#anime central 2016

[fiyaharts]

evolution of sunny btw

he started out being named derek... then pedro... then breccan.... now sunny. bro changed ethnicities twice, changed powers once, went from being a cishet straight guy to a gay trans guy, but thru it all..... he was always 17. a tim drake situation if you will

[orcelito]

ykno i was wondering if Dohalim would be promoted to the same level as Yuri Lowell in my mind. bc ive been in love with Yuri Lowell for yeaaars now.

and you know what. i think he already has been lmaooo

sorry Yuri, u got a rival in my heart

[commajade]

finally watched watched my brothers and sisters in the north when it's been in my to-watch list for years and it was so touching and so beautiful.

the people interviewed were of course handpicked and have better conditions than other people because of the impact of U.S. sanctions and such, but it genuinely inspired me how hard-earned their good living conditions are. the farmers had to work really hard to re-establish agriculture after the war and now they get so much food a year they donate most of it to the state because they simply don't need it. the girl at the sewing factory loves her job and gets paid with 14 kilos of food a month on top of her wages. the water park worker is proud of his job because 20,000 of his people can come and enjoy themselves every day, and Kim Jong-un himself took part in designing it and came by at 2am during construction to make sure everything was going smoothly. his grandmother's father was a revolutionary who was executed and buried in a mass grave in seoul but in the dprk he has a memorial bust in a place of honor and his family gets a nice apartment in pyongyang for free.

imperialist propaganda always points to the kim family as a dictatorship and a cult of personality but from this docu it's so obvious that it's genuine gratitude for real work for the people, and simple korean respect. if my president came to my work and tried his best to make my working conditions better and to make my life better, i would call him a dear leader too. if my president invented machines and designed amusement parks and went to farms all over the country to improve conditions for the people, i would respect him.

the spirit of juche is in self-reliance, unity of the people, and creative adaptations to circumstances. the docu rly exemplified the ideology in things like the human and animal waste methane systems powering farmers' houses along with solar panels, how they figured out how to build tractors instead of accepting unstable foreign import relationships, and how the water park uses a geothermal heating system.

it rly made me cry at the end when the grandma and her grandson were talking about reunification. the people of the dprk live every day of their lives dreaming of reunification and working for reunification, and it's an intergenerational goal that they inherited from their parents and grandparents. the man said he was so happy to see someone from the south, and that even though reunification would have its own obstacles that we have the same blood the same language the same interests so no matter what if we have the same heart it would be okay.

and the grandma said "when reunification happens, come see me." and it's so upsetting that not even 10 years later, the state has been pushed into somewhat giving up on this hope. the dprk closed down the reunification department of the government last year and it broke my heart.

a really good pairing with the 2016 film is this 2013 interview with ambassador Thae Youngho to clarify political realities in the dprk and the ongoing U.S. hostility that has shaped the country's global image. the interviewer Carlos Martinez asks a lot of excellent questions and the interview goes into their military policy, nuclear weapons, U.S. violence and sanctions, and the dprk's historical solidarity with middle eastern countries like syria and palestine and central/south american countries like nicaragua, bolivia, and cuba.

[cultivating-saplings]

In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

But first, before I properly explain what the Unofficial Homestuck Collection really is and why it is so effective as a digital archive, let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Frustrated with the poorly implemented official preservation of the comic, and with a lot of free time on his hands, one fan began the Unofficial Homestuck Collection as a personal project during lockdown, during the “depths of 2020.” As the project changed hands and more fans became involved over the following years, its true scope came into focus: the Collection would preserve not only Homestuck itself, in its entirety and with its Flash-dependent pages intact, but also as much of its contextual material as possible, thus making it a prime example of the effectiveness of fan-driven digital archiving and preservation. Because the people who created the Collection are long standing fans of Homestuck, they know which pieces of peripheral material will provide the context the comic demands. The Collection preserves Homestuck as a text in a way that would be impossible in an analogue format, creating an archive both of the work and of the experience of reading it in a serialized format.

Andrew Hussie began* Homestuck on April 13th of 2009, and published it serially on mspaintadventures.com, his personal website at the time, until its conclusion on April 13th, 2016. Prior to beginning Homestuck, Hussie had been publishing short webcomics and pieces of fiction for several years on his older website, Team Special Olympics, since 2004, which had gained him a small but very loyal following. This following was centered mostly around the forum attached to the TSO website, which hosted the first of Hussie’s ‘MS Paint Adventures,’ Jailbreak, in September of 2006. Jailbreak was a short comic which Hussie produced as a collaborative writing game on these forums, in the style of early text adventures.

Beginning with the prompt, “You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise,” Hussie then wrote the rest of the comic according to the first comment posted after every page. This, perhaps predictably, resulted in a barely coherent mess of a story.

Following the conclusion of Jailbreak after a short 134 pages, Hussie would produce two more comics prior to beginning Homestuck: the unfinished Bard Quest (June-July 2007) and Problem Sleuth (March 2008-April 2009), which was his longest work so far at the time of its conclusion. Problem Sleuth in particular represented a substantial increase in production quality and general coherency over Jailbreak, as Hussie gained experience using the MSPA forums as tools for collaborative storytelling, reigning in the meandering narrative by allowing himself to be more selective about which forum responses he followed.

Hussie would continue this more controlled style of forum collaboration throughout the first three Acts of Homestuck, which followed a much more focused story than any of his prior work, thanks to his decision to use reader input only in specific parts of the comic. In the introduction to the print edition of the first Act, Hussie described his own role during the production of these first Acts as “dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv comic all in one.” During the process of writing Act 4, Hussie stopped taking prompts from readers entirely, and would construct the rest of the comic ostensibly as its sole author.

‘Okay,’ you might now be thinking, ‘you’ve given me the context, but what the hell is Homestuck? And what’s it about?’ Well, to wildly oversimplify a very complex piece of media, Homestuck is a webcomic about four young online friends who play a video game that causes the end of their universe and grants them the power to create a new one as they see fit. It is a story about growing up and realizing you’ve been forever changed by your experiences, a story about leaving behind the life you knew and constructing a new one. It is also a story about time travel and paradoxes, genetics and cloning, a large number of aliens, a possibly larger number of puppets (at least one of which is sentient), and an unfortunate amount of clowns. 

This story slowly unfolds over the course of 8126 pages, 817,929 words, and 166 animated panels, 95 of which contained some degree of interactivity and all of which total over four hours in length. Most of the comic’s pages consist of a main image, usually a short looping gif, accompanied by a text description or dialogue, which is almost always written in the format and style of online chat-logs between characters. As mentioned previously, however, these simpler gif-and-description pages are interspersed with longer videos, animated in Flash and soundtracked by one of Hussie’s several collaborators.

The first of these animated panels was uploaded a few weeks into Homestuck’s publication — an animated opening title-card for the comic, scored ominously with sounds of howling wind and windchimes. This first Flash panel was relatively simple, but the next would introduce a bespoke soundtrack (“Harlequin” by Mark Hadley), and the third would include simple interactivity. These soundtracked animations and interactive segments increased in scope and complexity over the course of the comic’s run; the final animated page in the comic, “[S] Collide,” comes in at nearly twenty minutes in length, and some of the larger interactive segments can take upwards of two hours to fully explore. 

While some of the later interactive pages were developed in an engine based on HTML5, most of Homestuck would be built using Adobe Flash, and would depend on the program for basic functionality. This would prove disastrous for the comic’s long term preservation. Flash was very popular, and had become ubiquitous by the early 2010s, but it had security issues which were easy to exploit, its range was fairly limited in terms of what kinds of animations it could produce, and, as its most fatal flaw, it couldn’t run on mobile. Thus with the expanding use of smartphones and tablets, Flash became less and less practical as a tool for web developers, and Adobe began slowly preparing to kill it. On December 31st, 2020, Adobe sent Flash off to the farm where it could frolic and play in the digital sunshine, leaving many online communities facing a crisis. How do you preserve a text when its foundations have crumbled?

With Homestuck using Flash in such an integral way, the issue of preservation was an important one. After the finale, Hussie would post some short post-credits stories to Snapchat from October 2016 to August 2017, as well as a longer epilogue in April 2019, before stepping away from any formal involvement with the comic in 2020. In 2018, Hussie had given the distribution rights for Homestuck to VIZ Media, which primarily handled the English-language publication of several manga series, and had left the rights to the IP and the freedom to produce new work to former collaborators. Thus it was VIZ who took on the task of officially preserving Homestuck against the death of Flash.

