#i need a well-defined problem space and domain

[halt-kun]

Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 267 - The decisive battle in the uninhabited, demon-infested Shinjuku (38)

So can we finally kill the bastard and have 4 chapters of fun, no big idle transfiguration monster and epilogue ?

AWWWWWWWWW OwO

doggies

I hate dog breeds unless they are a bit humanely selected

Gojo's big sniffer is fun and all but they also probably have some collagen problems

Yuji's bulldog is one of the worst, stop crunching the face

Megumi's shiba inu is cute but I don't know their problems

NOBARA (so nice to see her) and her golden retriever with the cut tail is fucked up. Golden retriever have hip problems I think

Only sane dogs are bastards, they live-long, are as pretty and decent, and don't cost a fortune

My favourite breeds tend to be shepherd breeds who are quite healthy even though I would never have the space to have some : border collies, australian shepherd of course

My grandad used to have irish setters and they're cute but don't live long and I don't hunt. English and Gordon setters are the same, pretty cute

Poodles are cute and nice too but mixed poodles are better.

DON'T ALABAMA YOUR DOG GUYS

Ooooo Gojo is in Yuta's bodies right now, I was confused for a sec

Well we found another way to copy Sukuna's techniques

The fever what ????

Inumaki is a golden child and you need to settle down with him fast Yuta. Let Maki become the lesbian supreme

Some rules about Rika, okay

well this is fucked

like what defines "a strong techniques" too, is it purely offensive powers or the amount of energy to use it properly ?

What that's dumb, reverse cursed techniques doesn't regenerate the arm you ate, like it's in Rika's stomach now, a new arm grew so it should be fine

Poor Charles

But YUTA, you used Toge's cursed speech during Geto's attack, WDYM

what did you eat there that wasn't restored

FEED YOUR FINGERS TO RIKA

HOW TO COPY SUKUNA'S TECHNIQUES

anyway, I'm sure he could have restored his little finger ?

NOBARA NOBARA

I A SO HYPED

HAHAHAHAHAHAH

KILL THE BASTARD

SAY HI TO MEGUMI TOO

YESSS AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I LOVE YOU GEGE

I FORGIVE ALL YOUR SINS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

LIFE IS GOOD

KILL HIM NOW

AHAHAHAHA GOOD OL' TAG TEAMING WITH YUJI

fuck him from the inside and then punch him dead

AHAHAHHAHA

she looks weird though, Gege lost his touch maybe

NAILED AND CUT

git it Sukuna

Oh no it is my dude

after that we only have the icy enby twink to deal with

Yuji is fine

he always looked like that

and is best friend is alive so heeeeee's fine

mister tanked two hollow purple and several other techniques and opened his domain 45 times with a bunch of caveats

HAHAHAHA AGAIN

GOOD NIGHT BASTARD

it was a nice little jig but popop needs to go to sleep

See you next week guys

!

FINALLY

NOBARAAAAAAA

[zosonils]

May we hear about ghast or blaze biology?

oooh fun choices! blazes are a bit hard, mainly because i'm on the fence about whether i prefer them as natural creatures or artificial creations of whoever built the nether fortresses. either way, i'd define them as a magical entity, which to me are in an entirely different taxonomical domain to regular cell-based life. if they are naturally occurring, i like to throw around the idea that they're extinct in the wild but were bred in captivity [whether the blazes we know are the same ones that existed in the wider nether or a domesticated form is a whole other point of consideration] and have just kinda spilled out into the nether fortresses now that whoever built them is gone

while that might not have been quite what you were hoping for, i do have some properly speculative biology related ideas about ghasts!

most of a ghast's body is empty space! they're basically just a big flight membrane stretched over a cartilage skeleton, like so:

there are several benefits to this hollow structure. first, it helps them to stay cool in the intense heat of the nether, as air can blow through and ventilate its body. secondly, it's how they fly! they catch wind in their bodies and, because they're so light for their size, this slows their descent to a crawl and lets them steer themselves around like a kite, catching updrafts as they go and precisely manipulating the air in their bodies to stay airborne effectively forever. the tradeoff is that they're so specialised for gliding that they can't afford to stop - a grounded ghast is as good as dead, as they have no means of getting back in the air by themselves.

as a side note, the nether's extreme temperatures and cavelike structure make its atmospheric conditions pretty wild, so a ghast in the overworld or end will have significantly more trouble keeping itself off the ground. in general most nether mobs don't take well to the pressure and temperature changes in other dimensions, and vice versa, hence why there's very little overlap in each ecosystem despite an apparent history of portals being used

and unrelated, but ghasts 'crying' is actually how they keep cool! that minimalist body structure doesn't leave much room for internal thermoregulation, so the aforementioned air ventilation and constant stream of tears have to pick up the slack. [if we're being pedantic it's technically sweating rather than crying, but nobody wants to drink a potion with 'ghast sweat' in it.] what little moisture is in the air they pick up is collected by some weird organ or other and recycled constantly into tears. since water is so scarce in the nether i'm guessing its native species evolved not to need it at all, so flushing all the moisture they collect right back out is no problem for the ghast.

[jonathankatwhatever]

It’s the end of leap day. A period inserted to make the calendar work. Why should it work at all? Or perhaps, why isn’t it perfect? Why doesn’t the math come out exactly? The answer of course is that it does, except the place where that happens is not within the domain of physical existence, meaning it is D4-3 existence, not D3-4. You probably thought I’d forgotten how D-structure connects dimensions. It really is cool, isn’t it? We actually create grid squares which contain Things which themselves are grid squares containing the tObject, where the shift in notation indicates that we’re defining a tObject to fit into the larger conception. A tObject is the normal distribution of all the iterative potential within a Boundary, where a Boundary is the edge of a Thing in every presentation, represented as some form of result, from being a statistic to being a solid in Euclidean space. We define D3-4 and D4-3 in part to define Euclidean space relative to what we call gsSpace, which includes D4, which includes the frame, the gs frame and thus space as the gs is considered, thus placing - oh, I see, the count of D0 up to D3 generates within D4, not outside that domain. What a brilliant solution. When we see the existence of the D4 frame, then we generate all the forms that make up gsSpace, and D0-3 generate into that because what we call reality is the coming together and thus synchronization of D4-3 with D3-4. Thus Pathways matter.

That was messy, but I think necessary because I wanted to say the reason the math isn’t exact is that is why 0Space exists. If it did not exist, then we would not exist because that is or rather must be equivalent to the universal set which cannot exist. It cannot exist because that would imply or rather require a total ordering over a system which can only be incomplete because it is literally generated out of different dimensions. I mean it starts to appear absurd to think any other way: reality constructs out of the interplay of lower and higher dimensions and physical reality, as opposed to our highly varied perceptions of it, is constructed as well. In fact, the statement that there are so many perspectives, sometimes in your own head but certainly over any number of individuals, and that this also appears in animals, meaning it’s an unconscious difference in perspective, but also remember we noticed in the birds how the scatter to create varied perspectives, that being literal angles away from danger, thus reducing their own chances of being hit because the predator must choose one fast instead of 2 or more and then 1, meaning it’s a hidden counting problem. Never knew that.

The extent of being off. Is that in the fine structure constant? It was a tiny difference, on the order of .00003, and I guessed that was something like Pi but I doubted that was true and I don’t think it is. So the value is a bit off 137. That’s like L69. Does that mean anything? Why would the ideal be slightly below and the actual be slightly high? I remember going through 2T + SBE3, and I could see this could be the connector of 2T so all that’s needed is a 1 representing whatever Attaches. That does make sense, but it remains speculative. Oh, also if it oversteps and thus there’s a -1 Attachment to make 136 to 138, which is 68 and 69, which is of course L69. I see an 8 and a 9 of course, but that invokes a lot of counting, like SBE2*10 + 8 or 9. What if I take that in D terms, like it counts D8-9 and D9-8 as part of an SBE2 magnified identification. That’s also really good because D9 is Triangular of D3, which is fundamental mapping of D3 to any 1-0Segment, and D8 is the I//I of gs. So that space D9-8 and D8-9 maps that, maps all the permutations within that.

So the best I think I can do is to say that 137 is actually the midpoint between 136 and 138, which stand for 2 of these processes running. The actuality being slightly greater may mean that is the inside edge’s reach while the ideal being under represents the outside edge’s reach, so they are over the center mark. Not saying they’re balanced to each side, just that they are on either side.

Oh, forgot to say that the ideal is 2T in Alternation within CM1, so this might as well invert to SBE2*10 + D8-9//D9-8. The mapping here is from a count which we treat as gs, so 8gs or 9gs. This could even map to the SBE3 drawing so the count of 8 has a donut hole, 9 is apparently full and 10 is full because now there are 2gs at the center so the center is ambiguous in that sense. This also invokes LayerView.

There has to be more to this because I don’t understand the less than and more than. If it’s less than, as generated by the ideal of 2T within CM1, then there’s a gap which fills to 137. If it’s more than, as measured, there is no gap, and if we say for a moment that only 137 inverts then there is a bit of wiggle in what that is. Same in filling: there’s a bit of wiggle. It would be like each side communicating to and thus over the middle, which itself communicates because it connects the two according to its processes.

This seems to be the best we can do now. It will get better, of course.

[myresellerhome]

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Websites that do e-commerce or use WordPress need a wide range of services. When choosing a reseller web hosting company, we need to consider whether these services are part of the web hosting plan. Let’s check which service we must look for before buying a reseller hosting plan for our e-commerce and WordPress websites.

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Janet Watson MyResellerHome MyResellerhome.com We offer experienced web hosting services that are customized to your specific requirements.

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[vermillioncrown]

Sooo what would you say bil!kagamus playlist would consist of…? 👀👀👀

Also love love LOVE your writing it’s amazing. I keep refreshing my bookmarks to check updates and rereading it!! I’m really glad I checked out ur other fics too :) they’re all great!! 💗

some answers here in the reblog section of this post (x)

i assume you're relatively new to my blog bc there's periodic evidence that nothing quite provokes a meltdown from me better than asking a general "what does x like" question - particularly concerning music

(it 10000% is a me problem and not anyone else's problem)

also, like, you mean playlist as in songs that fit his vibe in a meta sense? or his top songs, which must be sourced from 2012 and earlier?

he has multiple playlists depending on mood and if it's an audience of one or background music. and bc it's an SI, he listens to music the same way i do AKA play one song to fucking death at a time

=

there will be some music stuff when he meets up with tatsuya again (the reunion will be Teenage Rebellion at its finest), but that's the party playlist

=

also also i hope my answers above didn't turn you off... i know i get fussy and precious with certain things but i try to keep it civil but i'm just like this... a verm in the dirt.

thank you for your praise! you should probably subscribe, instead - or you already do, but you're doing the internet equivalent of pacing within your enclosure. I'll take that as a compliment 😎

and thank you for reading my other stuff, too!

[tempenensis]

Jujutsu Kaisen: Abyss of Math Course - part 3

(Continue from Part 1, Part 2)

Thorough consideration of Hollow formula “Purple”

Takano (T): So we have defined “Blue” and “Red” and now we have to think about “Purple”. (Akutami-sensei) said it is a mix of the two but….

Sonoda (S): Before you said (he) wanted to use imaginary numbers, but isn’t this actually Minkowski metric? Minkowski metric is the result of breaking inner product axiom, but it tolerates minus results from squaring. It resembles imaginary numbers. To explain it simply, it will appear like negative length, and looks like it is hollowed. In opposite, the problem is when you define this, you will wonder if you can define “Blue” and “Red”

Hino (H) : I also don’t know if it can be properly investigated. Since Minkowski also have moving domain in the usual Euclidean target, if we cover it, it will look like that. In simple terms, if we think only in plus axis, it maybe can come to “Blue” or “Red”, but if we think to the direction of imaginary numbers, it looks like it will become “Purple”. I don’t know if it will be equivalent of mixing the two, though.

