#cultural cross pollination

[ouroboros8ontology]

The werewolf is a sorcerer, or a demon which inhabits the earth in man’s form, but which at will assumes the shape of a wolf and attacks and consumes men. Like his feminine counterpart, the estrie, he requires human blood in his diet—another version of the vampire.

Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion; The Powers of Evil: “Foreign” Demons

[thejoyofseax]

Why We Can't Have Medieval Food

I noted in a previous post that I'd "expand on my thinking on efforts to reproduce period food and how we’re just never going to know if we have it right or not." Well, now I have 2am sleep?-never-heard-of-it insomnia, so let's go.

At the fundamental level, this is the idea that you can't step in the same river twice. You can put your foot down at the same point in space, and it'll go into water, but that's different water, and the bed of the river has inevitably changed, even a little, from the last time you did so.

Our ingredients have changed. This is not just because we can't get the fat from fat-tailed sheep in Ireland, or silphium at all anywhere, although both of those are true. But the aubergine you buy today is markedly different to the aubergine that was available even 40 years ago. You no longer need to salt aubergine slices and draw out the bitter fluids, which was necessary for pretty much all of the thing's existence before (except in those cultures that liked the bitter taste). The bitterness has been bred out of them. And the old bitter aubergine is gone. Possibly there are a few plants of it preserved in some archive garden, or a seed bank, or something, but I can't get to those.

We don't really have a good idea of the plant called worts in medieval English recipes. I mean, we know (or we're fairly sure) it was brassica oleracea. But that one species has cultivars as distinct as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan (list swiped from Wikipedia). And even within "cabbage" or "kale", you have literally dozens of varieties. If you plant the seeds from a brassica, unless you've been moderately careful with pollination, you won't get the same plant as the seeds are from. You can crossbreed brassicas just by planting them near each other and letting them flower. And of course there is no way to determine what varietal any medieval village had, a very high likelihood that it was different to the village next door, and an exceedingly high chance that that varietal no longer exists. Further, it only ever existed for a few tens of years - before it went on cross-breeding into something different. So our access to medieval worts (or indeed, cabbage, kale, etc) is just non-existant.

Some other species within the brassica genus are as varied. Brassica rapa includes oilseed rape, field mustard, turnip, Chinese cabbage, and pak choi.

We have an off-chance, as it happens, of getting almost the same kind of apple as some medieval varieties, because apples can only be reproduced for orchard use by grafting, which is essentially cloning. Identification through paintings, DNA analysis, and archaeobotany sometimes let us pin down exactly which apple was there. But the conditions under which we grow those apples are probably not the same as the medieval orchard. Were they thinned? When were they harvested? How were they stored? And apples are pretty much the best case.

Medieval wheat was practically a different plant. It was far pickier about where it would grow, and frequently produced 2-4 grains per stalk. A really good year had 6-8. In modern conditions, any wheat variety with less than 30 grains per stalk would be considered a flop.

Meats are worse. Selective breeding in the last century has absolutely and completely changed every single species of livestock, and if you follow that back another five centuries, some of them would be almost unrecognisable. Even our heritage breeds are mostly only about 200 years old.

Cheese, well. Cheese is dependent on very specific bacteria, and there are plenty of conditions where the resulting cheese is different depending on whether it was stored at the back or front of the cave. Yogurts, quarks, skyrs, etc, are also live cultures, and almost certainly vary massively. (I have a theory about British cheese here, too, which I'll expand on in a future post)

So, even before you go near the different cooking conditions (wood, burnables like camel and cow dung, smoke, the material and condition of cooking pots), we just can't say with any reliability that the food we're making now is anything like medieval people produced from the same recipe. We can't even say that with much reliability over a century.

Under very controlled conditions, you could make an argument for very specific dishes. If you track down a wild mountain sheep in Afghanistan, and use water from a local spring, and salt from some local salt mine, then you can make a case that you can produce something fairly close to the original ma wa milh, the water-and-salt stew that forms the most basic dish in Arabic cookery. But once you start introducing domestic livestock, vegetables, or even water from newer wells, you're now adrift.

It is possible that some dishes taste exactly the same, by coincidence. But we can't determine that. We can't compare the taste of a dish from five years ago, let alone five hundred, because we're only just getting to a state where we can "record" a taste accurately. Otherwise it's memory and chance.

We've got to be at peace with this. We can put in the best efforts we can, and produce things that are, in spirit, like the medieval dishes we're reading about. But that's as good as it gets.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Noted socialist agitator Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Smith was articulating a basic truth: when an industry grows concentrated, it grows cozy. Cultural differences between dominant firms are homogenized as top executives move from company to company, cross-pollinating attitudes and approaches. Ambituous, firm-hopping workaholic top brass make all their friends at the office, and so their former colleagues from one or two jobs back remain in their social circles.

Once an industry consists of half a dozen firms, the people running those companies constitute an incestuous financial polycule. They are executors of one anothers' estates, best men and maids of honor at one anothers' weddings, godparents to each others' kids. They play on the same softball teams and take family vacations together.