To say their efforts were unsatisfactory would, I think, be paying them too great a compliment. The complex and highly detailed Flash animations were replaced with embedded YouTube links to low-quality screen-captures of the originals. The hours-long walkaround games were not translated at all, replaced with ‘choose your own adventure’ style pages of text and links. The official version of Homestuck as it currently exists fails to capture a lot of what made the comic work, because it removes a lot of the gamified elements of the comic that are so integral to its storytelling.

There are many snapshots of the website from before the walkaround games were taken down on the Wayback Machine, but the Flash emulator that archive.org uses is very inconsistent, frequently becoming stuck on looping loading screens or failing to process assets correctly. While the dubious preservation of the long Flash animations is a real issue on its own, the lack of any attempt to replicate the format of these longform games represents the loss of something essential to the comic. Homestuck is, throughout the whole of its story, intertwined with the visual and cultural language of video games. The loss of the complex interactivity of these panels fundamentally changes how the reader is permitted to engage with them and, by extension, with Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. The official version of Homestuck that exists online is no longer complete. 

This incredibly poor preservation was the impetus behind the creation of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. In its most basic form, the Collection is simply a preserved and restored version of Homestuck, intact and in high quality, accessible through a downloadable client, rather than online — reducing the Collection down to this basic description does it a disservice. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection includes not just Homestuck, but all of Hussie’s prior work: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth are in there, but so are the full contents of his first website, Team Special Olympics, alongside archived versions of his now-deleted accounts on various social media platforms, and copies of threads from the MSPA forums that he would later reference in the main comic. The Collection also includes material that Hussie released alongside Homestuck, like the in-fiction blog of one of the main characters, various short comics written by guest authors, and a full episode of an in-universe childrens’ cartoon.

These peripheral materials are interesting and provide context for some of the more obscure references throughout Homestuck, but many of them were not produced until well into the comic’s run, and assume an audience that is caught up with the most recent update, making them dangerously full of spoilers for the unaware new reader. This issue is solved by the appropriately named ‘new reader mode.’ One of a variety of useful accessibility tools included in the Collection, the new reader mode tracks which page a user has reached, and implements a universal spoiler cloak over the whole program, hiding all materials that were released after their most recent page’s publication. This tool is what transforms the Unofficial Homestuck Collection from an archive of a text, into an archive of an experience.

De Kosnik argues that fan-driven archiving serves as a way for fans to mediate their own temporal experience of a text, describing websites hosting fanworks as mechanisms which “maintain the possibility of individuals joining fandoms… long after a media text has ceased to air.” While De Kosnik’s focus is on archives of fanworks and their function in ongoing fan spaces, I would argue that this framework, which centers the impact of serialization on the dynamics of fan communities, fits extremely well when applied to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. Homestuck was published serially over the course of seven years, accompanied by blog posts, side comics, music, and other pieces of peripheral media that were released in tandem with the comic itself.

Updates were highly anticipated events, and fan communities were structured around them — one user on Tumblr found an unlisted part of the MSPA forums where Hussie posted new pages before they were published, and this “MSPA Prophet” became a fixture of the fandom for their ability to predict when the next update would come. The event that was an update (or upd8, after the typing style of a popular character) was a central aspect of the experience of reading Homestuck during its publication, and it is one that is very difficult to recover now that the comic exists as a static, completed work. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, through its new reader mode, functions as a solution to that absence. It does more than safeguard the reader against unwanted spoilers: it temporarily transforms Homestuck back into an incomplete text. 

Homestuck makes use of the assumed preexisting knowledge of the reader, and their “intuitive familiarity” with various types of digital media and culture, especially ones which are inherently participatory. The story’s use of narrative motifs and referential easter-eggs allows Homestuck to function, in Hussie’s own words, as “both a story and a puzzle,” but that “There [are] a range of ways to interface with it[…] Failing to grasp everything shouldn’t preclude basic enjoyment, nor is it a symptom of failure by either the reader or the story.” In the most frequent example of repeated symbology in Homestuck, Hussie peppers the text with references to the number ‘413,’ simplified from April 13th, the day the comic began.

The story follows four friends who are all thirteen years old, many of the songs on the comic’s soundtrack are exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds long, and the timestamps on chat-logs show that characters frequently begin important conversations at precisely 4:13, to name just a few of the number’s appearances. The combination of puzzle and story in Homestuck extends beyond these kinds of motifs, however, and into the way Hussie employs referential humour.

Some of these references are fairly easy to catch; in Act 4, one of the main characters is gifted the Warhammer of Zillyhoo — a brightly coloured weapon which originally appeared in Problem Sleuth. Others, however, are much more obscure. The older brother of another main character runs a business creating bizarre, semi-ironic puppet pornography. Most of the audience read this as an absurdist joke about the internet’s love for offputting porn; the subset of fans who had been following Hussie for several years, or those who looked into Hussie’s early activity on the MSPA forums, however, would find themselves with new understanding of a long-running joke. This element of the experience of reading Homestuck is something that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection not only preserves, but makes readily accessible to the comic’s readers in a way that would not have been possible during the comic’s publication.

On a purely theoretical basis, I would argue that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection is valuable not just in the context of contemporary fan activity, but as a potentially valuable resource for future research. Homestuck is a foundational piece of the current cultural landscape, its influences permeating both digital and analog media in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

Undertale, titan of online culture that it is, was created by Toby Fox, who was the composer behind a large amount of the music in Homestuck and was, during the game’s production, living in Andrew Hussie’s basement. Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb tetralogy, began her writing career as a prominent figure in the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although the reach of her original work has thoroughly outgrown her fandom roots, Muir includes sly references to Homestuck in several places in her books. Hell, one of the animators working on Bluey, a cartoon aimed at very young children, included references to Homestuck in the backgrounds of episodes they worked on, as easter-eggs for the benefit of parents in the know. All of this is to say that Homestuck has its hooks deep within the culture of the Internet, and its impacts will, I think, be felt for a long time yet.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is certainly not immune to digital decay or link rot, but it is resistant to them, since it is hosted on a large and well established website (GitHub), and, once downloaded, can be accessed without an internet connection, and shared freely. For the hypothetical future researcher, the Collection contains resources to mitigate the frustration of trying to hunt down pieces of contextual or peripheral material by packaging them with the text itself — it functions like a sourcebook. 

Bibliography

Bamboshu, and GiovanH. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. 2020. https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001.

Glaser, Tim. “Homestuck as a Game: A Webcomic between Playful Participation, Digital Technostalgia, and Irritating Inventory Systems.” In Comics and Videogames. Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noel Thon. 96–112. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035466-8.

Hussie, Andrew. Homestuck. MS Paint Adventures, 2009-2016. https://homestuck.com. 

Nakhaie, FS. “Reproduce and Adapt: Homestuck in Print and Digital (Re)Incarnations.” Convergence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221141961.

Read MS Paint Adventures. “Statistics.” Last modified April 7, 2018. http://readmspa.org/stats/.

Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence 25, no. 5-6 (2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954. 

[lupincentral]

Saturday was a big day for our beloved Discotek Media.

Not only did the team hold a huge panel over at this year’s Otakon convention in Washington, DC - during which they announced around twenty-five new physical releases - but they also confirmed that one of their final “retro” Lupin releases is coming to the United States during September 2024… the 2016 released television special, Italian Game.

Italian Game features three classic episodes from Lupin III: Part 4, linked together with around 24~ minutes of additional footage. The new footage is excellently animated, and ties together the standalone episodes in an interesting way.

The special also features a stunning opening sequence that pays tribute to the original manga and is directed by Kōji Morimoto of Studio 4°C fame.

At time of release, the special received some criticism from fans due to the reuse of footage from Part 4. This was a large departure from the usual uniquely animated 90-minute TV special format, and people became concerned regarding the future of the regular Lupin TV specials.

In my opinion, the new content fits the story well and helps brings things together, creating consistency between the regular TV episodes. If you don’t fancy watching the whole of Part 4, and simply want a quick Lupin fix, then this special may be perfect for you!