T: I see. Let’s establish the assumption for Minkowski metric we talked earlier, it needs closer scrutiny. I will summarize it a bit, So Gojo is a technique user who can tamper with the scale of local distance after all. Actually the space that Gojo deals with looks like it can tolerate special inner product.

H: With that you can define imaginary numbers-like concept using Minkowski metric.

T: However, there is no way we can properly investigate whether that assumption can accept “Blue” or “Red”. Let’s just expect it from enthusiastic fans.

H: Anyway, it’s thanks to those extra pages of Jujutsu Kaisen that I see people who considers the math in quite varying places when they are looked up.

T: Really… It’s a work that gathers a lot enthusiasm.

S: For now, let’s wrap it at this point, I think people with mathematics knowledge of 3rd year university students can understand it, while the mathematicians can turn to their textbooks.

continued under the cut.

Itadori-in-OJT and Instructor Gojo! In response to Jogou’s Domain expansion, the strongest Gojo uses his own domain expansion “Immeasurable Void” to achieve complete victory.

Thorough consideration of Domain Expansion

T: Teacher! I want to know about Domain expansion!

S: Then let’s write domain expansion in analytic continuation. There are already a lot of excellent considerations in the internet though (laugh)

T: But first let’s summarize our statements. Look at Note 2.

H: This time, let’s look into what correspond (the domain) that seems to be destroyed, then the issue of whether the technique will always hit. For example, domain expansion hits by another domain expansion during Jougou vs Gojou? Where Itadori was doing OJT (On the Job Training) right.

T: It’s been a while since I heard that word.

S: When you say “Ryouiki”, you will always think of “Domain”, right?

H: Even at this time, let’s make a proper definition. First, let’s try to think that in the Domain of innate domain D, a construct of technique X is listed. The construct is, for example, a set of functions of upper D. The D here is expressed as the unique space of the technique user, while X is expressed as the technique (they) used. If it’s Gojo, X can be corresponded to his Limitless cursed technique (Board 7)

S: This domain expansion is, a realization. We determine the indefinite value into a specific one. I wonder if we should make an expression. I will try to decide one of the basis. In domain expansion, to determine expression more favorable for one’s purpose, it’s something close to determining unique conduct down to the domain that can’t be seen.

H: In the analytic continuation, the expression of function is usually decided uniquely. It’s like deploying generalized Fourier series.

S: It sure feels like that. Well, you can write it in coordinates.

H: The things that we don’t quite understand until now, write it as coordinates in the framework of analytic geometric.

S: Or it can be numbers. Because it can be described (variably) depending on the compatibility/affinity, each domain can be expanded using different orthogonal function system.

T: Aah! We can’t stop talking! I’m scared to learn it! I will summarize it a bit. In short, the technique users deploy their respective formula in the unique space unique that they each have. From outside, it will look like as if (the formula?) can be recognized by specific numbers, is that right?

(Note 2) Requirements need for Limitless Cursed Technique

Domain expansion is a granted technique from the conduct of realizing innate domain using cursed energy. Innate domain here is not granted by technique, but it is realized insides the heart of a jujutsushi.

The technique will surely hit.

You can break domain expansion by employing your own inside a domain expansion.

H: It is something like, one side is expanded using Legendre polynomials, while the other side used Laguerre polynomials.

T: I don’t understand that (laugh).

S: It’s just like that.

T: What’s just like that?

S: In short, “expansion”, I thought of it somehow as analytic continuation, but in general it seems like a series expansion with predetermined basis. If we expand it up to ∞, we can express the same function, but in terms of limited (numbers), how accurate the degree of discontinuation expressed can change depending on how the basis is taken. To express your own technique, you should have an easy basis (to work with).

H: We’re actually talking about Kernel methods or Neural net. In Neural net, depending on the place, you can choose well a suitable basis. While Kernel uses the same basis everywhere.

S: For that kind of disposition, Neural net now is winning.

T: I see. When we want to express something, there’s efficient expression (that can be used), there’s also expression which is not.

S: Exactly! In short, because Kernel methods always use the same basis, it has unfavorable course.

(to Part 4)

[guccibootyellow]

White’s Houses, 7-12

Hello, everyone! Thank you so much to all of those who have followed this series; I’m glad people liked it. I hope it was informative and fun, and again, if anyone ever wants to use that information for any purposes like fanart or fics, let me know because that would be super cool to see! I want to finish White’s deep dive before I properly start Yellow’s chart (although I’ve already made some notes), so expect Yellow’s next but not for another couple of weeks at least because I want to properly dust off everything to do with White.

All of you are more than free to use the posts as discussions- in the comments or in the reblogs. You’re also more than free to message me about anything; if you did want to add anything or note anything, you can do that! Don’t feel you can’t. This info is in the public domain so do what you want with it 😂 Thank you again 😊

Seventh House: Capricorn

From here onwards, we focus on White’s outer world, rather than her inner self and inner environment. Here, we look at how she connects to this world and to others, particularly partnerships (not necessarily romantic, but partnerships of any kind), contracts, and cooperation. As it’s in Capricorn, she’s someone who is serious and dedicated when it comes to her relationships, and she would prefer, at all times, if her relationships were well-defined and sturdy, even as she may come across as cold or distant sometimes. This is because she’s cautious with her heart. Although this is great for a long-term view and especially in business, it can take the sweetness and spontaneity out of love. This means, in relationships, she may be delayed in making connections, although this is something she craves deeply. Considering her other placements, the lack of spontaneity may be overruled quite a bit. I think her Venus, Moon, and Fifth House points to the fact she likes creative, intellectual, and intense love, but I think we can see this as an extra addition that she’s someone who, perhaps, is looking for a long-term partner rather than casual relationships, and she wants a partner who is consistent, steady, and practical. Yet, these are all attributes we can subscribe to her relationships in general, not just romantic love. In business, with family, friends, and dating, she’s always looking at the long-term.

When she has relationships like that, she can have connections around her that are trustworthy and supportive. In return, she will develop a strong sense of responsibility to the relationships in her life, particularly in wanting to create a safe space for them, nurturing them in that way. She’s very eager to take on a more emotional role in long-term relationships. White puts up a front professionally, feeling she holds up society and her family, so she actually wants to take a step back and allow someone else to take charge in her relationships in the sense of being taken care of. Once she’s able to find that balance, she’ll find a relationship that is loyal, dedicated, and steady.

I think this will help her overcome a lot of emotional wounds that she’s developed over time. Moreover, there’s an Aquarius degree here, meaning she’s looking for something unique, forward-thinking, and innovative, which isn’t a surprise. In her relationships, I think this is definitely something that aligns with her personality and something she would need anyway in order to have a close bond with someone, due to her mix of traits and experiences- her unique qualities and traits would naturally lead to unique relationships.

Eighth House: Aquarius

Here, we come to the instinctual parts of life, such as rebirth and transformation, sexual energy, and even shared resources. With this being in Aquarius, White is likely to find and define her independence and unique intellect within the hidden or darker aspects of life. In her finances, this may be a problem, as she takes an unconventional approach to joint finances and what she invests in. She may like to play around with her finances and take big risks on a whim, which may or may not work out for her, depending on the situation. This may also mean she takes an alternative approach to her sexual and intimate relationships, and will probably experiment with esoteric practices during her lifetime. Her sense of humour could also help her to navigate any difficult or uncomfortable times in her life, though she should be careful, with her other placements, not to joke inappropriately.

As much as White doesn’t have a problem expressing herself in some areas, such as at work, in her interests, and with her intellect, her emotional realm is a bit more difficult and she may struggle to express herself in an authentic, self-guided manner, particularly if she has imitated authority figures or roles that she thinks she needs to adopt. Plus, she needs to be careful about what can come with this placement, as she may find that her difficulty to express herself properly leaves her unable to deal with stress and changes, particularly when it comes to societal changes. She may not feel grounded and therefore, is likely to take it hard or even lash out. Yet, personal transformation is easier for her. She can usually change herself fairly quickly and without much thought, and this may come across as unusual and abrupt to others. Yet, this dissonance between swift personal transformation and not always being able to handle the changes of others and society can make it difficult for others to understand her, and maybe even for her to understand herself at times.

The crises that occur in her life will help to guide her towards being more individual as a person, helping her to be more free and forward-thinking in general. As there is also a Pisces degree, there may be a sense of confusion around how she can effectively approach her own transformations in life, as well as how she can share with others on a society-based level, despite the fact she wants to give to others. Yet, this is also emphasised by the Pisces degree, as this is all about connection. Not only to others but to herself; the areas that come under this house can be extremely important for her development, as well as her spiritual journey. Learning to connect to herself first is the key to effectively connecting to others.

Ninth House: Pisces

In the house of expansion, growth, adventure, and belief systems, we have Pisces, making White someone whose philosophy is likely to be emphasised around the imaginative and mystical parts of life. These philosophies are of the highest importance to her and she applies them to her daily life. She may enjoy stories of the supernatural, so would enjoy fiction, mythology, as well as exploring altered states of consciousness, meaning that she’s most likely spiritual or religious, something that’s emphasised in other parts of her chart. Yet, despite this, she may be a little fuzzy on her worldview, what exactly it is, and her thinking may be too far out of this world to actually guide her. She’s always thinking beyond, which means her philosophy is not always based in reality. Once she applies her understanding and experiences from her spirituality to her outside world, she’ll find it’ll help to solve her problems.

Her ideal adventure would actually be when she gets to journey into herself, or when she gets to travel to a place of incredible beauty or stillness, or just being able to lose herself in something big and immersive. Despite that, she isn’t the type of person who wants to travel often and she may feel drawn to staying in places near water. With Aries in the degree here as well, we see that she’s creative here. She’s willing to explore, in a very direct and active way, these different philosophies, these imaginative and mystical parts of life, and she’s willing to go out and explore these adventures she really wants deep down, and she’s willing to be creative in how she does that.

Tenth House: Aries

White’s house of authority, career, public life, and societal roles is in Aries. This means she’s someone who’s likely to have an active and fiery professional life, who likes to take charge of her destiny, and who likes to be in positions of leadership, as she’s very comfortable in the spotlight. She’s someone who thrives when she gets to engage with her initiative, as well as show feats of courage in her career- the type that really impresses others and makes her look flashy. This is because she’s naturally energetic here and brings a sense of fun, due to her passionate nature. Moreover, this ends up leading into her wanting to lead projects and providing enthusiasm to others as they get the work done. This can work to her advantage, as she isn’t the type of person to be steady in her work motivation, so having people around her who are happy to provide the details whilst she provides the more public and encouraging tasks would be good for her.

Ultimately, White puts herself in a contradiction. She likes to be in the spotlight, to be in charge, to be the main voice, but she isn’t the type of person who can do the work herself, due to her attention span, lack of motivation, and impulsivity in her decision-making after the initial burst has worn off. Therefore, she has the right public persona to be a leader but not the type of leader who can do the hard graft. She would actually benefit from letting other people lead. From this placement alone, it suggests that she’s the type of person who can be hard-working and driven once she figures out what she wants and I believe this is somewhat true, but with her chart overall, I actually think she would benefit from finding a career that allows her to be a bit more scattered, to find a role that suits this part of her, as that’s not going to go away, even with some more balance in her life. She’s only as hard-working as she wants to be and the question is whether she wants to be. White needs to find a job that she’d be endlessly curious about, one with a bit of diversity.

