and we get to play a little homage to the carriage in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie. Back at the castle, shit has definitely changed, and now Agent is seeing apparitions. Also, there’s some weird old man there, who introduces himself as a descendant of Dracula, and a relative of the man who previously owned the castle. A relative whom holds a copy of the deed, and persuasive arguments about the ownership of the castle. But he’s less interested in arguing over some small sum of money than he is in purchasing property in London and moving some of his more prized items there.

And then it plays out pretty similarly to the Dracula story, but with more “deal with the devil” and “dark inversion of communion.” Yes. More. Agent’s Fiance gets bit, and becomes a vampire. Van Helsing is called in, and is in fact a woman, but her voice doesn’t match the narrator’s. Dr. Van Helsing can totally be a woman, there were tons of women doctors in the 1800s.

Dracula starts a reign of terror on London, and Dr. Van Helsing has to reach out to others for help. Fortunately, she has a group of learned men and women, mostly women, who gather to trade stories, collaborate, etc. Mostly after going on expensive expeditions that polite society considers extremely wasteful and pointless. Their motto is “Prodigium de monstrum” (ess. “Prodigy out of monsters”), and they’ve proudly taken on the name The Prodigal Circle.

In the fight, Van Helsing dies, but Dracula is defeated, partially because of Mina’s ability to fight on his level as she resists his control.

Finally, it is revealed that Mina is the narrator, who has taken Van Helsing’s position in The Prodigal Circle, guiding their transition into a vigilant order from Van Helsing’s notes and instructions after being inducted by Van Helsing in one of her vigils over Mina when Mina was her patient.

The mid-credits scene shows Prodigium scientists removing Van Helsing’s body from storage, preserved through something between magic and science, as Mina, who doesn’t look a day older, supervises from above..

That is four fucking movie premises. And I think that’s enough for tonight. If there’s interest, I could write up premises/outlines for Wolf Man; Prodigium, the conclusion of Phase 1; and maybe a start of Phase two.

[tomwatchfilm]

17|09|2018

Was in London again for a meeting with my co-director/-writer and producer (sounds more professional and less truthful than ‘friends’). Casting impending, location paid for, no backing out now, should probably make peace with the goddamn script...

But before the meeting I did my usual rounds: 

BFI Southbank

Producer in the cafe queue. Overheard snatches of discussion between two, one involved in the Mo’Wax doc, the other produced... something... and it’s doing well. He’s adopted a self-aggrandising pride disguised as self-effacing. 

Even from these limited fragments 

I bristle.

The shop opened, I found what I’d been hoping to get - The Edge Is Where The Centre Is: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology - it’s probably too late in our film’s process for the book to be significantly, impactfully useful, but it’s good to keep in the same headspace - and just look at it:

(a related note, I also found a copy of Peter Greenaway’s script for Prospero’s Books, which is a film that (similar to the Penda’s Fen book) employs dense, loaded images-on-images. Interesting to see how detailed the script is, and just how my favourite sequence in all film was originally articulated in written form by a man who hates film beholden to text)

Tate Modern

AIDS Room 

I get an intense, physical, visceral response to a lot of AIDS-related art (probably related: I got a dizzy deliriousness through sex-ed classes for about a year around age 13/14), but I could look at vintage photos of queer couples and collapse across time into myself forever.

A reputation in the cinema is transitory. Who cares for a well made film. What is a genre? I wouldn’t know what a genre was! Am I one?

Life is always more important than celluloid, where a reputation will last as long as aniline dye. All this will be forgotten as the mask and pageants of the renaissance, and for the most part thank god! Perhaps a couple of frames in some vault will lead the future to believe there was more than meets the eye.

- Unused V/O from the script to Derek Jarman’s Blue, as found in his Blueprint notebooks (1991-2)

The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010)

I have no truck with elitism in culture so the fact a 24hr experimental art film can be so readily engageable and, eight years later, still as popular and intriguing to people as it obviously was fills me with joy. As does arriving on a clip from Live and Let Die. See as much as you can if you can.

[extemporaneousmusings]

There’s this page from a manuscript that’s in LACMA’s collections I’ve been thinking about for a good year. I discovered it when watching a GettyTalks livestream last summer by the GoT costume designer. I kind of forget the context in which she discussed it, but it totally captivated me and isn’t really relevant to the rest of her talk, as she moved on to discuss the more psychological and emotional underpinnings of costuming, rather than original source materials. I was so intrigued that I messaged the Getty tumblr that day to ask for the citation when I couldn’t find the image myself, and it’s just been floating around on my computer for the past year.

15th century Islamic manuscripts are worlds away from my wheelhouse, obviously, but there was something here that clung to the edges of an already fringe concept I had been toying with, that over the past year has become more and more relevant and pervasive.

The idea is hinged upon two major foci. The first is the development of the attribute through time, which is much more central to what I do...The basic synopsis of what I’d like to ultimately accomplish with my PhD is to try and connect grounded, known archaeological assemblages to contextualize and examine them within a more robust and experimental theoretical framework. The discussion of images is often divorced from their context, especially when it comes to more ephemeral objects like vases. (Note, this is the first time I’ve ever really used the word ephemeral in connection with vases, I need to think about this more!) The second is of the extended lifespan of Alexander the Great, both in images and texts, which persisted for thousands of years after his death, and was incorporated into many different cultural narratives.