[foundtherightwords]

The Hollow Heart - Chapter 10

Pairing: Hellcheer, Gothic AU

Summary: To escape her mother's control and the stifling society of Gilded Age New York, heiress Christabel Cunningham impulsively marries Henry Creel, a charming and seductive stranger, and accompanies him to his remote mansion on the West Coast. There, as Henry grows cold and cruel, Christabel must uncover her husband's sinister secret before it's too late. But can she trust Kas, her husband's enigmatic assistant, who seems to be her only ally in this strange place, or is Kas's loyalty to his master stronger than his attraction to Christabel?

Chapter warnings: animal death, domestic violence

Chapter word count: 4k

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 - Chapter 9

Chapter 10 - Warned by a Vision

Sometimes Christabel felt there was a veil over her eyes, blinding her to the truth of her marriage, of Henry's true nature. Each time he hurt her, it was like a tear in that veil. In the early days of their marriage, those tears were far apart, easily ignored, but over time, they kept building and building. Now, there were simply too many, and the veil was falling apart.

Then came another incident, and this time, it wasn't just a tear. This time, the whole veil was wrenched painfully from her eyes, and finally, she understood what it meant to suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Luna was growing fast. Christabel knew that soon she would have to hire a trainer or perhaps send Luna to a stable to get properly trained, but for now, the horse was making great progress. Christabel dreamed of when Luna was big enough and they could ride up and down the shore, to Golden Gate Park and Sutro Heights and beyond.

The only thing about Luna that worried Christabel, the only thing that marred her perfect beauty, was that she had a rather strange bump on her forehead. Indeed, Christabel hadn't even noticed it in the first few weeks, thinking it was just bones, but as Luna grew, so did this bump, until it protruded into a quite visible nub between her ears. She often rubbed it against things and really enjoyed it when Christabel scratched around it.

When Christabel brought the matter up to Henry, he became oddly excited. Though he hadn't spared Luna another glance since he gave her to Christabel, that day Henry personally went into the stall to examine the horse. Luna, who was always so calm and friendly, gave a frightened little whicker and ran in panicked circles around the stall, refusing to let Henry come near, let alone touch her. Henry had to retreat before she quieted down.

"We may have a unicorn on our hands, darling," he said to Christabel with a grin.

"Don't be absurd, there's no such thing as a unicorn," she retorted. If he was not going to have the bump looked at, then she was not going to waste her time convincing him. Since it didn't seem to bother Luna much, Christabel put it out of her mind.

A few nights after that, Christabel's old nightmare came back. Since Christmas, thanks to the phonograph and her growing collection of records, her sleep had been specter-free. That night though, despite having listened to the phonograph before sleep as usual, Christabel found herself face to face with those three ghosts again, their eyes gray and empty like the mist, their chest gaping and dripping blood. They were on the beach this time.

"What do you want from me?" she asked, as she'd always asked them in her dreams, but she wasn't expecting an answer. Almost resignedly, she screwed her eyes shut and waited for the inevitable moment when the mist came for her and erased her. Once, when she was little, she had been skating in Central Park on one of the rare occasions her mother allowed her out of the house. Unbeknownst to her, the ice had cracked earlier that day. As she slid across the ice and felt, rather than heard, the gunshot snap beneath her skates, her heart had dropped to the bottom of her stomach, and it had seemed like an eternity before she hit the freezing water. There had been no more ice skating after that.

It felt just like that now, only increased a hundredfold, as she waited for the mist in her dream.

But the mist never came. There were hoof beats behind her, and Christabel turned just in time to see a streak of silver rush past her in a spray of sand. It was Luna. With the certainty of dream logic, she knew it was Luna, although other than its shiny white coat, this horse looked nothing like Luna—it was fully grown, and a long, sharp horn grew out of its forehead. A unicorn.

The unicorn headed straight for the three figures by the edge of the water, its horn aiming at them. Somehow, Christabel knew that if it touched them, something terrible was going to happen, just as something terrible always happened to her when she touched those figures. "No, Luna!" she screamed. "Stop!"

It was too late. The horn went through the chest wound of the figure in the middle—Frederick Benson—and it was no longer Christabel that was screaming, but Frederick, Patrick, and the still unnamed girl, their mouths yawning dark holes, issuing forth terrible screams, like those of a dying animal. To her horror, the unicorn was fading as well, swallowed up by the fog. Luna had taken her place.

"No, Luna, no!" Christabel cried, trying to hold on to the horse, but her hands only ran through cold, wet, empty air.

Luna reared up, looming over Christabel, and let out a scream, a too-real scream of fear and pain. The moment Luna's front legs, now little more than two wisps of fog, came down over her head, Christabel woke up.

She lay still, feeling the pillow damp with sweat under her cheek, listening to her thundering heartbeats. It had been so real, that dream, even more real than her waking nightmares, especially those screams... The figures had never made a sound in any of her previous dreams, they'd only stood and looked at her in silence. So what had changed?

When her heart refused to calm down, Christabel got out of bed, threw on her dressing gown, and went to the window. It was still dark outside, though a lighter strip of gray on the horizon told her that dawn was not far off. There was a light on at Kas's window, but that was nothing unusual. He often kept a light on throughout the night. Everything was quiet.

No, not everything was quiet. Straining her ears, Christabel could make out voices rising in contention and panic. They were coming from the other side of the house. Heart hammering in her chest again, she flew downstairs and followed the voices into the garage.

Blazing lights hit her full in the face, blinding her after the gloom of the house, and for a moment, Christabel couldn't see anything. When her eyes finally adjusted, a horrible sight greeted her—in the middle of the stall littered with crushed straw and splintered wood, evidence of a great struggle, was Luna, lying on her side, unmoving, a tongue so dark it appeared almost black protruding from her foaming mouth, legs bent at stiff, unnatural angles. Henry and Kas stood over her, their eyes wide, chests heaving from exertion. Dangling from Henry's hand was what Christabel thought was a leather belt at first, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a cobra, its head smashed.

Christabel didn't remember what she did then. She must have screamed and run to Luna, for the next thing she knew, Henry had tossed the dead snake aside and was hauling her to her feet, while she fought him to reach Luna's side.

"Let me go!" she screamed. "Let me help her!"

"She's beyond help!" shouted Henry. "Kas, put the carcass under the cypress, while I take Mrs. Creel inside."

The carcass. She thought he meant the snake, and then it hit her. He meant Luna. Her lovely Luna, now nothing but a carcass, like one of those weather-bleached skeletons she'd seen from the train.

Kas threw Christabel an anguished look. "Yes, sir," he said, taking a blanket and draping it over the inert white form. That simple, irrevocable gesture finally convinced Christabel that Luna was really dead. All her panicked strength drained out of her, and she let Henry drag her out of the garage and back to the house.

"What happened?" she asked, the moment they were through the door.

"The cobra escaped its cage. I guess the horse got spooked, and the cobra fought back."

"But you said the cages were secure!"

Henry shrugged and steered her toward the stairs. "Accidents happen. Now, go back to bed. Kas will bury her."

His dismissive tone stung. "I want to be there," she said.

"What?"

"I want to say goodbye to her. At least give me that."

"Don't be hysterical. It's just a horse. I'll buy you another one."

"I'm not a child," she said, pushing his hand away. "Do you think you can just give me another toy and I'll shut up?"

Henry rolled his eyes. "I don't have time for this."

He headed back to the garage. Some of Christabel's shock was wearing off, and anger rose in its place. How dare he be so nonchalant, how dare he dismiss her like this! She lunged after him.

"You're not even going to apologize?"

"For what?"

"This is your fault! You did this! You and those monsters of yours!"

She didn't see him move. Something struck the side of her head, leaving her cheek stinging and her ear ringing. She clasped a hand to her face, out of shock and fear more than pain, while Henry opened the door. He didn't even look at her. "Go back to your room," he said calmly and stepped out.

The moment he disappeared into the dark, Christabel turned and ran. But she didn't run upstairs. She ran outside, down the drive, and all the way across the path bridging the island and the shore. Upon reaching the shore, she kept running, driven by sheer grief and despair, ignoring the cold wind across her face, the rough sand under her feet. She only wanted to get as far away as possible from Creel House.

***

Christabel ran until her legs and her lungs gave out. The sun was coming up, shining through the gray clouds like a silver coin on a pewter tray, doing little to warm the air. Creel House still loomed behind her, enveloped in its own mist, a dark, malevolent mass, scowling, mocking. She would never be able to outrun it. She crumpled to the ground, leaning against a sand dune, too exhausted and heartbroken to move.

