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dfroza · 1 year ago

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“We were all ceremonially washed through baptism together into one body by one Spirit.”

“You are the body of the Anointed, the Liberating King; each and every one of you is a vital member.”

Today’s reading of the Scriptures from the New Testament is the 12th chapter of the letter of First Corinthians:

Now let me turn to some issues about spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters. There’s much you need to learn.

Remember the way you used to live when you were pagans apart from God? You were engrossed—enchanted with voiceless idols, led astray by mere images carved by human hands. With that in mind, I want you to understand that no one saying “Jesus is cursed” is operating under God’s Spirit, and no one confessing “Jesus is Lord” can do so without the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.

Now there are many kinds of grace gifts, but they are all from the same Spirit. There are many different ways to serve, but they’re all directed by the same Lord. There are many amazing working gifts in the church, but it is the same God who energizes them all in all who have the gifts.

Each believer has received a gift that manifests the Spirit’s power and presence. That gift is given for the good of the whole community. The Spirit gives one person a word of wisdom, but to the next person the same Spirit gives a word of knowledge. Another will receive the gift of faith by the same Spirit, and still another gifts of healing—all from the one Spirit. One person is enabled by the Spirit to perform miracles, another to prophesy, while another is enabled to distinguish those prophetic spirits. The next one speaks in various kinds of unknown languages, while another is able to interpret those languages. One Spirit works all these things in each of them individually as He sees fit.

Just as a body is one whole made up of many different parts, and all the different parts comprise the one body, so it is with the Anointed One. We were all ceremonially washed through baptism together into one body by one Spirit. No matter our heritage—Jew or Greek, insider or outsider—no matter our status—oppressed or free—we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Here’s what I mean: the body is not made of one large part but of many different parts. Would it seem right for the foot to cry, “I am not a hand, so I couldn’t be part of this body”? Even if it did, it wouldn’t be any less joined to the body. And what about an ear? If an ear started to whine, “I am not an eye; I shouldn’t be attached to this body,” in all its pouting, it is still part of the body. Imagine the entire body as an eye. How would a giant eye be able to hear? And if the entire body were an ear, how would an ear be able to smell? This is where God comes in. God has meticulously put this body together; He placed each part in the exact place to perform the exact function He wanted. If all members were a single part, where would the body be? So now, many members function within the one body. The eye cannot wail at the hand, “I have no need for you,” nor could the head bellow at the feet, “I won’t go one more step with you.” It’s actually the opposite. The members who seem to have the weaker functions are necessary to keep the body moving; the body parts that seem less important we treat as some of the most valuable; and those unfit, untamed, unpresentable members we treat with an even greater modesty. That’s something the more presentable members don’t need. But God designed the body in such a way that greater significance is given to the seemingly insignificant part. That way there should be no division in the body; instead, all the parts mutually depend on and care for one another. If one part is suffering, then all the members suffer alongside it. If one member is honored, then all the members celebrate alongside it. You are the body of the Anointed, the Liberating King; each and every one of you is a vital member. God has appointed gifts in the assembly: first emissaries, second prophets, third teachers, then miracle workers, healers, helpers, administrators, and then those who speak with various unknown languages. Are all members gifted as emissaries? Are all gifted with prophetic utterance? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Or are all gifted in healing arts? Do all speak or interpret unknown languages? Of course not. Pursue the greater gifts, and let me tell you of a more excellent way—love.

The Letter of First Corinthians, Chapter 12 (The Voice)

A note from the Voice translation:

Paul’s description of the works of the Spirit, the Lord (Jesus), and God (the Father) links the three persons together in remarkable ways. Although Paul never articulates the doctrine of the Trinity, what he writes here about the Godhead relationship—their community of persons—becomes the raw materials used by later believers to construct the church’s teaching on the Trinity. In this chapter the apostle emphasizes the agency of the Spirit. For him the Spirit is not just an impersonal force or feeling; He is just as much a person within the Trinity as the Father and the Son. Accordingly, the Spirit chooses where to impart gifts as He works together with the Father and the Son to build up the church.

Today’s paired reading from the First Testament is the 39th chapter of the book of Exodus:

For the priests who served in the holy place, they decorated finely woven garments with blue, purple, and scarlet thread donated by the people. They also made the sacred garments Aaron was to wear, exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses.

Bezalel had Aaron’s vest of gold made out of finely woven linen embroidered with blue, purple, and scarlet thread. Craftsmen hammered gold into gold leaf, sliced it into individual threads, and interlaced them with the blue, purple, and scarlet thread as they embroidered intricate designs into the fine linens. They also made two pieces for the shoulders of the vest that attached so that the front and back form one piece. The vest’s waistband was skillfully made of the same materials—blue, purple, and scarlet thread on finely woven linen—and with a similar design made by skilled artisans exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses. They prepared onyx stones, engraved them the same way signet rings are engraved, and set them in ornamental gold settings. As the Eternal instructed Moses, he positioned the onyx stones on the shoulder pieces of Aaron’s vest as a memorial for the people of Israel before the Eternal One.

He then had skilled workers make the breast piece in the same style as the vest out of finely woven linen embroidered with blue, purple, and scarlet thread and with gold. They made it square by folding over the material to double it and created a pouch in it nine inches by nine inches. They placed four rows of stones in it. The first row was ruby, topaz, and emerald; the second row was turquoise, sapphire, and diamond; the third row was jacinth, agate, and amethyst; the fourth row was beryl, onyx, and jasper. They were all attached to the breast piece with ornamental gold settings. The twelve stones stood for the twelve tribes of Israel. Each was engraved like a seal with the name of one of the twelve tribes. They braided strands of pure gold into chains and attached them to the breast piece. They fashioned two ornamental gold settings and two gold rings, and they placed the two rings on opposite ends of the breast piece. Then they fastened the two gold chains to the two gold rings at the two ends of the breast piece. They fastened the loose ends of the chains to the two ornamental gold settings at the front of Aaron’s vest on the shoulders. Then they fashioned two more gold rings and attached them to the breast piece at the inside edge next to the vest. They made two additional gold rings and attached them to the front of the vest below the shoulders near the seam just above the waistband. They connected the rings on the breast piece to the rings on the vest using blue cord, so that it would be attached above the vest’s waistband and not come loose from the vest. They did all this exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses.

He then made the robe worn under the vest blue. They made a hole for the head and formed a collar around the hole by lining it with extra material so that it might not tear. All around the hem they stitched pomegranates out of the blue, purple, and scarlet thread. They also fashioned bells out of pure gold and attached them all around the hem between the pomegranates. They used an alternating pattern: bell, pomegranate, bell, pomegranate, and so on. They did this exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses.

They made tunics out of finely woven linen for Aaron and his sons. They made the turban, caps, and undergarments out of fine linen as well. They also made the sash out of finely woven linen and embroidered it with the blue, purple, and scarlet thread. They did all this exactly as the Eternal One instructed Moses.

They made the medallion, the sacred emblem that set the high priest apart, out of pure gold and engraved it like a seal with the inscription, “Holy to the Eternal.” They fastened it with a blue cord to the front of Aaron’s turban, exactly as the Eternal One instructed Moses.

All the work that went into the sanctuary of the congregation tent was finally finished. The Israelites did everything exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses.

Then the Israelites brought all they made to Moses. They brought the tent and all its furnishings, including its hooks, frame panels, crossbars, posts, and bases; the layers of red-dyed rams’ skins and the sea-cow skin that covered the sanctuary; the veil shrouding the most holy place; the covenant chest with its poles and the seat of mercy; the table, its tools, the bread of the Presence; the gold lampstand, its lamps and all its tools, the lamp oil; the golden altar of incense, the anointing oil and the scented incense; the fabric screen for the tent’s entrance; the bronze altar for burnt offerings, the bronze grating, its poles and tools, the basin and its stand; the panels that enclose the courtyard, the posts and bases, the screen that covers the court’s entrance, the cords and pegs; and all the tools used in the sanctuary of the congregation tent, the finely woven clothing for priests serving in the holy place, the sacred garments worn by Aaron the high priest, and the clothes his sons are to wear when they serve as priests as well. The Israelites completed each part of the project exactly as the Eternal One had instructed Moses.

Moses inspected every piece of work they had completed, and he saw that they had done it all with excellence according to the specifications given to Him by the Eternal One. So Moses blessed them.

The Book of Exodus, Chapter 39 (The Voice)

A link to my personal reading of the Scriptures for Thursday, may 30 of 2024 with a paired chapter from each Testament (the First & the New) of the Bible along with Today’s Proverbs and Psalms

A post by John Parsons about the “corrections” we face in life on earth:

Our Torah reading this week (Bechukotai) is the final portion of the Book of Leviticus (וַיִּקְרָא), which is the central book of the Torah. In light of all that God had done for the Jewish people - from their great deliverance in Egypt to the ordination of the priesthood in the Tabernacle - God expected them to live up to their high calling as His chosen people: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). Therefore, some of the sages say that the central point of this concluding portion is tochachah (i.e., the warning of punishment) rather than nechamah (i.e., comfort). The focus is not, "If you walk in my laws" (Lev. 26:3), but rather, "if you do not listen (shema) to me, then..." (Lev. 26:14)....

It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather indifference, and that explains why the punishments would come if the people “left their first love.” Indeed, the “rebuke” portion of the tochachah begins with "ve’im lo tishme’u li" (וְאִם־לא תִשְׁמְעוּ לִי), “if you do not listen to me” (Lev. 26:14), which recalls the Shema and the duty to love the Lord bekhol levavkha, “with all your heart.” If the people walk carelessly (i.e., keri: קְרִי) with God, then God will afflict them with "the troubles of love" (i.e., yissurei ahavah: יִסּוּרֵי אַהֲבָה). A student once asked his rebbe: "Do we get punished for our sins in this world?" His succinct response was, "Only if we are made fortunate..." The worst possible fate is for God to be indifferent to someone! Can anything be more tragic than to be forgotten or to go unnoticed by God? It is far better that He afflict you with "yissurei ahavah" - the “troubles of love!”

The idea of tochachah (rebuke, correction) is not simply something for ethnic Israel, of course, since the New Testament likewise warns us that God will punish those who likewise walk carelessly (i.e., keri: קְרִי) with Him. Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as God’s children? "My son, do not regard lightly (ὀλιγώρει) the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary by his reproof (תּוֹכֵחָה). For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and reproves (יוֹכִיחַ) every child whom he receives" (Heb. 12:5-6; Prov. 3:11-12). The Lord charged the assembly at Ephesus that they had let go of their first love. Yeshua therefore urged them: “Remember from what high state you have fallen and repent! Do the deeds (ἔργα) you did at the first; if not, I will come to you and remove your menorah from its place – unless you repent” (Rev. 2:4-5). Because God is never indifferent toward those who are trusting in His salvation, he will discipline and correct us to keep close to Him. He will afflict us with the “troubles of love.” As it is written, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God” (Heb. 10:30).

Regarding the litancy of woes, troubles, and curses listed in parashat Bechukotai, I’d like to relate a beautiful story I once read long ago.... The son of a Torah sage was away from home during the Shabbat of Bechukotai, so he went to a different synagogue to hear it read. As he listened to the cantor (reader), he became progressively alarmed at the severity of the curses, until he fainted in the middle of the reading. After he was revived he was asked if this happened to him every year, to which he replied, “No, when my father reads the Torah, the curses sound like blessings.” Amen. Rightly heard. The warning of punishment for our sin should awaken us to hear the heart of our heavenly Father, who loves us and profoundly cares how we live our lives...

[ Hebrew for Christians ]

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Psalm 119:67 reading:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/psalm119-67-jjp.mp3

Hebrew page:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/psalm119-67-lesson.pdf

5.29.24 • Facebook

from yesterday’s email by Israel365

Today’s message (Days of Praise) from the Institute for Creation Research

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alphabetsoup-blogposts · 1 year ago

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I have no idea...

...why you would want that particular little nugget. Anyway, I dug it up from a document of almost 200 pages. I haven't used the "version history" function—it's too cumbersome. But I can tell you that it's a recollection from a meeting about the necessity of incorporation in c. 2013, which I finally wrote up in my diary in 2021.

Y'know, when you say "lies", I literally cannot think what they might be telling you about this, or the pension/benefits, or the £450k other than the truth. If I understood I would probably try some myth busting but I just cannot imagine.

So, yes, obviously incorporation was all done over my strenuous objections and anxieties. I had nothing to gain and everything... but everything to lose. I went from pillar to post to beg anyone I could think of to intervene, including B who clearly was close to the ground but tight-lipped in his usual way. GG—who I did not beg for help, not wishing to muddy any personal/professional boundaries and not thinking anyone would listen to him—may even remember that I was anxious about it in May 2013 because I briefly referred to it—but I am a reasonably well-trained social actor and give out less than I feel.

Some members of the Board were closely involved back in 2013 because they were also members of the Plenary Committee, others only became closely involved over the process of registration in 2015. Mr Parlours sent that letter I excerpted and the Chair took it to Plenary. B spoke up to give a firm view--in plenary, I think, but perhaps in private—and suggested that incorporation was inevitable, would be relatively easy, should be welcomed (really) and could be managed by a small subcommittee of people. I think he also may have said he would respectfully nominate persons to serve on that ad hoc group. The Chair—and likely the plenary committee—was persuaded to follow his plan. DG was one of those who got involved in the subcommittee. EM (not now a member) was also involved. I think there was a third but I am not wholly sure who that might have been.