An attribute, within iconography (which is at its very simplest, the study/interpretation of images and symbols) is an object or a shorthand that gives further information linked to the central character. Dionysos is one of the most attribute-laden lads in Greek art. To name a few, he has a kantharos, which is a specific type of drinking cup, leaves, wine, satyrs, maenads, which all in and of themselves, have nested attributes. 

Attic black-figure vase depicting Dionysos and a few of his typical attributes. (Musée de Louvre, MNE 938)

Athena has her owl, and gorgon head on her shield. Zeus has thunderbolts. All of these are small visually represented objects, yet convey a great amount of culturally loaded information. I’m just speaking from the Greek tradition at the moment, but iconography and attributes exist across time and space. Thor has his hammer, which is an extremely potent symbol that conveys a lot more than just his favorite accessory. The Statue of Liberty has a torch and books. You get the point.

Attributes have not remained the same, in terms of what they represent or how they are interpreted, throughout history. Narrowing back down to the Greek world, the Hellenistic period brought about enormous cultural shifts in nearly every arena, and art was one of them. It hasn’t really been explored through such a lens yet, to my knowledge, but the very power and intent behind attributes shifted dramatically. I am super intrigued in trying to find a way to trace the development of the attribute, and see how and when its use began to change.

Here we get to the point of contact between the two ideas. The Hellenistic period is a broad, uneven, inelegant term to discuss a period of time directly impacted by the death of Alexander the Great and the aftermath of his political and military campaigns, but before the Roman Empire became the main cultural and political power. This is, of course, impossible to define, but in reductive academic short-hand refers to the years 323 BC- 31 AD. The Hellenistic period also considers a much broader geographic scope than is usually incorporated into classical scholarship in earlier periods, because Alexander conquered so much land, and Greek ideas were then transmitted in very different ways to a broader swath of people and cultures.

I’ve now reached the point where this gets beyond me, for the moment. I’m not an Hellenistic historian, and the political and military narrative of history during these years is a fucking quagmire. The art produced during this time-period in many ways reflects this time of upheaval and constant change, because it’s experimental, bizarre, and all over the place.

Alexander was a brilliant commander and political thinker. He curated his image and controlled its dissemination. The dude had a whole host of personally commissioned artists at his command who produced sculptures/coins/jewels depicting him that were somehow regulated and presented a unified front, despite the geographical breadth across which they worked and he travelled. (This is precisely why you can always identify sculptures of him, even hundreds of years after his death, because they were all produced using cookie-cutter templates.) He used attributes and his own image to influence politics in a way that hadn’t been done before, and this continues long after his death.* This is picked up and totally incorporated into Roman imperial politics and art further down the road. 

At the moment, this is my (utterly unsubstantiated) half-baked axis: I think that the attribute had been developing and shifting in use somewhat, but that Alexander radicalized what it was, and how it was used. THEREFORE, not only can one continue to trace how the attribute continues through and beyond Alexander in Greek&Roman art, but Alexander himself through time and cultures makes a fascinating case study of the attribute. (Maybe??? Or maybe this is just two separate things just barely linked??? I’m gonna try to explain the second branch more.)

Alexander was, obviously, a big fucking deal. He went a bunch of places and did a bunch of shit. As such, he was remembered and mythologized broadly, for many different reasons, in many different ways. His actions were incorporated into the narrative fabric of many cultures and societies. Before I watched this Getty talk I had NO IDEA that Alexander appears in the Quran. Fascinating!!

He appears in the Quran as Dhul-Qarnayn which means “The Two-Horned One” in English. Scholars don’t know exactly why, but have tentatively suggested that perhaps it is because Alexander was sometimes depicted on coins as having curling rams horns. This is super dope, and I totally wanna buy it and argue for it BECAUSE, his use of the rams horns on coinage was a direct attempt to assimilate himself within a blended Eastern/Egyptian mythology. The rams horns were an attribute of Ammon, an Egyptian deity who is often considered alongside/culturally synonymous to Zeus. So, it is possible that his name in the Quran and further Islamic tradition is a direct reference to the way he, and then his followers, manipulated attributes to accomplish political goals.

Tetradrachm of Lysimachus depicting Alexander with the horns of Ammon. British Museum 1919,0820.1

Along with being incorporated into the textual history of these diffuse cultures, he is also depicted visually in a whole host of new and evolving forms. I haven’t looked into the artistic depictions of Alexander once he becomes Dhul-Qarnayn, or Iskander (his Persian name), but I think that’s probably what I should do next. By the time it gets to the way-aforementioned manuscript page he is completely transformed iconographically speaking. In this illumination Alexander/Iskander is depicted (the solo figure on the right) as an official from the Chinese court, visiting the Kaaba. He is, therefore, culturally reborn, depicted as someone from China, interacting with one of the most sacred monuments of Islam. This is so far removed from his original context, and yet one can trace the path of his transmission through time and media to this point.

