#i need to know the equivalents for fire and earth. this has been plaguing me for the last three days.

[goatunderthebridge]

Tendou scrolling through the notes app on Ushijima's phone out of pure boredom and slight interest, realising just how strangely uniform his notes are (e.g., shopping list, things to remember, birthdays - all kept in titled, self-contained notes) until he stumbles across an unnamed note written at 2AM thats just:

"air mattress. water bed. fire [???]. earth [???]."

And Tendou simulatenouesly loses his shit and understands again why he loves him.

[period-dramallama]

Spanish Princess Episode 5: many many thoughts

Strap yo selves in 

-WHERE WAS THE APOLOGY?? Lina’s just back with Catherine like nothing happened?? 

-Katherine, I get why you’re upset, but you kind of should be unsurprised?? Your dad was unfaithful to his wife, most kings were. Henry VII and Richard III were the exceptions, and even they had illegitimate sons before their marriages. Many kings also had official mistresses that everyone knew about, so by the standards of the time Henry and Bessie are actually being pretty tactful in at least trying to keep their affair out of sight. (Sexy dancing aside). 

-Honestly it would have been so much more moving if KoA was like “I know kings take mistresses...but I thought...I was so sure... he would be different...”

-”they gave me a purse of gold!” It’s expected that you give the monarch lavish presents, lmao Ursula and Stafford would do that even if they hated each other and you

-”everybody loves a masque” the only sensible thing Henry has said so far in this show. Also court probably had way more masques than we see in the show, and it would standard to have a masque every holiday. 

-”she is not a boy” hurry up with your character development and learn to love Mary already i am so TIRED of this miserable BS

-seems a rather depopulated masque? If the Chateau Vert pageant is anything to go by putting on a masque was a court activity, with most of the ladies performing.  

-Bessie Blount in her cute masque costume... sweet mother i cannot weave Aphrodite has overcome me with GAAAAAAAAAAAAY

-”I never enjoyed carousing...my mother scolded me” look i love the Neville sisters with my whole heart but a) Margaret was 3 at most when her mother died, how does she remember her? She’d have clearer memories of her double-uncle and double-aunt, Richard III and Queen Anne b) Isabel Neville in the White Queen was established as very prim and proper, a well-bred girl who cared about enforcing decorum, she refused to ‘carouse’ and she certainly would never bring a 3 year old to a party c) we saw little Margaret as a girl at the end of the White Queen and she didn’t seem at all shy. 

-”she died young, didn’t she” ...yes? most people did?

-”they both did” understatement of the year. Isabel Neville died young because she was ill, George died young (in the universe of The White Queen, at least) BECAUSE HE WAS FORCEFULLY DROWNED IN A VAT OF MALMSEY WINE. THESE TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME! I do at least trust the writers of this show that the understatement was intentional, I’m sure even Emma Frost couldn’t forget a major character getting violently drowned.

-So the court only noticed the plague when one of their own got it so obviously and then died? Yes, plague could move fast, but if there was a whiff of plague the court would flee with the speed of the Looney Tunes road runner. If an acquaintance of an acquaintance of a cook had a cousin who saw someone with the plague, the court would flee to the country. How have these people not died of terminal stupid?! Like Compton was in the same building as the heir to the throne

-To be fair, it makes sense that they’re surprised Compton’s dead. Because the real Compton died of the sweating sickness. In 1528. Also he was involved in Buckingham’s downfall so... you just wrote yourself into a corner.

-Oh wow an actual good reason for More and Pole to be quarantined together i am amaaaaaazed

-”attend the queen” Boleyn, what do you think your daughter’s been doing all season if not attending the queen? Playing tetris?

-Katherine helping Anne into the wagon...I actually like that little moment. Like it does make sense, because the two have no reason to hate each other yet. (And who couldn’t like Anne? She’s such a babby!)

-Thomas More in the Tudor equivalent of casual clothes... much better. Shame about the 1930s lady’s wig.

-”what else should we do?” Maggie, this cannot be the first epidemic you’ve ever lived through. Have you forgotten the sweating sickness of 1485? You’ve probably lived through more epidemics than Oviedo has, you should know the protocol better than him.