She told herself not to think of Luna, though everything around reminded her of the little horse, from the cold, white sun that put her in mind of Luna's coat, to the sand where Luna used to run. But the tears wouldn't come. A heavy, somber fear, the remnant of her dream, weighed her down like a shroud, preventing the grief from taking over. That particular dream had been prophetic. Did this mean that her previous dreams all foretold her future as well? Was she fated to die a horrible death, like poor Luna?

No. She couldn't think that way. It was bad enough that she was out here on this God-forsaken beach in her dressing gown and bedroom slippers like some madwoman, now she believed in premonitions and fate too? No. She must stay rational. As much as she hated to admit it, Henry had been right. What happened to Luna had been an accident, no more.

At the thought of Henry, another kind of grief, mixed with anger and fear, surged up within her like bile, and her cheek throbbed again. It wasn't just that he'd hit her. She could even accept that he'd done so in the heat of the moment. But what disturbed her most was the casual way he'd done it, without a care, without a look back, like swatting away an irritating fly. That was what she was to him. Nothing.

What could she do now? Where would she go? Leave Henry and return to New York with her tail between her legs, admitting to her mother that she'd made a mistake? No! Not in a million years, not after she'd made such a show to Jason about how happy she was. And to be one of those divorcees, to have people turn their backs on her, to see their mock-polite smiles, knowing how they whispered about her behind closed doors? No, no, no. She couldn't bear it. She had married Henry to escape all that, she couldn't leave him to go back to that world now. The very thought of it made her stomach twist with shame and disgust.

Then her stomach twisted with something else, and Christabel realized the sun was now high in the sky. She had been out since daybreak. She was tired and cold and hungry, and there was nothing around her but sand and sea. With a sigh, she struggled to her feet. Creel House may be loathsome and frightful, but it was also her house, in name at least. She was not going to give it up just yet.

As she reached the causeway, Christabel saw, with dismay, that the path was now completely submerged. The tides must have come in while she was running down the shore. The boat was back on the island. She rang the bell. The sun was too bright for Kas to be out, but if Henry was home, he would come for her, surely. She rang the bell again, straining to see if there was any movement on the island. There was none. Was Henry out? Was he looking for her? The shore stretched on for miles and miles, had he missed her behind the sand dunes?

She dipped a foot into the water, testing it, only to jerk back as if she'd been bitten. The water was freezing cold. If she tried swimming in this, the cold would kill her before she could reach the island.

She rang the bell again, her hope of getting answered diminishing by the minute. Perhaps she could wait until Henry came back, or until sundown... It wasn't the day for grocery delivery, so nobody would come down this path and she need not worry about having to explain her awkward predicament.

Just as Christabel dropped down onto the sand again in fatigue and despair, a movement on the island caught her eyes. A dark speck was bobbing over the water toward her. It was the boat! As it got closer, Christabel saw that the parasol had been rigged over it, and shielded under it, wearing his long cloak and the gloves, was Kas.

"Are you all right?" he shouted the moment he came within her earshot.

"Yes." Something burst in her chest at the sight of him, something warm and pleasant that chased away all the pain and hurt. By now, she was desperate enough to accept any rescue at all, but she was glad it was Kas that came for her, glad in a way she knew she wouldn't have been if it had been Henry.

"I'm sorry it took me so long. I couldn't make the parasol stay upright," he said, maneuvering the boat so she could step on. His eyes widened as they landed on her face, and Christabel put a subconscious hand to her cheek. It must be more swollen than she'd thought.

"Don't worry about it." She meant both about the boat and her cheek, and Kas clearly understood, for he said nothing more. Once she settled on the seat opposite him, he started toward the island in long, steady strokes. Only his white-knuckled grip on the oars betrayed his true feelings.

"I wish you didn't have to risk yourself for me," she said.

"I don't mind."

"Where's Mr. Creel?"

"He had to go into town on urgent business." She was silent. Of course. He hadn't bothered to comfort her about Luna, why would he care when she ran away? Sensing her anger, Kas added, "I wanted to go after you, but he told me to let you blow off steam." He watched her for a moment and said, more quietly, "I'm so sorry about Luna, Mrs. Creel."

Pain squeezed her heart, choking her.

"What have you done to her?" she managed to ask.

"I've—I've buried her."

"Under the cypress trees?"

"No, by the beach."

Christabel nodded. She couldn't bear the notion of Luna being confined to those dark, haunted trees. "Thank you," she said. "She would like that. It's her favorite place."

Then she thought of Luna, sweet, pretty, clever Luna, dead and buried now, and she began to cry. Never again would Luna run on the beach alongside Christabel, never again would she nip Christabel to ask for pets or push her nose under her hand in search of sugar, never again would Christabel open the garage door to find Luna waiting for her. How many times she could have petted Luna or given her sugar without being asked, and hadn't? It was too late to make up for it now. The tears kept coming, wrung out of her in bitter, gulping sobs, and Christabel buried her face in her hands and cried and cried, for Luna and for herself.

The boat stopped. She felt Kas sit down by her. He held the parasol in one hand, shading them both, and his other arm went around her, pulling her to him. She held back at first, but when he drew her forward to his chest, she let her head fall onto his shoulder. Oh, how lovely! How lovely! For so long, too long, Christabel hadn't been properly held, and she had almost forgotten how lovely it was to sit like that, with his shoulder taking on the weight of her grief and his hand massaging the knots out of her back. Her sobs quieted. With a sigh, she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, breathing in his familiar scent of earth and smoke and the sea.

"It's all right," he murmured, rocking her against him, gentle as the rocking of the waves on the sides of the boat. "You'll be all right, Mrs. Creel."

The name rankled. "Don't call me that," she said. It came out sharper than she'd intended, and Kas's arm stiffened across her shoulders.

"What'd you want me to call you then?" he asked.

She lifted her head to look at him. "Call me by my name. Call me Christabel. At least—at least when it's just the two of us together."

Those words struck her as oddly intimate, and she became aware of how close their faces were, so close she could feel his breath on her cheek, could see his dark eyes, enormous in the shade under the parasol. He'd heard the desperation in her voice too and was looking at her, eyes wide in shock or fear. How foolish she'd been! Just because she'd been fantasizing about him didn't mean that he felt the same about her. What she did in the privacy of her bedroom was shameful enough, but here—she was practically throwing herself at him. A servant! What would her mother say? My God, what if he told Henry?

"You know what, never mind." She sat up straight and pushed him away. "Just take me back."

"As you wish, Mrs. Creel," he said. Something in his voice was like an arrow through her heart. Had she really worried about what her mother would've said? Why did she still care? Everything she'd done had been to get away from her mother, and it seemed she hadn't escaped at all.

Kas got to his feet to return to the bow. She grabbed his hand, pulling him down by her side. She didn't know what possessed her to do so when she'd pushed him away only seconds ago, but at that moment, she couldn't bear to be away from him. He looked down at her hand clutching his, then lifted his eyes to her face. The look in those eyes made her breath catch in her throat, and, without thinking, she kissed him.

His lips parted in surprise. She pushed forward, taking his bottom lip between hers, marveling at how soft his mouth was, how responsive he was to her kiss, so unlike Henry, whose answer to her kisses was always a tight-lipped grimace. Kas's arm was around her again, his mouth moving hesitantly under hers, returning the kiss with a fervor that matched her own. Her hands came up to clasp his temples, her trembling fingers sinking into his curls, holding him close, while she captured his mouth again and again, draining it, like one dying of thirst—

He wrenched himself away from her, so abruptly that he left her dizzy.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly, even as she was drawn back to him by some invisible magnet. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I..." She hardly knew what she was saying. She only saw his mouth, still temptingly close, and couldn't stop herself from pulling him to her once more, from claiming that soft, lush mouth with hers once more— 

"We can't," he said, seizing both of her wrists to hold her at arm's length.

The parasol dropped out of his hand into the water, and Kas's face began to redden as sunlight spilled over him. He snatched the parasol up and scrambled to put it back in its place by the bow, but it wobbled, refusing to stay.

"Here, let me." Christabel took the parasol and held it over him. For a moment, Kas looked like he wanted to protest, but he took up the oars again without another word.