Iskander at the Kaaba. LACMA M.73.5.462

As I’ve said. I’m not sure how these two concepts (the attribute and ~Alexander through time~) necessarily link up, or if they even productively can. It’s possible they should both be pursued as separate, though theoretically related trains of thought. I was hoping, through the course of writing this, try and figure out some more/gain further clarity, but unfortunately I don’t think any of the resources I’ll need to really dig down on this are readily available online, as I have discovered a rather scanty digital trail, even about Alexander in his extended legendary life.

*27/4/19 this is pretty bold and I'm not sure I'm currently equipped to defend the statement against a critical attack but it still feels right. 

If you read all of this, hey thanks! This was an attempt to try and mitigate the fact that I’ve just been crawling up the walls of my own mind and it’s been getting pretty bad the past couple of days. Injuries are really difficult for everyone, but coming directly from a summer of mobility and hiking and freedom in the place I love most, despite the fact that I wasn’t even in the field very much, and being utterly and completely grounded has been a devastating and crippling (pun intended) adjustment. Sitting in one place has never been something I’ve been good at, and I am really only just coming back into my own mind as I ease off the pain meds. SO, this was an attempt, inspired muchly by @post--grad’s fucking brilliant and captivating newsletter to just try and muse and think without any pressure or connected to anything that has any current relevance to my scholarly production. 

Let me know what you think, really! Even if you’re someone for whom this is all totally new, bc let’s be real, most people don’t spend their lives thinking about objects and images and The Past. I wanna know what you think! Does it make sense? Is it weird? What was the most interesting thing about this, if at all?

[juniperpublishers-gjaa]

Why is the Turin Shroud Authentic?- Juniper Publishers

What is the Shroud

The Shroud of Turin [1-7], the Holy Shroud or simply the Shroud (Figure 1) is the archaeological object, as well as religious, more studied in the world. It is in fact the only Relic that boasts not only dozens of publications in specialized scientific journals, but also hundreds of books in dozens of different languages; you cannot count the articles and notes that come out almost daily in the newspapers and on the web.

The Shroud is an ancient linen cloth, 4.4m long and 1.1m wide, which enveloped the corpse of a tortured man, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced by a spear in the chest. Many are convinced that the Shroud is the sepulchral cloth of Jesus Christ resurrected there after about forty hours from the wrapping. The double body image there impressed has been the subject of intense studies especially during the twentieth century, but even today, it is not technically reproducible and cannot even be explained scientifically.

On the Shroud, various signs are visible [2,8], important and not easily comprehensible at first glance, also because their partial overlap complicates the identification. We can see: the double mirror image, frontal and dorsal, of a man, the bloodstains corresponding to the wounds of the Man that was wrapped, the stains caused by water, the traces and the holes caused by the fire of Chambéry of 1532 and other minor signs.

The Shroud is an object of great scientific interest for its body image still unexplainable today, but it is also an object of great religious interest because many persons are convinced that it shows some traces of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This fact has aroused some logical-deductive problem. Unfortunately, many researchers tend to confuse the religious aspects with the scientific ones and, if this is the case, it is very easy to find objective-oriented documents. Believers [2] sometimes try to find proofs of authenticity even by using facts that are not strictly scientific and sometimes connected to phenomena of pareidolia; non-believers [6], on the other hand, seem sometimes blind to scientific evidence that is not in accordance with their beliefs.

Here we will try to consider only the scientific aspects of the problem, avoiding the possible interference of other kinds, especially religious, even to try to dampen the controversy that has emerged in recent times on this subject. Since many topics are very complex, we reserve the right to investigate any points of interest in possible subsequent interventions.

The Authenticity of the Shroud

Very frequently, there is also a heated discussion about the authenticity of the Shroud, without however clarifying what is the subject of the discussion, or what is meant by authenticity. For someone, the authenticity consists simply in the fact that the Shroud is not of European medieval manufacture, as some mistakenly speculate, but of Eastern-Middle Eastern manufacture, executed 2000 years ago. However, other hypotheses could not be discarded; for example, even the hypothesis that the body image had been realized by an extraterrestrial intelligence or that it was the result of a miracle, would lead to the authenticity.

Others intend to authenticate the Shroud only if it has enveloped the body of a man who suffered all the tortures inflicted on Jesus. Others still define it as authentic only if it has wrapped Jesus Christ. Finally, other more demanding define it as authentic only if it enveloped the body of the Resurrected who left his body image impressed by rising from the dead and emanating an energy. Obviously, in the latter case, the answer goes outside of science, because this discipline is not able to treat the Resurrection phenomenon that is not reproducible.

By authenticity we mean here a burial sheet, of very ancient manufacture, about 2000 years ago, which wrapped the corpse of a severely scourged man, crowned with thorns, crucified and dead, who could be identified with Jesus of Nazareth. In this case, the conditional is necessary because it is not currently possible to identify with full scientific certainty the name of the person who was wrapped in the Shroud, even if the correlation between what is detected experimentally on the Relic and what we read in the Gospels helps a lot to recognize this Man.

    A brief Historical Mention

The origin of this linen Sheet is still unclear today, characterized by a very precious manual weaving of the type 3: 1 that seems to have been built for high-ranking priests with a “Z” type twist, instead of the normal “S” weaving. Following recent DNA analysis from the dust aspirated by the Relic, it appears to be of Indian origin [27]. In the first century AD, trade between the Palestinian area and India was flourishing and it cannot be excluded that this sheet was bought by a wealthy Jerusalem person for burial.