It would be heartwarming if it wasn't so costly to the rest of us. Remember Smith's maxim: "the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Class solidarity among corporate executives forms a united front to screw us in every conceivable way, from corrupting our politicians to maiming and cheating workers to gouging buyers.

That's the basis of American antitrust law. When Robert Sherman was stumping for the passage of the Sherman Act, America's first major antitrust law, he thundered "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Or rather, that was the basis of American antitrust law – until the Reagan era, when the fringe theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork were elevated to a new orthodoxy. Under Bork's conception of antitrust, monopolies were evidence of excellence. If a company puts all its competitors out of business, that must mean that it is "efficient."

In Bork's fantasy world, the only way a company could attain dominance is by being so beloved by its customers that every competitor withers away. Governments that bust monopolies aren't protecting the public from "autocrats of trade"; they're overthrowing the winners of an election where you "vote with your wallet" to pick the best company.

But Bork and his co-fantasists couldn't quite manage all that with a straight face. They grudgingly admitted that a certain kind of bad monopolist could hypothetically exist, one that used its "market power" to raise prices or lower quality. Only when these offenses against our "consumer welfare" occurred should the state step in to protect its people.

This may sound good in theory, but in practice, it was a dead letter. The consumer welfare test isn't as simple as "If prices go up after a merger, punish the company." Instead, the government had to prove that the price raises came from "market power," and not from an increase in energy or labor costs, or some other "exogenous factor," like Mercury being in retrograde:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that the mathematical models prescribed to distinguish greed from unavoidable circumstance inevitably "prove" that the monopolist wasn't at fault. Surely, it's just just a coincidence that the priesthood that understood how to make and interpret these models were Chicago School Economists who sold model-making as a service to companies that wanted to raise prices.

Pro-monopoly economists insist that this isn't true, and that their theory still has room to prosecute bad monopolies and cartels where they occur – more, they say this is already happening. In particular, they insist that "greedflation" can't be real, because it would require the kind of conspiracy that Smith warned of, and that their sickly antitrust enforcement is sufficient to prevent:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

This strains credulity. After all, the CEOs of giant companies in concentrated industries openly boast to their shareholders about how they've used the covid and Ukraine invasion shocks to hike prices to increase their profit margins – not just cover their additional costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

While excuseflation is new, open, naked price-fixing by industry cartels is not. Take the meat-packing industry, dominated by a tiny handful of giant corporations whose executives literally ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid each week while working in their cramped, unventilated factories:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55009228

These companies have seen their margins soar – up 300% over the lockdown – while their payments to ranchers and growers cratered:

https://www.reuters.com/business/meat-packers-profit-margins-jumped-300-during-pandemic-white-house-economics-2021-12-10/

All this might leave one wondering whether there isn't something a little, you know, "conspiracy against the publick"-y going on in Big Meat?

Let me tell you about Agri Stats. Agri Stats has been around since 1985. Every large meat packer pays to be a "member" of Agri Stats, and they each submit weekly, detailed statistics about every aspect of their business: all their costs, all their margins, broken out by category. Agri Stats compiles this into phone-book-thick books that each member gets every week, telling them everything about how all of their competitors are running their businesses:

https://www.agristats.com/history

The companies whose data appears in this book are anonymized, but it's trivial to re-identify each supplier. Tyson execs hold regular "naming process" meetings where they go through new books and de-anonymize the data. A Butterball exec confirmed that he "can pick the companies for rankings with 100% certainty."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, these books are incredibly detailed: "bird weights, freezer inventory, and 'head killed per operating hour.'" Within the cozy meat cartels, Agri Stats acts as a clearinghouse that allows every business in the industry to act in concert, running the entire meat-packing sector as a single company:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-03-lawsuit-highlights-why-meat-overpriced/

As interesting as the list of Agri Stats members is, the groups that don't get to see Agri Stats' "books" is just as important: "farmers, workers, or retailers." Agri Stats also offers consulting services to its members. As an exec at pork processor Smithfield put it, Agri Stats advice boils down to four words "Just raise your price."

Agri Stats ranks its members based on how high their prices are – they literally publish a league table with the highest prices at the top. Meat packers pay bonuses to their execs based on how high the company's rank is on that table. Agri Stats meets with its members throughout the year to discuss "price opportunities" and to advise them to "exercise restraint" by restricting supply to keep prices up. When one Agri Stats member considered leaving the cartel, Agri Stats wooed them back by telling them how to make an additional $100k by raising bacon prices.