However, as she has a Taurus degree here, she naturally attracts abundance, particularly materially, so, despite these challenges, she’s the type of person to thrive anyway. This might mean she’s someone who always manages to work it out one way or another, but it also means she’s potentially the type of person who takes the credit for other people’s hard work behind the scenes, and doesn’t always give them any verbal or material reward for that. Either way, she would benefit from more balance, despite the natural abundance she attracts.

Eleventh House: Taurus

Here, we arrive at themes surrounding humanity, group dynamics, aspirations, and hopes and dreams. With it in Taurus, White is someone who wants the community/society around her to be slow and stable, a place where she can feel grounded and that she feels is reliable at all times. This is backed by her Eighth House where we see she doesn’t like the idea of a fast-changing society or environment around her; it makes her feel unsteady. As she shows elements of being excessive and spontaneous within herself, I think it’s important for her to have a place that is the opposite of that and if it moves too quickly, she’ll end up feeling disoriented or uneasy. Some of her aspirations for humanity and for society is about increasing a sense of security, particularly materially.

Like her other placements, we see the value of community and beauty emphasised. She really just loves spending time with her loved ones and feeling she has solid bonds with those around her. Again, the idea of connections over superficial or material aspects is emphasised here- she likes the simple things in life. She’s also the type of person to not have a lot of friends but she’s close to the ones she has, and is more likely to make long-term connections than have something short lasting. However, as Taurus’ can be slow and stubborn, White may become the same here, becoming stuck in groups or places when they no longer benefit her or when they never did in the first place, especially with her loyal nature. She’ll feel it’s wrong to move on. Yet, there is a Gemini degree here, meaning she’s curious and willing to explore when it comes to her sense of community and exploring her bonds in general. This is something she’d enjoy, but tied with Taurus, probably just at a slower pace than usual.

Twelfth House: Gemini

Coming to the last house, White’s is in Gemini, and we see themes surrounding hidden strengths, endings, transformation, and spirituality. This means when it comes to these areas, as well as the world of dreams and the subconscious, she likes to take a mentally-oriented approach. She’s endlessly inspired and curious about this aspect of life and finds much depth in exploring her curiosities and ideas here. White likes to find answers because, to her, this area of life is captivating, though sometimes confusing for her. There’s some themes in her overall chart saying spirituality is good for her, that she also loves to explore darker sides of life, but not all of spirituality is heavy and dark, it’s light and inspiring. Finding a balance between all of these aspects may mean she finds it difficult to balance her subconscious and her approach to these areas; mentally, she becomes too busy to be present. She’s the type of person to go everywhere and nowhere at once. Even so, because she is intellectual and even poetic in her nature, this enables her to express herself and tap into spirituality in a way that’s eternally exciting for her. This will be a great gateway for her to start exploring realms that are a little more confusing for her when she first starts. Moreover, there’s a Cancer degree to this house, meaning she’ll find security and a sense of being at home in herself when she allows herself to truly explore this area and be open with it, but once she can find a firm footing in this area, she can also direct it towards her family and home environment that she so truly desires and needs, and bring some sense of healing to it too.

[k7l4d4]

Plane Shift: The Boiling Isles, Brief Character Portfolio

Hello all, today I am going to go into some measure of detail for the characters in this crossover between the Owl House and Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Everybody clap your hands!!

Now, to give a little heads up, the way this portfolio is set up is based on the following Format:

Character Name

Defining Quote/Motto

Alignment Inclinations

Favored Classes/Known Classes

Brief Profile

Okay, now that the format is listed, time to get into the nitty gritty!

Luz Noceda

“Limits? What are those!”

Chaotic Good/Neutral Good

Primary Class: Wizard, Subclass: Order of Scribes. Secondary Class: Artificer, Subclass: Battle Smith. Tertiary Classes: Paladin, Rogue, and Bard.

The young daughter of the famed Plane Warden and Cleric, Camila Noceda, Luz has always had her head in the clouds, longing for adventure and friendship. Upon entering the Adventurer’s Academy, she proceeded to rock the very foundation of Plana and adventuring by choosing not one, not two, but FIVE classes to train in! She would’ve tried them all, but was talked out of it when they professors made it clear it would be physically impossible for her to take them all, and that the number she had selected would push her to greatest of limits. Luz lives life without limits or regret, and while her extremely impulsive nature has resulted in a rather poor social life, she is greatly beloved among the street dwellers and lower ranks of local organizations and groups of her home.

Amity Blight

“Perfection is impossible. That’s why we seek it.”

Lawful Good/Neutral Good

Primary Class: Warlock, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Artificer.

The youngest child of the affluent Blight Family, recently displaced from her home dimension, Amity holds herself to a strict standard of decorum. Her methodical nature, dedication to study, and respect for authority has made her a divisive figure within the Adventurer’s Academy, as while her new instructors find her dedication admirable, they also worry it will disallow her from living a healthy and happy life. Amity regularly runs afoul of Luz, but the human girl’s friendly nature, genuine endearment, and appreciation for magic and learning has served as a bonding bridge between the two. Hints of something deeper within her heart grow clearer all the while.

Willow Park

“Nature is a blessing to us all. We have a duty to care for it, and each other.”

Neutral Good/Chaotic Good

Primary Class: Druid, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Barbarian.

The only child of the Park family, Willow is a quiet, gentle child all around, but within her lurks a frightening power over nature itself that constantly threatens to break free if not for her ironclad self-control, and kind nature. Once friends with Amity Blight, circumstances forced a rift between them, and she holds that pain as a torch within her heart, always wary of letting it burn her down to nothing but unwilling to let go. Willow’s incredible connection with Plants has made her a rare talent among the Druid classes, and she is constantly called to demonstrate her power before her new peers, much to her delight.

Augustus “Gus” Porter

“So much to learn! So much to experience!”

Neutral Good/Chaotic Good

Primary Class: Wizard, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Bard.

A young prodigy who skipped several grades in his home dimension, Gus is still an outstanding figure when it comes to both technical skill and application of magic. Excitable, kind if somewhat insensitive on occasion, and with a fierce need to prove himself, Gus often finds himself in difficult situations, both socially and dangerously, but he never allows it to affect his optimism. He’s rapidly built a bond with Luz over their shared passion and energy, not to mention his excitement over befriending “an actual real-life human!”

Boscha Triplet

“I saved the day! Why? Because I’m a Star of Course!”

Lawful Neutral

Primary Class: Monk, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Artificer.

An athletic star with an incredible ego, Boscha is by all accounts an unpleasant individual, yet since coming to Plana, she’s gradually shown signs of a more vulnerable personality, one she vehemently denies and buries within herself, much to the chagrin of others. While she initially chose Monk as a joke, thinking it of a blow-off course or something similar, the relentless physical training, and the brutally humiliating smackdown dealt on her first day have served to motivate her to continue and succeed in the Class she chose, if only out of pure spite. The philosophical aspects of Monk training seem to go over her head, yet her friends and foes alike have noted her occasionally seem to verge on saying something mean or crude, only to stop herself and stare off in contemplation.

Skara Levine

“Just go with the rhythm. Everything will work out, right?”

Lawful Neutral

Primary Class: Bard, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Sorcerer.

A young girl who lived at the top, Skara had many halmarks of being a potential problem child, often being easily lead and influenced by those deemed her friends, Skara is typically very sweet and outgoing, but for all her social butterfly moments, they are undercut by her poor interpersonal skills, frequently stumbling onto sensitive topics without any inclination she understood why she shouldn’t bring them up. She is a paradox, being both kind and cruel, nice and mean, in equal measures, the parallel nature of her behavior often befuddles those around her. She’s recently begun stating that she hears things suddenly when no one is around.

Emira Blight

“Don’t worry, I can handle this on my own.”

Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral

Primary Class: Rogue, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Fighter.

The oldest daughter of the Blight family, Emira is a mischievous girl with a fondness for mayhem. Nonetheless, she cares for her family and friends, even if her methods occasionally leave much to be desired. Of the Blight Children, Emira is the most independent, often resentful of any perceived restrictions, but calm enough to find workarounds rather than lash out. She frequently professes that looks forward to the day she can live her own life, and enjoys teasing her sister along with her brother.

Edric Blight

“We got this, we just got to stick together.”

Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral

Primary Class: Rogue, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Bard.

The lone son of the Blight family, Edric is Emira’s twin, and is in many ways both her equal and her mirror. While sharing her sense of mischief and love of tricks, Edric is far more flighty and whimsical, often hyper-fixating on animals and whatever shiny thing catches his eye, often projecting a childish air about him. He is the most insecure of the Blight siblings, though he hides it well, and dreads the idea of being alone, particularly from his twin.

Viney Arkswood

“Animals are our friends. They have just as much capacity for good as we do.”

Chaotic Good

Primary Class: Ranger, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Druid.

One of three students sentenced to the Detention Track for their mixing of magical disciplines, Viney has a caring heart and a love of people and animals that manifested in a rather strange way, in that she attempted, and technically succeeded, in training her pet griffin to be a nursing assistant. Viney is genuinely unsure if she wishes to return, with the lone benefit in her mind being to see her parents again.

Jerbo Underslack

“I might be nervous, but that doesn’t make me incompetent.”

Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral

Primary Class: Cleric, Subclass: Nature Domain. Secondary Class: Druid.

One of the three Detention Track students, Jerbo’s love of plants and his fondness for the idea of loyal aides combined in his creation of plant monsters that trashed the gardens of his school. Jerbo is the most suspicious and leery of his friends, often being slow to trust and even slower to act, he nonetheless is a kind soul, and used his admittance into the Adventurer’s Academy to try and kind some new meaning in his life.

Barcus Howsberry

“Your soul glimmers with the joy of a newfound toy in the arms of a lonely child.”

Chaotic Good

Primary Class: Wizard, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Artificer.

Last and oddest of the three Detention Track students, Barcus’ unusual body and strange speech make him truly bizarre, and his cryptic demeanor doesn’t help. Barcus enjoys both the art of Potions and Prediction, and frequently seeks to join the two. Upon arrival, and confirmation that yes he is a sapient being, Barcus was checked by Camila, and was determined to have a hereditary curse bound to his being, and when offered to have it removed, his comfort with his form initially made him refuse, only to be told that the speech impediment and oddness of his form would destroy any chance of him being able to integrate into society, causing him to compromise and have the curse suppressed instead.

Camila Noceda

“To bring goodness and love in this world means I can rest easy, knowing I left it in the hands of those I love.”

Lawful Good

Primary Class: Cleric, Subclass: Life Domain. Secondary Class: None.

Mother of Luz Noceda, Camila is the current Plane Warden of Plana, being entrusted with guarding the city from extraplanar threats and to help guide and aid those lost between realms. Camila is a loving soul, but the strain of her job has worn on her over the years, with the sole reprieve being her precious daughter. Camila often adopts a motherly role for the displaced children now in her care, offering both advice when needed, and discipline as necessary. Camila also frequently aids and offers advice to the adults now sharing her living space, hoping to help them adjust to their situation.

Edalyn Clawthorne

“I’m the most powerful witch in the Isles, but it never meant a thing until I found someone to use that power for.”

Chaotic Good

Primary Class: Sorcerer, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Wizard.

Fiercest Wild Witch to grace the Boiling Isles since Belos’ ascension, Eda marches to the beat of her own drum, no exceptions, but she still holds a beautiful heart for those she cares for, and people in general, no matter how much she denies it. Eda was genuinely shocked to learn that Camila could, and did, heal her curse, effectively if not easily, and feels a deep sense of obligation towards the woman a a result, not to mention her all around soft spot for Camila’s daughter. Eda genuinely has no desire to return to the Isles at this point, beyond maybe a chance to reconcile with her mother and retrieve Hooty and all her stuff.