Many historians [2,7], by identifying the Shroud with the Mandylion, see then the Relic in Edessa, the current Salinurfa in Turkey in the early centuries until it reached Constantinople until its fall in 1204. This last fact is shown not only by a rich iconographic research but also by a recent numismatic analysis of the Byzantine coins [8] minted from 692 AD, which depict a face of Christ very similar to that of the Shroud. A probabilistic calculation that considers a series of details common to the two representations comes to affirm that the engraver of one of these coins would have had just seven odds on a billion different possibilities to spot all the features together, without having seen the Shroud.

After more than a century of unclear paths, the Shroud appeared in Lirey in 1353, and it was subsequently kept in Chambery from 1502. There, in 1532, it suffered the famous fire that seriously damaged it. In 1578, it was brought to Turin where it remains until today, except for some sporadic hiding during the wars; for example, during the last WWII, it was brought to Montevergine.

    Dating

Although the Shroud linen fabric is at first sight very old because it is yellowed and woven by hand, it is still very well preserved and resistant. In 1988, a sample of a few centimeters was taken from a corner and radiocarbon dated by three famous laboratories [9]: Oxford, Zurich and Tucson in Arizona: it turned out to be an age of 1325 AD with uncertainty of ±65 years, but this result was widely criticized [10-13] both for procedural and statistical problems.

Five different methods, independent of each other, instead agree with the assignment of the first century AD as probable age when the artifact was built. A Project of the University of Padua (CPDA-099-244) has allowed the development of alternative methods of chemical and mechanical dating. The chemical methods, based on FT-IR / ATR and Raman spectroscopy, dated the Shroud at 300 BC ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 with a confidence level of 95% respectively. The high uncertainty associated with the result is mainly since the Raman spectra are influenced by the fluorescence while the FT-IR / ATR spectra are influenced by thermal factors. The linen of the Shroud was in fact exposed at a temperature of about 200 °C during the fire of 1532.

The mechanical method based on the analysis of some parameters such as the breaking strength, the Young’s modulus and the loss factor appeared more promising though more complex. After an adequate calibration of the method, based on the results of two dozen samples of known age, a Shroud age of 400 AD ±400 years emerged with a 95% confidence level.

To these three methods, Raman, FT-IR and mechanical the numismatic method that sees the Shroud before the seventh century AD must be added. Another chemical method developed by the chemist Raymond Rogers [14], based on estimates of the kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin, sees the Shroud posed in an ancient period from 1000 BC to 700 AD.

    The Blood

On the Shroud, it is possible to observe different blood drippings:

a. Those due to the insertion of the nails during the crucifixion,

b. The more than 370 wounds produced by the scourges,

c. The blood wound of the side produced by the spear of the Roman centurion to verify the death of the Crucifix and

d. The wounds on the forehead, temples and nape due to the crown of thorns.

Some of these drippings have been analyzed by means of adhesive tape samples put directly in contact with the Relic. Samples of blood crust have been analyzed and the blood resulted considerably deteriorated. The ageing of the blood material caused part of the deterioration, but the main alteration derives from the exposure to the sixteenth-century fire that partly changed the chemical composition; analysis by Raman spectroscopy [15] in fact confirmed this characteristic with experimental tests.

The blood so deteriorated is very brittle and easily disperses into the environment, so it is easy to think that these blood traces have faded over time, so they almost disappeared at the sight of the observer. Consequently, it can be thought that in the past centuries such bloodstains have been reinforced by means of pigments such as red ochre and cinnabar. Both pigments were found together [15] with the Shroud blood. Recently, spectrometric analyses showed the presence of biliverdin [16], caused by the degradation of hemoglobin in the blood of the Shroud, typical of a traumatized person.

    The Impossible Image

Perhaps the most interesting point from the technicalscientific point of view of the Shroud research concerns the body image that to date is neither reproducible nor explainable in all its very particular characteristics (Figure 2).

Since 1998, when Secondo Pia took the first photographs of the Relic and allowed scientists to study more closely the body image of the Shroud, dozens and dozens of scholars have tried to reproduce the Shroud image but without success. As the scientists of STURP stated, who in 1978 performed the most detailed scientific analysis on the Sheet, what can be reproduced from the macroscopic point of view is impossible from the microscopic point of view and vice versa. This is not the place to detail these characteristics [17] and the different hypotheses [18,19] proposed by scholars to explain the formation of the image. Here we limit ourselves by observing that the explanation must include a hypothesis of a phenomenon acting at a distance generated by the inside of a corpse wrapped in the sacred Linen.

Among the hypotheses that seem most promising, there is that connected to a strong electric field that generates the so-called corona discharge. Experimental tests carried out in collaboration with Giancarlo Pesavento [20] of the Department of Industrial Engineering of Padua University (Italy) have confirmed the achievement of a good part of the Shroud’s characteristics reported in the literature, although obviously not all.