Though they sat side and side, he held himself stiffly, as far away from her as possible, while they traveled the rest of the way to the island. When they reached the shore, Christabel got off the boat on her own and held the parasol for Kas as he pulled the boat up and tied it to the dock. The house loomed above them, and the fog reached out its fingers, drawing them back into its grayness.

"I'm fine from here," Kas said, taking the parasol from her without looking at her.

Christabel turned away, but she couldn't bring herself to go into the house, to face its gloom and Henry's silent contempt. Her feet took her toward the garage. She had to see for herself, to believe that Luna was really gone.

The stall had been cleaned up. The saddle, reins, and brushes were gone from the wall. The straw had been swept away. There was no sign that a horse had ever been here.

The sight of that empty stall brought on a fresh flood of tears. Christabel slowly sat down, put her forehead on her knees, and let the tears flow down her face and drop onto the floor, like rain.

Something between the floorboards caught her eyes. Christabel picked it up and turned it over in her hand curiously. It was a flat, triangular shape, the size of her palm, slightly curved, grayish green in color and ridged all over. She would've thought it was simply a piece of tree bark, if it hadn't been for its strange shape and feel, rough and smooth at the same time, almost like a fish scale.

"Don't touch that!" Kas yelled behind her, making her drop the thing.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It could be from the cobra. Anyway, it's not a good idea to pick up unknown things around here." He tried to appear casual, but from the way he used a piece of rag to pick up the thing, Christabel realized Kas knew more about it than he let on. It was too big to be from any cobra, unless that cobra was the size of a python. But she was too tired to press him about it.

"You go up to the house," Kas said. "I'll bring you some food later."

There was nothing else to say then. "Thank you, Kas."

"You're welcome, Mrs. Creel."

Mrs. Creel.

Pulling the belt of her dressing gown tighter, Christabel stumbled into the house, swallowing the lump of disappointment in her throat.

Chapter 11

[fatehbaz]

In February 2024, creature enthusiasts and popular media outlets celebrated what has been described as the 200-year anniversary of the formal naming of the "first" dinosaur, Megalosaurus.

There are political implications of Megalosaurus and the creature's presentation to the public.

In 1824, the creature was named (Megalosaurus bucklandii, for Buckland, whose work had also helped popularize knowledge of the "Ice Ages"). In 1842, the creature was used as a reference when Owen first formally coined the term "Dinosauria". And in 1854, models of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon were famously displayed in exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London. (The Crystal Palace was regarded as a sort of central focal point to celebrate the power of the Empire by displaying industrial technology and environmental and cultural "riches" acquired from the colonies. It was built to house the spectacle of the "Great Exhibition" in 1851, attended by millions.)

The fame of Megalosaurus and the popularization of dinosaurs coincided at a time when Europe was contemplating new revelations and understandings of geological "deep time" and the vast scale of the distant past, learning that both humans and the planet were much older than previously known, which influenced narrativizing and historicity. (Is time linear, progressing until the Empire is at this current pinnacle, implying justified dominance over other more "primitive" people? Will Britain fall like Rome? What are the limits of the Empire in the face of vast time scales and environmental forces?) The formal disciplines of geology, paleontology, anthropology, and other sciences were being professionalized and institutionalized at this time (as Britain cemented global power, surveyed and catalogued ecosystems for administration, and interacted with perceived "primitive" peoples of India, Africa, and Australia; the mutiny against British rule in India would happen in 1857). Simultaneously, media periodicals and printed texts were becoming widely available to popular audiences. For Victorian-era Britain, stories and press reflected this anxiety about extinction, the intimidating scale of time, interaction with people of the colonies, and encounters with "beasts" and "monsters" at both the spatial and temporal edges of Empire.

---

Some stuff:

"Shaping the beast: the nineteenth-century poetics of palaeontology" (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas in European Journal of English Studies, 2013).

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, 2014).

"Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel" (Gowan Dawson in Victorian Studies, 2011).

Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010).

Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle (Lukas Rieppel, 2019).

Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2020).

"Making Historicity: Paleontology and the Proximity of the Past in Germany, 1775-1825" (Patrick Anthony in Journal of the History of Ideas, 2021).

'"A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell": The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park' (Nancy Rose Marshall in Victorian Studies, 2007).

Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (Brian Noble, 2016).

The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Ralph O'Connor, 2007).

"Victorian Saurians: The Linguistic Prehistory of the Modern Dinosaur" (O'Connor in Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012).

"Hyena-Hunting and Byron-Bashing in the Old North: William Buckland, Geological Verse and the Radical Threat" (O'Connor in Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914, 2013).

And some excerpts:

---

When the Crystal Palace at Sydenham opened in 1854, the extinct animal models and geological strata exhibited in its park grounds offered Victorians access to a reconstructed past - modelled there for the first time - and drastically transformed how they understood and engaged with the history of the Earth. The geological section, developed by British naturalists and modelled after and with local resources was, like the rest of the Crystal Palace, governed by a historical perspective meant to communicate the glory of Victorian Britain. The guidebook authored by Richard Owen, Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World, illustrates how Victorian naturalists placed nature in the service of the nation - even if those elements of nature, like the Iguanodon or the Megalosaurus, lived and died long before such human categories were established. The geological section of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which educated the public about the past while celebrating the scale and might of modernity, was a discursive site of exchange between past and present, but one that favoured the human present by intimating that deep time had been domesticated, corralled and commoditised by the nation’s naturalists.

Text by: Alison Laurence. "A discourse with deep time: the extinct animals of Crystal Palace Park as heritage artefacts". Science Museum Group Journal (Spring 2019). Published 1 May 2019. [All text from the article's abstract.]

---

[There was a] fundamental European 'time revolution' of the nineteenth century [...]. In the late 1850s and 1860s, Europeans are said to have experienced ‘the bottom falling out of history’, when geologists confirmed that humanity had existed for far, far longer than the approximately 6,000 years previously believed to represent the entire history [...]. ‘[S]ecular time’ became for many ‘just time, period’: the ‘empty time’ of Walter Benjamin. […] The European discovery of ‘deep time’ hastened this shift. [....] Historicism views the past as developments, trends, eras and epochs. [...] Victorians were intensely aware of ‘historical time’, experiencing themselves as inhabiting a new age of civilization. They were obsessed with history and its apparent power to explain the present […].

Text by: Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

---

At the time when geology and paleontology emerged as new scientific disciplines, [...] [g]oing back to the 1802 exhibition of the first Mastodon exhibited in London’s Pall Mall, […] showmanship ruled geology and ensured its popularity and public appeal [...]. Throughout the Victorian period, [...] geology was as much - if not more - sensational than the popular romances and sensation novels of the time [...]. [T]he "rhetoric of spectacular display" (26) before the 1830s [was] developed by geological writers (James Parkinson, John Playfair, William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, Robert Blakewell), "borrowing techniques from [...] commercial exhibition" [...]. The discovery of Kirkdale Cave in December 1821 where fossils of [extinct] hyena bones were discovered along with other species (elephant, mouse, hippopotamus) led Buckland to posit that the exotic animals [...] had lived in England [...]. Thus, the year 1822 was significant as Buckland’s hyena den theory gave a glimpse of the world before the Flood. [...] [G]eology became a market in its own right, in particular with the explosion of cheaper forms of printed science [...] in cheap miscellanies and fictional miscellanies, with geological romances [...] [...] or [fantastical] tropes pervading [...], "leading to a considerable degree of conservatism in the imagery of the ancient earth" (196). By 1846 the geological romances were often reminiscent of the narrative strategies found in Arabian Nights [...].

Text by: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. A book review published as: “Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802 - 1856.” Review published by journal Miranda. Online since July 2010.

---

Dinosaurs, then, are malleable beasts. [...] [T]he constant reshaping of these popular animals has also been driven by cultural and political trends. [...] One of Britain’s first palaeontologists, Richard Owen, coined the term “Dinosauria” in 1842. The Victorians were relatively familiar with reptile fossils [...] [b]ut Owen's coinage brought a group of the most mysterious discoveries under one umbrella. [...] When attempting to rise to the top of British science, it helped to have the media on your side. Owen’s friendship with both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray led to fond name-dropping by both novelists. Dickens’s Bleak House famously begins by imagining a Megalosaurus, one of Owen’s original dinosaurs. Both novelists even compared their own writing process to Owen’s palaeontological techniques. In the scientific community, Owen’s dinosaur research was first [criticized] by his [...] rival, Gideon Mantell, a surgeon and the describer of the Iguanodon. [...] Naming dinosaurs was a powerful way of claiming ownership [...]. Owen [...] knew the power of the press [...]. [M]useum exhibits [often] [...] flattered white patrons [...] by placing them at the apex of modernity. [...] Owen would not have been surprised to learn that the reconstruction of dinosaur bones is still an act that is entangled in politics.