Lilith Clawthorne

“I am far from perfect, and have made many mistakes. This is the least I can do.”

Lawful Good/Lawful Neutral

Primary Class: Paladin, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Wizard.

Lilith Clawthorne, elder sister to Eda, means well, but is both painfully naive and far too trusting for one her age, as well as disturbingly childish and immature. For all that though, Lilith holds a good heart and thrives in a structured and ordered environment and system. When she received the knowledge that Eda’s curse had been cured, Lilith was nearly left catatonic, as the curing of Eda rendered all her efforts meaningless and her life without true purpose. When Eda bluntly stated that even with her curse cured she will NEVER join a coven, Lilith forced herself to accept it, no matter how much it hurt. Since that day, Lilith has attempted to find a new direction in life, and to help others as best she can.

Odalia Blight

“Like it or not, one’s word is their bond.”

Lawful Neutral/Lawful Evil

Primary Class: Wizard, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Bard.

Matriarch of the Blight family, and a near-Karen level individual, Odalia is both incredibly goal-oriented and driven by a desire to succeed. Domineering and controlling, Odalia exerts a highly unhealthy and toxic level of influence over her childrens’ lives, though she does truly love them. Odalia enjoys having the upper hand, and will do anything to allow her children and family to not only survive but thrive, and is very much fond of disproportionate retribution against her enemies.

Alador Blight

“This could prove interesting.”

Lawful Neutral/Lawful Evil

Primary Class: Artificer, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: Rogue.

Patriarch of the Blight family, and all around bizarre individual, Alador cares for little in his life aside from his inventions, his wife, and his children, in that order. Often dazed and easily distracted, Alador is highly curious and constantly seeks new inspiration for his devices and creations, no matter how dangerous the circumstances. He cares little for his wife’s antics and schemes, but in no way does he find them unacceptable, he often acts as a stabilizing influence upon her, and is perfectly fine with calling her out on her behavior when she genuinely goes too far.

Hieronymus Bump

“Dedication and Focus are important, but true passion and joy for what you do makes all the difference.”

Neutral Good/Lawful Good

Primary Class: Wizard, Subclass: Undetermined. Secondary Class: None.

Principal to the famed, some would say infamous, Hexside School of Magic and Demonics, Principal Bump loves to teach and help others learn, and is perfectly willing to play the system to ensure he can do so. While he genuinely loves all his students and wishes them to succeed, he is willing to admit he is old-fashioned to a certain extent and can have trouble keeping his views on a topic unbiased, and can occasionally act in unethical ways if it means finding a solution to a problem, though he does not enjoy such measures. He aids Camila in searching for a way to return home for him and his fellows, and often acts as a reasonable authority figure for the students who came with them.

[a-room-of-my-own]

Hi! Did you see the NewStasteman interview with Judith Butler? The way she framed the whole debate about gender is so depressing, I cannot believe it... And that's without going into the Rowling debate, the more I read about it on Twitter and tumblr and the most depressed I get. How can womanhood be reduced to a feeling anyone can claim?

https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

I had not seen it so thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it. She’s really manipulative and that’s pretty scary honestly. I picked up a few examples to show you 

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…) I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…)I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.  

It’s “our” responsibility to act on something she cannot prove? It’s quite easy to observe that trans-activists are an active minority within the feminist movement. On the other hand, it’s much harder to prove than most people support modern trans-activism in all its implications. She doesn’t give any source, proof or figures to support her claim but ask people to fight for it, nevertheless. That’s faith, not fact. 

If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” [the problem of men claiming to be trans to access women’s space] we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. 

Then again, no proof, when many gender critical bloggers have lists of dozens of examples of men using self-ID to access bathrooms, women’s shelters, women’s prisons, some of them sex offenders.  

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. 

That’s a lot of words to call women who are afraid of men “hysterical”. #sorority 

Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. 

Word salad that could be translated like this: our priority shouldn’t be protecting women from men, it should be accommodating men, because #notallmen are predators, so it would be very unfair to them, uwu. Men’s concerns should always be considered while women who are afraid are irrational. 

I am not aware that terf is used as a slur.  

I’m 99% sure that’s a lie, but okay. 

I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? 

Women who want to have spaces without men should be called exclusionary, because we define women based on their relationship with men and how they include them. Suuuuure. 

If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. 

We’re not the ones telling you can cure a psychological problem with cross-sex hormones and amputations, but we are the one pathologizing trans and GNC people. That’s hi-la-rious.  

My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived. 

Meaningless word salad > "women should let men redefine the word woman as they please"

Let us be clear that the debate here [between people who support JKR and others] is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. 

TLDR: Real feminist can only be trans-supporters. 

Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.  

That’s gender for you Judith, not biological sex. Social identities vary, biological sex is a constant. Saying that isn't essentialism.

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women...  

“Women who are afraid of men are irrational” third instalment.  

Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.   

Men are whoever they say they are, women are whoever men say they are.  

One does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle.  

Many feminists consider that men can only be feminist allies, so the debate is clearly not settled.  

When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?   

Does “woman” need to have a *gasp* definition? Judith is saying it doesn’t. You’ll notice that she doesn’t say that anything about “man” not having a stable definition. She believes it’s possible to fight against misogyny while having no stable definition for what a woman is. Laughable. 

I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. 

Word salad > “we don’t get to choose our gender but we get to choose it I am very smart"

Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.   

Many women have internalized misogyny and homophobia, which in turn had a huge impact on their sense of self and self-esteem, but that doesn’t mean they’re not women Judith. And I don’t think any woman who was forcefully married, who had her vulva mutilated for religious reasons, had to wear a veil since she was a toddler, or was sold as a child into prostitution ever “felt at home” with having been born a girl, you absolute unit.  

Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. 

That was going so well until the last sentence 

I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. 

JB, darling, just read your own word salad and get some self-awareness. 

The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms. 

Tell that to your supporters Miss I Wasn't Aware TERF Were A Slur.

I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. 

Kindergarten argument, but sure. Also, yet again, no proof. 

I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US.  

“Threats against JKR are bad BUT have you seen what’s happening in Brazil?”. I’m sorry what? Also, could trans-activist please stop instrumentalizing Brazilian stats, since they reflect the situation of prostituted homosexual transsexuals ?  

 So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. 

NO ONE, literally NO ONE said that threats against trans people were acceptable. In fact, most, if not pretty much all threats, especially physical threats, don’t come from radical feminists, but from men. Basically, what she’s saying is “who cares about threats against JKR, trans people (men) matter more”.  

If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists.  

♫ Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya ♪ 

It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society. 

All radical feminists are right wingers, sure. 

Anyway, it's terrible that this kind of article is taken seriously when it could be summed up as "women are irrational and hysterical, men can be women and redefine the word woman if they so wish"...

[bluewatsons]

Alone Ferber, Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”, New Statesman (September 22, 2020)

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?

Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

Alona Ferber: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.

Judith Butler: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

Alona Ferber: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.

Judith Butler: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

Alona Ferber: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?

Judith Butler: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?

Judith Butler: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals? . . . I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms. . . . Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.

Alona Ferber: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?

Judith Butler: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.

Alona Ferber: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?

Judith Butler: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.

Alona Ferber: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper's this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you?

Judith Butler: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently . . . On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.

Alona Ferber: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?

Judith Butler: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.

Alona Ferber: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?

Judith Butler: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

Alona Ferber: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?

Judith Butler: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.

[anangelicday-mrwolf]

Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 36 – Disorder in Order

‘I don’t get it.’

The man’s fingers clasped his biceps tighter as his arms were crossed.

The 3rd Elder was seated on his bed, his brain whirring madly in reflection.

The day that QuadraNet’s switch was supposed to be turned on – or rather, the day that according to Helga they would get to find the opportunity they have been waiting for, he fulfilled his mission.

That was the day for him to make good use of the mayhem everyone will go through and pick up any vulnerability or noteworthy factor they could use against the blonde scientist, who will surely prove himself as the tallest, hardest, and mightiest wall for the surviving Union to break through.

And on the D-day, Helga’s words came true.

Apparently all networks connected for the QuadraNet had gone haywire; not even Frankenstein could stay free from alarm.

No, he was more than alarmed; he was in panic.

‘As far as I know, he didn’t take part in the project. That day he was there simply to watch QuadraNet come alive. Which must be why he was so flustered, since he was in no position to do something about it, with no one to answer him, let alone help him.’

During the event, Frankenstein was basically stuck in the middle of his cave expedition, with all the lighting equipment mysteriously sabotaged, trapped in a pitch-dark space with the rest of his team too far away to reach, with no option other than emitting echoes of cries unanswered.

But Frankenstein was no idiot. In fact, when it comes to technology he is a virtuoso, competent enough to make Union covet and compete against him.

So to nobody’s wonder, Frankenstein eventually recovered the transmission and reconnected to the rest, incredibly fast for someone who was invited as a spectator.

Naturally, he could not spare his attention to anything else other than his computers.

Thus he gave 3rd Elder enough time to flaunt his skills in profiling and snooping.

‘Though I had to be extra-careful, in consideration of the person I was snooping about.’

As Frankenstein’s eyes were successfully diverted, 3rd Elder headed to the lab, to make use of the gear he was so thankful he had packed: a spray that reveals fingerprints, a development from a life technology company under Union’s possession, once used by civilians as well.

It evaporates over time, leaving no traces whatsoever once it is gone. And it conveys different hues depending on the time the fingerprint was first left, allowing its user to deduce the order and marking time of each fingerprint.

However, it can no longer be seen among civilians, as it was permanently discontinued following the public concern that it must not be led into the wrong hands.

And 3rd Elder could finally make it useful in order to track down Frankenstein’s most recent cognitive journey.

By taking a look at the files he submitted for the human scientist and files the latter had collected by himself, he would be able to pinpoint the main topic of the files or the topic Frankenstein is most interested in.

And ultimately infer what he is most deeply involved with and what he is planning, for the Union to prepare against in advance.

The 3rd Elder gave a little tip regarding this, by telling Helga that Frankenstein specified he intends to find out the reason behind the Noblesse’s mysterious return to life.

Which Helga did not buy.

Listening to you, now there is no doubt it is our gravest woe and fear that the Union had failed in making an ally out of him. Now that he is undeniably our enemy, we should be wary of his every word and action. And do you honestly think he was being honest with you?

He wanted to retort by correcting her assumption – Yes, you can trust him. He’ll never lie when it comes to his master – but he did not; after all, she did have a point.

‘By the way, how come I momentarily got so close to taking his side back then?’

The white-haired man shook his head to tune out a tiny voice within, to instead clutch his arms even tighter and reassess what his scavenging revealed for him.

He decided to add weight to Helga’s claim and delved into as thoroughly as possibly the files Frankenstein had been dissecting, to gain nothing in particular.

The volume and contents were beyond his imaginations, but all in all Frankenstein’s files were centered on similar topics.

Revival. Extension of life. Inducing coma or pseudo-coma state. Definition of biological death. And all that jazz.

QED, they were mostly related to life and death.

‘Which means he was staying true to the goal of his research he shared with me.’

Despite his disappointment, 3rd Elder did not deem his exploration a waste of time.

Which is why he was so puzzled.

‘For some strange reason, I found most of his fingerprints not on his files but on the cup he’d always place on his table. And on the equipment used to generate chemical drink. And he’s touched it very recently.’

To say “most of his fingerprints” was an understatement; for a moment 3rd Elder had thought he became a detective excavating a drug addict’s lair.

So he did not hesitate in pulling out a specially designed slip of paper to dip into Frankenstein’s cup for a sample.