    The Shroud Wrapped a Corpse for a Short Time

There are many particularities still not well clarified related to the Shroud image, one of them is the following. The Shroud was certainly used as a funerary sheet [21] to wrap a man, but this Man was wrapped there for no more than forty hours. Normally, the corpses remained in the wrapping sheet until their complete rotting, but in this case, the image of the human body does not show the slightest sign of putrefaction, a phenomenon that begins about forty hours after death. In addition, the cadaveric rigidity of this Man, also confirmed by new studies [22,23] of three-dimensional reconstruction of the human body wrapped there, is a phenomenon of relatively short duration that disappears after a few tens of hours.

Therefore, some questions arise that are not easy to answer from a purely scientific point of view. For obvious scientific reasons we exclude here to consider the effects of that phenomenon reported in the Gospels as Resurrection. Why then the corpse wrapped in the Shroud remained wrapped there for a few days only? Where that corpse went after the burial, because of corpse we must talk based on other scientific data found on the Relic?

In addition to these problems, we must remember that the blood leaked from the wounds of the Man was dissolved by fibrinolysis in the damp environment of the sepulcher. Therefore, any tampering with the corpse would have produced smears on the imprints of the wounds that are instead perfectly transferred also in correspondence of the glutei, on the dorsal image, area where certainly some crawling would have occurred during the movement of the corpse.

    Why is the Turin Shroud Authentic?

If, as discussed above, by authenticity of the Shroud is meant a funerary sheet, of very ancient manufacture, of about 2000 years ago, that wrapped the corpse of a man hard tortured and dead on a cross, all the scientific clues considered seem favorable to this hypothesis.

Six [8, 10-14] out of seven independent dating methods (and [9] has been widely criticized) indicate that this linen Sheet is datable to a period including the first century after Christ. The most important Relic of Christianity wrapped a corpse. The blood traces correspond to those of a tortured man. The body image cannot be explained, but the most reliable hypotheses refer to an intense and probably very brief burst of energy. The corpse, endowed with considerable corpse rigidity, remained wrapped in the Shroud for a short period, not exceeding forty hours. All these clues therefore confirm the authenticity of the Shroud [27].

As St. John Paul II stated, “The Shroud is a provocation to intelligence... The Church entrusts scientists with the task of continuing to investigate”, but for the moment scientists have not been able to provide definitive answers. We must recognize, however, that man who is limited produces Science, so Science is also limited as a result. Will Science be able to explain the phenomenon of the Shroud in the future?

To know more about Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology: https://juniperpublishers.com/gjaa/index.php To know more about our website click on Open access Journals publishers: Juniper Publishers  

[tlatollotl]

Approximately 13,500 years after nomadic Clovis hunters crossed the frozen land bridge from Asia to North America, researchers are still asking questions and putting together clues as to how they not only survived in a new landscape with unique new challenges but adapted with stone tools and weapons to thrive for thousands of years.

Kent State University's Metin Eren, Ph.D., director of archaeology and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and his colleagues are not only asking these questions but testing their unique new theories. They want to better understand the engineering, techniques and purposes of Clovis weapon technologies. Specifically, they study stone projectile points, such as arrowheads and spear points, made by flint knapping, the ancient practice of chipping away at the edges of rocks to shape them into weapons and tools.

In their most recent article published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Eren and his co-authors from Southern Methodist University (Brett A. Story, David J. Meltzer and Kaitlyn A. Thomas), University of Tulsa (Briggs Buchanan), Rogers State University (Brian N. Andrews), Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri (Michael J. O'Brien) explain the flint knapping technique of "fluting" the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention. This singular technological attribute, the flake removal or "flute," is absent from the stone-tool repertoire of Pleistocene Northeast Asia, where the Clovis ancestors came from.

Archaeologists have debated for years as to why the Clovis added this flute feature to their points. Basically, it is a thin groove chipped off at the base on both sides, perhaps first made by accident, which logically makes it very thin and brittle. However, after several types of testing, the researchers have reported that this thinning of the base can make it better able to withstand and absorb the shock of colliding with a hard object, such as the bone of a mastodon or bison.

This fluted point turned out to be an invention that allowed these colonizers to travel great distances with some confidence that their weaponry would hold up at least long enough until they could find the next rock quarry to make new points.

"It was risky and couldn't have been easy to learn how to do this effectively," Eren explained. "Archaeological evidence suggests that up to one out of five points break when you try to chip this fluted base, and it takes at least 30 minutes to produce a finished specimen. So, though it was a time-consuming process and risky technique, successfully fluted Clovis points would have been extremely reliable, especially while traveling great distances into unknown regions on a new continent. They needed points that would hold up and be used over and over again."

In their article, the researchers compared standardized computer models of fluted and unfluted points, as well as experimental "real-world" test specimens, and found that the fluted-point base does in fact act as a "shock absorber," increasing point robustness and ability to withstand physical stress via stress redistribution and damage relocation. In other words, upon impact, the brittle base of the spearhead crumples and absorbs some energy, which prevents fatal breaks elsewhere on the point so it could be reused.

"It's amazing to think that people 12,000 years ago were flaking shock absorbers and engineering stone weapons in a way that it took 21st century modern engineering to figure out," Eren said.

"As engineers, we don't typically get to work with archaeologists, but this project has allowed us the exciting opportunity to provide additional tools from engineering mechanics to explore how fluting affects the behavior of Clovis points," Story said.