R (not then a member but a very close friend of B's—the Duo) also got involved but not in the subcommittee. The mechanism by which R got involved was that we were both self-employed at the same shop, on the outside and he offered to help. I had been left not only to suffer the consequences of the mandated spin-off and loss of everything I held to be of value, but to write the articles of incorporation on top of my job qua self-employed person. The combination was daunting—incorporating a company, acting as your own draftsman, running a think tank and working for paid clients was just impossible and I lost more than the battle with Mr Parlours at the time. Anyway, as I mentioned, R and I had frequent coffees at his invitation and he offered to help with the drafting. In offering to help he articulated the view that there should be no corporate members (ie no shareholders other than Board members, because that might be tricky somehow) and that the Board should comprise only the senior lawyers on the Plenary Committee (not the bankers because they might be seen as agenda-driven lobbyists--ha, oh the irony!) and that is how we ended up with the Board you see on the filings... one that—as I have said many times—remained in situ for the best part of a decade despite my efforts to roll it over for the sake of my own sanity. (The original Board also included Mr GC Banks, who held one of the two nominal shares, if I recall correctly—which is interesting if you think about it.)

As for Mr Parlours, he produced a new arms length service agreement and we pretty much swallowed it whole. The meeting with the diss above, between Mr Parlours, me and the subcommittee representatives, was just part of that whole process. The question of invoices, donations, non-charitable purpose trusts, resulting trusts, management accounts, audits, taxable income blah blah and the exact amount that should be transferred to the new company arose at this time and stretched past incorporation in the Autumn but had begun to surface in late 2012 when I queried the management accounts with the HoD of Financial Control.

Two years later, of course, R was fully plugged in and one of the drivers of the thinking on registration. K was also involved in developing that thinking.

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theexodvs · 1 year ago

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What is the primary sacred text of Judaism? There are 24 books Judaism claims as its holy writings. They are the five books which tell of the origin of the Israelites and discuss the laws their God gave to them, the Torah (law); eight books written by or about the prophets of ancient Israel, the Neviʾim (prophets); and eleven books which contain wisdom and miscellaneous aspects of Israelite history, the Ketuvim (writings). Altogether, these books comprise the Tanakh. The Christian Old Testament as used by Protestants has the exact same content as the Tanakh, but arranges the constituent books differently and usually splits the books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah into two each, and the book of the minor prophets into twelve. Jews are generally uncomfortable with this name, as it implies that the Tanakh is complete without the New Testament, along with different misconceptions on how Christians have translated and presented the Tanakh, discussed below. For the rest of this FAQ, this set of books will be referred to as the Tanakh except in its capacity of a constituent part of the Christian Bible. Non-Protestant Christians include a number of books written during the Second Temple era or later in their Old Testament canons. These books are collectively known as the Apocrypha or Deutercanon, and are outside the scope of this FAQ.

What language(s) was the Tanakh written in? Almost the entire Tanakh was written in Hebrew, while parts of the Daniel and Ezra(-Nehemiah), along with words and phrases from throughout the Tanakh, were written in Aramaic.

Was Biblical Hebrew written with vowels? The Tanakh was originally written in a writing system called the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other very early examples of Hebrew writing, and retained by the Samaritans. During the time of the Second Temple, the Jews gradually adopted a script derived from the Imperial Aramaic script, and modified it to become the square script, which is now the more familiar "Hebrew script." Both were ultimately derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and operate on similar principles, to the point where there is essentially a one-to-one correspondence. They are both technically defined as abjads rather than proper alphabets, the reason being that they lack letters whose primary use is to express vowel sounds.

Why wasn't Biblical Hebrew written using a system that clearly marked vowels? Hebrew is a member of a larger family called the Semitic languages, most of which do not have (or did not use to have) many distinct vowels. Arabic only has three, and there is no strong evidence that Akkadian had more than four. Aramaic, Ge'ez and Amharic all have at least five, and there is evidence that Ugaritic did as well, but the additional vowels in these languages do not converge the way they would if they had been inherited from a common ancestor. At the beginning of its written history, a predecessor of Hebrew, either Proto-Northwest Semitic or an immediate descendant, likely had three vowel qualities /a i u/. Its writing system, the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, accordingly lacked vowel letters, as a given consonant sequence would have been substantially less ambiguous than in other languages with larger vowel inventories. In the stages between PNWS and Hebrew, and in Hebrew itself, a number of different sound changes caused its vowel inventory to expand, ultimately adding two, possibly three, more vowel sounds /e o (ǝ)/. As Hebrew developed, so did the variant of the Proto-Sinaitic script used to write it, albeit more slowly, giving rise to both the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet and the square script. As the written forms of a language are more conservative than their spoken forms, and the changes which brought about these additional vowels were very gradual, there was no impetus for any group of scholars to sit down and propose the addition of vowel letters to be used in writing Hebrew before it went extinct around the beginning of the fourth century. That being said, four letters, alpeh א, waw ו, he ה, and yodh י, used ordinarily to express consonants /ʔ w~v h j/, took on a secondary role of expressing vowels in variant spellings. The letters aleph and he were used for essentially any vowels, waw for rounded vowels, and yod for front vowels. In this capacity, such a letter is called an ʾem qriʾa or mater lectionis.

How do we determine the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew if it is extinct and did not have proper vowel letters? Hebraicists rely on a number of different methods for determining the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew words. Even though Hebrew went extinct, it was retained liturgically in Judaism, leading to three different vocalizations, the Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian. During the high middle ages, a group of Jewish scholars called the Masoretes developed systems of vowel markings called the niqqud to clarify these vocalizations in Hebrew writing. Only the Tiberian vocalization survived the middle ages or was extensively covered by niqqud, and it is referenced when determining the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. The matries lectionis produced variant spellings of certain words, which also clarifies the pronunciation. In ancient times, a Greek translation of the Tanakh was produced called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). Its origins are shrouded in fable, but it is generally agreed by historians of the Bible that in the mid-third century BC, about seventy rabbis gathered in Alexandria and translated at least the Torah into Hebrew, with the rest of the Old Testament completed by the first century. As Greek is written in a proper alphabet, the vowels used in proper nouns and loanwords give insight into how these words would have been pronounced in Hebrew. Around the middle of the third century AD, a critical edition of the Tanakh called the Hexapla was produced. Consisting of six columns, it placed the Hebrew text alongside an attempt to write the Hebrew text with the Greek alphabet (in the second column, this text is called the Secunda), and four different Greek translations. Though it exists in fragmentary condition, the Secunda gives some insights into the pronunciation of Hebrew. Syllable timing can be predicted based on Biblical poetry. Finally, as it is part of a larger language family, Hebrew can be compared with other Semitic languages that have been spoken constantly since antiquity. Special emphasis is put on comparison to its closest living relatives, Aramaic and Arabic.

What is the Tetragrammaton? It is a name for God used well over 6000 times in the Tanakh, spelled using four Hebrew letters, יהוה.

Have any of the above methods been useful in determining the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton? Judaism developed a taboo against pronouncing the Tetragrammaton during the Second Temple Period. For this reason, except for one possible exception (and even that is doubtful), no LXX manuscript presents a genuine effort to transliterate the Tetragrammaton; the only remaining fragments of the Secunda which include sections featuring the Tetragrammaton replace it with the Hebrew form amidst the Greek letters; and Tiberian vocalization lacks a pronunciation for it. In addition, all four of its letters can be matries lectionis, and it lacks known cognates in other Semitic languages. Samaritanism developed the taboo later, and a group of Jewish mystics that survived a century or so after the destruction of the Second Temple never had it. In the fourth century, Theodoret, in his Quaestiones in Exodum, records a Samaritan pronunciation of /i.a.ve/, consistent with Clement of Alexandria recording a mystic pronunciation of /i.a.we/ in the fifth book of his Stromata. Since /v/ and /w/ were never distinguished readily in any form of Hebrew, this points to a pronunciation /jah.weh/, hence the spelling Yahweh. The name "Jehovah" was an earlier rendering of the name, produced from a misconception among Christian Hebraists when encountering the Tetragrammaton in Masoretic texts. To prevent anyone from even accidentally saying the name aloud, a practice arose of saying it with the vowels in the word for "Lord," אדוני adonai. Christian Hebraicists did not realize this was a hybrid word and thought it was God's actual name, producing /ja.ho.vah/, eventually Jehovah.

Is Lashawan Qadash as promoted by various Black Hebrew Israelite groups remotely authentic to the actual pronunciation of ancient Hebrew? As with almost all other particular teachings of the BHIs, the Lashawan Qadash lacks any kind of historical evidence and is easily disproven. For example, under LQ, the name of God is not "Elohim," but rather "Alahayam." However, the first element is cognate with Arabic إله /ʔi.laːh/ and is an element of a mile-long list of different theophoric names from the Tanakh, such as Elijah, Daniel, etc, consistently spelled ηλ /eːl/ in the LXX. This points to a front vowel, both long before Hebrew became a distinct language, and towards its extinction. The second vowel is confirmed by the spelling variant which includes a waw, indicating a rounded vowel. However, the BHIs who employ LQ do not use a variant "Alahawayam." The word itself is the plural of the word "eloah" (please note that verbs always indicate grammatical number in Hebrew, and that the actions of the God of Israel are described using singular verbs in the Tanakh) which has always had a letter waw. The same plural ending shows a consistency with vowels in Aramaic plural endings. The pronunciation of the entire word is consistent with the form ελωειμ as found in the Secunda for Psalm 72:18. Black Hebrew Israelitism is usually conspiratorial, and BHIs will suggest the pronunciations of Hebrew proposed through accepted methods of historical methods are actually some kind of wicked plot perpetrated by the Jesuits, Masoretes, adherents of Babylonian mystery religion, or some combination thereof, usually in cahoots with each other. Whatever shadowy force(s) which acted to produce the pronunciation "Elohim" would have had to alter every last Hebrew scroll and carving which contains the singular "eloah," waw in tow, and every last Septuagint and New Testament manuscript containing a theophoric name containing "El" to include the letter ēta, including those manuscripts which laid in dark caves and buried in the desert for centuries; every remaining Secunda fragment to spell the name as ελωειμ; convinced millions of Arabic speakers, men, women, and children, rich and poor, to say "ilah" and write accordingly; and convinced millioned of Aramaic speakers, men, women, and children, rich and poor, to use front vowels when saying nouns in the plural, and write accordingly, centuries before anyone seriously proposed that Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew were related languages. This is all that would have had to have been done just to deceive the whole world of the pronunciation of just one word. There are far more words which also present a host of problems under LQ.

The existing evidence suggests that LQ originated in 20th-century Harlem, without any historical precedent whatsoever, and does not belong in any serious discussion of Biblical Hebrew.

Why is it said that Hebrew "went extinct" when it has been in constant use by the Jews until the present day? The term "extinction" in linguistics is used of languages without living native speakers. When the last native speaker of a language dies, that language is then extinct. Sumerian is extinct. Ancient Egyptian is extinct. Gaulish is extinct. Wampanoag is extinct. Ubykh is extinct. No informed person disputes any of these languages are actually extinct. However, many Jews and philosemites take offense at the term "extinction" when used to describe the ultimate fate of Biblical Hebrew. The fact of the matter is that Assyria dispersed most of the tribes of Israel, and Babylon captured what was left. We do not know what happened to the 10 lost tribes, but the members of Judah and Levi began to speak Aramaic. Even after Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to resettle Judaea, most Jews continued to speak Aramaic and teach it to their children. Through the Second Temple Era, Hebrew went from threatened to endangered. It did not matter that Hebrew was used in the synagogues; whether a language is alive or dead is determined at the cradle rather than the altar. Bar Kochba attempted to reinvigorate Hebrew during his revolt around AD 130. After this revolt was suppressed by the Romans, any hope of Hebrew continuing were essentially dashed. The Mishnah, thought to have been among the final documents written in Hebrew during the lifetime of any native speakers, was completed around the turn of the third century, and was in a form that showed obvious changes one would expect of a language approaching extinction. There is not a shred of evidence that there were any native speakers more than a century after the Mishnah. Extinct languages find use liturgically in different religious traditions throughout the world. No Jewish person or philosemite would deny, given sufficient information, that Avestan is extinct, despite its continuing use in Zoroastrianism. Nor would they deny the same about Coptic, Latin, Ge'ez, or Sanskrit, nor would they deny that Sumerian was in use by various pagan groups as long as 2000 years after it went extinct. Yet, for these same people, it is "inaccurate" or even "bigoted" to suggest the same regarding Hebrew. The knowledge of Hebrew during late antiquity and the middle ages was restricted almost exclusively to rabbis and Jewish literati, exactly 100% of whom spoke some other language natively. Yes, Hebrew was revived during the modern period, but it took great effort in creating enough vocabulary to describe the modern world, and there are enough difference between modern and Biblical Hebrew to motivate Avraham Ahuvya to create a modern Hebrew translation (for lack of a better term) of the Tanakh. Simply put, if these people want to discuss historical linguistics, they need to use terms which are found in historical linguistics, as they are defined by historical linguistics, terms which specialists in the field, Jew and gentile, accepted a long time ago. This includes the term “extinction.”