The reason Dayen is writing about Agri Stats now is that the DoJ Antitrust Division has brought an antitrust suit against them. This is part of a wave of antitrust actions brought by Biden's DoJ and FTC, who, along with his NLRB, are shaping up to be the most pugnacious, public-interest force against corporate power since the Reagan administration:

https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29124-doj-sues-agri-stats-for-complicity-in-meat-market-manipulation

All this enforcement isn't a coincidence. It comes from an explicit rejection of neoliberalism's core tenets: inequality reflects merit, monopolies are efficient, and government can't do anything. In Biden's DoJ, FTC and NLRB, they're partying like it's 1979:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

What's amazing about the Agri Stats conspiracy to raise prices is that it's been going since the Reagan administration. It's a smoking gun proof that "consumer welfare" never cared about price-fixing and robbing the public (can a gun still smoke after 40 years?). There was never a time when consumer welfare antitrust cared about consumer welfare. It was always and forever a front for "a conspiracy against the publick," a "contrivance to raise prices."

Big Meat has been robbing America for two generations. Some of those stolen funds were used to corrupt our political process. The meat sector gets $50 billion in public subsidies and still gouges us on prices and rips off its suppliers:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds

Which means that it's possible that we're simultaneously being ripped off with meat prices and that meat prices are artificially low. Try and wrap your head around that one!

The do-nothing, pro-monopoly neoliberal antitrust is a virus that spread around the world. The EU's antitrust laws were reshaped to mirror American laws after the war through the Marshall Plan, but since the late 1970s, European lawmakers and enforcers have ignored their own laws (just like their American counterparts) and encouraged monopolies as "efficient."

This Made-in-Europe oligopoly, combined with energy and grain shocks from Russian invasion of Ukraine, created the perfect storm for European greedflation. As food prices spiked across the EU, Austrian hacktivist Mario Zechner set out to investigate Austrian grocers' pricing. Using the grocers' own APIs, he was able to compile and analyze a dataset of prices at Austrian grocers:

https://www.wired.com/story/heisse-preise-food-prices/

When Zechner open-sourced his project, collaborators showed up to expand the project across other EU countries, and an anonymous party donated a huge database of prices stretching back to 2017. The data reveals clear collusion among the grocers, who raise prices in near-lockstep, and use gimmicks like cyclic price drops to hide their collusion:

https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise

Not every grocer has an API, and even the ones that do have APIs could easily block Zechner and co from accessing their data. When that happens, they could – and should – turn to scraping to continue their project. They should also scrape grocers elsewhere, including in Canada, where grocers rigged the price of bread:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Because Big Meat's "conspiracy against the publick" isn't unique to meat. It's in all our food, it's in all our goods, it's in all our services. The fact that the meat industry was able to rob American buyers, ranchers and farmers for two generations under a 200' tall neon sign that blinked "AGRI STATS AGRI STATS AGRI STATS" night and day is frankly astonishing.

But there's never just one ant. If the meatheads running Big Meat were able to do this in broad daylight since the NES years, imagine what all the other industries were able to get up to in the shadows.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[cryptotheism]

To what extent would you say the western occult world’s development of Qabalah and moving it away from the explicit Jewish essence of Kabbalah is a form of cultural appropriation versus cultural cross pollination and evolution?

I'm not really qualified to answer that question imo. That's one of those things you could get a PhD trying to get specifics on.

[olderthannetfic]

On the strict top/bottom dynamics of east asian media: one of the (relatively) recent BLs from Taiwan (Kiseki) completely broke many fans because it subverted that. It had Zerui, the eldest of the main ship who is involved with the mafia, bottom when he was with Zongyi, who's only a wimpy HS student, when they're together for the first time. Tbh Zerui jumping on Zongyi's lap will live in my mind rent-free for a long time. But it was exactly because it's so rare it was magical and broke everyone

--

Ooh.

And yeah, any trope that's common enough is going to get people wanting to poke it with a stick.

I think some Western fans kind of miss that Asia has plenty of gay media and, you know, gay culture, and depending on the era and country and what all is going on, there's going to be cross-pollination between that and BL/danmei. You'll get makers of BLy stuff wanting a little more Real Queer Culture™ in their art. True, plenty of real people like to do the same thing in the bedroom all the time, but the minute you get art that wants to mess around with more real world shit and less pure romance novel trope stuff, you'll see people changing things up.

The more mainstream and accessible actual queer culture gets in a given country, the more people will casually drop various things into their art, like QaF having a big effect on parts of Western slash fandom. Same-sex marriage is legal in Taiwan. Thailand isn't the paradise some people imagine, but it has some pretty visible home-grown queer community. This isn't some situation where all BL is by a virgin living in a basement who barely knows queer people exist offline.

There's not some kind of law that decrees Asian artists can't change things up. Fixed roles are just what's most popular in BLy media on average. That's no different than, say, English language "m/m romance" and even most fanfic being... like... monogamous 2-person ships and not poly.