[cuscoandeantours]

INFORMATION OF TOURS IN CUSCO  - SACRED VALLEY - MARAS AND MORAY

INFORMATION OF CUSCO

Cusco (Qosqo in Quechua), means navel of the world, and is one of the largest regions of Peru. Its geographical location has allowed it to develop agriculturally, standing out in the cultivation of corn, quinoa, barley, potatoes, tea and coffee. Today Tourism is its main source of income, due to the great archaeological wealth left by the Tahuantinsuyo empire and the passage of the Spanish. It is without a doubt, the city that preserves the most beautiful and important archaeological monuments of Peru and America, among them Macchu Pichu, being in this way the first tourist destination in our country, an important tourist destination for those who come to appreciate the impressive Inca architecture; stone work carried out with originality and perfection. In its surroundings there are many Inca and Colonial archaeological remains such as the Macchu Picchu archaeological site, located 130 km northeast of the city of Cusco, 600 m approx. on the Urubamba river. Inside this Inca citadel a total of 150 houses is calculated; one-room houses, highlighting the solar clock (or Intihuatana), an astronomical observatory that was built in a strategic place in the citadel, from where the Incas could observe the movements of the sun. cusco tours

Among its main archaeological monuments we can mention the fortress of SacsayHuamán, Ollantaytambo, Písac, Kenko, Acllahuasi, the archaeological site of Tambomachay, among other sites of archaeological and tourist importance. Important architectural remains of the colonial style are still preserved from the Spanish past, among them the Cathedral Basilica, the temple and the convent of La Merced, the church of the company of Jesus, the pulpit of San Blas, the churches of Santa Catalina , Santa Clara and San Cristóbal, Santo Domingo, and museums and paintings of the Cusqueña School.

The Sacred Valley for the Incas

With the river feeding the valley, its fertile lands were one of the main centers of food production during the time of the Incas; some places, like Moray, were even used as agricultural laboratories, to experiment with plant species brought from all over the empire. The Incas cultivated potatoes, white corn, coca, fruits and vegetables, on terraces like those seen in many valley towns specially designed for this purpose. Today the valley produces lucuma, peach, avocado, and one of the best corn kernels in the world.

Sacred Valley Tour

But it was more than just an important agricultural center; the Urubamba river valley, "Willcamayu" for the Incas, was one of the most important elements in the religious cosmology of the Incas. They believed that the flow of the Urubamba was closely linked to the constellations and mountains, they also believed that it was the counterpart of the Milky Way on earth.

Where is the Sacred Valley of the Incas located?

The Urubamba river valley or "Sacred Valley of the Incas" is located 15 km northeast of the city of Cusco, reached by a paved road. A drive to one of the nearest towns will take you around 40 minutes. From there you can move to the other towns in the valley.

What is the climate like in the valley?

The Sacred Valley of the Incas is located 2,800 meters above sea level, 600 meters below Cusco, and enjoys one of the best climates in this region, daytime temperatures vary between 19 ° and 24 ° C. This privileged climate made the Incas take it as their main center of agricultural production, experimentation and research. Today travelers use the valley to acclimatize, before starting their tours of Cusco and Machu Picchu, and without a doubt one of the best ways to avoid altitude sickness.

What to see in the Sacred Valley of the Incas?

Known to the Incas as Willcamayu, the beautiful valley stretches from the town of Pisac to Ollantaytambo, along the Urubamba River. The ancient Inca settlements in these cities are presented as checkpoints, before entering the "Inca trail" that leads to the sacred city of the Incas, Machu Picchu; they are simply amazing, and one of the best previews of what you will see in wonder.

MARAS AND MORAY INFORMATION

What does Moray mean?

The word Moray would have different origins. In the Quechua language (language of the Incas) it means: a territory occupied since ancient times. Although the origin of the name of Moray is not known for sure, it is presumed that it had to do with the corn harvest called 'Aymoray', or with the month of May named in the same way by the Incas (sowing month in the calendar inca). Moray is also presumed to come from the name of the dehydrated potato known as the 'moraya' (white chuño). Cusco tours

History

Before the Incas, this part of the Sacred Valley of the Incas was inhabited by the ‘Maras’ and ‘Ayamarcas’ ethnic groups, who occupied a large part of the current territory of the Sacred Valley of the Incas. After the Inca conquest, the construction of large buildings and platforms began in the territory of the Sacred Valley. Thus, the Moray platforms were built, which were used by the Incas as an important agricultural control center. There the production of the coca leaf was carried out, a plant considered sacred to the Incas. Investigations do not clearly indicate whether during the colony (from 1532) the Moray platforms were worked. The truth is that it was not until 1932 that the Shirppe Johnson’s expedition flew over the place, discovering the existence of the platforms, then covered by thick vegetation. During the 20th century, various investigations were carried out on Moray. Perhaps the most valuable of all was made by anthropologist John Earls who established that it was an experimental agricultural center.

How's the weather?

The climate in Moray is dry and temperate. The temperature varies from 21ºC. (69ºF). during the day until 1ºC. (33ºF). at night. From October to April the rainy season elapses where river precipitation is frequent. From May to September the dry season occurs where rains are not so frequent. April, May and June are believed to be the best time to visit Moray.

What am I going to see in Moray?