Why don't Christians use Hebrew source texts when translating the Tanakh? They do, and have been doing so constantly since the Reformation. The printed Hebrew edition of the Tanakh, by Daniel Bomberg, was arranged from several Masoretic manuscripts collected and collated by Jacob ben Hayyim. This was the primary base text of the Old Testament in all Protestant English translations of the Bible from at least the Geneva Bible (first published 1557) up until at least the Revised Version (published 1885), and seemingly the Darby Bible of 1890 and American Standard Version of 1901. Only Catholic Bibles used the Vulgate as a source, and an obscure translation of the LXX by Charles Thompson was printed in 1808; this translation made its source clear on the title page, not that almost anyone paid attention to it. A scholar of the Tanakh named Rudolph Kittel collated an even greater set of Masoretic manuscripts, creating the Biblia Hebraica Kittel (BHK), first published 1906. Later, it was determined that a manuscript, which had been produced in Cairo, mysteriously ended in the possession of a Russian Jewish collector named Abraham Firkovich, was displayed in Odessa, and then later in St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) was in fact the oldest complete copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew. It is now known as the Westminster-Leningrad Codex, and was made the primary source of printings of the BHK from 1937 onward, and by extension the OT of the Revised Standard Version. It later became the primary basis of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), first published 1968, and by extension the OT in the New American Standard Bible, New International Version, Good News Bible, New RSV, New KJV, Contemporary English Version, World English Bible, English Standard Version, and New Living Translation, just to name a few. Another printed edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew, the Biblia Hebraica Quinta, was completed last year, also derived from the WLC, and there is no reason to believe it will not serve as the basis of future translations. The LXX, Targumim, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Samaritan Pentateuch are occasionally consulted, mostly to illuminate the meaning of obscure Hebrew words or phrases, or solve inconsistencies among Masoretic manuscripts. The translators invariably place conspicuous footnotes to indicate such. If you do not believe Jewish translators of the Tanakh do the same thing, you need to explain how “amber” appears three separate times in the book of Ezekiel (1:4, 1:27, and 8:2) in the JPS Tanakh, in exactly the same places as it appears in Christian translations, despite the mystery which would surround the meaning of the base word, חשמל apart from the LXX.

#Hebrew #Hebrew language #Hebraicist #Hebraicists #Hebrew studies #Tetragrammaton #Language death #Tanakh #Old Testament #Seputagint #LXX #Dead Sea Scrolls #DSS #Targum #Targumim #Masoretes #Masoretic #Textual criticism #History of the Bible

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lemonhemlock · 2 years ago

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I've tried to comprise a reply to this baffling take, as exhibited in the thread available here, but, surprise surprise, the reblog feature is not working anymore, so I'll just leave it down here, because I'm such a benevolent despot, willing to educate lost souls:

Except they're not. 🤡 No one in-universe believes Rhaenyra's children to be legitimate. We've already had this exact topic in the main series and, I promise you, that absolutely no one was arguing that Cersei's children are legitimate just because she officially claims as such.

Ned's accusation cost him his head and the North refused to acknowledge the rule of the Iron Throne any longer. Stannis declared himself the rightful King on the basis of Cersei's children being bastards. Then he sent a bunch of letters across the realm and enough lords stopped recognising Joffrey as King because he was revealed to be a bastard.

Do you think Stannis sent them a DNA test? A sex tape with Jaime & Cersei? No, this is what he wrote:

"All men know me for the trueborn son of Steffon Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, by his lady wife Cassana of House Estermont. I declare upon the honor of my House that my beloved brother Robert, our late king, left no trueborn issue of his body, the boy Joffrey, the boy Tommen, and the girl Myrcella being abominations born of incest between Cersei Lannister and her brother Jaime the Kingslayer. By right of birth and blood, I do this day lay claim to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Let all true men declare their loyalty. Done in the Light of the Lord, under the sign and seal of Stannis of House Baratheon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms."

I could say the same thing as you and argue that Cersei claimed those children were Robert's, then Tywin and Jaime and Tyrion corroborated her claim. On his deathbed, under dictation, Robert names Ned Lord Regent "until my son Joffrey comes of age". Ned changes the words to "rightful heir" in the will.

So, going by that logic, you can argue that even Robert explicitly named Joffrey his son and heir, which would make Ned a traitor to the crown and Stannis a usurper. Yet this accusation of bastardy caused sufficient uproar within the Realm for the War of the Five Kings to break out. So, evidently, enough people were not okay with an illegitimate person as their King.

You can even draw a parallel between House Baratheon in ASOIAF rejecting Joffrey as a trueborn Baratheon and House Velaryon in HOTD rejecting Luke as a trueborn Velaryon.

#anti rhaenyra targaryen #anti jacaerys velaryon #anti lucerys velaryon #house of the dragon #asoiaf #gods be good #cersei's children being bastards is literally one of the main plot points of the series #never in my life did i think i would be standing here in front of you defending ned and stannis #hotd meta #bastardposting #cersei lannister #ned stark #stannis baratheon #forgive me cersei for draggin u like this

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limeade-l3sbian · 2 years ago

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oh the superman eugenics thing is pretty cut and dry to the point. he's from a race of incredibly intelligent, very powerful people who stand above all humans in basically every single way. it doesn't help matters that, by nature of the racism and misogyny imbedded in the culture at the time, all early depictions of krypton showed it as an all-white, Übermensch society that follows gender roles from 1900s america to the exact letter. frankly, the early depictions were only a box of hair-dye away from being a representation of hitler's ideal society.

one could say "but the kryptonians died because of their own hubris, therefore it depicts that society as bad," but the overmining explanation for why krypton exploded was only one of many backstories given for the same phenomenon. most of the time, krypton just blows up for uncontrolled reasons. it got too old, it got too close to their sun, or it literally just blows up with no particular reason. even in the version of the story that explains the explosion with overmining, it doesn't address why the society is all white and comprised only of buff dudes and hyperfeminine women. it has a pro-environment and anti-capitalist message, sure, but there's nothing there to address why this planet of seemingly perfect beings look exactly like what a white supremacist would think a perfect society would look like.

as for wonder woman and the star sapphire corps...well. let's start with wonder woman. in general, i dislike how amazons are depicted, and wonder woman and dc's themyscira fail to make themselves exceptions. removed body hair, boob armor, makeup, "armor" that looks like corseting, leotards, miniskirts, styled hair, even sometimes high heels. these women do not look like women who are removed from patriarchal society in the slightest. and the authors...they take every chance to remind us that the amazons don't accept men, but also make every effort to make exceptions to that. accepting a tim into themiscara through changing the lore of where amazons come from is seen as beautiful and natural, but the amazons are routinely treated as childish or even cruel for being female separatists. wonder woman herself was shamed in the comics for "abandoning" her son when he was born (he was adopted by superman and lois lane, and i doubt that happened coincidentally...she put him in good hands). the writers will say "the amazons created a society where women could thrive away from male violence," but they always act like that's impossible or a sin, when it comes down to actually depicting it. and what the hell is with the "bracelets of submission," anyways?

i would love it if the women of themyscira were actually allowed to be natural, rowdy, buff women with hairy legs and absolutely no connections or references to bdsm. i want them to be guilt-free manhaters who view the lesbians within their society as blessed by the goddesses (yes, i know depictions of lesbians that are normal and seen as normal are necessary, but why can't we see ourselves as valuable when society tells us we're trash).

the star sapphire corps, meanwhile. well. the purple lantern represents "love." they're depicted as mostly female, and mostly very provocatively dressed. i'm not sure when this change occurred, but i'm pretty sure they used to be "pink lanterns" at one point, and probably only changed since pink isn't a color present on the actual light spectrum--the only evidence i have of this, though, is that early depictions of the character carol ferris (the primary violet lantern), used to wear all-pink.

now, you may be thinking "oh, an all-female group based around the concept of love, it's a bit cliché, but not too bad." well. the power of "love" according to the emotional spectrum canon is embodied by a monstrous character quite literally called "predator." i can't quite cover everything wrong with this character without writing a novel, but basically, the power of "love" seems to be something that makes the people using it (again, primarily women, because "there's a lack of men who are worthy for it," which sounds feminist until you get to this next part) obsessive, paranoid, and irrational. predator himself is apparently a manifestation of carol's "business side," as well as her daddy issues. by the way, speaking of carol: she's crazy. the writers have given her a sort of multiple-personality disorder, where there's carol ("good woman") and star sapphire ("evil woman"). and predator ("evil man") is also apparently her? at least in some regards. some of the powers seem a little...coercive (to put it gently), as well. the whole thing is a mess, and if you're curious, i would suggest visiting pages like the dc fandom/wikia pages on the things i've listed to get an idea for what i'm talking about here.

i'm honestly not quite sure how to "fix" them, beyond maybe...i don't know, removing the "love is crazy and stupid and irrational" and sexualization of love angles? i think they should still mostly be women, at least with regards to entities in the group that come from earth, because men from earth are kind of terrible at actual love. it would be nice if the lantern was a little discriminatory against "obsession" or "possessiveness," and only valued certain kinds of love (not necessarily just romantic or sexual, but platonic as well).

this doesn't actually cover a whole lot, despite having a lot of text, but i feel like i've said enough for one message lol.

You've got a good brain for picking. This was fascinating! /gen. You ever want to drop more commentary, please feel free! 💜

As a side note, the sons of themyscira plotline is another point to mention regarding the Amazons being depicted as petty for not wanting men around. It's revealed (in that version) that the way amazonians have children is by going on boats and having sex with sailors, going back to the island pregnant, and then just keeping the female ones.

I don't know what reason for how they maintain their numbers I like, but that was probably the stupidest one above this new one that invites a TIM into the mix and completely removes the nature of Themyscira itself. I wish they had made the nature of how Diana was born the common form of birth (molded from clay and brought to life by Athena, instead of Zeus.).

Overall though, great analysis. 💜 This was really dope to read.

#ask

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novoaa1writes · 4 years ago

Text

candles

image source

pairing(s): dark!wanda maximoff x reader

summary:

you’ve been feeling strange for the past month, particularly when it comes to dating.

you do your best to ignore it, thinking it’ll resolve itself on its own—given time, that is.

it doesn’t.

(and it’s got everything to do with wanda.)

[also available on ao3]

word count: ~5,300

rating: mature

warnings: dark!wanda, NON-CON spanking (with a belt), NON-CON BDSM play, mental manipulation, partial mind control, emotional manipulation, mental coercion, trauma bonding, toxic dynamics, drinking, possessive!wanda, non-con mind-reading, vandalism, adultery (not in reference to you or wanda), brief instances of slut-shaming

notes: [requested by anon] reader’s sexuality isn’t explicitly stated, but ex-partners of different genders are referenced/mentioned

— —

wanda uses a couple bulgarian terms of endearment for reader here, so below is a lil’ list in the order of which they appear.

*note: all of these are exactly one letter away from being precise matches to synonymous terms in russian. HOWEVER, the bulgarian alphabet and the russian alphabet are different—granted, in fairly minor ways. for one, while both are comprised of cyrillic lettering, russian has 33 while bulgarian only has 30.

— —

You have no fucking clue what’d gotten into you.

One moment, things were fine—good, even. And the next… well.

You’ll explain.

It was something like 11:30 on a Saturday night, and you were drunk.

Well, not drunk. More like buzzed.

But whatever, right? Considering the week you’d had, you deserved to let loose, even if only for a night.

Monday night saw a very angry and decidedly unhinged soccer mom banging on your door, screeching vehemently about the ‘two-faced slut’ who ruined her marriage and demanding to be let in so that she could ‘make her sorry.’ Turns out, the older guy your roommate had been sleeping with as of late was married—not that he’d bothered to share that particular bit of information with her, obviously.

The two of you spent the better part of the evening barricaded inside, passing a bottle of cheap wine back and forth while trying to explain to the 911 operator that you weren’t messing around, that there really was an angry soccer mom on your doorstep and you were actively fearing for your safety.

She eventually left around 10:00pm—no thanks to the police, since the 911 operator hadn’t even bothered to give them a call. It wasn’t until the next morning when you left for work that you saw the woman’s parting gift to the pair of you: the word ‘HOMEWRECKER’ spray-painted across the front door in obnoxious red lettering.

Bye-bye, security deposit.

That same night, you made your roommate promise to start dating people in a similar age range—because really, the both of you were stressed enough as it was without worrying about coming in between yet another middle-aged couple’s dying marriage.

The rest of the week wasn’t much better.

On Thursday, your balding creep of a boss had made yet another blatant pass at you in the workplace, making you seriously consider (and not for the first time) the prospect of just quitting and being done with it.

Then, at shit o’clock on a Friday morning, you awoke to an urgent phone call informing you that an ex of yours (one you were actually on semi-decent terms with) had gotten into a fairly serious car accident, and still had you marked down as her emergency contact.

30 minutes later found you showing up at the hospital just moments after your ex’s current girlfriend had arrived, which then prompted the whole ‘you still being your ex’s emergency contact’ revelation when the current girlfriend demanded to know what you were doing there, which ended up being… well, you’ll just say it wasn’t pretty, and leave it at that.

And your ex was going to be completely fine, anyways. She just had some minor cuts and abrasions, and would need to undergo a fairly minor (read: minimally invasive) surgery over the next couple days.

Before leaving, you instigated a quick check-in with the doctors to ensure they had everything they needed—which then turned into you providing a list of allergies, as your ex wouldn’t likely be conscious for another couple of hours, and apparently the current girlfriend didn’t know of her sensitivities to penicillin and phenobarbital… which the current girlfriend was less than happy about, if the daggers she glared at you were any indication.

Whatever. You were just trying to help.

You thanked the doctors, told them to feel free to call you if anything went awry, then asked if they might tell your ex to call you when she awoke. You thought about offering some words of comfort to the current girlfriend as she sat vigil at your ex’s bedside, but the murderous glower she shot you the moment you got within ten feet of her was more than enough to make you think better of it.