[screamscenepodcast]

A Point of Clarification (More Linguistics, CW: Slurs)

Another Dracula Daily related post. In the novel Dracula, the count has minions who are a racist caricature of people of the Rromani ethnicity. Stoker uses a variety of terms in the text, and as a person of Romanian ethnicity, I would like to clear up some possible places of confusion. The most commonly known word in the English speaking world that Stoker uses for Rromani people is Gypsy. This is an English word ultimately descended from the word Egyptian, based on a misunderstanding by medieval European Christians that the itinerant Rroma were nomadic Egyptians, based on an interpretation of the Bible that the ancient Egyptians were scattered by God. This is incorrect, and most historical, linguistic, cultural, and genetic evidence suggests that the Rroma originated in northern India, which might have been obvious if medieval Europeans talked to any of them, or knew anything about India. Most Rroma today consider Gypsy to be a slur, although some do not - this is (ironically) similar to the attitude about the word Indian by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Among social justice activists, both words are regarded as slurs and faux pas, and at the bare minimum both are inaccurate. So, if you are still using that word in 2022, and you are not a Rromani person, knock it off. Stoker, however, also uses the word Romany in his text, which is just his spelling for Rromani, because by the 19th century it was known in English that “Romany” was the endonym (the word a people use for themselves) as opposed to the exonym (the word a people use for others). If you’re a descendant of settlers and live in North America and you find yourself often confused by the “changing” names of Indigenous groups, its usually because -- as is the case here -- the exonym for that group was a slur, and got adopted into English simply because settlers encountered that group’s enemies before encountering the group itself. The word “Rrom” means “man” in the Rromani language. “Rromni” means woman, “Rroma” is plural. “Rromani” is a female adjective, “Rromano” is a male adjective. Now, where we can really get into some misunderstandings in the context of Dracula is with the term Romanian, which Stoker often spells Roumanian. Rromani =/= Romanian. Romanians are people from the country Romania, of which Transylvania is a part, as well as Wallachia and part of Moldavia and Bukovina. Stoker’s Castle Dracula is located in Romania. Galatz is in Romania, and is called Galați in Romanian. The words Romania, Romanian, etc. have nothing to do with the words Rroma, Rromani, etc. The name of the country of Romania comes from a belief on the part of the Romanian people that they are historically descended from a province of the Roman Empire once called Dacia. The greatest piece of this evidence is that Romanian is a Romance language, which is to say a language descended from the language of the Romans, Latin. Despite being surrounded by nations speaking Slavic tongues, Romanian is closer to Italian than it is to Ukrainian, despite cross-pollination over the years. The reason I use a double-r (representing a trilled r) in my spelling of Rroma for the nomadic ethnic group is for disambiguation purposes, because in the Romanian language the word for Romanian people is Români. The double-r spelling is also used within Romania for this reason. Historically Romania has always had a relatively high population of Rroma, and historically speaking they have I think it is fair to say almost never been treated well. Today Rroma are the second largest ethnic minority in Romania behind Hungarians, but despite the similar names the Români have never treated Rromani people very well. From the time of their arrival in the region in the 1370s until the emancipations of the 1840s and 50s, Rromani people were enslaved within the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and made serfs in Transylvania. In the 1940s there were genocidal programs carried out against them, and under the Communist regime there were attempts made to force Rroma to live in government built housing and abandon their traditional culture. Since the fall of the Communist government Rroma are extremely discriminated against in Romania, and it is mainstream there to be racist against them. Which brings us to Szgany, which can be a confusing word in Dracula until you know that the Romanian language didn’t have standardized orthography until 1881. Basically the only place you’ll see the word Szgany today is in Dracula or in modern gothic horror fiction copying Dracula without thinking and treating “Szgany” as just the word for Dracula’s servants or something. In the novel, Stoker uses it as if it referred to a specific group of Rromani people, ones native to the area around Castle Dracula, in the Călimani Mountains. However, Szgany is really just a phonetic transliteration of the Romanian word Țigani, which is just the Romanian word for “Gypsy”. The letter Ț in Romanian indicates a kind of “tz” sound, like in the word “pizza”. It is also found in Vlad Drăculea’s epithet -- Țepeș means “the Impaler”, and is pronounced like “Tze-pesh”. So Țigani sounds like Szgany, and is also similar to the word for “Gypsies” in many other languages: Zingari in Italian, Çingene in Turkish, Cigány in Hungarian, Tsingánoi in Greek, etc. These are all still slurs, and descend from the word Atsínganos from the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire, which means “untouchable.” Țigani is still a commonly used word in Romania, partially due to the racism and partially due to the desire on the part of Români to avoid association with Rromani. There is a feeling in Romanian that the word Rromani gives Romanians abroad a “bad name” due to racism against Rromani people in many parts of the world. This is all, of course, absolutely terrible. So, to summarize: Gypsy = at best inaccurate, at worst a slur Romany = 19th century English for Rromani, often spelt today as Romani, a common acceptable name for a diverse group of nomadic peoples ultimately descended from northern India Roumanian = Romanian, a person from Romania Szgany = Stoker’s attempt at spelling Țigani, a Romanian language slur for Rromani people.      