Text by: Richard Fallon. "Our image of dinosaurs was shaped by Victorian popularity contests". The Conversation. 31 January 2020.

[blueiscoool]

Bronze Age Girl Buried With More Than 150 Sheep Ankle Bones Found in Kazakhstan

Archaeologists in eastern Kazakhstan have unearthed a Bronze Age burial mound of a girl surrounded by various grave goods in the Ainabulak-Temirsu Necropolis.

The young girl was laid to rest with a number of peculiar grave goods, including 180 animal ankle bones and a small, exquisite silver accessory depicting a frog on a disc.

The excavations are carried out together with experts from the University of Cambridge and under the direction of Rinat Zhumatayev, Head of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU) Archaeology, Ethnology, and Muzology Department. The ongoing excavations have gained momentum since 2016 when the journey to explore the region’s historical treasures commenced in the Zaisan district, spearheaded by Abdesh Toleubaev.

According to The Astana Times, an English-language news outlet in Kazakhstan, the girl’s grave is located near Ainabulak village in the east of the country and dates from Central Asia’s Bronze Age, which lasted from roughly 3200 B.C.E. until 1000 B.C.E.

Rinat Zhumatayev, an archaeologist who led the excavation and heads the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Museology at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Kazakhstan, said: “She was buried on her left side, bent over. Small wire earrings were in both ears and beads around her neck.”

The frog-adorned artifact carries immense significance. Scholars associate the frog motif with water-related rituals found in China and Egypt, adding an intriguing layer to the ongoing research. According to the researchers, this is the first example discovered in Kazakhstan and may be associated with the image of a woman in labour and the cult of water.

The sheer volume of animal bone fragments buried in the burial mound also piqued researchers’ interest. The number of bones buried with this person was extravagant compared to other graves on the Eurasian steppe that contained animal remains, frequently in child and adolescent burials.

Some scientists think that the burial of astragalus bones was part of a “cult practice” and that the bones were used during meditation. However, other researchers view the bones as “symbols of well-being” and “good luck” that served as a “wish for a successful transition from [one] world to others,” Zhumatayev said.

“Our exploration is far from over. By the year’s end, we anticipate unveiling our findings and publishing a comprehensive scientific article,” shared Rinat Zhumatayev.

By Leman Altuntaş.

[ms-ship]

Okay, so before, I've posted my opinion on Janine Melnitz's physical appearance on both The Real and Extreme Ghostbusters animated shows. But now, I would like to acknowledge Annie Potts' looks from the live-action films we all know, from how it started to how it was left.

I immensely believe that Annie Potts' classic Janine Melnitz look from Ghostbusters 1984 was, and still is, the superior signature look of Janine Melnitz. I mean the pixie cut hairdo and pink wide specs are just Janine's style and you know what they say: why mess with a classic?

The GBII look, on the other hand, took a downturn for me, from the red bobcut to the round black glasses. Even in the movie's universe, anyone could tell that she was obviously wearing a wig. If I were in the GB universe, I'd have a hard time believing Janine would go from a pixie cut to a full grown bob cut, even in the span of the timeline from the first and sequel of thr GB franchise.

Sidenote: I know I haven't mentioned Janine from Afterlife or Frozen Empire, or even *horrified gulp* the 2016 one. Regardless, however, I believe that Melnitz's most timeless look that can never be beat is from the Ghostbusters in the live action universe is the classic. Again, why even mess with a classic look?

@bixiebeet @spengnitzed @spook-spectre-ghost @spenglerssweetheart @spook-central @janeb984 @lulusplaycorner @silver-embersss @kawaiisakura143 @soulfulbelieves

[leaping-laelaps-art]

Sculpt of the small bivalved arthropod Gladioscutum lauriei from the middle Cambrian of Australia (after Hinz-Schallreuter & Jones 1994).

Gladioscutum had a body only 2-3 mm long, but, being undoubtedly aware of its disappointingly small size compared to its cooler Cambrian cousins like radiodonts and trilobites, tried to make up for it with a pair of (presumably) front-facing spines that were at least as long as the rest of the head shield.

Other than improving its self-esteem, the function of Gladioscutum's extremely elongated spines is unknown. The enlarged spines of other small Cambrian bivalved arthropods have been suggested to fulfill a sensory role, but this remains speculative (Zhang et al. 2014).

References and notes:

Gladioscutum was originally described as an "archaeocopid", an order that is now known to be an artificial grouping of various small bivalved arthropod fossils superficially resembling modern ostracod crustaceans. To my knowledge, the affinities of Gladioscutum have not been reinvestigated since its initial description, but its appearance (marginal rims, valve lobation, ornamented surface, simple hinge line) and age seem bradoriid-y enough (Hou et al. 2001) for me to more or less confidently reconstruct it as one (top scientific rigour as always on this blog).

Appendage morphology is unknown in Gladioscutum - what little soft anatomy I have not modestly hidden under the head hield is based on the bradoriid Indiana sp. from the Chengjiang Biota (Zhai et al. 2019). In that species, only the antennae are differentiated from the rest of the appendages, which has the double advantage of (1) not making crazy hypotheses about limb specialization in Gladioscutum and (2) giving me fewer different types of limbs to sculpt.

Like Gladioscutum, most bradoriids are only known from their decay-resistant valves, which are often squashed flat in a so-called "butterfly" position. This arrangement has been traditionally interpreted as the life position of the animals, which were implied to crawl over the seafloor like tiny crabs (e.g., Hou et al. 1996). Yet, undistorted fossils of head shields preserved in 3D are almost always closely drawn together, which is similar to the way modern bivalved arthropods like ostracods are articulated (protecting the soft limbs and body) and probably more reflective of the actual life position of bradoriids (Betts et al. 2016), as depicted here.

References:

Betts, M. J., Brock, G. A., & Paterson, J. R. (2016). Butterflies of the Cambrian benthos? Shield position in bradoriid arthropods. Lethaia, 49(4), 478–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/let.12160

Hinz-Schallreuter, I., & Jones, P. J. (1994). Gladioscutum lauriei n.gen. N.sp. (Archaeocopida) from the Middle Cambrian of the Georgina Basin, central Australia. Paläontologische Zeitschrift, 68(3), 361–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02991349

Hou, X., Siveter, D. J., Williams, M., Walossek, D., & Bergström, J. (1997). Appendages of the arthropod Kunmingella from the early Cambrian of China: Its bearing on the systematic position of the Bradoriida and the fossil record of the Ostracoda. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 351(1344), 1131–1145. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1996.0098

Hou, X., Siveter, D. J., Williams, M., & Xiang-hong, F. (2001). A monograph of the Bradoriid arthropods from the Lower Cambrian of SW China. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 92(3), 347–409. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263593300000286

Zhai, D., Williams, M., Siveter, D. J., Harvey, T. H. P., Sansom, R. S., Gabbott, S. E., Siveter, D. J., Ma, X., Zhou, R., Liu, Y., & Hou, X. (2019). Variation in appendages in early Cambrian bradoriids reveals a wide range of body plans in stem-euarthropods. Communications Biology, 2(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0573-5

Zhang, H., Dong, X., & Xiao, S. (2014). New Bivalved Arthropods from the Cambrian (Series 3, Drumian Stage) of Western Hunan, South China. Acta Geologica Sinica - English Edition, 88(5), 1388–1396. https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-6724.12306

[cappymightwrite]

An Unexpected Norse Detail in Winterfell

I was scrolling through tumblr yesterday, as you do, and suddenly paused on a gifset of the Lannister party in Winterfell during the early episodes of season 1. What caught my eye was this:

Behind the long table in Winterfell's great hall is some kind of large wooden screen/divider featuring some very interesting carvings. These carvings are near identical to those found on the Urnes Stave Church in western Norway, which dates from the 12th century:

I don't think we ever see this wooden screen in Winterfell again, but it's an interesting inclusion nonetheless, back when the show stuck more closely to the source material.