With that, you left.

So… yeah. It’d been a shitty week.

And now, here you were: a girls’ night out at the lively nightclub you and your roommate had scoped out just last weekend, tossing back $12 cocktails and letting the trashy EDM beat blaring over the speakers drown out the rest of your thoughts.

You’d been feeling a little weird all week—all month, really.

As far as you were concerned, this was exactly what the doctor had ordered.

So, when a cute guy wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt that was at least a couple sizes too big yet did well to compliment his well-muscled torso came up to you and started chatting you up at the bar, you didn’t blow him off.

The exact opposite, in fact.

He was nice, and funny, and had a gorgeous smile that made your chest feel warm for reasons that had nothing to do with the alcohol. When he flirted with you, you flirted right back.

You felt a little guilty for doing so, though you couldn’t exactly put a finger on why that was. Either way, you didn’t allow yourself to dwell on it for very long.

After all, you’d been feeling hints of that for the past month, if not longer. It seemed to happen whenever you flirted with a cute guy, or went out on another Tinder date with a pretty girl, or even hugged one of your close friends.

You’d get this painful tightening sensation in your gut, nausea roiling in your abdomen… a distant, lofty voice in your head telling you that this was wrong, that you already belonged to someone else.

Which was pointless, really. Stupid.

You were single.

Your last serious relationship (barring the one with your now-hospitalized ex-girlfriend) had been over seven months ago with an eccentric guy named Lukas. He was kind, well-meaning… a bit of a dork at his very core, but you always found that more endearing than anything else. You’d dated him for four and a half months before deciding to break it off; because as much as you cared for him and enjoyed being around him, you didn’t love him, and you knew by then that you never would.

You thought about him, from time to time—even missed him now and again.

And yet, the strangest thing about the shameful feeling you’d get whenever your roommate so much as brushed a friendly kiss up against your cheek—it had absolutely nothing to do with Lukas.

You didn’t know how you knew that, but you did.

Whatever.

This guy was not Lukas.

His name was Des—short for Desmond, you learned over your fourth sugary-sweet cocktail of the night. He was charming and slightly foul-mouthed, but conscientious and passably polite where it mattered. He didn’t grope your ass or stare at your tits, nor did he make any lewd commentary about your body in any capacity.

He also smelled… really good, like Old Spice and spearmint gum and the barest hint of cigarette smoke.

That was more than enough for you.

(Whatever, alright? Decent guys were in short supply these days.)

You smiled and let him buy you another drink, even after you’d insisted that he really, really didn’t have to. And when an obnoxious pop song with a beat that was far more catchy than you’d have liked to admit came over the speakers, you let him coax you out to the dance floor with minimal resistance.

It was… fun. You liked the way his hands rested on either of your hips—gentle, almost careful; holding you like he understood he didn’t have a right to your body, like he was more than content that you allowed him this to even think of demanding any more.

Despite the twinges of guilt flaring in your gut, you let yourself get a little more comfortable… dancing closer and closer to him amidst a packed crowd of writhing bodies, letting your breasts graze up against his chest.

It was teasing—provocative, even. A test, of sorts—one that Des passed with flying colors.

He didn’t do a thing to rush you, just kept dancing across from you with his hands on your hips and his darkened gaze on yours—seeming fully content to let you set the pace for the moment. And God, but the way he was looking at you… patient but eager, like he wanted nothing more than to crush your body against his own and grind himself into you like an animal—and yet, still, he held himself back.

You couldn’t help but find that attractive as hell.

Looping your arms around his neck, you let your body to press flush against his as you swayed to the beat of the song, not shying away from the slight stiffness you could feel growing against your hip.

That guilty, nauseous feeling in your gut pulled tighter.

You ignored it, and, when he leaned a little closer to shout over the deafening music, “Would it be alright if I kissed you?”... well.

You wasted absolutely no time in lunging up on the tips of your toes to capture his lips in a messy open-mouthed kiss, the strobe lights of the club fading into obscurity around you. His lips were warm and gentle against yours—tentative, at first, until you pressed a little harder and traced the seam of his lips with your tongue… and, yeah; that did the trick.

A moment later, his lips parted to let out a quiet groan directly into your mouth as he began to reciprocate in earnest, setting every nerve ending on your body alight with electrifying want.

And that’s when it happened.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a twisted sort of clarity hit you square in the chest—slowly, and then all at once.

The next bits were something of a blur.

You tore yourself away from Des, turned to forcibly elbow your way through a floor of grinding bodies. You thought you heard him call out your name, and more than a couple people on the dancefloor turned to glare at you as you rudely brushed past them without care—but, whatever.

You texted… someone, telling them you were headed back to the apartment, so they shouldn’t bother waiting up. The group chat, maybe?

And now… Now.

Before you can blink, the past crashes into the present, and you find yourself back outside in the pitch-black night.

It’s dark… chilly. A brisk wind catches you the moment you stumble out onto the sidewalk, assaulting every inch of your exposed skin like scores of needles piercing your flesh. You whimper, shudder, and hug your arms around your body—trying to warm yourself back up like a scared little kid who forgot their jacket.

For the first time that night, you regret the tiny black babydoll dress you’d chosen to wear for the evening—and that’s not even to mention the four-inch heels.

It’s miserable, to be sure, but you can hardly focus on it for very long.

No, you have to go somewhere. You feel sick, and cold, and wrong in a way you’re loath to even begin explaining to anyone else.

And your head… you’re positively aching for something—someone to make this better.

You need… Wanda.

Yes, Wanda is the person you’re looking for. She can make all of this better.

You don’t know why, but you’re sure of it. You just need to find her. Hopefully she’s spending the night in her apartment on that super cozy sofa of hers, drinking hot chocolate and binge-watching something on Netflix like the two of you did a couple weeks back.

A fond grin curves your lips at the recollection as you stumble off down the sidewalk, headed for the nearest subway station.

Another wintry gust of wind hits you square in the chest, and you pinch your forearm hard, silently willing yourself to focus.

The station should be less than a block down, if you’re remembering correctly.

At the next street corner, you manage to brandish your pepper spray in one hand while you rummage around in your purse for your MetroCard with the other.

It’s cold as hell, and you’re probably a little too drunk to be walking through the City streets alone right now, but you don’t much care.

All you gotta do is find Wanda. That’s all.

She’ll make everything better again.

— —

Where everything else is confusing, there’s one part that seems to make sense—Wanda.

You nearly pick a fight with the card reader at the subway entrance when it makes you swipe your card three times to let you through, and even the stairs leading down to the lower tracks are more of a challenge than they probably should be… and yet, somehow, the rest of it is blessedly simple. A no-brainer, really.

You know which train you need to take… the blue one that arrives in four minutes. You know you need to stay on it for five stops before getting off.

Once you’re up at ground level, you’ll have a short walk ahead of you—one that you know like the back of your hand despite only ever having been to Wanda’s a couple of times.

You’ll enter Wanda’s apartment building, take the elevator right up to floor four, and boom! Home free.

You do exactly that.

It takes a short time (thankfully) and there’s not an ounce of uncertainty within you all the while, like you’ve done this 100 times before.

In seemingly no time at all, you’re there—standing on Wanda’s doorstep, knocking a couple times just beneath the burnished bronze ‘4A’ nailed into her door.

Your head feels all light and dizzy; you’re still shuddering from the time you spent out in the cold; but—

“One sec!” Wanda’s muffled voice comes from inside, the mere sound of it washing over you like a soothing balm—promising relief.

You’re safe now.

You made it.

— —

The moment the door swings open to reveal a bleary-eyed Wanda Maximoff dressed in tiny grey pajama shorts, an oversized Star Trek T-shirt, and nothing else, it’s like everything falls back into place.

It’s like… like you can breathe again.

You’re still drunk, and shivering, and more than a bit confused; but now that Wanda’s awake and here and smirking like she knows exactly what’s happening even if you don’t, you feel… better, somehow. Not nearly so lost as you were before.

“Y/N,” Wanda greets, stepping aside and offering out a hand to help you inside. You’re quick to take it. “I was not expecting you,” she drawls, though everything about her demeanor is saying the opposite as she shuts and locks the door behind you.

You pay it little mind. “Yeah, I... ” you trail off, turning to face her even as an embarrassed flush warms your cheeks. All of a sudden, you can’t help but feel rather ridiculous for knocking on her door and barging in so late—especially without calling first. “I’m so sorry, I... I don’t know why I’m here.”

Wanda just tilts her head, appraising you curiously even as the ghost of a knowing smile curves her lips. “Are you sure about that?”

The heat in your cheeks seems to intensify tenfold at that. “I… I need to tell you something,” you hear yourself say, and the moment it’s registered, you realize that it’s true.

You feel… guilty, all of a sudden. Nauseous, too. Scared.

You danced with that guy—Des. You flirted with him. You let him touch you… You kissed him. Why would you do that?

In the present moment, Wanda nods, like that makes perfect sense. Like all of this makes perfect sense.

“Okay,” she acquiesces lightly, flares of crimson flitting through her measured gaze. “Is it something I’ll have to punish you for?”

‘Punish’ me? What—?

You feel Wanda’s presence in your head… inconspicuous tendrils sifting through your thoughts, worming their way through your scattered memories.

No point in lying.

“Y-Yes,” you hear yourself say. Much like earlier, it isn’t until the moment you’ve confirmed it aloud that you know it to be true. You danced with someone else. You flirted with him. You let him touch you… kiss you. “I… I’m so sorry, Wanda; I-I don’t know what I was thinking.”

You see the moment Wanda finds it—your memories of the nightclub. Meeting Des at the bar. Flirting with him… Kissing him.

The look on her pretty features goes from bemused to disbelieving to absolutely murderous in zero seconds flat, and the realization hits like a freight train that you’re really in for it now.

Fuck.

“Go to the bedroom,” she snarls, her typically blue-green eyes burning with scarlet light. “Then take off that slutty dress. I want you on the bed, face down, naked. Do you understand?”

Your head is spinning; confusion rears its ugly head in your gut even as every ounce of your being screams at you to just obey—‘cause if you can just do that, the rest of it will start to make sense. (Maybe.) “O-Okay.”

— —

You don’t know how you know the way to Wanda’s bedroom, but you do.

You slip inside a room shrouded in darkness, and no matter how it strains your eyes to look around, you don’t dare turn on the light.

It’s a modestly-sized bedroom with hardwood flooring, fairy lights along one wall, and an adjoining bathroom just opposite the entrance. There’s a tall, wooden dresser pressed up against the wall directly across from a large, king-sized bed. That’s pretty much all the detail you can manage to make out in the darkness.

Well, either way, you suppose it isn’t really your business.

Wanda gave you specific instructions, and you intend to follow them.

Not for the first time tonight, you’re quite happy about the babydoll dress you’re wearing—particularly for how easy it is to pull it up over your head and off, leaving you in panties and a strapless bra in a matter of moments.

You fold the dress neatly in your hands, then leave it atop the dresser. Your panties and bra come next. In seconds, you’ve formed a small, tidy pile.

As you step out of your heels and approach the neatly-made bed, you’re struck with the strangest sense of déjà vu… like you’ve done this before.

It lingers in the forefront of your mind as you crawl up onto the bed, biting back a groan at how easily the plush mattress gives way under your hands and knees.

God, you’d kill to have a nice nap in this absolute cloud of a bed.

You shake the thought off, simultaneously willing the haze of intoxication fogging up your brain to abate.

You’re not here to nap.

You settle face-down onto the bed, just like Wanda said. You’re careful not to rest your face on the pillows, though, since you have the distinct feeling that’s not something Wanda would want you doing without permission.

Instead, you fold your arms and rest your head atop your forearm, staring straight down into nothing. You scrunch up your features and let out a quiet huff as the black duvet tickles the tip of your nose.

It smells like her—all of it does. Cinnamon, vanilla, and something indefinable; something that belongs to Wanda, and Wanda alone.

You feel your body stiffen as a familiar set of footsteps draw near, approaching the room where you lie—naked and vulnerable atop Wanda’s bed.

The patter of Wanda’s gait becomes almost soundless as she enters, circling around the bed over towards the nightstand. You don’t dare to turn your head and watch as she pulls out one of the drawers, rummaging through it until she finds… well, whatever it is she’s looking for, you suppose.

A moment later, there’s the telltale chk! of a match being struck, and a hiss as the phosphorous tip lights itself aflame.

It’s quiet for a minute... then two. The only sounds you can hear are your breathing and the strike of a match every time Wanda lights another.

Gradually, gentle flares of light grow in your periphery, bathing the room in a dim, yellow-y glow. She’s lighting candles—a lot of them.

You’ve always loved candles.

A couple minutes later, she’s finished, and she returns to tuck the matchbox safely back in the drawer.

You lose track of her as she retreats once more, and your mounting curiosity is more than piqued when you hear her rummaging through the dresser near the foot of the bed; still, you don’t dare turn and look.

Instead, you wait, fetid nausea churning low in your gut, pinpricks of apprehension dancing across every inch of exposed skin. Your heart thuds painfully against your ribcage as she takes something out from the dresser drawer, then shuts it with an audible thud!

You swallow the lump in your throat and urge yourself to focus on your breathing.

In, out.

In… out.

“I’m disappointed in you, Y/N,” Wanda’s voice comes from somewhere behind you, genuine hurt coloring her hushed tone.

You have to fight the urge to shudder as a chill runs down your spine. “I… I’m sorry, Wanda,” you say meekly, pathetically, cheeks hot with shame.