Beautiful landscapes - The set of platforms that make up Moray are visually beautiful to human eyes and, of course, in front of a camera lens. Many people come there to take their picture postcard and post it on their social networks. Circular platforms - The circular platforms of Moray were a very important place for Inca agriculture. It is believed that it was a center of experimental studies that the Incas used to plant products that, under other conditions, could not be cultivated. Adventure sports - There are tours to the Moray platforms that include adventure by bicycle or even ATV. These services can be obtained at any tourism agency located in the Historic Center of Cusco.

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

QTime, Cat Robots & 2 Studio Ghibli Movies

With the wind rustling the trees, a faint hint of the bouquet from the honeysuckle on the air, the moon moved from behind the cloud. It was hard to accept that this was still the same group that everyone knew and liked (loved is suck a strong word and with Buck involved we might be stretching it a bit). The utter shock of it all is beyond belief; we are almost at that time folks. Yes, we really are almost at the 2 year mark. Tell your friends that like Keith Richards we have refused to stop going, like an aging rock band we are here once again. The Nerds are back!

                First up this week we have a segment about QTIME, what is that you ask? Well it is an amazing device to help when gaming is more important than life, but you still have to pay the bills. It is awesome for those parents that want to guide their dirt urchins out into the wide blue yonder and do their chores around the house. It is also the perfect way to destroy a room full of sports fans. Want to know exactly what this miracle device is, listen in and hear the Professor tell us about it and Buck hatch evil ideas.

                Now there are restaurants that have monkey waiters, cafes where you can cuddle a cat or puppy, there are even sushi bars with trains. Now we give you Cat Robots! Yes folks it is that time of year when the biggest collection of Nerds and Geeks gather. It is the CES once again and Buck has found that there are Cat Robots, also a super important and special bot for those times when you stuck needing a roll of paper. This is important and we invite you to tell us your favourite exhibit at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) we only discuss a couple, there are some many things it would require a special episode of its own.

                Next up we have DJ telling us about the news that Studio Ghibli are planning to release 2 new movies. The special part of this is we have an expected release date of….Listen in and find out when. Also we discuss what the movies theme is going to be. We don’t want to spoil it for you and tell you everything now, but we are sure you will enjoy it as much as we do. Lastly, we have the usual game played, shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and special events. Until next time, thanks for listening, take care of yourselves, look out for each other and stay hydrated.

Qtime : Limiting Gaming Time - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/23/father-son-create-app-parents-shut-childs-video-consoles-remotely/

Cat Robots in Restaurants - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51003084?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/technology&link_location=live-reporting-story

Studio Ghibli making 2 movies for 2020 - https://www.cbr.com/studio-ghibli-two-new-films-2020/

Games currently playing

Professor

– Final Fantasy Adventure - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Adventure 

Rating – 5/10

Buck

– Desert Order - https://www.desertorder.com/

Rating – 3.5/5

DJ

– Watchers - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124980/Watchers/

Rating – 3.5/5

Other topics discussed

QTIME official website

- https://getqtime.com/

Court dress (style of clothes prescribed for courts of law and for royal courts._

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_dress

YouTube Challenge - Hey Jimmy Kimmel I Unplugged the TV During the Game

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMmqqKV49cg

YouTube Challenge – I Turned Off the TV During Fortnite

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPTXkp4pPeI

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) and its info

- https://www.ces.tech/

- https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/08/ces-stand-dates-held-7212783/

Cat Cafes in Brisbane

- Lucky Cat Café - https://www.luckycatcafe.com.au/

- Cat Cuddle Café - https://catcuddlecafe.com/

Charmin’s Rollbot unveiled at CES 2020

- https://www.cnet.com/news/charmins-pooptime-robot-pal-will-bring-fresh-toilet-roll-when-you-need-it-most/

The Good Place (American fantasy comedy television series created by Michael Schur.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place

How Do You Live (1937 novel by Yoshino Genzaburō. It follows a 15-year-old boy named Junichi Honda, nicknamed Koperu, and his uncle as the youth deals with spiritual growth, poverty, and the overall experience as human beings.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Do_You_Live%3F_(novel)

Studio Ghibli 25 Years Concert - Joe Hisaishi in Budokan

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY1XtWyKlJA

Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest pledges $70 million bushfire relief and recovery donation

- https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-09/andrew-forrest-pledges-$70m-donation-to-bushfire-relief/11854654

Four Wedding and a Funeral (American romantic comedy web television miniseries, based on the 1994 British film of the same name written by Richard Curtis.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Weddings_and_a_Funeral_(miniseries)

Stephen Fry (English actor, comedian and writer)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry

Hugh Laurie (English actor, director, singer, musician, comedian and author.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Laurie

1st episode of Q.I. starring Hugh Laurie, Danny Baker & John Sessions

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lmJ15QvMZE

James A. Garfield (20th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881 until his death by assassination six and a half months later.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield

Musicals Taught me Everything I Know (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/mtmeik