[not-poignant]

@morbidlizard replied to your post “Can I ask, why do you love BL romance better than...”:

I mean it's unfortunate but asian BL is just hands down better than western for so many reasons <: / I've been reading asian BL for literal decades now (AHHH) and I can maybe count on one hand the western series I've enjoyed that had some sort of queer romance that had all I wanted or at least a part of the tropes I like...And even then, it's usually F/F relationships 9_9 (and when I say asian, I mean japanese, korean, chinese, some indonesian too! etc etc...)

​Actually yeah this is also really where it's at

I think a lot about how we're still getting extremely like... milquetoast wholesome queer narratives (most of the time) in western m/m romance media (I have nothing against Heartstopper, but it's extremely 'all queer people are pure wholesome need-to-be-protected jellybeans' and like, cool, but I want more than that as well - like give me 20 shows that are 'all queer people' in 20 different genres, thanks. BL will give me that - BL will pay people to give me that.

The only way I can get that from western media is fanfiction, and sometimes - kind of - from published m/m, when it's not paint-by-numbers rapid release that isn't about telling stories from the heart and it's about telling stories from the bank account instead (which is a valid reason to write, it's just not what I'm looking for as a reader - most readers who end up loving and writing fanfiction aren't looking for this imho)).

Thomas Baudinette is actually doing incredible work in this area of Media Studies, where it's literally a known thing that BL - particularly in countries like Korea, Thailand and Taiwan - is actually taking huge strides ahead in the genre, comparatively, especially when up against western BL.

It almost feels like we're on a giant lag, buffering behind them, and about the only place we aren't is in fanfiction, which makes sense, because the cross-pollination between fandom and south-east Asian BL is incredible (literally, they got omegaverse and guide-verse from western fanfiction and western fandom, and imho are doing a lot more with it for money than we are, see: Pit Babe).

I've been reading up pretty heavily into Baudinette's work, and also a lot of the recent and up-to-date work in BL Studies (a thing), and like, it's just kind of fascinating the different interrogations of BL we have going on in different cultures and subcultures, and how different senses of place and culture and ethnicity and minority and belonging can influence our tales, along with many different manifestations of capitalisation, economy, influence etc.

And that isn't to say there aren't huge problematic areas for BL in all countries, not just western, I can critique western BL so easily because I am western, and it's been really interesting reading critiques of BL from academics who live within other countries from their perspectives too. But I do think if I want really great BL romances, turning to fanfiction and then turning to other cultures and what they're doing is often the first thing I do. I just don't have to search as hard to find what I'm looking for. And like, I'm lazy, lol, I don't want to search through 100 published works to find like 1-5 stories I might reread but not over my favourite manhwa or like fanfiction or whatever.

This has been my area of like... personal study for a few months now (literally reading Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media and Masculinity in Tokyo by Baudinette atm) and I have a lot of thoughts of which this is just a very generalised ramble and not actually anything of great meaning but like sadkljfas TL;DR yeah

[tanadrin]

Shoemaker points out in his book that the narrative of the Quran being compiled under Uthman is, when you dig into it, only one of many narratives about the compilation of the Quran from early Islamic tradition (and one that Shi’a sources long contested), and a composite one at that. The first chapter is an extended argument that 1) the literature of early Islam was far more heterogenous than the traditional narrative has it, with no clear distinction between hadith and quran (i.e. between divine revelation and teaching of Muhammad), 2) different proto-Muslim communities sometimes had very different texts they used, and 3) the final compilation probably took place in the reign of Abd al-Malik, specifically under the direction of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the governor of Hejaz, decades after Uthman, and thus after a long period of cultural cross-pollination with the Christian and Jewish communities of Syria and Iraq.

[ouroboros8ontology]

The estrie had the faculty of changing her shape as she willed, and of returning to her original demonic state when she flew about at night. A certain women, who, it transpired, was an estrie, fell ill and was attended during the night by two women. When one of these fell asleep the patient suddenly arose from her bed, flung her hair wildly about her head, and made efforts to fly and to suck blood from the sleeping woman. The other attendant cried out in terror and aroused her companion; between the two of them they subdued the demon-witch and got her back into bed. “If she had succeeded in killing this woman she would have preserved her life, but since her effort was thwarted she died.” These creatures sustained themselves on a diet of human blood, which preserved their lives when they were desperately ill. If an estrie was wounded by a human being, or was seen by him (in her demonic state), she must die unless she could procure and consume some of his bread and salt. A man who was attacked by an estrie in the shape of a cat and beat her off, was approached by the witch the next day and asked for some of his bread and salt. When he was innocently about to grant her request an old man intervened and scolded him sharply for his generosity. “If you enable her to remain alive, she will only harm other men.” If the preceptor, during services, offers up a prayer for the health of a sick woman who is known to be a vampire, the congregation must not respond with “Amen!” When a broxa or an estrie is being buried, one should notice whether or not her mouth is open; if it is, this is a sure sign that she will continue her vampirish activities for another year. Her mouth must be stopped up with earth, and she will be rendered harmless.

Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion; The Powers of Evil: “Foreign” Demons

[princessofmerchants]

A prediction for ACOTAR 5 about the Valkyries and the Illyrians

Coming atcha from the middle of my post-HOFAS reread of ACOSF.