And the worst part? You’re not lying.

You listen carefully for the sounds of her bare feet padding across the floor as she circles the bed once more, crouching down right beside you in the very corner of your periphery.

“Look at me,” she orders, gentle yet firm.

You do.

The moment you meet her gaze, you can’t help the errant thought entering your mind that she looks so pretty like this—face bare of makeup; long brown hair piled into a messy bun atop her head; dainty features cast into darkened shadows by the low, yellow light of burning candles clustered together atop the nightstand.

The muted light seems to soften her anger, her pain… allowing her to really look her age for the very first time since you’ve known her.

“You think too loudly, Y/N.” Wanda’s words are dry, almost teasing as they jolt you back into reality. “Focus on me, please.”

You do.

“You belong to me,” she asserts after a beat of silence, an uncharacteristically intent and almost solemn look splayed across her dimly-lit features. “I thought you understood that.”

The words confuse you even as they seem to resonate poignantly with some fundamental part of you… a part of you that categorically refuses to be ignored.

“Wanda…” you trail off, bewilderment and contrition warring violently within your chest until it aches to draw breath. “I’m confused, Wanda,” you whimper out finally, overwhelmed tears burning in your eyes. “I-I-I don’t understand what’s happening—”

Wanda cuts you off with a derisive snort. “Yes, clearly,” she agrees, her tone ripe with sardonic ire. “You’ve forgotten yourself. You’ve forgotten who owns you.”

You worry your lower lip between your teeth, desperately trying to make sense of it all. “Is that why…” You search Wanda’s eyes intently. “... I-I felt sick, an-and… guilty about dancing with Des.”

Something like anger flares in her gaze, hot and bitter, and you have to resist the urge to shrivel beneath it. “That boy had no right to touch what’s rightfully mine.”

“B-But then… why didn’t I remember?” you ask, utterly forlorn. “I-I felt it last weekend, too, but I… I didn’t—”

“Last weekend?” Wanda repeats, features hardening.

Oh, shit. You feel your cheeks get hot again. “I… I shouldn’t have brought it up, Wan’, I’m sorry—”

“What happened last weekend?” she interjects, her tone cold and hard like a double-edged blade. “You can tell me yourself, or I can start looking.”

You shiver. “I… I went on a-a… a date with a girl that I met online,” you admit, tears welling in your eyes even as Wanda’s jaw visibly tightens. “I-It was just the one time! A-And nothing happened; we didn’t even k-kiss! I just… I didn’t… I didn’t know—”

“Yes. You’re right; you didn’t know.” Wanda stands abruptly, then, and it’s at that moment that you see the folded belt in her hands—thick, worn leather with a sterling silver buckle.

An icy sense of dread blossoms in your chest, chilling you from the inside out.

Is she going to—?

“I was indulgent before… I let you get away with far too much. I will not make the same mistake again.”

With that, she turns to circle back around the bed, the belt buckle audibly jangling in her hands with every step.

“I have to punish you, принцеса,” she continues, her voice scarcely more than a whisper as she comes to stand near the foot of the bed—and somehow, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s no convincing her otherwise.

She’s going to punish you, and it’s going to hurt. Bad.

All at once, panic seizes you. You squirm, writhing in an effort to get up and off the bed—

Only to be stopped by tendrils of lurid crimson curling around either wrist, forcing them together just over your head like magic—glowing crimson cuffs holding both arms fast to the headboard. On a whim, you test your legs—tensing and pulling, only to be met with iron-clad resistance encircling either ankle in a tight, unrelenting grip.

Well, fuck.

“W-Wanda,” you plead, hardly paying any mind to the way your voice trembles. “Please, I—I don’t want—”

“I do not enjoy punishing you, мила,” she laments, almost sounding genuinely apologetic. It tugs at your heartstrings in a curious way—something you really don’t have time to examine right now. “But you did something bad. And when you do bad things, there are consequences. You understand that, don’t you?”

A tear trickles down your cheek, warm and wet as you steel yourself for the first hit. “Y-Yes.”

“Good girl,” Wanda lauds, and you can’t help the surge of warmth that washes over you at the simple praise—the pride that blooms in your chest at knowing you’ve finally done something right. “Now—try and relax, принцеса, okay?”

It’s all the warning you get before the first blow comes down upon your bare arse with a resounding Crack!

White-hot pain flares across your bottom, racing up your spine like wildfire and tearing a strangled whimper from your throat.

Jesus fucking Christ, that hurt—

Crack!

Holy fuck.

The impact of the leather against your naked cheeks leaves strips of fire burning in its wake, expelling all the air from your lungs in a choked-out rush.

“P-Please, no, Wan’,” you beg breathlessly, struggling in vain even as coils of vibrant scarlet hold you fast, “it hurts, please—”

Crack!

“This is for your own good, baby,” Wanda coos, sounding for all the world as though she truly believes every word of it.

Crack! This one lands directly across your sit spot, ripping a shriek from your lips as molten agony rocks you to your core.

“Wan’—Fuck, please, no—”

Crack!

“G—God, fuck, pleasestop, please—”

Crack!

“P—Please, hurtssobad, I’m—”

Crack!

“FUCK !”

Tears stream down your cheeks, wetting the black duvet beneath your face. You’re absolutely beside yourself with torment, your bare ass aflame with a pain unlike any you’ve ever known.

Crack!

… And the hits just keep coming—raining down stripes of blistering heat across your sore, bruised buttocks; pummeling your throbbing, exposed rear until it feels as though the entire area has just become one puffy, pulsating bruise.

Crack!

All the fight has completely gone out of you; now, your body completely slack—devoid of any resistance even as every hit seems to sear itself into your impossibly tender bottom like a third-degree burn… The pain is absolutely incredible, unlike any else you’ve ever known.

You’ll do anything—and you really do mean anything—to make it stop.

“P-P-Please, stop it, Wanda, PLEASE—”

Crack! Another hit directly across your burning sit spot rips a watery sob from your throat, followed by—

Crack!

It’s all you can do to keep yourself from hyperventilating until you pass out.

Crack!

Agony blackens the edge of your vision, fresh tears streaking down your cheeks as you await another strike…

But it doesn’t come.

Wh—?

“Have you learned your lesson, мила?” Wanda asks, and this time, her voice comes from closer… like she’s right beside you.

You don’t have it in you to be startled when a feather-light kiss lands itself between your shoulder blades, nor when one hand begins stroking up and down your heaving torso in soothing motions.

“Y-Yes! I—please, God, yes,” you babble, overwhelmed by the sensation of unadulterated pain branding every inch of your battered arse. “I promise I’ll never, ever, ever do it again, Wan’—Won’t ever be with anyone else—jus-just please stop hurting me—I’ll be so good, please—”

“Shh,” Wanda shushes you tenderly. You feel yourself twitch as the mattress suddenly dips beside you. “It’s okay, любима,” she soothes, coming to rest beside you. “Just breathe, okay? Breathe.”

‘Breathe’...

Your pulse thunders in your ears; your ass is on fire with an anguish far beyond your years; and yet, there’s something undoubtedly soothing about her words as they wash over you in gentle waves… something that tells you you’re safe.

Were you a little more lucid, you might’ve found that quite the nonsensical paradox—this feeling of safety and security with the woman who’d just beaten your arse raw without mercy no matter how you wailed and sobbed and begged for her to stop.

But as it is, you’re not.

Instead, you’re just broken and teary-eyed and in pain, and Wanda’s tenderness is a most welcome respite to alleviate that excruciating ache.

You take a deep, shuddering breath, even if it burns your lungs something awful, and force yourself to let it out slowly.

In, out.

In… out.

“That’s it, мила,” Wanda praises gently, tucking a stray lock of hair behind your ear. “You’re doing so well… Just like that.” Her fingers come to rest beneath your chin, urging you to turn and face her…

And you do, far too exhausted to even think of doing anything other than what she tells you to. Your lungs burn; your nose runs; and the pain in your bottom hasn’t abated any—if anything, it’s intensified.

You’re more than happy to be given something else to focus on.

When you look at her, her blue-green eyes are wet—glossy with tears.

“Wanda?” you manage weakly, feeling your brow crease with worry. “You ‘kay?”

Wanda sniffles, huffs out a watery-sounding laugh. “Yes, Y/N, I’m alright,” she whispers, then leans forth to plant a gentle kiss upon the tip of your nose. “I’m just so very, very proud of you.”

Despite yourself, you feel a pleased flush spread throughout your body at that. “Really?” you mumble, exhaustion drooping your eyelids until it’s a challenge just to keep them open.

Wanda nods, a tear sliding out of her eye that you yearn to reach forth and catch with your thumb—but alas, you’re far too weak. “Really.”

You hum, burrowing your face further into the duvet beneath your cheek—even if it is still damp with your tears. “‘M sorry I was bad, Wan’,” you murmur, feeling darkness near on every side. “Didn’t mean’ta make you upset.”

“I don’t like punishing you, принцеса,” she says once more, and this time, you have no reason to doubt that she means it. Honestly, you don’t know how you ever could. “It hurts me just as much as it hurts you.”

You hum again. Your eyelids feel too heavy to open. “‘M sorry,” you say. “Gonna do better… make you proud… I promise.”

Wanda chuckles. The sound of it makes your chest feel loose and warm and happy. “You already do, darling girl,” she murmurs. You don’t know if it’s because she’s whispering, or you’re fading into sleep, but you can barely hear her when she repeats it once more: “You already do.”

Sleep descends upon you, then, and you succumb to it willingly, feeling safer and more at peace than you have in a very long time.

— —

tagging:

[marvel]: @normanijauregui

— —

end notes: yeah i don’t know what this is either. i was only aiming for maybe 1,000 words or something, but things happened and...

look. i haven’t been to therapy in a hot minute, ok?

link to masterlist

#stuff i wrote #wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff x f!reader #f!reader #dark!wanda maximoff #dark!wanda maximoff x reader #dark!wanda maximoff x f!reader #dark fic #mcu fic #marvel fic #scarlet witch x reader #dark!scarlet witch x reader #dark!scarlet witch #reader-insert #requested

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gliklofhameln · 4 years ago

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Messianic sermons, partly authograph, by Rabbi Solomon Molkho; Italy, circa 1530-1532

One of only two known autograph manuscripts by the famous messianic harbinger and martyr Rabbi Solomon Molkho.

The fifteenth century was a time of intense messianic excitement and speculation. Beginning already in its first third, news spread of the return of the Ten Lost Tribes, and toward its close a number of Jewish elites, particularly in Italy, undertook calculations of the end time. This eschatological effervescence came to a head when David Reuveni (ca. 1483-ca. 1538), an adventurer who (at times) claimed to be the son and brother of Jewish kings who ruled the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh in the Arabian “Desert of Habor,” arrived in Italy in the autumn of 1523. Supported by some local Jews and by the great humanist Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, Reuveni was eventually granted an audience with Pope Clement VII, who issued him a letter of recommendation that allowed him access to King John (João) III of Portugal in 1525. While the king was initially kindly disposed to Reuveni and treated him like an official ambassador, his attitude changed as he came to suspect that Reuveni was inciting crypto-Jews to revert to Judaism; he subsequently ordered him to leave the country.

One of those inspired by Reuveni to reclaim his Jewish heritage was Diogo Pires. Pires was born in Lisbon in 1501 to crypto-Jewish parents and, at the tender age of 21, was appointed a visiting judge to the Casa da Suplicação (Court of Appeals) of Portugal. After encountering Reuveni at the royal court, Pires circumcised himself in secret and adopted the Hebrew name Solomon Molkho (possibly actually pronounced “Malko” in reference to 2 Sam. 22:51). He then fled Portugal and eventually made his way to Salonika, where he joined the beit midrash of Rabbi Joseph Taitatsak (1465-1546), under whom he studied Kabbalah. A gifted rhetorician and charismatic leader, Molkho soon gathered a following of his own, and at his students’ urging he published a collection of messianic sermons in Salonika in 1529 (in later editions, the book came to be titled Sefer ha-mefo’ar). In the same year, he relocated to Ancona, where he continued preaching about the coming redemption, attracting large crowds of both Jews and Christians. He spent the following three years criss-crossing northern and central Italy, spreading his messianic messages wherever he went. In Venice, a Jewish doctor opposed to his agitations accused him of being a judaizing Christian, prompting an inquisitorial court in Rome to condemn him to be burned at the stake. It was only with the intervention of Clement VII himself that Molkho was saved and another martyred in his stead. In 1532, Molkho traveled to northern Italy, where he again met Reuveni, and the two of them resolved to visit the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in Regensburg late that summer. While the exact purpose of their mission is unclear, it is known that Charles V ultimately had them both arrested, sending Reuveni to Spain in chains and transferring Molkho to Mantua, where he died a martyr’s death in November 1532.

Both in life and in death, Molkho was held in high regard within the Jewish world (including the likes of Rabbis Joseph Caro, Levi Isaac of Berdychiv, and Menachem Mendel Schneerson), and his influence on Jewish messianism in his own time and thereafter was substantial. However, very little of Molkho’s written oeuvre has survived.