In The Vikings (Penguin, revised edition, 2016) Else Roesdahl talks a bit about this particular style of ornamentation:

The Urnes style is the last phase of the long development of Scandinavian animal ornament. This seems to have developed shortly before the middle of the eleventh century and was popular for nearly a century, that is into the early Middle Ages. After a final phase where it gave rise to details and influences in Romanesque art, now predominant in Scandinavia, it had died out completely before the year 1200. Many other forms of Viking Age followed the same course. The vigour and vitality of the Ringerike style gave way to this sophisticated, elegant, indeed almost decadent, style. It is named after the exquisite wood carvings that were re-used in Urnes Church in western Norway: a portal and a door, two wall planks, a corner post and two gable ends, one complete [...] The large, four-legged animal is still one of the main motifs, but it has become as slim as a greyhound. Snake-like animals with one foreleg, snakes and thin tendrils sometimes ending in a snake's head are also featured. The designs characteristic of this style form open, asymetric patterns, creating an impression of an undulating interweaving of animals and snakes. The large loops are often figures-of-eight and the shapes grow and diminish evenly; there are no abrupt transitions. The style is also used with virtuosity on brooches and on large numbers of rune stones in central Sweden, where the undulating ornament follows the shape of the stone and the long bodies of the snakes are used as rune bands [...] Several examples of the style have been found in England, and in Ireland it became as popular as the Ringerike style.

What's so intriguing about the original carving though is that it is depicting pagan symbolism... but on a Christian church. As mentioned above, the Ringerike style predate Urnes and was "roughly contemporary with the intial spread within Scandinavia of Christianity, and was the first to contain Christian iconography, although pagan symbolism was still present," notes Philip Parker (The Northmen's Fury, Vintage, 2014). By around 1050, it gave way to the Urnes style, named for the stave church shown above.

But what do these carvings mean? In Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (Oxford University Press, 2013), G. Ronald Murphy offers this explanation:

The door is simply surrounded with whorls of writhing snakes and vines. The tangle is so perfectly executed in a welter of animal elongation and plant reduction to vines, that it is difficult to identify where a head begins or where a tail finally ends, if at all, or to trace what seems like a joint to a neck or a leg or a vine. The main point seems to be the inter-twined-ness itself of all living things, animal or vegetable, in one huge tangle [...] Now as one looks at the left side of the doorway there is one animal standing on four legs [see above!] that is simply startling in the clarity of its depiction. It has been called a lion and explained as the Lion of Judah (Christ) fighting with evil. I think that such an interpretation makes the mistake of using an inappropriately biblical explanation when the artist, by his very Viking-like pictorial style as well as his tangle of animal and plants, tells you he is here using a Germanic one. If you look at the animal you can see that he is eating at the vine or branch which in turn is a serpent biting at him in the neck. Look at the animal's head and you can see two small horns protruding—that animal is a young male deer, a hart. Now it becomes clear it is not the Old Testament that is giving the context here for the meaning of the portal: this is an allusion to the Elder Edda and its description of Yggsdrasill as the suffering tree with many serpents forever biting on its twigs and branches, as those twigs and branches are also being devoured by a hart. The traditiona of the single deer may also come from a previous stanza in the Grímnismál where the hart is named: Eikþyrnir [Oak-thorn] is the hart's name, who stands on Father of Hosts' hall and grazes Læraðr's [kenning for Yggdrasill] branches; and from his horns liquid drips into Hvergelmir [seething cauldron], from thence all waters have their flowing (Poetic Edda 55 and 270n)

According to Murphy, "to enter the door of the Urnes stave church is to enter Yggdrasill." So, to bring this back to the world of asoiaf, it´s an interesting piece of set design to include this screen or divider in Winterfell, a place closely connected with the "old gods" of the north and that has its own world tree, in a sense: the weirwood tree, or heart tree, of the godswood. Moreover, beneath one of Yggdrasill's three large roots is the spring Hvergelmir (mentioned above, meaning 'seething cauldron'), beneath another is Mímisbrunnr ('Mímir's well) and beneath the third is Urðarbrunnr ('Well of Urðr'), this is interesting to note in parallel to the hots springs and ice-lidded pool in Winterfell's godswood, close to its heart tree.

In the Prose Edda, one of our foremost sources on Norse mythology, Yggsdrasill is also connected with Ragnarök, the doom of the gods. In chapter 54, it is told that Óðinn will ride to the well Mímisbrunnr and consult Mímir on behalf of himself and his people. After this, "the ash Yggdrasill will shake and nothing will be unafraid in heaven or on earth," and then the Æsir and Einherjar will don their war gear and advance to the field of Vígríðr. In asoiaf, the north has its own legend very reminiscent of Ragnarök, called the Long Night and I've written about their similiarities before and keep meaning to return to that.

Anyway, I just think it's pretty cool they included that detail of the Urnes style screen in Winterfell — I'm always putting Norse details into my fics wherever I can, most recently the Oseberg tapestry.

[thegodstheycall]

"The prominence of the Delta cults of lion deities in general is, however, quite surprising. We would rather expect lions to be more prominent in the conceptions of people living in Upper Egypt, where the arboreal vegetated semi-desert habitat for lions intermediates between the desert and the agricultural area bordering the Nile and thus is much closer to the settlements. Therefore, the overriding preference for lioness cults in the Delta seems unexpected. Yet, a detailed investigation of the oldest traceable lioness cults in the Delta may help to answer this question. "As the earliest attestations of the cults of Sekhmet, Bastet and Shesemtet have shown, their origins are located in the south-eastern Delta near the entrance to the Wadi Tumilat. Being the remains of an ancient Pleistocene branch of the Nile, the Wadi is a narrow depression 52 km long and no more than 6km wide, running to the east where it ends at the shore of the Timsah Lake (Fig. 1). A sparse but regular rainfall and seasonal flooding led to the development of a seasonal lake in the centre of the Wadi where the deepest depression is located. With plentiful water, the Wadi was vegetated and wooded offering an ideal habitat for several animal species, including lions. Since we know that in the economic system of Ancient Egypt the Delta was the raising ground for large herds of cattle, it was these artificial concentrations which made the fringes of the Delta a highly attractive hunting ground for prides of lions, which controlled large areas. Yet, the organized and grand scale cultivation and animal husbandry in the Delta began in the early Old Kingdom, starting from its border zones and developing into the central parts later on; this period saw the rapidly growing creation of estates for the provisioning of the residence and royal building projects during the 3rd and 4th dynasties. Thus, the reason for the phenomenon of early cults of female lions concentrated especially in the south-eastern Delta could be the existence of large amounts of cattle in these areas which attracted lions from the semi-desert zones of the Wadi Tumilat to those estates. Taking this thought further, the question arises as to whether the location of such cults follow a pattern, reflecting the process of large-scale agricultural colonization of the Nile Delta at the beginning of the dynastic period. […] "Certainly, the development of deities in the shape of lions could have happened in the south-eastern and western Delta before the development of estates, as settlements on the fringes of the Delta would always have attracted lions, but it was the intensified breeding program which came with the foundation of cattle farms of the early state that would have fuelled the raids of these large beasts of prey. As field studies on hunting lions have shown, females are much more active when the prey is small or medium sized, operating within a variety of vegetation and actively engaged in cooperative team hunting, whereas male lions hunt alone, utilizing dense vegetation as ambushes, and thus not as easily observed as would a team of hunting female lions more suited to areas of open plain without ambush opportunities such as the cattle grounds of the Delta estates. Therefore, the hunting activities of female lions may have left a stronger impression on the Ancient Egyptians, leading to the picture of the ferocious lioness goddess who plays an important role in the religion of Ancient Egypt in later periods."

Eva Lange-Athinodorou, The Lioness Goddess in the Old Kingdom Nile Delta: A Study in Local Cult Topography, published in Sapientia Felicitas: Festschrift for Günter Vittmann, CENiM 14 (2016), pp. 316-317

[dweemeister]

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

In narrative art that features individuals with deafness or hearing loss, these films tend not to portray such characters on their own terms, failing to centralize the story around them. Neither Jane Wyman’s character in Johnny Belinda (1948) nor Patty Duke’s portrayal of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962) frame their respective films; both movies rely on a hearing character to do so. Looking beyond the United States, the same is true of The Shop on Main Street (1965, Czechoslovakia) and the anime film A Silent Voice (2016, Japan) – once more, it is the hearing character who becomes the audience’s proxy. No deaf or hard of hearing actors played the roles referenced in this paragraph.