(HOFAS spoilers after the break)

From ACOSF, ch. 38, when Gwyn is telling Nesta and Emerie about Mind-Stilling:

"It involved deep breathing and becoming aware of one's body, then learning to let go. They [the original Valkyries] used it to remain calm in the face of their fears, to settle themselves after a hard battle, and to fight whatever inner demons they possessed."

"Illyrian warriors do no such thing," Emerie murmured. "Their heads are full of rage and battle. It's only gotten worse since the last war. Now that they're rebuilding their ranks."

What if the rebirth of the Valkyries, under Nesta, Gwyn, and Emerie, will have a direct positive effect on the Illyrians as they contend with the discovery of their origins as creations of the Daglan?

The whole second half of ACOSF, culminating in Gwyn and Emerie winning the Blood Rite and achieving the Carynthian rank and Nesta the Oristian rank, has woven into it the idea that the Valkyries reborn, under the training and tutelage of two Carynthian Illyrian warriors in Cassian and Azriel, are not quite Illyrian in technique and not wholly Valkyrie in technique, but something completely new that blends the two.

But what if, it's not only the new Valkyries that are going to benefit from the cross-pollination of fighting techniques? What if, as Azriel inevitably contends with his loathing of his own Illyrian people in ACOTAR 5, and clearly Nesta has been set up in HOFAS to play a big role in ACOTAR 5 as well (and with Nesta comes Gwyn and Emerie) — what if part of how both Az and, by extension, the Illyrians as a whole, come to terms with the fact that they were created to be almost monstrous soldier grunts for their even more monstrous Daglan overlords, and overcome the negative effects of that heritage, is to absorb the healthier approach to fighting and battle espoused by the Valkyries?

What if Az, with the Valkyrie trio and Cassian, help the Illyrians in part by showing them there is another way to be a warrior culture that doesn't cause harm to themselves (vis a vis misogyny and a rage-fueled approach to fighting), a la the Valkyries?

It seems both groups — Illyrians and Valkyries reborn — stand to gain and learn from each other, and it seems like the set up for ACOTAR 5 is the perfect opportunity to tell a story that features a symbiotic relationship between these two cultures.

(I also both wish and predict in tandem with this healing process that past clippings of female Illyrians' wings, centering Emerie but radiating out to them all, get healed and reversed through some intense creative (firstlight core under Ramiel?) magic. 👀)

[legobiwan]

do you have any thoughts on powerups/how the bros use them?

You have no idea what you have just unleashed, anon. :D I am super into world-building and lore when it comes to Mario stuff, so here's a random list of ideas that may or may not bear fruit for anyone who reads this. (Also, part of this is me sketching out concepts for solus creatura, so I thank my followers in advance for their patience here).

The vegetable/fruit/foliage powerups are naturally occurring. The Mushroom Kingdom has the most fertile conditions for these plants to grow, although other kingdoms have done a decent enough job of genetically engineering their own powerup plants.

This makes the powerups an integral part of the Mushroom Kingdom economy, and one of the reasons they're able to survive so long without any real standing army or defense system outside of Mario and Luigi. It's also one of the reasons they get invaded so often.

The Darklands, centuries before Bowser's reign, used to also cultivate powerups. They were overfarmed by a corrupt agricultural council, however, and in combination with a once-in-a-lifetime drought, the vast majority of their land and crop was ruined.

Luckily for the Darklands, their native species is capable of fire and they still retain a strong tradition of magical culture through the Magikoopas (although this was briefly wiped out during Bowser's father's reign, as he thought the Magikoopas were planning a coup. They, in fact, were, but for good reasons).

Now, the Mushroom Kingdom is wary of magic, due their own history and complicated relationship with the Darklands (this may be in part linked to an old civil war that caused the split between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Darklands). Their species is also just not that magically adept (something having to do with Toad physiognomy?) The powerups are a decent compromise - they afford magic-like abilities without rendering their user permanently superpowered.

There was some contention in the royal court when Mario and Luigi first arrived in terms of allowing them access to the powerups. Ultimately, it was decided the safety of the kingdom would supersede any worries about abuse of power. (This being said, Peach had to argue long and hard for this).

Mario and Luigi receive a monthly allotment of powerups and if they find any "in the wild," they're supposed to record each instance. Neither brother bothers with this and every month they get a nasty letter from Porcina in accounting, which has led to a years-long feud between her and Mario. Luigi has learned the better way to circumvent the system is bribery by brownie. It usually, although not always, works.

The non-vegetative powerups are created in Mushroom Kingdom labs. Because the Mushroom Kingdom is like a Times Square Station for warp-pipe travel, the dimensional crossroads makes it easier to cross-pollinate powerups with characteristics of other species and lands (cats, penguins, etc.)

Back in the day, E. Gadd was involved with a lot of this research, but ultimately left to pursue his own interests in the paranormal. It's also rumored that he and the governing scientific committee at the time had a spat about the limits of experimental ethics.