Folios 1-31 comprise a kabbalistic meditation on two stories of Rabbah bar Bar Hanah found in Bava batra 73a, an extended commentary on the book of Ruth, a dissertation on the eleven biblical verses that begin and end with the letter nun corresponding to the eleven psalms authored by Moses, and discussions of the secrets of the redemption and the arrival of the two messiahs: the messiah son of Joseph and the messiah son of David. Folios 33-60 present a series of interconnected sermons and messianic speculations based on comments in the Zohar, in which Molkho treats the topics of the ascent of the soul and eternal life, dates the final redemption to 1540, and predicts his own death by canon fire. This section features an unusual visual representation of the four earthly camps of the Israelites in the Wilderness corresponding to various elements of the celestial Chariot: each camp includes the names of three of the tribes and their princes, one angel (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel), one forefather (David, Isaac, Abraham, Jacob), one of the four “animals” of the Chariot (lion, ox, man, eagle), and one of the letters of the Tetragrammaton (f. 44r).

#jumblr #judaism #manuscripts #rabbi solomon molkho #myposts #italy

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strawberrystarcake · 3 years ago

Text

I posted 83 times in 2021

15 posts created (18%)

68 posts reblogged (82%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 4.5 posts.

I added 70 tags in 2021

#art that is not mine - 29 posts

#strawberrie speaks - 14 posts

#zuriii - 7 posts

#🔔💙 - 5 posts

#eret - 3 posts

#eret fanart - 3 posts

#a million possible outcomes - 3 posts

#tom holland - 2 posts

#art - 2 posts

#strawberrie's stories (and other related things) - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 104 characters

#reblogging this again so that if people go on my blog they don't have to scroll down too much to find it

My Top Posts in 2021

my animal crossing villager just gave me a pair of cute pants, looked me in the eye, and said "you deserve nice things." i love you marina

6 notes • Posted 2021-11-13 09:31:09 GMT

something i love about the world

We’re all connected.

You know someone, that someone knows someone, that someone knows someone too. Maybe that last someone knows you, and maybe you’ll go your entire life without realizing that your friends have other groups comprised of other people you somehow, some way, know. You know someone and you will never truly be alone.

Perhaps one day you’ll bump into someone on the street and not think anything of it. Perhaps later that same day you’ll log onto tumblr and text your favourite mutual about the experience and they will hesitate. They will tell you that they had the exact same experience but in the opposite direction, and you will realize then that you just met your best friend for the first time through pure coincidence. You are connected.

Perhaps one day you’ll go abroad and meet a nice person some years older than you. Perhaps they will tell you a story about someone they know. But what’s this? You’ve heard this story before. You know you have. You mention it offhandedly to your mother in one of your phone calls, and she will tell you that the comedic main character of the anecdote is one of her friends. She told you the story one night. It turns out you’ve befriended your mother’s high school classmate’s sister. You are connected.

Perhaps you will marry someone, one day. Perhaps you will look through old pictures together and you find that you’re in one that was taken years and years and years ago. And finally, it makes sense. Why they’re so familiar, why you feel as if you’ve known them forever. You have! You married your childhood best friend, that sweet kid who moved away when you were both three! You were connected then and you are connected now, by the rings on your fingers and the love in your hearts, and you know that you will be connected to them forever.

The world is terrifyingly big, but I think it’s so much smaller than we realize.

7 notes • Posted 2021-11-03 07:30:12 GMT

the feminine urge to live inside a tree with a couple sheep and a beautiful partner and do nothing but bake and embroider and sketch and write love letters to each other and wake up at dawn to go on adventures in the very pretty woods and blow glass and

10 notes • Posted 2021-11-01 05:03:42 GMT

the children of the forgotten chest

Summary: The Sawamura Estate has many secrets.

Warnings: death (it's not too graphic but it probably deserves to be mentioned here)

Author's Note: i wanted a haikyuu dark academia au so i made a haikyuu dark academia au. sugawara's genderbent here because it's set in some past era when gay marriage was definitely not legal. credits to @lazycherri for the lovely banner!

A chest lay, unmoved and unopened, in a darkened room that was more dust than air.

Inside it were five items.

A stiff lace collar full of painted stars.

White shoes stained with chemical.

Cardstock filled with indecipherable equations.

A thin stack of scribbled poems.

A pair of thick spectacles.

The things of children long dead, whose bodies were never found, and whose memories are preserved by the things that in life were so very insignificant to them.

Once upon a time, these children roamed the expansive gardens of the Sawamura estate. Before the mistress of the house allegedly went mad, before the master became a recluse, before everything, the five children of the dark dusty room and the forgotten chest were alive.

The charges of Koushi and Daichi Sawamura were barely older than two when they arrived, they were hardly twelve when they left, and to an outlier, their ten years with the Sawamuras were spent only in pursuit of academics. This was not an entirely incorrect conclusion, of course. By the time they were seven, Koushi, a renowned schoolmarm, had turned them into relatively successful scholars in their respective fields. But the hypothetical outlier would not know the extent of the couple’s affection for their charges- affection that easily equaled that of parents toward their children. It is no wonder they too disappeared after the tragedy.

The children’s names were Hitoka, Shouyou, Tobio, Tadashi and Kei.

Hitoka, the artist. The sweet, demure little girl who wore aprons and lacy dresses, who understood colour and patience better than most adults. She thought, I believe, that she was too good for the world, or that the world was too good for her, so she wanted to create her own world with pencils and paints where she could have lived in without guilt. She was soft and slow with it; Rome, after all, wasn't built in a day.

Shouyou, the scientist. The boundless ball of boundless energy, who fought with the world, armed with chemicals and sheer willpower, and who did not believe in boundaries at all. He was fast and bright and constantly changing, chaotic in the best way. He believed everything was possible, so he pushed everything to the utter limit in an attempt to break free and soar.

Tobio, the mathematician. The stoic, self-important one with a one-track mind that filled sheet after sheet of paper with numbers and clean lines. He was as precise and quick as a machine, and as brilliant as one. It's a race to the finish line, math, and he had expected to win by a margin.

Tadashi, the poet. The blushing sweetheart who could not speak, and who communicated through his quill and ink. He wanted to put down the feelings he couldn’t convey aloud on paper. He wanted to make people understand, because so few ever have. He was used to being judged from a distance and hoped that his words have the ability to endear him to people without them ever having met him at all.

Kei, the historian. The boy with a poker face behind heavy spectacles, who was forced to grow up quicker than anyone would have liked. He never could let go of the past and- wise child- he decided to embrace that. He was cold and pretentious and factual, always seeming like he knew something you don't. His world was made up of things long-dead, beautiful only in his eyes. Rather ironic that he joined them in the end, is it not?

...Well, once upon a time, they were children and not corpses, memories. They were scholars and siblings and students and beamed unknowingly upon the cruel world.

Once upon a time, the children of the dark room and the forgotten chest existed.

Author's Note; The Sequel: whoo! i've wanted to post that for a bit now. i do hope you like it, dear reader! remember that reblogs and likes are much much appreciated!!

25 notes • Posted 2021-11-04 10:02:00 GMT

timmy and tommy

42 notes • Posted 2021-11-04 04:41:37 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #MY NO. 1 POST IS THE LOW QUALITY TIMMY AND TOMMY MEME IM CRYING

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dfroza · 2 years ago

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“God has meticulously put this body together; He placed each part in the exact place to perform the exact function He wanted.”

“You are the body of the Anointed, the Liberating King; each and every one of you is a vital member.”

Today’s reading of the Scriptures from the New Testament is the 12th chapter of the letter of 1st Corinthians:

Now let me turn to some issues about spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters. There’s much you need to learn.

The Letter of 1st Corinthians, Chapter 12 (The Voice)

A note from The Voice translation:

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is the 13th chapter of the book of Jeremiah:

The Eternal directed me.

Eternal One: Go and buy a linen undergarment; put it around your waist next to your body beneath your clothes, but do not wash it.

So I bought the undergarment, just as the Eternal had told me, and put it around my waist. Then the Eternal spoke to me a second time.

Eternal One: Now take off this undergarment you’ve purchased and have been wearing around your waist, and go to the Euphrates. I want you to hide it in a crevice in the rocks there.

So I took the undergarment to the Euphrates and hid it in the rocks, just as the Eternal told me. After many days had passed, the Eternal spoke to me a third time.

Eternal One: Now go back to the Euphrates, and get the linen undergarment I told you to hide there.

When I went back and dug up this garment from the place where I’d hidden it, I found it had begun to rot. This garment that was once new and clean was now completely worthless. The word of the Eternal came to me to drive home His point.

Eternal One: Mark My words, for the same thing will happen to the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. I will ruin these haughty and wicked people who ignore My words, who follow their own stubborn hearts, who run after other gods, who bow down to lifeless idols. They will end up like this rotten undergarment in your hands—completely worthless! Just as the undergarment clings to a person’s waist, so did I, the Eternal One, make Israel and Judah to cling tightly to Me. They were to be My people, known by all, bringing honor and glory to My name. That was My plan for them, but they did not listen.

Eternal One: Speak this word to the people as well: “Listen to what the Eternal, the God of Israel, has to say: ‘Every jug will be filled with wine.’ When they respond, ‘Tell us something we don’t already know, prophet! Don’t you think we know that every jug will be filled with wine?’ Go on telling them, ‘This is what the Eternal says: “I am going to fill all who live in this land with drunkenness—the kings who sit on David’s throne, the priests, the false prophets, and all the citizens of Jerusalem. And then I will smash them together in confusion and panic—smashing fathers against sons in the chaos of the enemy invasion. I will have no pity on them. My sorrow or compassion will not keep Me from ruining them.”’”

Listen carefully to me!

Stop being so smug, because the Eternal has spoken.

It is time to honor the Eternal your God before He makes the darkness fall

and you stumble on the darkening mountains.

You will long for the light,

but He will make the darkness deepen as the gloom settles in.

If you still won’t listen, I will weep for you in secret.

From the depths of my soul, I will cry bitter tears,

Because the Eternal’s own flock will be taken captive.

Tell the king and the queen mother:

“Come down from your thrones, and take a seat in a humble place,

for your glorious crowns will be taken from you.”

The cities in the Negev have already shut their gates.

There will be no one to open them.

The people of Judah will be taken captive,

all of them carried away into exile.

(to Jerusalem) Now look to the north and see who is marching toward you.

Where is the beautiful flock that was entrusted to you?

What will you say when He appoints your so-called allies,

the very ones you trained, to rule over you?

Will not the pain stab at you

as it does a woman in childbirth?

When you begin to ask yourself, “Why is all this happening to me?”

know this: it is because of the weight of your sins.

This is why your enemies will tear off your skirts and violate your bodies.

And still, you will not change.

Can the Ethiopian change his skin?

Can a leopard change its spots?

It seems just as unlikely that you will change your ways and do good,

when you are so used to doing evil—it has become such a part of you.

Eternal One (to His people): This is why I will scatter you

like chaff driven by the desert wind.

This is now your fate—retribution measured out for you from the Eternal—

for you have forgotten Me and trusted in the lies of another.

For all this, I will be the One who lifts your skirts over your face,

exposing you and letting others see your disgrace.

As for your faithlessness, your adulteries and your lustful ways,

as for the degrading way you prostitute yourself to other gods out in the open, I see it all.

For all this, your fate is sealed. O Jerusalem—how bad it will be for you!

How long before you are clean again?

The Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 13 (The Voice)

A note from The Voice translation:

This is the first of several symbolic actions or prophetic dramas in the book. God made Israel and Judah to stick close to him—as close as an undergarment—but because they disobey Him and refuse to live within the bonds of the covenant, God will bury them in exile, and they will be ruined.

A link to my personal reading of the Scriptures for Wednesday, September 13 of 2023 with a paired chapter from each Testament of the Bible along with Today’s Proverbs and Psalms

A post by John Parsons about seeking & finding:

If you were ask to God for just one thing, what would it be? Our deepest yearnings are like prayers. Whatever the heart genuinely seeks, it will find. The person who pursues righteousness will find it, just as evil comes to the person who searches for it (Prov. 11:27). Therefore the voice of wisdom cries out, “I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me” (Prov. 8:17), and the prophet shouts, “Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near” (Isa. 55:6). God is near to us in Yeshua, who said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” As you believe, so you will receive (Matt. 21:22).

This is the “like for like” principle of faith. Forgive us as we forgive; judge us as we judge; love us as we love; make us righteous as we take hold of righteousness, give us courage as we believe, and so on. As Isaiah said to fearful king Ahaz: “If you will not be firm in faith, you will not be firm at all” (Isa. 7:9). Your “amen” echoes the “amen” of heaven: “Let it be done for you according to your faith” (Matt. 9:29).

The principle of “let it be according to your faith” is profound and is a two-edged sword, since it applies not just to matters of velleity and hope, but also to murmurs of the heart and discontent. The sages said that the manna in the desert would taste good or bad depending on the heart attitude of the person. Likewise, when the people arrived at Marah, they could not drink the water because it was “bitter” (מָרָה), though the Hebrew text allows us to read that it was the people themselves who were bitter - ki marim hem (כִּי מָרִים הֵם), and their bitterness made the waters seem bitter as well (Exod. 15:23).

“Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness, and honor” (Prov. 21:21). Notice that the subject of this verse is a participle that comes from the verb radaf (רָדַף), which means to follow after, or to pursue, as in a chase or a hunt. This same verb is used when King David exclaimed, “surely goodness and love will pursue me (יִרְדְּפוּנִי) all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6). King David understood that as he pursued God, so God’s love would pursue him! In other words, as we seek, so we are sought by God; as we draw near to God, so He will draw near to us (James 4:8).

Notice further the repeated use of the word “righteousness” (i.e., tzedakah: צְדָקָה) in this verse. When we pursue God’s righteousness, we will find it, and we will be declared righteous (i.e., tzaddik: צַדִּיק) and given life (i.e., chayim: חַיִּים) and honor (i.e., kavod: כָּבוֹד). “In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death” (Prov. 12:28). Therefore Yeshua calls us to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt 6:33).