All he has to do is to take the paper to Helga for analysis; this is where a problem arises.

‘The camera and recording device Frankenstein implanted in me may be dormant, but as of now I can’t send this to Helga. Not with Lady Lunark paying visits to this island. Not to mention no chance in hell will she ever trust me. Which means I must be the one to analyze the contents of Frankenstein’s drink.’

The job is neither impossible nor difficult, given that he is provided with appropriate apparatus.

He had trained himself in theories and practices in experiments, having orchestrated and participated in several experiments and projects at the Union.

‘But the only equipment I can use in this place all belong to Frankenstein. I’ll need distraction to use them.’

A single chance – that was all he needed.

A single chance of disturbance equal to the recent uproar affiliated with the QuadraNet. Or Frankenstein’s urgent trip to the werewolf realm.

‘Then it’d be less than a gulp to run the analysis,’ sighed 3rd Elder, his mind tracing back to the transparent plastic bag he had hidden, containing the paper slip safe from oxidation.

‘Should I place an order for disorder to Helga? She’s the one who commanded both occasions.’

Marveling once again at her leadership, 3rd Elder had yet to realize that his chance would come much faster than expected.

*****

It has been days since the night at a café by the beach of Incheon, Korea.

Because of which Yuigi has grown more comfortable around Takio.

The awkwardness and discomfiture she had been haunted with ever since she was parted from Union without consent were pretty much no more.

Nonetheless, Yuigi did not define her standing as better.

‘So let’s say I continue to help him locate Union’s facilities and gain his gang’s trust. And free myself from this choker. But then what? Once the last of the Union is gone, what should I do? What am I supposed to do with my life from then on?’

Driven by the searing guilt that she could not protect her brother and sister, Yuigi had lived a life of obsession with power.

Notwithstanding, she lost the powers she has so very feverishly nurtured. She lost the association and purpose that were entailed.

The life of Raciela, the sister of Arthur and Hailey, had long been disconnected from her.

The life thrusted upon her was the life of Yuigi, a member of the Cerberus, one of the top personal guards of the Union.

And Yuigi’s life was robbed from her over a mere day.

And she had no way to return to Raciela’s life.

She has come too far to indulge in ordinary life now. After all, she was now used to dubbing herself as Yuigi, surrounded by people who treat her as Yuigi, not Raciela.

She was reminded of a fairy tale she once read for her siblings: a story of a frog rejected by all animals.

The frog was born from water, to dwell in and dance across both earth and water once fully matured.

Alas, the frog’s gift of mobility in two completely unidentical domains won itself hatred from creatures of both domains. The creatures of water resented the frog’s ability to walk upon solid ground they could not even dream of; creatures of land were more than unhappy to see a native of aquatic dominion, reckoned inferior by the terrestrial-born, was treading along their footprints.

So in unison, they rejected the frog, to make sure it could find respite in neither the earth nor the water.

‘And looks like I’m the frog right now.’

Also, she had been plagued with void within, now that her life as Yuigi was lost as well. And she knew not how to get rid of the void.

She knew that she could not join what remained of the Union.

‘That’s just unimaginable, as long as this leash stays on me. Besides, even without this choker, I can’t possibly do that. Because...’

At then Yuigi fell heavily in silence, which was already hung upon her entire being.

Because?

Because what?

‘Why would you bring up the term at the moment? Don’t tell me you’ve grown a liking to that guy just because he’s been taking care of you.’

Yuigi violently shook her head, as if a bug had dived into her hair.

She shook her head so hard she thought she could hear her skull vibrating.

No, she actually felt like the entire safehouse was vibrating.

‘...Wait a minute.’

She reconsidered her thought, upon checking the water left in the cup on the table.

She could swear upon her life that nothing in the safehouse was moving, herself included, but the water was trembling, as if there were a quake.

As Yuigi fixed her eyes upon the cup, similar effect started to inflict the possessions within the safehouse, including the chair she was sitting in, the table she set her elbow upon, and the dishes inside the sink that were clattering in a nervous beat.

Just when Yuigi was trying to conjecture what could these be signaling, with a BAM the walls constructed to stand sturdy against majority of firearm and missiles spit out thousands of splinters, like a glass window hit by a brick.

Yuigi was swept in the aftermath and flung through the air, to be caught in the constructions and objects that had been composing the safehouse just a second ago.

Had she not been a modified human, and had Frankenstein employed materials less substantial, she would have never stood on her feet again.

Holding her head in her hand in a desperate attempt to do something about her eardrums, being bombarded with screeches due to the explosion, Yuigi could soon make out the highly likely suspect of the unappreciated delivery of disorder.

Fortunately her eyes were still functional, and she caught the sight of a huge man with hair the color of hay and face similar to that of a gigantic toad.

“...Could sme... I kn... Ver wrong.”

Yuigi had to squint to process what he was talking about, due to the noises that were still whipping up in her ears.

“...Was told... Ract tho... Not thi... Et you here.”

The man smirked, making himself look even more like a toad, with his eyes on Yuigi.

“No offe... Old to do... Be happie... Once I... Ally be... Anding at the spotlight!”

Before Yuigi could catch her breath after she was sure her ears have somewhat returned to normal, the man lunged towards her.

(next chapter)

I introduce you a new character - yes, he is an OC, and he is a supporting character. However, I added him for a reason, and you’d soon get to see why. Stay tuned for more!

[dementeris]

Peter Parker [bursting into the living room] : I’ve found a new game !

Clint Barton [rising an eyebrow] : Cool, how do you play it, Spidey ? Tactics to confuse your challengers?

Thor [countering] : Strength to make them kneel ?

[Loki’s silent thoughts: Why do I feel irony right now?]

Tony Stark: Incredible ingeniousness to let them see how awesome you are?

Peter Parker [scratching his neck nervously]: Hum, not really… it’s more about vocabulary and speed…

 ~ The three men exit the room, all of them suddenly pretending to remember some kind of urgent affair ~

 Shuri [taking him in a supportive embrace]: Aw, don’t be sad, Pete : I’m interested ! So let’s play together, yeah?

Loki [closing his book]: Your friend is right, Spiderchild. Forget about those brutes, they wouldn’t have achieved anything but destroying this place at the first argue anyway…

Peter Parker [quite overwhelmed by the sudden affection]: T-Thank you, you two. But it will be better if there are one or two more players.

Stephen Strange [making a surprisingly human and non-supernatural entry]: Then, may I offer my participation?

Loki [hissing slightly]: Tss, nobody cares, Doctor I-want-to-be-a-sorcerer.

Peter Parker [on a begging child’s tone]: Mister Loki, please!

Shuri [giving Loki a vigorous tap against his back]: Come on, big guy, it will be fun!

Stephen Strange [sitting in the nearest armchair]: Don’t ruin the mood, Thirty-minutes-falling God. And after all, since it shouldn’t break our universe’s balance, I can do what I want for once, can’t I?

[Loki’s silent thoughts – second take: Is it a quotes’ contest or something?!]

Peter Parker: Okay, So let’s begin with the rules!

 ~ Le Petit Bac : a french game in which your goal is to be the first to complete a succession of words, each one belonging to a specific category and beginning by a same letter. These ones are defined by the players before the party starts. For the first player who finishes his list, there’s one bonus point. Then, every player compare their words, so if two or more of them have found the same one, 0 point counted. On the contrary, if you manage to propose a unique word, take 1 point. Continue the same process by taking new letters. At the end, the player with the higher score win ! ~

 Peter Parker [wearing a beaming smile] : Understood ? At worst, the first round is always here to do some practice.

Shuri : Right, so we need different classes to start. Any suggestions?

 ~ Few minutes later ~

 Peter Parker [counting on his fingers] : So we have : domestic pets, colours, …

Shuri : Advanced technologies…

Stephen Strange : Mystical artefacts…

Loki : And fantastic creatures…

Peter Parker [shrugging] : Well, it’s a bit original, although not unexpected. Next step : Mister Loki, can you read alphabet in your mind and give me a letter when I tell you to stop ?

Loki : Sure, child, but which alphabet do you want me to use ? Asgardian’s or Midgardian’s? In the second case : latin, hebraic, manda- ?

Shuri [throwing a tired glance towards the Asgardian] : Don’t mind it, I will do it!

Peter Parker : Huh, thanks Shu ! So………….. Stop!

Shuri : T !

Stephen Strange [brows furrowing] : Hum, well, it promises to be entertaining.

Loki [smirking devilishly] : Already admitting your defeat, Strange ?

Stephen Strange [completely ignoring the tease] : You may have had the privilege to accumulate a monstrous amount of knowledges through your life, immortal, but don’t underestimate me and the Sorcerer Supreme’s teaching.

Peter Parker : L-Let’s started !

 ~ Not even two minutes later ~

 Loki [making his pen click dramatically] : And… Finish !

Peter and Shuri [in unison] : What ?!

Stephen Strange [mumbling to himself] : Tss, I had just one left…

Peter Parker : B-But how- ?! Hum, no problem, you got one point there, let’s just… Check your words, ‘kay ?

   ~ And so goes the Scores’ debrief and commentaries ~

·       A fantastic creature

Peter Parker : Thunderbird  (Hey, Have you seen the Fantastic Beasts, Doctor Strange ? / Depends of which ones you’re talking about, Peter…)

Shuri : -

Stephen Strange : Tokoloshe (I’m surprised you didn’t find this one, Miss Shuri : it normally comes from South-Africa / I’m an engineer, not a wizard…)

Loki : Triton

 ·       A mystical artefact

Peter Parker : -

Shuri : Talisman (That’s also a category, Shu… / I said : I’m not a wizard !)

Stephen Strange : Time Stone (This one was easy…)

Loki : Tesseract (For once, I agree with you / Aw man, how can have I let pass these ones ?!)

 ·       An advanced technology

Peter Parker : Tracer

Shuri : Trans-dimensional Teleportation device (That’s my domain…)

Stephen Strange : Tracer (I’m not a big technologies’ user myself / Well, think it’s 0 point for us, Doctor…)

Loki : Television (Man, really ? / Should I remember you that I come from a Realm where Magic is our best technology ?)

 ·       A colour

Peter Parker : Taupe (Miss Pepper-Potts knows a lot of things when it comes to space design !)

Shuri : -

Stephen Strange : Topaz

Loki : Terra Cotta (Hey, isn’t that one a dessert ?! / Peter, you’re again mistaking it for “Panna Cotta”…)

 ·       A domestic pet

Peter Parker : Tarantula (I assure you they’re really nice !)

Shuri : Tiger (Come to Wakanda for the next holidays, Pete, and I will show you how to ride one !)

Stephen Strange : -

Loki : …

  Shuri [astonished] : “Thor” ?! How’s that, “Thor”?! I’ve let pass the television-thing, but this one?!

Loki [perfectly calm] : I don’t see where is the problem with that one : the rules don’t say that proper nouns are forbidden.

Peter Parker [trying to sound sympathetic to the both of them] : I’m sorry, Mister Loki, but I have to agree with Shu on this point…

Stephen Strange [maybe a bit concerned] : I know your relations with your brother weren’t the most… amicable. But still, Loki, you can’t consider him as an anim- !

Loki [shrugging] : Then give me a definition of what is a “domestic pet” according to your standards…

Peter Parker : Hum, well, to start that’s a living being with whom you have created a special and profound bond. It’s a proof of affection, even if it can be overwhelming sometimes…

Shuri : As a life partner, he never object to help you and make you feel better when you need him…

Stephen Strange : And, for some of them, when the danger arises, he won’t hesitate to protect you.

Loki : So you gave me the terms, I now feel obliged to give you the facts in return.