When Mario and Luigi are first introduced to the powerups, they think this is the coolest thing in the world. They have powers, which was an impossibility back in New York.

It takes them a while to get the hang of using the powerups. Mario set fire to a Mushroom Kingdom stable one time. Luigi crash landed into someone's wedding as a kitsune. The citizens, by and large, were relatively forgiving of these incidents, although it did make for a wild few days in the press.

At first, Mario and Luigi both love the fireball ability. That is, until the events of Super Paper Mario, after which they go a solid few months without coming NEAR a fireflower. Mario can't help flashback to that terrible moment in Merlon's house while Luigi experiences the oddest phantom pains if he as much holds a fireflower, although he can't say why exactly. (Mario, of course, has no idea Luigi was boxed and bombed twice by Dimentio).

Luigi loves flying and may steal a few extra Tanooki leaves to go out and experiment with aeronautics/aviation concepts in the dead of the night. This, subconsciously, directly influences his Brobot designs in his time as Mr. L.

Mario's favorite powerup is the classic mushroom. Finally, he gets to be as tall or taller than his younger brother.

They both think the Invincibility Star is incredible until they're faced with a situation in which the invincibility wears off at a dangerous moment, which almost turned fatal for Mario. It's a sobering moment, and brothers learn the lesson that no one is invincible forever.

The Mushroom Kingdom allows Mario and Luigi to use the powerups under the assumption that the "magic," as it were, never lasts. What they don't know, however, is that Luigi has a strange penchant for magic, which is why on more than one occasion, the effects of the powerups take longer to wear off on him. (One day, Luigi shows up to meet his brother looking a little...furrier than usual. "You look hairy, bro," Mario says, furrowing his brow. "I'm Italian." Mario rolls his eyes at his brother's quip. "Not that Italian. What, did you forget to shave again?" Luigi just shrugs, not wanting to admit this isn't the first time he's woken up with more hair than he's used to).

They tease each other mercilessly when they are introduced to some of the animalistic powerups. Luigi puts a litter box in his brother's room and buys him a collar with the name tag, "Fluffy." Mario cooks Luigi fish for five days straight after the penguin incident. He also starts singing the "Walk Like a Penguin" jingle every time his brother comes into the room.

[bonefall]

do your cats recognize invasive-ness? i was reading your custom moth/butterfly taxomomy and it reminded me of spotted lanternflies (which are not in the UK i think?) so i got curious

Yes, AND I am willing to use StarClan to let them know about certain long-term damages that some species do that they may not know about on a short timescale,

BUT

That's all within reason! Ecologically speaking, not every non-native species is invasive, and there are some species which the Clan cats can't get rid of. In addition; the environment of Sanctuary Lake is different, in some aspects, from the environment of White Hart.

Here's a couple of the examples that are particularly interesting off the top of my head;

Sycamores and Spottedleaf's tar-spot blight are exclusive to the White Hart. They are an American species, and were deliberately planted.

Cedars are exclusive to Carrionplace, they were planted to help with the smell.

The pine plantation that ShadowClan's Bog Project decimates was mostly sitka spruce with an occasional douglas fir, they had never seen a douglas fir until Sanctuary Lake

They are not aware that Signal Crayfish are invasive. Signals spread a disease that is almost 100% fatal towards the native Whiteclaws. The species cannot coexist in the same ecosystem.

Clan cats fucking hate Gray Squirrels, every time canon has a 'pointless argument' about squirrels crossing the ThunderClan border, in BB that is a very real point of anger about other Clans doing unauthorized hunting of Red Squirrels.

Part of why ThunderClan is seen as so 'pushy and bossy' is because they are self-proclaimed Red Squirrel Defenders

Without getting into the cultural significance of this, it has to do with Thunderstar (righteous, defender of the weak, Our Glorious Leader) and Skystar (treacherous, hater of the weak, Their Barbarous Dictator)

Minks. Clan cats fight Minks constantly. River otters leave them alone, but minks are notorious prey-stealers (and RiverClan is probably looking for an excuse to get at those pelts)

Muntjacs are what humans consider an invasive species, but Clan cats actively manage their populations. They're the perfect size of deer to hunt and they produce very valuable pelts.

Rhododendron is uprooted ASAP because it gets out of control fast. This is StarClan knowledge.

Giant Hogweed is an IMMEDIATE danger and killed as soon as it's spotted. It's noxious, it spreads like wildfire, it gets so big it's impossible to handle. If I wasn't working with canon and had Thistleclaw to make a name pun out of, I would have used Giant Hogweed as the authoritarian parable. Ecologically speaking Thistles are actually very valuable for pollinators and are a pioneer species-- Giant Hogweed should die by my hand

[headspace-hotel]

Hey again, so, I’ve been seeing a lot of your posts and since I work in Ecosystem Regeneration here in South-Eastern turtle island I want to add some notes. Prior to the Oconee war, the oconee river basin was described as looking like some of the hillier parts of the Great Plains. Other parts of the area around the rivers were described as looking almost like parkland.