Such is also the case in Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God, with one significant exception – a deaf actress, Marlee Matlin, plays the deaf main character. In the late 1980s, such representation was a revelation, and simply unheard of. Matlin, deaf since she was eighteen months old, came to the producers’ attention after starring in a Chicago-area stage play. While auditioning for the role, she and actor William Hurt struck up a relationship – questionable timing, as both actors got the part (more on their troubled relationship much later).

Haines’ film, distributed by Paramount and from a screenplay by Hesper Anderson and Mark Medoff (adapting his own stage play of the same name), is a capable romantic drama with two great performances. Its portrayal of a deaf character by a deaf actress was indeed significant for its time; the decision to position the film through the hearing character’s experiences fails to distinguish it from its fellow films and numerous films since.

Somewhere in New England, James Leeds (William Hurt) arrives for his new job: as a teacher at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing. His enthusiastic teaching style rubs off on most of his students, as he emphasizes that, as important as it is to sign and read lips, they must also learn to speak. Also working at the school is Sarah Norman (Matlin), a former standout student who works as the school’s custodian. While the school’s hearing staff, for reasons initially unclear, dislike Sarah, the students appreciate her. James falls quickly for Sarah and they eventually begin dating, after a few rebuffs on her part. What follows is a romance where our two protagonists navigate through his desire to help her adjust to the world beyond the school walls and her lack of trust in others. Drifting in and out of the film are the school’s hearing principal, Dr. Curtis Franklin (Philip Bosco), and Sarah’s mother (Piper Laurie) to give both main characters advice, encouragement, and dramatic obstacles.

Children of a Lesser God suffers from its emphasis on James’ perspectives. Between James and Sarah, it is James who demands the most in any compromises between the two. When he first asks Sarah whether she would want to move in with him, James’ approach is, at times, more demanding than it is a genuine query. His insistence on Sarah speaking phonetically to hearing people, from the onset, seems to disregard whatever personal reasons Sarah might have for refusing to do so. Late in the film, the most heated discussion between the couple on this topic comes in perhaps the most inappropriate way – he wants to hear her say his name during sex. Both James and Sarah carry into this relationship sizable foibles and broken pasts, but the former’s communication style can be abrasive and domineering. At times, it makes Children of a Lesser God seem like yet another savior narrative.

Certainly, Sarah’s reluctance to speak phonetically is a defensive mechanism – one to shield her from the pain of past interactions with hearing people and a refusal to have anybody to speak on her behalf. The film also implies that she may be a survivor of sexual abuse. Matlin is magnificent in this role (my goodness, does she sign quickly or what?) and there are a few key scenes where, as Sarah, her character truly shines without James’ input. Interestingly, both scenes involve music. The first instance comes on their first date at a restaurant, when Sarah insists on dancing to “I’ll Take You There” by the Staple Singers. Feeling the vibrations of the music “through [her] nose”, Sarah grooves, eyes closed, to the music. Rather than shaking her hips and moving her head with the beat, she sways, and gracefully moves her arms to the song – released from the bounds of the musical and lyrical phrasing.

Later in the film, Sarah does not betray any irritation when James claims he cannot enjoy his favorite piece of classical music (in this case, the second movement to J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto) because she is unable to enjoy it. Instead of showing her discomfort or lashing out, she asks James to “show [her] the music”, similar to how she “felt” the music on the first date. James fails to do so, but not for lack of trying. Here, Matlin, as Sarah, is fully observational – one can see, through her eyes and face, a sincere attempt to understand what the Bach “feels” like. Where others might point out Matlin’s emotionally fraught scenes in this movie as the best exemplars of her work (any of the fights with Hurt’s James, her jealousy while watching the school show, her reconciliation with her mother), Matlin’s command in these less dramatically important moments also deserve praise.

Matlin’s performance, however, cannot stop Children of a Lesser God from depicting Sarah as the otherized character that must change the most. The film, released in a decade of popular cinema with a more cavalier attitude towards relationship violence than previously seen, puts so little on Hurt’s James. It is fine to portray an imbalanced romantic relationship in a movie. But the film seems tepidly interested in Sarah in stretches, and fails to truly allow the audience to connect with her in moments where that might be possible. Additionally, whenever Sarah or anyone else who is deaf or hard of hearing signs in the film, there are no subtitles. Instead, it is up to James or another hearing character to verbalize the sign language – disallowing the opportunity for any viewer to find, in Sarah, a chance to see the events of the film through her. This, like CODA (2021; which incidentally also stars Marlee Matlin and concentrates on a hearing character, albeit a child of deaf adults), makes Children of a Lesser God a film not for the deaf or hard of hearing community, but for hearing audiences. Sarah’s deafness becomes an obstacle in this film – indeed, some of this is on the original stage play, but there surely were ways to address this.

The chilly New England atmosphere of this movie lends it a coziness that no stage play could possibly replicate. John Seale’s (1996’s The English Patient, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road) cinematography and Michael Convertino’s (1988’s Bull Durham, 1994’s The Santa Clause) electronic-heavy score (electronic-heavy scores tend to date quickly, and this is no exception), however, are merely functional. Children of a Lesser God, lacking in any technical accoutrements, relies solely on the strength of its actors and its adapted screenplay and the odd autumnal landscape of red-orange tree leaves and mist wafting over water in the early mornings. Director Randa Haines had never made a theatrical film prior to this, with her directorial career only covering network television and television movies until Children of a Lesser God. Her direction is here is unremarkable, but at least is sufficient for the purposes of this adaptation.

Hurt and Matlin began a romantic relationship shortly after auditioning for Children of a Lesser God – establishing a tricky situation of power dynamics on set during the making of the film. Matlin, seen as the ingénue, knew she had much to learn from Hurt (one year removed from his Academy Award-winning role in Kiss of the Spider Woman and one year away from Broadcast News) and everyone else on set. Matlin has always praised her fellow cast and crew members for that education in filmmaking. She moved in with Hurt shortly after shooting ended on Children of a Lesser God, but that was the beginning of the end of their relationship. The relationship, marked by drug and verbal abuse and rape, continued through the 59th Academy Awards in March 1987 (that evening, on the way home, Hurt questioned the legitimacy of Matlin’s Best Actress win, callously comparing Matlin to the other four nominees) but ended several months thereafter. In later years, following the publication of Matlin’s memoir detailing the worst aspects of their relationship, Hurt apologized for any harm he inflicted on Matlin and her family, wishing them all well. After Hurt’s death in 2022, Matlin reflected on her time making Children of a Lesser God and noted that Hollywood had “lost a really great actor”.

When Children of a Lesser God received five Academy Award nominations and won Marlee Matlin her Best Actress Oscar, speculation abounded regarding changes in the portrayals of deaf characters and opportunities for deaf and hard of hearing actors. Matlin was the incarnation of a potential groundswell of such representation in Hollywood. That groundswell has been less dramatic than anticipated (as are all such movements to address underrepresentation in American films), but Matlin’s win has, slowly, in its own way, opened a wealth of new opportunities for deaf and hearing-impaired actors in the United States in film and television. Children of a Lesser God might not be the revolutionary film that many non-viewers may have heard of. Nevertheless, its positive impacts continue to create small ripples through American filmmaking, belatedly, more frequently than ever before.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[pwlanier]

Kudryashov Oleg Alexandrovich (1932–2022) "Volume composition." Board № 566. 1983, 2016.

Paper, dry needle, gouache, 41×32 cm.

At the bottom are the author's numbering, captions and dates with a graphite pencil.

Painter, graphic artist, author of artistic objects. In 1950-1951 he studied at the Moscow Art School. From 1956 to 1958 he worked at the Animation Film Studio in Moscow. In 1974, he emigrated to England, where he gained fame. He returned to Moscow in 1997. The range of Kudryashov's work is unusually wide: from huge graphic triptychs and polyptychs to exquisite miniatures, from paper reliefs to metal structures, from grotesque figurativism to lyrical abstraction. The central theme of O.'s creativity Kudryashova - "former dwelling" - a destroyed or disappeared human nest. Kudryashov's works are stored in the collections of the State GMII. A.S. Pushkin, GTG (Moscow), GRM (St. Petersburg), Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery (London, UK), Boston Museum of Fine Arts (USA), Dresden National Gallery (Germany).

Litfund