 ~ At the same moment, loud laugh and stomping steps echo through the corridor ~

 Loki [sighing with a grin] : Speaking of the dog…

Peter Parker : Huh, the correct expression is “the dev-“…

Thor [almost running towards the group] : Brother ! We and the Captain have returned victorious from our mission! Oh, hello again, Spiderchild ! And nice to see you too Shuri, Sister of the Black Warrior, and Strange, Master of the Magic Cape!

Stephen Strange [massaging his temples] : For the umpteenth time, it’s a Cloak, not a ca- !

Loki [an ounce of worry in the voice] : Thor, you oaf, what’s that red mark on your armour ? Have you let yourself be hurt? Again?!

Thor : Oh! This? Don’t worry for that little scratch, Loki : it takes more than that to kill me ! [gently ruffling his hair and taking him in a warm strong suffocating embrace] And what about you? How have your day been so far?

 ~ Proof of overwhelming affection : checked ~

 Loki [gasping for air] : Good, good : I h-have been playing with the m-mortals. But l-let me breathe n-now!! And can you go take me s-some water, p-please?

Thor [finally releasing Loki] : Of course I can !!

 ~ He then goes straight to the kitchen, bringing back a large glass of fresh water with even some snacks which have been neglectfully left on the counter. Next time, Clint would have to let a warning note for his lunch’s sake ~

 Thor [beaming radiantly] : Here ! I must say that I’m glad to see that you’ve finally found some friends to spent time with!

 ~ Proof of selfless carefulness : checked ~

 Loki [now sounding nervous] : Yeah, you’re… right, brother…

Thor [brows furrowing] : Loki ? Is something wrong? You don’t seem convinced.

Loki [waving his hand slightly] : Oh no, I… That’s really nothing’s big anyw- …

Thor [taking his hand in a comforting manner] : Nonsense! So, what is it brother?

Loki [avoiding Thor’s gaze] : It’s really nothing, it’s just that he…

Thor [now panicked] : Come on, lillebror, tell me!

Loki [nearly crying and pointing an accusing finger towards a perplex Doctor Strange] : H-He called me a m-monster!

Thor [roaring] : He what!?!

Stephen Strange [too but incredulous] : I what!?!

Loki [now almost crying] : A-And he menaced me with his fa-falling portals too!

Thor [fulminating] : Strange, how dare you?!

Stephen [holding his hand in surrender] : Thor, please, let me explain ! I’ve used those words, but it was not in this con- !

Thor [battle’s death mode : on] : Your magic won’t save you from the wrath of a god! Mine!!

 ~ If one of the other Avengers would have entered the room right now, he would have surely wondered why on Earth an ancient blond god was chasing after a mystic Art’s sorcerer with a hammer and all lightning’s effects, screaming “Get back here and face your fate, wizard!!” ~

 Loki [rising an eyebrow in expectation] : So… Does it mean I won?

Peter Parker [eyes glued to the scene] : Protect when the danger arises : checked.

Shuri : I still maintain that he putted the danger above the Doctor’s head…

Loki [grinning maniacally] : Double-win for me then.

[megacanadianwebhostingservi-blog]

Picking the Right Web Host: 10 Important Questions To Ask Your Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

Choosing a web host isn't hard, though sifting through the good and not-so-good options can be a head-twisting experience - especially if you're taking the plunge and building a web site or blog for the first time.

For example, FREE web hosting companies place ads on YOUR web site. That's how they make their money, and you've got no idea what ads will appear on your site. So, if you're a medical doctor looking to build trust among site visitors, an ad for a "weekend" dating service isn't going to make you shine. Avoid free hosts.

That means it's going to cost you something every month. You may have to pay a sign-up fee, a maintenance fee, and a bunch of other fees that nibble away at your margins. No, choosing a web host isn't rocket science but you should at least know what questions to ask.

Here they are.

1. How do I ask questions?

Whoa, good question right off the bat. You can't ask questions of a web host if there's no contact information, no help desk, no tech support. Some hosts manage client care via email and when your web site has disappeared and you're wondering about that 404 error message appearing on your computer screen, an e-mail response 28 hours after you e-mailed the host means you're effectively invisible for 28 hours.

And if your site is spidered when it's off line, you'll get slammed. SEOs (search engine optimizers) point to "Lack of accessibility to the site" as the number one negative ranking factor among search engines. Google isn't going to send visitors to an inaccessible site so you need a quick fix quick.

Make sure the web host displays a variety of means of contact - especially a toll-free telephone number. E-mails are fine for billing questions and other matters that aren't time sensitive. A down web site needs fixing now.

2. Where is customer care and tech support located.

Start here during your "interview" with prospective hosts. (See #1. If no telephone number is provided, you can't ask questions 2-10 so move on.)

First, you want customer care and tech support based in the U.S. A lot of web hosting companies outsource this task so you're talking to someone 12 time zones away trying to "figure out" where you web site went.

Tech support should be right down the hall from the server room so when a problem arises, someone can fix it fast.

3. What do I get with my web site?

You should get everything you need to build whatever kind of website you want and whatever kind of website is in the budget. Your web host should provide web site templates for beginners (use them if you're just starting out) to simple integration of a blog, a checkout, and the ability to hand code the site with a blank-slate option.

No tool kit, no bag of goodies, keep looking.

4. How much experience do you have?

Look for a company that has a long lineage on the web. Experience in handling a large client base, dozens of servers and running a collaborative business with clients. A college kid can rent server space and become a hosting reseller. So you think you're working with Bob's Hosting Company, when in fact, you site's on a server in the earthquake zone .

Oh, and when Bob graduates, he can just unplug his laptop and move on to greener pastures, leaving you trying to figure out where you web business went to.

5. What kind of server side security do you use?

Look for hard-wired fire walls, firewall software, anti-spyware and anti-virus protection on the server side. A reputable host has multiple layers of security so ask about security redundancy. Your host's rep will be proud to explain, assuming you're talking to a quality hosting company.

6. What happens when my web-business grows?

Well, for one thing, you start making money. But you may want to expand. Look for a flexible host with a flexible plan that allows you to expand incrementally as you add more products, more services, archives and other site features.

7. What if I hate it?

The W3 isn't for everyone, though there are more than 122 million web sites and 6,000 new launches every day. But you may find that it's too complicated, too unproductive or just too something.

Quality hosts don't want to lock you in to some long-term contract. They don't want unhappy clients, they want happy clients. So, a quality web host will offer a 30-day trial period so you can take your new web site out for a test drive. BTW, using templates, building and maintaining a web site is pretty automated and, therefore, simple and it doesn't take a lot of time.

But if a web site isn't your cup of tea, look for a host that offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee.

8. Can I register my domain through you?

Any hosting company is equipped to register a domain name - your URL or web address. But, if you register your domain with host B and then choose host A, you have to redirect your domain or migrate it to the new host. You get the idea.

Register your domain name with the hosting company that will rent you that disk space each month. Simplifies life on the web.

9. What can I learn from the host's web site?

A lot, if you read between the lines.

The web site identifies the hosts "brand" - its corporate culture. Some use funny logos and radical type fonts, targeting a "younger" demographic. Other hosts have a more professional appearance and take the time to explain its corporate values, i.e. commitment to client satisfaction, tech support, fair prices and good value. If you're serious about your web site, go with a host that is serious about hosting.

Everything from the company logo to the site text language defines the company brand. Which would you choose? The wild techno-geek or the clean design and quality information provided by a host with a different take on its own corporate culture.

10. Does the host employ green technology?

The web grows exponentially, expanding from business novelty to business necessity in just a few years. From the spare-room entrepreneur to multi-national conglomerates, a web presence is almost a requirement.

That means more energy consumption, expanded infrastructure and a lot of out-dated servers, loaded with toxins, ending up in our landfills, and it's a problem that will only expand.

Green hosting isn't some passing fad or some 60s hippie thing. It's the future of hosting. It has to be. So, look for a host that employs wind power to generate the juice to run the servers to host the web site - yours.

Look for water-cooled servers that use recycled water instead of energy gobbling blowers to cool off those racks of servers, one of which is where your website resides. Read more here best Canadian web Hosting Services in Canada.

[veryimportantsparkles]

Alright I’ve kept meaning to do sort of an infodump on my projects because I’ve been really slipping lately.  I dunno how obvious it is?  Probably kind of obvious.  I’ve also been really bad about checking messages and responding to people.  So I figure I can write up a status report and then point to it when I’ve been inadequate about communication.

My IRL job has been wiping me out.  I’ve been getting short, labor-intensive shifts in the evenings, and then random surprise morning shifts shortly after, which has been really hard to manage my time around.  My sleep schedule has been extremely broken and it’s affected my productivity a LOT.  Leadership in my department is about to shuffle around and I’ve been interviewed for the manager position.  If I get it I’ll be working an entirely different schedule, which could potentially be good for my sleepy brain but will definitely leave me with less art time overall.  I’ve also been enduring some back/shoulder issues over the past few months.  Nothing urgent, but it’s limiting how much I can draw each day.  I think replacing my desk chair is going to be a big factor but it’s not the only factor.  I just need to be a smart human and take care of my joints and not hunch over so much.  Working on it.

Here’s the current status of my various art projects:

Laserwing

I ended chapter 5 in June and said I would finish up some other side projects before I start concept work for chapter 6.  One of the projects I needed to finish was the Popkas Yugioh season 4 special, which I finished.  The other big one was my Neonmob card set, which is most of what I’ve been posting lately.  Once that’s out of the way (see below) I need to do concept art.  Chapter 6 will put all the Laserwing characters in new outfits which will need reference sheets.  I’ll need background sketches and layout diagrams so I don’t have furniture shuffle randomly around between scenes.  I also need to sketch out the chapter 6 draft page by page.  I’ve made Laserwing in GIMP up until this point and am going to try switching to Krita for chapter 6.  I might need to do a test page to make sure my process transfers over well into a slightly different system.  Once I’m ready to make real pages, those take a while.  Chapter 5 pages were going up maybe every 2-3 weeks.  I don’t know how many pages are going to be in chapter 6, nor can I say for sure how many chapters are in Laserwing.  An old outline had maybe 40 chapters.  It’s a story with a defined end point, I can say that for certain, but it’s intended to be long.

Popkas

I’ve had issues with Popkas for a while.  I keep picking new themes for dailies, thinking they’re going to be quick and easy, but then end up making them hard for myself.  It’s been to my benefit, I’ve forced myself into learning new art programs and techniques through Popkas.  But it’s hard to keep up the daily schedule.  Currently I’m doing the Paper Mario: TTYD bestiary, which has 124 enemies.  At a rate of one per day, by the time I’ve finished them, Pokemon Sword and Shield should be released and we’ll have all the info about the new Pokemon.  Those will be drawn in ‘Popka classic’ style (scribbly shitposts).  After those are finished, unless my IRL work situation dramatically changes, I’m considering putting Popkas on pause.  In order to do any other monster dexes I’d have to do a lot more research (for example, people have suggested Yokai Watch but I’ve never played one) in order to have anything meaningful to post.  Same deal with Popka Specials (the anime writeup things), those take prep time and anime-watching time that I might not have.  I don’t ever want to end Popkas, but a hiatus might be necessary.

Angelfire Hime

Did anyone even know about Angelfire Hime?  Well I want to post more but that involves finding, scanning, retouching, and transcribing my old high school scribble comics.  It takes as long as any other project but is also low priority because it’s all old content.  Nobody is waiting for the latest update because nobody but me actually knows what that content is, and possibly nobody but me can even read it.  It’s more a personal journey of self-reflection than anything.  I want to return to it but not at the expense of better work.