This is because prior to colonization, and prior to the colonial plagues that wiped out something like 90% of the people living on the continent, there were enormous mound cities like Etowah and Cahokia. Since there were essentially no wild animal species that could be domesticated like there were in Europe, culture went in a different direction. Instead, there was fastidious management of “wild” locations in order to ensure food sources for animals. That Oconee river basin? It was a ‘beloved location’ akin to the Black Hills, and was host to species like Eastern Woodland Bison, Elk, and Bears. It was also systematically burned to ensure they had the necessary grasses and berries.

William Bartram described this abundance in his account of the South-East saying that the rivers ran with so many fish that alligators simply sat in the water with their mouths open. Colonists encountered this landscape and assumed it was Eden, filled with edible plants and animals and fertile soils, but it was a deliberate cultural participation in ecology. Humans, having at some point either eliminated the megafauna or watched them disappear, decided to behave as a keystone species. The colonists ripped it all out in order to enslave people, farm it until it was all red clay, and make as much money as possible.

I say this because it’s important to realize that restoration isn’t simply helping succession along or planting native plants. Restoration is about decolonization and forming relationship with the plants, animals, and ecologies of a given location. We can’t trust a landscape so brutalized to heal itself, instead many species will go extinct, and over millions of years it will evolve into something else.

Instead we can do things like plant for our native bees, learn what the specialists who only pollinate one species like and the generalists will be happy too. Plant for the hummingbirds (cross-vine), the box turtles (may apple), the raccoons, and the deer. Eat them too (well maybe not the hummingbirds) if you can’t find a family of wolves to release, sometimes the animals will give themselves to you. Plant pawpaws and hazelnuts and Cherokee plums and blackberries and service berries and fill the forest with food, and it won’t just feed us, we’ll see our animal neighbors come back too.

The idea of letting the wild be comes from Teddy Rosevelt, who also advocated for killing predators so that more people could hunt. His ideas led to the trophic collapse of Yellowstone. Instead, humans can play a part as a keystone species, even if it’s just helping the birds and reptiles in our yards to start. I’m sure you may vibe with many of these ideas, in which case, could you share them? Because people need to remember how tied together decolonization and ecological restoration are. What are your opinions or strategies?

Yes! All this is great.

I think a lot of people don't realize that...there is no stable "state of nature" that will automatically come back with no intervention. Yes, nature heals itself, but invasive species and other troubles can really mess with that process.

For instance, in my region disused fields are being totally overtaken by the invasive Callery pear tree, which forms a dense wall of foliage that chokes other shrubs and trees out. Restoring these fields would require some slashing into the invasive monoculture and planting native trees to shade out the invasive. Of course, something will eventually break through on its own, but a lot of damage is done in that time.

It needs to become more common knowledge how what is now called the USA was thoughtfully managed instead of being an untouched wilderness. That management was based on generation upon generation of careful, and essentially scientific, observation of ecosystems and how they worked. That's why Native American people need to be in the ecology and land use conversations...that body of wisdom is invaluable.

I learned when googling tree lifespans that Europeans haven't even been on this continent for one (1) full lifespan of many of our trees. Mind blowing.

[inkcurlsandknives]

I have a bottle of tequila covered vanilla beans I've been saving for something special. I'm making a vanilla tequila flan. My hands smell like heaven after scraping the vanilla seeds.

Kinda amazing to think about the cross pollination of cultures, the sharing of indigenous knowledge and technology that made this possible.

Filipino immigrants and sailors brought distillation techniques used to turn tuba (palm wine) into labanog (coconut palm liquor) to Mexico where the technique was used on agave to create mezcal and tequila.

Vanilla beans which are each individually hand pollinated by a method invented by Edmond Albius born a slave on the tiny island of Réunion off the coast of Madagascar this making Madagascar vanilla the one exported today around the world.

I love when my novel research lets me learn about these forgotten moments of knowledge sharing. Really makes you think about how western learning and the legacy of colonization wants us to believe they created the vast wealth they plundered, rather than just stealing the knowledge and credit and profits from others

[jewreallythinkthat]

hey i found you thru the notes on that "israelis didnt actually steal their cuisine" post and saw you mentioned you've done stuff on food history in that realm and wanted to see if you would be willing to link me to some of that? I do love a good food history that is willing to accept the nuance of cultural cross-pollination, fusion cuisine, and innovation over time, rather than going "anything other than the OG recipe is an atrocity, either because the Kids are cooking it wrong or because Americans are stealing it wrong or because someone dared to have mixed heritage"

Hiya,

Sorry for taking so long to reply! I hope you understand if I say I'd rather not link to it as I dont want to inadvertently doxx myself on tumblr - all my food history stuff is linked to me in real life.

I will, however, happily post a bit more about things as and when they are written up!

Sorry I can't be more open but with everything that's going on at the moment.... Yeah 😒