Shoutout

4 Jan 2019 - Tom Long passed away. Tom Long an Australian film and television actor. He played court official and avid surfer Angus in the late 1990s TV series SeaChange and Brendon Abbott in the 2003 Australian TV movie The Postcard Bandit. He was also in the movie the Dish as Glenn Latham, Comedian Jane Kennedy, a writer and producer for The Dish said Long was "one of the most modest and talented human beings I have had the privilege to work with". He died of encephalitis at the age of 51. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-06/tom-long-seachange-the-dish-actor-dies-aged-51/11843328

5 Jan 2019 – Hayao Miyazaki celebrated his 79th birthday. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker ofanimated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the animation business. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki

6 Jan 1994 - Washington State University’s research moose, Morty, who strolled to fame in the opening credits of the CBS-TV series 'Northern Exposure,' has died. The moose died of cobalt and copper deficiency. - https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/01/07/Northern-Exposure-moose-dies/1000757918800/

6 Jan 2019 – Australian comedian Celeste Barber has raised more than $46 million dollars for The Trustee for NSW Rural Fire Service & Brigades Donations Fund.  - https://www.facebook.com/donate/1010958179269977/2477326602586291/

Rememberances

6 Jan 1990 - Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934. Cherenkov observed the emission of blue light from a bottle of water subjected to radioactive bombardment. This phenomenon, associated with charged atomic particles moving at velocities greater than the phase velocity of light, proved to be of great importance in subsequent experimental work in nuclear physics, and for the study of cosmic rays. Eponymously, it was dubbed the Cherenkov effect, as was the Cherenkov detector, which has become a standard piece of equipment in atomic research for observing the existence and velocity of high-speed particles. He died at the age of 85 in Moscow,Russian SFSR. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov

6 Jan 1990 - Ian Charleson, Scottish stage and film actor. He is best known internationally for his starring role as Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell, in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire. He is also well known for his portrayal of Rev. Charlie Andrews in the 1982 Oscar-winning film Gandhi. He performed numerous Shakespearean roles, and in 1991 the annual Ian Charleson Awards were established, particularly in honour of his final Hamlet. The awards reward the best classical stage performances in Britain by actors aged under 30. Ian McKellen said Charleson was "the most unmannered and unactorish of actors: always truthful, always honest". He died from AIDS related causes at the age of 40 in London. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Charleson

6 Jan 1997 - Catherine Scorsese, American actress, and the mother of director Martin Scorsese. Of Italian descent, she began acting when her son Martin Scorsese cast her in his film It's Not Just You, Murray!. She frequently played the role of an Italian mother, and is perhaps most well known for her appearance in her son's film Goodfellas, as Mrs. DeVito, Tommy's mother. She acted in films other than her son's. She was married to Charles Scorsese. Her father, Martin Cappa, was a stage co-ordinator and her mother, Domenica, was a shop owner. She published a recipe book, Italianamerican: The Scorsese Family Cookbook. She died from Alzheimer's disease at the age of 84 in Manhattan, New York. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Scorsese

Famous Birthdays

6 Jan 1822 - Heinrich Schliemann, German businessman and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine levels of archaeological remains with dynamite has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artifacts, including the level that is believed to be the historical Troy. Schliemann's famous finds include Priam's Treasure, a cache of gold jewellery discovered in 1873. Schliemann was also the excavator of the bronze age site of Mycenae in North Greece, where he found the so-called "Mask of Agamemnon" in 1876. He was born in Neubukow,Mecklenburg-Schwerin. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann

6 Jan 1954 - Yuji Horii, Japanese video game designer and scenario writer best known as the creator of the Dragon Quest series of role-playing games, supervising and writing the scenario for Chrono Trigger, as well as the first visual noveladventure game Portopia Serial Murder Case. In Chrono Trigger, Horii appearing in one of the endings with the game development staff. He was born in Sumoto, Hyōgo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuji_Horii

6 Jan 1955 - Rowan Atkinson, English actor, comedian and writer. He is best known for his work on the sitcoms Blackadder and Mr. Bean. Atkinson first came to prominence in the BBC's sketch comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News, receiving the 1981 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance, and via his participation in The Secret Policeman's Ball. His other work includes the James Bond film Never Say Never Again, playing a bumbling vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral, voicing the red-billed hornbill Zazu in The Lion King, and playing jewellery salesman Rufus in Love Actually. Best known for his use of physical comedy in his Mr. Bean persona, Atkinson's other characters rely more on language. Atkinson often plays authority figures speaking absurd lines with a completely deadpan delivery. He was born in Consett,County Durham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Atkinson

Events of Interest

6 January 1873: Crédit Mobilier of America scandal investigated, this led to the censure of Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York. This scandal showed how corruption tainted Gilded Age politics, and the lengths railroads and other economic interests would go to assure and increase profits. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal

6 Jan 1912 - German geophysicistAlfred Wegener first presents his theory of continental drift. He hypothesized that that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth. He suggested that the continents were once a single landmass and gradually drifted apart, either because of the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation, or astronomical precession. Wegener also originally thought mid-ocean ridges might play some role, since the Atlantic seafloor “is continuously tearing open and making space for fresh, relatively fluid and hot [material rising] from depth.” But he eventually abandoned those notions. - https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201901/history.cfm

6 Jan 1950 – The United Kingdom recognizes the People's Republic of China. The Republic of China presently known as Taiwan severs diplomatic relations with the UK in response. -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_in_China

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

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