MeganFantastic dot com

I had a domain name linked to a tumblr that was supposed to be my news blog/front page and I barely use it.  Also, I let the domain registration drop.  Also, I had let a typo in my banner graphic go unnoticed for YEARS and still haven’t fixed it.  Even now, I’m writing this big post to my personal blog instead of the one for news.  The idea was to eventually buy some real hosting and make MeganFantastic a whole site of its own, but that’s a lot of work.  I’ve got a generally good idea of HOW I’d do it (probably wordpress) but I’m not a coder, it would take a lot of trial and error.  This would be a huge undertaking and eventually Laserwing, Popkas, and all my other junk would be contained on one big non-tumblr website.  But it’s uhhhhh not happening yet.

Hundera Youtube

My contribution to our LP channel is to show up, talk about video games, and then draw title cards.  All recording, editing, and channel management is maintained by Josh, and I can’t speak on his behalf about our update schedule.  I will say there are a lot of half-finished games we want to return to.  I will also say that when the new Pokemon comes out Josh is dead set on recording it.  I don’t know if he intends that to be a stream or a regular LP.  In the meantime he streams Minecraft with his friends every Sunday and we fit in our own streams and recordings when we can.

Commissions/Patron Art/etc

I’ve not been very good about this lately and I’m truly sorry!  I have a few things I’m working on, a few things I’ve promised to start working on, and a few things I’ve told people I can do once my workload lightens up, which hasn’t been happening yet.  I really don’t have an answer.  I almost never delete anything so if I’ve been sent a message in any form I should still have it, and I’ll be sure not to forget anyone.  And if I do forget someone feel free to throw rocks at me!

Rane Story 2

What the heck is Rane Story 2?  Well I guess I have to explain Neonmob.  Imagine if ChickenSmoothie and DeviantART had a baby.  It’s a virtual trading card site, which is fun and cute, and I’m drawing out a card series to release on there.  I’ve been using it as practice for painting backgrounds and to fill out some backstory for some 4th-string Laserwing support characters.  Before Mistaire came to Earth, she went to space high school, and that’s where Rane Story takes place.  You can preview the series, and when it’s finished I’ll post about it.  I’ll also repost all the art to DA.  If you scroll through the last several pages of this blog you’ll see some of the art.  I’ve put a lot of my brain energy into getting this done in spite of my work/sleep issues because I don’t want to resume Laserwing until I’ve finished it.  This is what’s stolen my life, guys.  Right now I have 6 more cards to make, and then I have to write and finalize all the text.  I should be done SOON.

Pokemon Nonsense

When my back and shoulder get too hurty and I have to take a break from drawing, one of the easy things to do is whip out a DS and play Pokemon.  I’ve done a lot of twitter shitposting about it lately.  I’ve also drawn up a bunch of gijinkas for my Pokemon.  I’m talking about it now because I also intend to draw up gijinkas for Pokemon to trade away.  I’ve already done a few.  However, I don’t know for sure how I’m going to distribute them.  The idea is people can trade actual Pokemon with me (in either X or Let’s Go Eevee) and the Pokemon they get will come with a character design for you to keep.  I was thinking I might do a discord server for organizing trades and such, but I haven’t yet.  Mostly because it’s low priority and I have SO many other things going on.  But actually playing Pokemon can happen when I’m too fatigued for real work, so the horde keeps growing.  Hopefully my posts and scribbles about it are entertaining.

I feel like there’s other projects on hold that I wanted to discuss, but right now I’m too braintired to remember, and some of my ‘projects’ never actually got talked about online so nobody’s waiting for an update.  My greatest problem seems to be that I try to juggle too many pointless side projects and then drop them all over the place.  Sometimes I’ll shitpost about an idea and even I won’t be sure if I was serious or not.  How do I end this post?  I don’t know.

tl;dr Megan is SLEEPY and dropped her spaghetti everywhere but somehow still has time to play POKEMON and WON’T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT

[savrenim]

Hi! I'm kinda having a hard time understanding the Green-Ostrogadski theorem/Divergence theorem and I'm wondering if you can help?

OH this is a lot of fun and by fun I mean an absolute nightmare, and it gets very long because trying to explain the bits of how to calculate it and then what the calculation of the parts means and how it fits in with physics/a geometric picture and then math as a whole, so let’s go under the cut.

So we’re going to go with this

as our formulation, same as Wikipedia does, and actually talk about what every bit of that specifically means and how to visualize it; “memorize it and then just do it” usually cuts it for getting through problems but knowing what it means helps with not writing the wrong thing down before taking a crack at the equation.

Let’s start with what is F? it’s some kind of vector field, it needs to be reasonably smooth enough so that you can differentiate it. It’s going to come, in the 3-D case, with an x (or maybe called i), y (j), and z (k) component: ie F(x,y,z)=f(x,y,z)x+g(x,y,z)y+h(x,y,z)z. The nabla/upside-down triangle is the divergence, which means you apply the x derivative to the x part, y derivative to the y part, and z derivative to the z part, and then add them together. So

$\nabla\cdot F(x,y,z)=d/dx f(x,y,z)+d/dy g(x,y,z)+d/dz h(x,y,z)$

(they are partial derivatives, so you hold all other variables as fixed as you take the derivative in the one you want to take, as ya do) and now you have something that F(x,y,z) used to be a function that produced a vector and now it’s something that produces a scalar and you can just integrate that sum like you’d normally integrate something in 3D. Usually this is stupidly easy to calculate and then it’s going to be pretty easy to integrate back.

V and dV are the boundary of the object and the volume (so probably given in dxdydz and then boundary values, or get getting told “it’s a ball” and then you probably want to do spherical coordinates so r^2sin(theta)dr dtheta dphi). But that’s the space you’re doing the integral over. That one should be provided pretty easily in terms of equations/bounds of x, y, and z. Volume integrals are easy to do, they’re just three integrals in three different variables. It becomes a surface integral over the boundary of the surface when you switch to the right side of the equation. dS can be pretty annoying to calculate if you’re not given it or if it’s not for something super simple like a sphere/square/rectangle and setting up the integral involves taking partial differentials of the equation of the surface and/or parametrizing and first of all you’re usually going from the surface integral to the volume integral and secondly I’m assuming you know how to do that because it takes a bit long to explain. (this is a fairly straightforward page that talks about it/ ask me about surface integrals if you want me to try to get into it?) But yeah, that’s usually why the divergence theorem is used to go from surface integral to volume integral because the volume integral is easier to do, UNLESS you’re using the 2D version in which case it’s *so* much easier to do a path integral because that’s just along a path, but then tbh you’re using Green’s Theorem and there’s a picture at the very bottom about infinitesimal squares canceling each other out that is just the picture of what’s happening. But we’re in 3D so we’re looking at surfaces and volumes.

So now we’ve got the left side and the concept of “so we’re going from volume to surface or surface to volume” and the question becomes why? The punch line of what is happening is “for well-behaved functions, everything that is happening inside the shape can be determined by what is happening on the boundary of the shape.” This is actually a really common theme in mathematics and it doesn’t come from nowhere – so many differential equations that people try to solve, like for example the heat equation, you are given boundary conditions only and those determine the behavior of the function over the entire domain. In fact, you’re usually given boundary conditions and the derivative of the function in the space and asked to come up with the function, that’s the setup of pretty much every initial value problem, and you can just….do that. Because when functions have derivatives they Behave In Predictable Ways. The entire field of ODE’s/PDE’s is about Doing That. But the Divergence Theorem in particular has a cool physics interpretation that specifically makes it easier to picture.

Alright let’s move on, what’s that n? The n is the unit normal vector to the surface. It’s pretty much the right angle going out, Wolfram Alpha has a really good picture:

We want it normalized (ie length 1) so that it doesn’t contribute any “noise” to the overall integral, after all, what we care about is the field F, and this is just defining a surface so you make sure that you’re looking at what happens with F over the right shape. The way that you calculate the normal vector is if you can write the surface as an equation s(x,y)=z, then N=[ds/dx, ds/dy, -1], and n=N/|N|. (and if you haven’t done vectors in a while, length of N=|N|=sqrt(N-dot-N)=sqrt((ds/dx)^2+(ds/dy)^2+1).) This is going to be useful because:

The dot product! The dot product is what answers the question of “how much are these two vectors going in the same direction”. [a, b, c] (dot) [x, y, z]=ax+by+cz – and note that this is just a number, you don’t have to care about components of vectors in a direction. It’s a scalar. Which is great because dotting [nabla] with F also gave us something scalar instead of vector-valued, so you can tell that the equation makes sense. 

We care about F dotted with the normal vector instead of just F integrated over the whole boundary because the only thing that actually matters at the boundary is what is happening in the same or opposite direction/if stuff is going in or out, not stuff going sideways. So by taking F[dot]n you’re just calculating what’s flowing in or out of the surface. Because n points out, it’ll be positive if F is also flowing out and negative if F is pointing in. 

Now that we know how to do absolutely everything on either side,

What does this mean re the physical picture? Well, it’s pretty much a conservation law. The easiest way to think of it is with fluid flow. Take your favorite fluid, water maybe, and picture it flowing a whole bunch. Make it as weird and turbulent as you want. Add sources (so throw some hoses in there) or sinks (so throw some drains in there.) The vector field F is the velocity – so speed and direction – of the fluid at any point. The divergence of F basically gives the strength of what’s going on (that’s just Newtonian, force = mass* acceleration, and acceleration is the derivative of velocity, which gives you an intuition about why the derivative of F matters). Your volume is any shape that you drop into the fluid. The Divergence Theorem basically says that it doesn’t matter what weird stuff or eddies or currents or sources or sinks are happening inside your shape, the only thing that matters to characterize what is going on is watching the velocity of the fluid on the boundary of your shape and that tells you everything you need to know. Which kind of makes sense, the stuff flowing in or out should tell you how much is entering or leaving from the inside. Or what direction and how fast it’s all going on the inside. And if it’s doing any weird stuff in forward and backward directions, that bit cancels out, there’s a net flow conservation. Your liquid has to move in a way that makes sense and the places where it appears or disappears are going to be accounted for by how much is going in or out of the boundary. You can also do the same thing with heat flow or electric current, but fluid is the easiest way to picture it. The divergence theorem is stating “fluid can’t appear or disappear for no reason, we can tell overall what’s going on, on average because integrals mean average, inside a shape and whether or not there are spots where fluid is draining or being inserted into the shape by looking at how much and in which direction it flows across the boundary of the shape.” It’s divergence/derivative/nabla for everything inside because of how velocity relates to acceleration, it’s dotted with the normal vector on the surface because that’s exactly measuring the flow inside or out. This is one of the few times where physics is a lot more elegant than math and tbh the physics explanation is the thing that should be listened to, and it’s just that the equations make sense for any differentiable fields F you stick in. That’s what’s really going on. The physics of fluid flow. Conservation of matter. 

There’s actually a larger mathematical context for the Divergence Theorem, and two other theorems that are usually taught, namely Green’s Theorem and Stokes’ Theorem. Green’s Theorem goes like:

and Stokes’ Theorem goes like:

That thing that you see on the right side is actually the generalized exterior derivative which kinda involves a thing called wedge product and is just overall a bitch. But it does work in pretty much the most general cases/now just in a bunch of dimensions and on manifolds. If you’re a physics student they will be explained via a drawing on a chalkboard one time that is of little lines circling and cancelling each other out (although for Green’s it’ll be 2D with the arrows circling the boundary), like this

as if that makes the “proof” of why only the boundary matters, and then Just Memorize Them And Use Them When You’re Told To For These Specific Physics Problems That Use Them. The Divergence Theorem is then just a special case of Stokes’ Theorem. (Actually so is Green’s Theorem, but Green’s Theorem is used often enough that it’s usually memorized/explained separately. Also Green’s Theorem comes up independently in Complex Analysis in a way that the others don’t.) The cool thing about Stokes’ Theorem is basically it can be used in any dimension/topology, as long as certain smoothness conditions are satisfied, so it’s nice and general. But those are the other two versions of the theorem that come up a bunch.