The prophet expresses hope: “Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth” (Hos. 6:3). Salvation is “of the LORD.” May God help us pursue him b’khol levavkha - with all our heart - because the He has promised, “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13). Amen.

[ Hebrew for Christians ]

========

Proverbs 21:21 Hebrew reading:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/prov21-21-jjp.mp3

Hebrew page pdf:

https://hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Blessing_Cards/prov21-21-lesson.pdf

9.12.23 • Facebook

from yesterday’s email by Israel 365:

While it is important to renew our faith in God and profess belief in Him and His creation (zachor), it doesn’t end there. We must recognize that we are all created in the divine image and are called to live accordingly. This is the essence of observing a day of rest (shamor), just as God did at the end of creation. By stepping back from our worldly concerns and aligning ourselves with the divine cycle of rest and work, we are partnering with God in the ongoing narrative of Creation.

Today’s message (Days of Praise) from the Institute for Creation Research

September 13, 2023

Reconciliation

“For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:10)

It is interesting to note that as important as is the doctrine of the atonement in Christian theology, the word itself occurs only once in the King James New Testament. It is in the very next verse after our text. “And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement” (v. 11).

The Greek word is translated “reconciliation” in 2 Corinthians 5:18: “All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation.” Thus, the doctrine of atonement is the doctrine of reconciliation. Men are separated from our holy God both by their sin nature and also by their actual guilt of committed sin. But through the substitutionary death of Christ for our sins, “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” That is, God has already reconciled sinners to Himself by the sacrificial death of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The problem is that sinners are not actually reconciled to God until they personally accept this free gift of God’s love to them.

But we who “have now received the atonement [that is, reconciliation]...joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:11). A part of that joy should be in the fact that God has now “given unto us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Thus, it has become our great privilege to tell others that they can be completely forgiven and eternally saved. “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:20-21). HMM

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autumnalglaze · 4 years ago

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The Enigma machine was created in Germany in World War I, by Arthur Scherbius. It is a cipher machine, able to change the letters of a message, making it appear to be scrambled or random. The Enigma had an electromechanical rotor mechanism, scrambling the 26 letters of the alphabet. One person would enter text on the Enigma’s keyboard and another person would write down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard would light up. If plain text was entered, the lit-up letters would be the encoded ciphertext, whilst if the ciphertext was entered, it would be transformed back into readable plaintext. The security would depend on a set of machine settings, changed daily and based on secret key lists that had been distributed in advance. German military messages created by the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau in December of 1932. They then designed mechanical devices for breaking Enigma cyphers. However, from 1938, the Enigma machines were made more complex, causing decryption to be more difficult.

In 1939, during the invasion of Poland, the Polish codebreakers were sent for France for safety, before being sent to Britain. There the British codebreakers solved a great number of messages created from Enigma, giving the plaintext to military staff. The information received from this was named Ultra by Britain, being a great help to the war effort. Ultra included decrypts of other German, Italian and Japanese cyphers and codes, including the cypher of the German High Command. Mistake made by

German operators helped the cryptanalysis of Luftwaffe Enigmas, whilst the British capture of key tables and a machine from a machine from a German submarine helped with the Navy ones.

The Enigma machine was used, as it allowed for billions and billions of ways to encode messages, making it difficult for other nations to crack the codes. For a short while, the code seemed unbreakable.

In 1939, Alan Turing took up a full-time roll at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker, deciphering military codes used by the Germans and allies. He worked alongside other codebreakers, using intelligence that was provided by the Polish. Using the assumption that each message contained a crib – a known piece of German plaintext at roughly the same point each message – Turing set to work. An example of a crib would be the Atlantic weather forecast, written in the same format each day. With location-detecting equipment in listening stations, the codebreakers were able to find where a message was originating from and whether it matched up with the positioning of a weather station. The word “wettervorhersage” (weather forecast) was presumed to be present and in a similar place in each message.

Another clue that was used to the codebreaker’s advantages was that Enigma had an inability to code a letter as itself – the letter T could never be a T. This way, the encrypted message could be lined up with the crib until no letter lined up as itself. However, the code was still seemingly impossible to code, as individual letters were encrypted in different ways, each time they were entered into the Enigma machine. The exact number of ways that Enigma could be configured was 158,962,555,217,826,360,000-to-1. A different code had to be cracked every single day to account for the German’s change in settings at midnight.

Turing’s prototype of a Bombe machine was built on a budget of £100,000, or £4m today. They were an electromechanical machine comprised of the equivalent of 36 different Enigma machines, each containing the exact internal wiring of the German counterpart. Once switched on, each of the Enigmas was allocated a pair of letters from the obtained crib text. Each of the three rotors moved at a rate mimicking the Enigma, checking roughly 17,500 possible [positions until a match was found. The machine would only stop when each of the Enigma machines found what was believed to be a correct pair of letters at the same time, opening up the electrical circuit. Rather than guesswork, the Bombe used logic to dismiss certain possibilities. The method narrowed down the possible correct answers, although still providing a number of those still to be tried. Further work was necessary until the code was solved. Using a checking machine, the process was repeated until the correct answered was able to be discovered. The codebreakers would then use the knowledge provided by the Bombe and figure the key out. Once cracked, the workers would set up an Enigma machine with the correct key, reversing the code for every message intercepted.

Once the Enigma machine was cracked, 211 Bombe machines were built and ran, being stationed at different locations across Britain, reducing the threat of bombings wiping out the complex and expensive machines. Due to the shortage of Enigma machines, British cipher machines were used instead, converted into working Enigma machines. The fully deciphered messages were then translated from German to English.

At its highest peak, the Bombe helped to crack 3,000 German messages per day, amounting to over 2.5 million by the end of the war, estimated to have shortened the war by two years.

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theshadowstage · 4 years ago

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The Making of Photoplay Titles

The importance of the titles and subtitles in motion pictures, while scarcely realized by the layman, is recognized by those in the profession, but probably many of the latter fail to realize that a third of the actual picture is comprised of the words thrown upon the screen and that this phase of the productional work is comparatively as important as any other. Moreover, the quality of the titles, the art with which they are produced, go far toward making the finished picture either a success or a failure, or at least open to serious criticism.

A recent interview with Loren E. Taylor, head of the title department at the Famous Players-Lasky west coast studio, at Hollywood, elicited much of technical as well as general interest on this element in the vast industry of providing screen entertainment.

“We use,” said Mr. Taylor, “special inks for both printing and hand-lettering, made according to our own formulas and which would be practically valueless to the ordinary commercial printer or painter. For instance, the tints are not used for their artistic appearance, but for their actinic or non-actinic values for reproduction. Also, their printing quality is a consideration. The same is true of the paper stock, which must possess actinic or non-actinic values also. White, as is ordinarily accepted, or black, are neither white nor black to the camera.

“Our titles must have depth and relief, and to secure these it is necessary to figure color values and reduce them to monochrome, giving the same values that would be gained by the eye in viewing the printed or painted title before it was reproduced for the screen. We use lights with no red rays in them, and the red pigments are an important quality in the paper and inks used.

“The art department has to be alive to the necessity of clever designs and new ideas, which shall combine the art of designing and printing with engraving, photography and the various so-called trick methods which have been applied to the camera, such as double exposure, dissolves, composites, etc. The most artistic titles are those which have a soft and impressionistic background of decorative design, appropriate to the subject, with the lettering standing forth clearly, in a sort of screen stereoscopic effect.

“Everything that is employed in the way of inserts, such as cards, newspaper clippings, telegrams, etc., are turned out by this department.

“In the printing work for titling where register is required it must be more accurate than in the finest colorplate work, because it is enlarged 12,000 areas and the slightest defect is distressingly visible.

“The process is something like this. The title sheets come to us from the scenario editorial department, typewritten, and we are then required to design ‘atmospheric’ backgrounds, which means that they must be so harmonious as to keep the audience in the atmosphere of the story. In other words, there must be no jarring note which would take the spectator's mind from the story and spoil its continuity for him.

“The letting is either painted or printed, as the case may be. The background is painted and photographed. A non-actinic color is employed for that part which is to be covered by lettering later on a second exposure. By using actinic shades in certain degrees the exact color values are obtained for the screen, giving results either softly subdued or vivid.

The use of artistic titles has a great effect upon the spectator. It is a matter of psychology, and the best picture may be marred by imperfectly made titles, or those which are out of harmony. Yet the art of the screen subtitle is really in its developing stage.”

Motion Picture Magazine, March 1919. Internet Archive.

#loren e taylor #behind the scenes #silent film #geraldine farrar #carmen #1919 #motion picture magazine #motion picture magazine march 1919 #1910s #article

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capricornus-rex · 5 years ago

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Two Sides of the Coin (1)

Chapter 1: Vengeful Vader | Jidné Sheedra x Cal Kestis

Summary: Hell-bent on exacting revenge and retrieving the Holocron, the dreaded Darth Vader is now on the hunt for the young Jedi Knight, Cal Kestis. Under the assumption that he still possessed the artifact, while fueled by the intrigue of the boy’s strength and skill with the Force, the dark lord hires the bounty hunter, Jidné Sheedra, to track him down and have him delivered alive. However, the task becomes a trial for young Jidné, as she faces a conflict that tests her beliefs of a scarred past she had hidden for so long.

A/N: I’ve had this idea since April, I’ve already made the outline and everything. But back then I was afraid that it might not be well-received for silly reasons borne from my overthinking. Until an Anon sent this prompt a few weeks or so after I’ve made the original outline. Turns out, I just needed that little push… so, a big thank you to Anon for adding up to the plot and allowing me to finally use my precious OC for this story! ^w^

I wanted to show this to you guys, I just couldn’t wait ^^ : @berenilion @wrongplaces @stellar-trinity @queen-destenie @peterwandaparker @calgasm @silver-is-in-too-many-fandoms @sweeetteaa @calsponchoemporium @ayamenimthiriel @superwarsofthrones @fallenjedii @droidrights @cal-jestis

Also in AO3

Tags: Fem OC, Jidne Sheedra, Force-Sensitive! Fem OC, Bounty Hunter! Fem OC, Jedi! Fem OC

Next: Part 2 | Masterlist

1 of ?

Darth Vader barely contained the sea overflowing and flooding into the broken glass that the wretched Jedi boy created. While this was no stretch for himself and his abilities, the sight of the boy and the adult woman swimming away to safety while he holds back a wall of water greatly vexed him.

That frustration evolved into anger, Darth Vader literally cut through the tunnel of water using the Force. The water gave way like servants to a king, he had both hands outstretched to the sides, the ripples swirled unnaturally to follow the whim of the Force under Vader’s manipulation. He marched through the corridor and finally reached the end with the door, seawater sloshed and gave for the dark lord.

The door whizzed open, but not a single drop of the sea entered—only Darth Vader. He can now finally rest his arms. The ocean raged in the other side of the door, the bubbling seawater muffled through the blast door. The Sith lord hurried his way to what little remained of the turbolift. He was safe inside that cylinder, away from drowning; he set the elevator to bring him to the highest level, the upper hangars were his destination.

“Commander,” Vader called through the commlink available in the turbolift’s terminal.

“Lord Vader?” the commander acknowledged.

“Have my ship ready in the hangar,”

“Yes, Lord Vader, I’ll personally send you the hangar coordinates,”

Silence on Vader’s end until the transmission cut. Seconds after the call, a tone chirped on the screen of the terminal. A string of text comprised of a single letter and three numbers flashed white against the black screen.

C-848.

Darth Vader knows the location. He remained poised and erect in his posture as he stood at the center of the lift, arms crossed together, head slightly hung low—in this kind of position, he often found himself meditating involuntarily. Although, he preferred his own chambers. The elevator rumbled, the lights flickered for a brief second, and the doors hissed open.

He stepped out of the platform, proceeded along the corridors of the uppermost levels of the fortress. Keeping the hangar coordinates in mind, he knew where a path leads in this place, after all, it was modeled and referenced after his own fortress back in Mustafar. He found the same commander standing by the entrance door of hangar C-848.

“Welcome, Lord Vader. We have your ship prepped, fully-fueled, and calibrated for travel.”

“Very good, Commander. See to it that the damaged areas below sea level are repaired before this whole building collapses.”

The dark lord did not stop his tracks for the niceties. He continued striding across the hangar towards a shuttle; its sleek, ivory body gleamed and stood out against the black, tiled floor of the hangar—emphasizing the symbolism of its elite status and the regal sophistication of its design.

The officer followed his master, but within a safe distance behind him while still in Vader’s earshot. He dared to lean forward, as if hoping to get a reaction from this lumbering machine of a man.

“But, sir, the fortress’s foundation is impregnable! Three to five maintenance units can easily rectify the critical areas and restore the integrity of the building.”

“I do not have the fool’s faith as you do when it comes to infrastructures, Commander. You either do as I say or go down into the bottom of the ocean with the rest of this tower!” Vade rebuked, his strides becoming wider, indicating his impatience and growing annoyance on the commander.

When the officer realized that he has raised his voice against Darth Vader—even for just a pitch higher—he softened up, withdrawing to retain his distance, and felt his stomach sank. Quickly, he thought of a way to ease the lord’s mind or shift his attention somewhere else; he overthought so much that the vein on his temple throbbed—both in self-imposed sheer pressure and fear of what Darth Vader might do to him for speaking back.

“Has the Emperor been reported of this whole ordeal?” he stammered.