There are a lot of really good examples of working through the divergence theorem both ways here: http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~nega0024/docs/2263_S14/GaussExamples.pdf and I would highly recommend just reading through them? They’re great, straightforward, and give you a sense of getting used to the calculations.

Khan Academy also has some pretty solid resources of a video of a person doing problems/examples with it here, if watching a thing helps: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/multivariable-calculus/greens-theorem-and-stokes-theorem/divergence-theorem/v/3-d-divergence-theorem-intuition covers it pretty thoroughly. They do a nice drawing on their little video chalkboard describing the whole fluid flow thing.

Lemme know whether or not that makes sense? It’s A Lot, and I’m more than happy to go into different/more detail.

[geopolicraticus]

The Limits of Interdisciplinarity

Why do we have many sciences instead of one science? Why is not science more robustly interdisciplinary? These are a deceptively simple questions that are difficult to answer, as the answer takes us into regions of thought that rarely receive explicit exposition. I am going to approach these questions by way of a circuitous detour through the popularization of specialized knowledge.

Will Durant, who made himself independently wealthy from the success of his book The Story of Philosophy (which good fortune he paid forward by subsequently writing The Story of Civilization), wrote of his experience as a popularizer of philosophy in the Preface to the second edition of The Story of Philosophy:  

“The appetite of the layman grew by what it fed on. There were in America millions of men and women who had been unable to go to college, and who thirsted for the findings of history and science; even those who had gone through college showed a moderate hunger for knowledge… Then came the flood. Outline followed outline, ‘story’ followed ‘story’; science and art, religion and law, had their stenographers…”

Durant concluded, however:

“The public appetite was quickly satiated; critics and professors complained of superficiality and haste, and an undertow of resentment set in, which reached every outline from the last to the first. As quickly as it had come, the fashion changed; no one dared any longer say a word for the humanization of knowledge; the denunciation of outlines was now the easy road to critical repute; it became the style to speak with a delicate superiority of any non-fiction book that could be understood. The snob movement in literature began.”

While it is no longer the interpretation of philosophy for the general public that produces literary sensations, the task of interpreting increasingly subtle and complex scientific theories to the public now occasionally produces best sellers, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. While I do not myself consider A Brief History of Time to be a successful interpretation of science to the general public—Hawking made a lot of assertions without making much of an attempt to explain or clarify the ideas he asserted (and, yes, I read the book)—no one can dispute its literary success.

Science communications (which was once known as popularization, but I can understand why “communications” is preferred before “popularization”), when successful, plays an underappreciated role in providing an exposition of the underlying intuitions that form the background of a scientific discipline. Thus while popularizers are sometimes looked down upon, as Durant noted, they are doing something that many who make use of these underlying intuitions in advanced theoretical work cannot do themselves. 

For example, Brian Greene in his The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (pp. 291-292), has done a remarkable job of elucidating the different intuitive motivations that underlie physics and cosmology in his exposition of the flatness problem in cosmology: 

“By no means does the flatness problem show that the standard big bang model is wrong. A staunch believer reacts to the flatness problem with a shrug of the shoulders and the curt reply ‘That’s just how it was back then,’ taking the finely tuned matter/energy density of the early universe—which the standard big bang requires to yield predictions that are in the same ballpark as observations—as an unexplained given. But this answer makes most physicists recoil. Physicists feel that a theory is grossly unnatural if its success hinges on extremely precise tunings of features for which we lack a fundamental explanation. Without supplying a reason for why the matter/energy density of the early universe would have been so finely tuned to an acceptable value, many physicists have found the standard big bang model highly contrived. Thus, the flatness problem highlights the extreme sensitivity of the standard big bang model to conditions in the remote past of which we know very little; it shows how the theory must assume the universe was just so, in order to work.”

“By contrast, physicists long for theories whose predictions are insensitive to unknown quantities such as how things were a long time ago. Such theories feel robust and natural because their predictions don’t depend delicately on details that are hard, or perhaps even impossible, to determine directly. This is the kind of theory provided by inflationary cosmology, and its solution to the flatness problem illustrates why.”

Physics and cosmology, while both obviously natural sciences, are distinct natural sciences, and one of the things that distinguishes different disciplines of the natural sciences is the underlying intuitions that each makes use of, one part of the underlying intuition is the nature and degree of scientific abstraction that enters into the thought of each discipline. It is because of these distinct intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction that the cosmologist can shrug his shoulders at an observation that makes physicists recoil.

The particular kind of scientific abstraction of which physicists make use looks for isolatable systems that can be reduced to a mechanism. Physicists can be perfectly happy with laws of nature that work as well with time going backward as with time going forward, and think nothing is amiss in this, because these laws of nature are robustly testable (at least, testable in time as we know it, exclusively flowing forward) and can be isolated from the flow of history and elaborated in this idealized way. Physics is about finding mechanisms that work regardless of context.

Cosmology, like biology and geology, is essentially an historical science, and, as an historical science it is not so much looking for the kind of laws of nature that physics likes to find as it is looking for the exact sequence of development that brought us to where we are today. Historical sciences give meaning to their domain of knowledge by contextualizing that knowledge in larger structures, and so isolated, idealized mechanisms play a much smaller role in cosmology than they do in physics (though they are certainly not absent in physics). 

Cosmologists, of course, have their own forms of abstraction. They may not think to tell you that, for a cosmologist, the basic building blocks of the universe are galaxies, so when a cosmologists tells you that the universe is expanding in all directions, they sometimes have to answer questions like, “If the universe is expanding, does that mean we are getting bigger?” or, “If the universe is expanding, are the stars in the Milky Way moving farther apart?” These are perfectly legitimate questions for a common sense view of the universe when told that the universe is expanding in all directions. We want to know exactly what is expanding and how it is expanding. But since the cosmologist is accustomed to his particular level of scientific abstraction at which entities less than galaxies don’t play much of a part, addressing these qualifications will be an afterthought.

There is a contemporary discipline known as astrophysics that synthesizes some of the intuitions and methods of physics and cosmology, as well as touching on concerns of astronomy, but it is significant that a new specialization of astrophysics appeared to address the need that was felt, because this is how the western sciences have approached the elaboration of knowledge. Each particular domain of knowledge has its own specialization, and the expansion of knowledge that makes us aware of previously unsuspected problems produces new domains of knowledge in the attempt to address these problems. 

Astrophysics cultivates its own intuitions and its own forms of scientific abstraction that make the discipline function in its distinctive way. Indeed, these intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction more-or-less define the discipline, even if those who are working in the discipline cannot explain exactly what it is that they are doing, and must wait for a science communications specialist to come along and explain in ordinary language what the astrophysicists are doing. For science communications itself has its own intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction of which the other science specializations are innocent.

Brian Greene, obviously, is a physicist with a talent for science communications, and is capable of holding both physics and science communications in his mind at the same time, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous remark, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Despite the imperative of epistemic wholeness that we all feel (totality of knowledge achieved by a single method), and which is at the root of calls for interdisciplinary research, most interdisciplinary research ends up producing a new specialization, because we make progress in scientific knowledge by focusing on a particular area of knowledge, and this means masking the rest of the world from view in an act of scientific abstraction, so that the specialist’s view of the objects of his inquiry is uncompromised by irrelevant and distracting detail.

This irrelevant and distracting detail—what William James called, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”—is what characterizes lived experience, and it is at this point that we can understand the point at which lived experience diverges from scientific knowledge. Lived experience is a blooming, buzzing confusion, and while we filter this confusion in order to make sense of it, and focus on things that interest us, the blooming, buzzing confusion is never far. In science and the production of scientific knowledge, the blooming, buzzing confusion is rigorously excluded by protocols of experimentation and scientific method that narrow the scope of experience to the value of an observed dependent variable.   

The literary genre we know as the novel is an evocation of lived experience, and we have much to learn from novels, but a novel is not an exposition of scientific knowledge. Literature is not going to give us the proper value for the Hubble constant; only science can focus on that question in a way that will produce an answer. A novel that described the drama of scientific discovery in the work of scientists converging on the Hubble constant would present a picture of the human side of doing science, and would help us to better understand the social context in which science is done—the lived experience of scientific researchers, at it were—and it might even illuminate the conclusions of researchers, but it would not arrogate to itself the role of arriving at the answers to the problems that science studies.

Science, on the other hand, is not going to give us the lived experience of researchers, but only scientific knowledge and a description of the meticulous process of arriving at this knowledge. This exclusion of lived experience can go so far as to obscure or even conceal the intuitions that underlie scientific research and discovery, and this is related to the problem that there is no science of science (on which cf. Theory Development in Science is Unscientific). That is to say, there is no systematic and methodical way to teach the intuitions and forms of scientific abstractions employed in science. The most one can do is to be a Socratic midwife to science, exposing someone to the procedures of scientific method in the hopes that they “get” it and are able to continue on their own. 

It is often difficult, in reading scientific papers, to try to extract the plain, intuitive meaning behind the many circuitous and apparently oblique assertions contained therein. Scientists deeply invested in the forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that characterize their particular discipline cannot easily step back and view these intuitions with the same objectivity with which they view their data. With these barriers to understanding the intuitions that underlie science, it is no surprise that we do not possess a fine-grained account of the various kinds of intuition and scientific abstraction employed by the special sciences. But this is what we need in order to make sense of what we are doing in the growing enterprise of scientific knowledge, which is the engine that drives technological civilization forward. 

The very least we can say in the light of the above considerations is that the problem of disciplinary silos is misconceived; researchers do not isolate themselves within disciplinary silos out of any sense of protecting their turf, or as part of a battle to attain status within a restricted domain, or to deny knowledge of the uninitiated and the Great Unwashed. Scientists are isolated within disciplinary silos because they have trained themselves into seeing the world through the filter of particular forms of intuition and particular kinds of scientific abstraction that are not employed, do not obtain, or are not relevant in the same way within other disciplines. One can blunder around other disciplines without a grasp of the relevant intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction, and everyone once in a while one will make an important connection that the specialists miss, but one will almost certainly never make a contribution to the advancement of the discipline itself. In all likelihood, if one does make an advantageous connection, this insight will then become the basis of a new specialization that will make progress to the extent that individuals converge upon novel forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that best serve this new discipline.

The specificity of disciplinary intuitions and distinctive forms of scientific abstraction define the limits of interdisciplinarity and the attempt to get the sciences to work together to the one, single end of expanding scientific knowledge, and thus this also explains why there are many sciences instead of one, single science. However, these many sciences accomplish the work of expanding scientific knowledge, though that knowledge is often highly specialized and must be interpreted in order to find its place within human life as knowledge that makes a difference in navigating the obstacles of an indifferent world.

Some time ago in a post I asked—Is it possible to specialize in the big picture?—and I think the above demonstrates how this question is more relevant than ever. We require stand-alone “big picture” disciplines with their own special kinds of intuition and their distinctive forms of scientific abstraction that can bring together the synthesis of scientific knowledge that is missing from the specialized disciplines. We should not expect that big picture disciplines—and there may eventually come to be many of them, as should be expected in light of the above reflections—will simply be an eclectic gathering of specialized scientific knowledge, but each will be a discipline in its own right, that makes use of the knowledge of the specialized sciences in its own distinctive way. We shouldn’t resist this movement of thought, but rather we should let a hundred flowers bloom.