Not wishing any more elaborations in this banter, he uses this simple line to leave little to no room for arguments, “Leave all of that to me.”

“As you wish, my lord.” The commander got the hint that there should be no more words further said, he dismissed himself to the command center of the hangar, praying for himself to melt and dissolve into the floor for that exchange, wishing that the last few lines he had traded with the dark lord had never happened.

Darth Vader continued to march through the hangar. His cape billowed with every step, flanked by rows upon rows of Stormtroopers—with militantly straight backs and hands cradling their blasters in an unwavering steadiness—on both of his sides. A pair of crimson-robed guards stood by the entry ramp of the shuttle; hydraulic steam wafted about the vibrant red fabric of their capes while awaiting their master, they didn’t move a single muscle until Darth Vader has fully set foot into the shuttle. They were the last one to board the ship as they flanked behind the Sith lord.

The pilot asked the destination, Vader simply replied with the coordinates of the planet he wishes. Without question, the pilot enters the combination of letters and numbers into the computer, the ship’s system quickly registered the data. He relayed the coordinates to Darth Vader’s command ship, to be immediately done upon his boarding.

“Setting course for Modala.” The pilot announced.

By rote, the pilot connected his speakers to the hangar’s bridge and underwent the standard procedure and protocols—as everybody in any Imperial establishment does: he recites the monotonous, robotic pattern of sentences that he relays to the command center—in return, an operations officer verifies and authorizes the take-off of the shuttle.

The ship was finally allowed to leave the hangar. The sooner they get out of the building, the better, thought Vader—sinking into the sea floor with black fortress debris wasn’t exactly part of his itinerary in this planet. In a bird’s-eye view, the tower looked fine; it shrank in size as the shuttle gained altitude, for a brief second, sheets of clouds obscured Vader’s view of the deep black space. The ship finally pored through Nur’s stratosphere; the tiny ivory speck that is the Imperial shuttle zipped towards one of the bigger ships—the Star Destroyers.

“This is shuttle Revenant, with Darth Vader requesting boarding into command ship Paradox,” the pilot announced casually through the microphone of the cockpit dashboard.

A muffled voice crackled through the speakers, “Request permitted, shuttle Revenant. Proceed to boarding hatch. Welcome, Lord Vader.”

The shuttle hovered itself into an open hatch in the underbelly of the bigger ship. Tractor beams braced the small vessel on both sides and drew it further into the command ship’s interior. A slight quake in the Revenant signaled that they have successfully boarded the Paradox. A tunnel walkway connected the exit ramp into the wide hallway floor of the command ship, Darth Vader saw himself out of the Revenant—flanked by the crimson Royal Guards—and made his way to the bridge, where the operators have already charted a course to Modala and punched it when Vader set foot into the ship.

At the center of the bridge, in front of a window of a full view, stood Vader gazing back at the cluster of Nur—its planet as well as its moons. The sight of the fortress long gone, the dark lord turned his attention to the vacuum of nothingness as black as the heavy armor that cages him.

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dokidokivisual · 5 years ago

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Gochiusa BLOOM episode 3 impressions

Previously: episode 2, episode 1 (seriously, the number of notes on ep 2 review is too low...)

Welcome to another review of Gochuumon wa usagi desu ka? BLOOM. In this episode, the series explores a topic it rarely touched previously, which is school life. Unlike many similar slice-of-life series, Gochiusa rarely concerned itself with such a mundane setting, preferring the ambience of cafés and cobblestone streets. There were a few exceptions, such as the first half of season 2 episode 10, but this is the first episode fully dedicated to a school setting.

Another distinguishing trait of Gochiusa is that the group of main characters attends not one, but several different schools. In particular, there are two high schools: a “normal” one attended by Cocoa and Chiya, and an “elite” one attended by Sharo and Rize. Moreover, there’s a group of middle school characters on the verge of graduating. As such, the question of which high school will Chino, Maya and Megu eventually choose was bound to come to the forefront at some point. And that’s exactly what happens in this episode.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff to discuss, so let’s get down to business...

The episode opens with a shot of Aoyama Blue Mountain on a boat, which also appears in the beginning of season 1 episode 1. By the way before COVID you could totally ride a boat like this in Colmar. Just watch your head...

Yeah, this is under the bridge from season 2 ED. Filmed by me.

Anyway, I’m being sidetracked. What’s important is that this is the only shot where you could tell it’s morning, because of the angle of the shadow from the bridge. It is indeed morning, and we see Cocoa and Chino walking down to school. Seems the summer vacation is over and it’s already September? Cocoa, the self-described pikka-pika no onee-chan, tries to coerce Chino into committing to enter the same high school as her, while Chino is not sure about that. We’ve seen Chino being unsure about her future as recently as this season’s episode 1, and in regards to the high school choice the time for a decision is quickly approaching.

Soon we see Maya and Megu who are facing the same decision. Megu seems to have already decided on what Maya derisively calls the gokigenyo school. The greeting gokigenyo (ご機嫌よう) comes from the word “kigen” (機嫌) which means “mood”, and can be literally translated as “how do you do”. However the same word is also used as farewell, which often causes troubles for translators.

The concept of “gokigenyo school“ has been popularised by the light novel and anime series Maria watches over us (Marimite), which is also one of the most influential works of the yuri genre. This concept has also been parodied a number of times, for example in the excellent episode 5 of Flip Flappers.

Megu manages to convince Maya and Chino to come with her to a tour of this school, and we get a close-up of Maya hinting that she’s definitely hiding something.

Meanwhile at Cocoa’s school, the class president declares the theme of the cultural festival being “cafe”, and puts Chiya and Cocoa in charge of it, because they work at a cafe. It seems that Chiya is considered to be more dependable than Cocoa by her classmates, since she got a higher rank. Nevertheless, it is Cocoa who mostly delivers the speech to fire up the other students.

Note the usage of Chinese tally marks to tally the votes. The five strokes comprising the character 正 (”truth”) equate 5 votes. This method is popular across East Asia, even in Korea where Chinese characters are no longer used.

Also I’ve seen a lot of people were confused by the inclusion of “sex museum” as one of the proposals, which is how 秘宝館 (hihokan) has been translated by the official subtitles. This word, which literally means “the hall of hidden treasures” has been used by various establishments of this type in post-war Japan, however only few of them remain open now. I think “sex museum” is a bad translation because, while technically correct, it breaks mimesis, or in simpler terms, immersion. The English translation is so blatantly inappropriate that it would never make it onto this blackboard, whereas the Japanese word is obscure and innocent-looking enough that it just might. A better translation would be “adult museum”, in fact that’s what the most well-known hihokan, Atami Hihokan uses for its English title.

As proof of each other’s ability, Cocoa mentions Chiya’s triple tray wielding skill (お盆三刀流 obon santoryu) which has been demonstrated in season 2 episode 1. Chiya brings up Cocoa’s “basking in the sun” (日向ぼっこ hinatabokko) attitude which supposedly makes her popular among customers. This is a reference to season 2 episode 5 where Rize says Cocoa always either practices latte art or basks in the sun.

On the way back from school, we learn that Chiya is actually scared of the responsibilities placed on her, and her dream of becoming the president of Ama Usa An franchise (which has been mentioned in s2e1, s2e9 and maybe other episodes I forgot) might be ruined because of this. Cocoa consoles her, again showing her motherly side.

Back at Rabbit House, Cocoa explains how the upcoming festival will be exciting (wakuwaku) and fluffy/cuddly (mofumofu). This is one of several times Cocoa uses silly onomatopoeia to describe something in this episode (aforementioned pikkapika onee-chan and describing her school also as mofumofu in a latter scene). Interestingly, all of these lines are anime-original, and at this point seems like an intentional effort to make Cocoa speak in a more eccentric manner.

In the next scene Sharo becomes angry at Chiya for keeping secrets from her, and blows her cheeks, which makes her turn into a Fugu fish, according to Chiya. Fugu is famous in Japanese cuisine for being a highly poisonous but sought after delicacy, however in this case the comparison has to do with the tendency of a live fugu (as well as other pufferfish) to inflate its stomach, giving it an almost spherical appearance to deter predators.

Next there’s another anime-original CocoChino scene where Chino asks Cocoa about what her school is like. This is my favorite part of the episode because it’s just so adorable. Like, even the fact that Cocoa is drying Chino’s hair with a towel after bath shows how close they became. The direction and the delivery of the dialogue is masterfully executed. Cocoa would be really hurt if Chino chooses any other school, and Chino knows that. But Chino can’t admit she’ll choose her next school because of Cocoa, at least not yet.

Now we move on to the main plot of the episode, which is Chimame visiting Rize and Sharo’s school. Like I said in the preview, this episode covers chapters 10 and 11 of the volume 5 of the manga, which in-universe occur at the same time. However while it fully covers (and has the same title as) chapter 10, only the first half of chapter 11 is included. So about 2/3 of the episode are dedicated to the story of chapter 10.

Chimame attend a speech by “OG” Mate Rin. OG in this case doesn’t mean “original gangsta”, but “old girl”, which is a Japanese term for female alumni of some school (there’s also OB for men). Chino recognizes Rin as the editor of Aoyama Blue Mountain, and I’m not sure if Maya and Megu ever met her, so they don’t. When Rin recalls a senior who turned her life around, Chino recalls her chance meeting with Cocoa. In particular the phrase deai ga taisetsu (”chance meetings are to be cherished”) sticks with her. On the other hand, Maya seems to be interested in the fact that Rin was recommended for scholarship. Interestingly in the manga, Maya slept through most of the speech.

The senior Rin was talking about was obviously Aoyama and we see that there’s actually a huge bounty placed on her. The currency sign consisting of combined letters G and U wasn’t seen before, with prices usually displayed in yen, but there was a Euro-like sign at an open market at the beginning of season 2 episode 1, which might be a shorthand way to write GU. Either way this currency must have a serious hyperinflation problem as the reward for finding Aoyama exceeds 10 billion GU. In countries affected by hyperinflation, a stable foreign currency is often used to perform economic transactions, which might explain why most of the prices are in yen.

But is there some significance to this exact number? Why, yes, 10/27 is Aoyama’s birthday! It is also the start of “reading week”, which actually lasts 2 weeks, until November 9.

After the speech Megu gets separated from the rest of the group, and the other two also get lost in the vast campus of the school. As seen from the above interior shot of the school, it is also inexplicably rabbit-themed (or maybe just this particular hall is), with golden rabbit statues and also a picture on the left wall with the kanji for rabbit (兎).

Through a series of misunderstandings Chimame end up infiltrating the school with Sharo and Rize providing uniforms for them to blend in. Despite having trouble to behave “ladylike” before, Maya naturally blends in once she treats it as a game, and even gets invited to a tea party. She makes a mistake though by mentioning moyashi (bean sprouts) which is considered a cheap and low-class food, but she’s saved by the fact that the rich girls don’t even know what that is, and Sharo explaining how to prepare it in a fancy way.

Eventually the groups meet each other and Maya reveals she has been recommended for scholarship due to her good grades. Perhaps she also treated her school grades as experience points to gain, as the title of the episode (and the manga chapter) ”The whole world is my experience points” seems to suggest. This is the idea behind a real concept of gamification, by the way.

There’s also a callback to the season 2 episode 8, where Maya asks Rize for advice while Chino and Megu are spying on her. It is worth to rewatch that scene, because it’s full of foreshadowing for this episode. Back then Maya thinks she’s the only one of the three to go to this school, but now she thinks there’s a good chance all three will still go to the same school. Chino doesn’t seem to feel this way though.

In the end we see Cocoa and Chiya joining the group, also wearing the elite school uniforms, which is briefly explained by them gathering supplies for the cultural festival. I guess the next episode will explain how they ended up there. In the manga even the fact that they have a cultural festival wasn’t revealed until this point. Also in the manga fukiya club president, Karede Yura, inexplicably appears for just one panel so that Cocoa and Chiya could thank her, without any lines. In the anime she appears just as (if not more) suddenly, however there’s some foreshadowing with her inviting Rize to a tournament earlier, and she gets quite a few speaking lines.

If you listen closely there’s a funny sound effect as she looks at Rize, and then at Sharo. I really liked her design since her first appearance in the manga, and Koi probably does too, as her role has greatly increased in the recent chapters. Consequently her single-panel background appearance has been expanded as well in this episode, she got her full name mentioned in the credits, and there’s even a Karede Yura character song included on the second BD volume (which includes this season’s episodes 3 and 4). All things considered, I fully expect Yura to appear in the episode 4 as well.

The episode ends with Chino looking at the sky with a worried expression. It just hit her that both Megu and Maya are going to a different school than she is expected to go to. As Megu and Maya have a clear path forward, Chino’s future has become even more uncertain, and she feels like the odd one out in the group. Now the part of the ending where Chino is suddenly alone makes sense:

this is basically her imagining the future where Maya and Megu leave her. The coffee cup transition symbolises Chino waking up and seeing that MaMe are still her friends and aren’t going anywhere. We’ll see though...

This time it’s Megu doing latte art in the ending, and the picture is of Chino and Maya dancing. The weird thing is, Megu wasn’t even present at this scene, so how did she draw it in such detail?

Also another random fact I noticed: Chino’s Alice costume actually appeared in the opening of both season 1 and season 2. Here’s a comparison for reference:

Anyway, that was the third episode of Gochuumon wa usagi desu ka? BLOOM and I hope you enjoyed reading my review. See you next week... or so.

#gochiusa #gochuumon wa usagi desu ka?#is the order a rabbit?#review

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