-Oviedo continues to be the only man with rights. I wish we could see him crying and missing his wife and babies, but then my lil heart would break so maybe it’s for the best.

-They burn Maggie’s weird blue hood AS THEY SHOULD! IT WAS UGLY AND STUPID! I NEVER HAVE TO LOOK AT IT AGAIN NOW! THANK YOU SO MUCH! yes they also burned her nice dress with the strawberries on it but honestly it’s worth it, bc now i can rest easy, knowing the evil hood has been defeated.

-”you were a plaything” Katherine is so obviously insecure. I’m getting second-hand embarrassment. Like if she really was certain Bessie wasn’t important, she wouldn’t need to say it, would she? Except to rub it in. Which this KOA would absolutely do. 

-literally all Bessie said was good morning?? Like Bessie is doing her best?? The masque was Henry’s idea, not hers, she hasn’t shown off about her affair, she hasn’t demanded money or titles, she hasn’t demanded any status to rival Katherine’s, she doesn’t flirt with or even speak to Henry when Katherine’s around, she acts like they’re strangers, she doesn’t even react when Katherine loses her temper...someone please please stick up for Bessie!

-”the rocking of the cart is unsettling to the stomach” is Anne naive, or is she covering for Bessie? I hope it’s the latter, in which case Anne is the one person looking out for Bessie...the babby is Soft, I repeat the babby is Soft!

-the irony of Mary being cold to Bessie when she’s next in the firing line...

-”it is not the rocking” Thank you Lina, where would we be without your gift for stating the obvious?

-”where did Wolsey get his money”...He’s a churchman...at the top of the church hierarchy...how do you fuckin think he got wealthy. Have y’all not been in the sixteenth century for five minutes? Why do you think Luther is so mad at the church?

-”I know of no other man in her bed most nights” Honestly wow I’m surprised KoA wasn’t like “well :/ a girl like that :/ who knows how many men process in and out of her bed :/” KoA gets half a point for being less bitchy than usual. Also Bessie looked so uncomfortable with Henry groping her stomach in front of Katherine. I pray the next man in her life treats her right and that Fraham don’t prematurely kill her off like they did with Compton.  

-”the future king” if you’re regent on his behalf, then he’s already king! “Civilised companionship” back at it again with the Scots-are-barbarians.

-Laura Carmichael is utterly stunning this episode, with her hair down. The cinematography was beautiful in general this week.

-”freedom to speak and licence to speak are two different things” hey look at that one of Thomas More’s actual beliefs. I am giving all the credit to the historical advisor for that, I don’t believe for one second Fraham knew that beforehand.

-Maggie I love you but no, God does not sanction adultery. For any reason. 

-KOA smirking and gloating about Bessie’s pain...she has never been so punchable. I would understand, if not condone it, if Bessie was manipulative, or greedy, or ambitious, or trying to supplant Katherine. But Bessie’s been betrayed by Henry too, and there’s no concrete evidence she ever gloated about her affair, to anyone let alone Katherine.  

-”You think only of your own fate while London is struck down with plague” Earth to Katherine?? What concern have you shown for the Londoners?? Also calling Bessie selfish...Bessie’s not the one who lashed out at Lina, was jealous at Lina for having twin boys, and who wanted to continue a war for personal reasons. And then Bessie proves KoA wrong 5 hot seconds later by sticking up for Mary. Bit rich of KoA to be all “how dare you leave my daughter unattended” when she herself won’t even hold Mary. 

-”Louis didn’t last a year” What! Is! The Timeline!

-Meg in that cloak reminds me of the Scottish Widow adverts. Georgie is so greedy- she steals every single scene she is in! Even when she’s raging she has more dignity and more presence than KoA ever has.

-”YOU LYING SOD” i burst out laughing it’s really not the little two-timing shit’s day, is it?

-Mary receiving Charlie B in the most Extra way possible. A++

-Why does Wolsey look like he’s about to cry?

-”thoughts are not actions” Lina I love you but... that is NOT what the New Testament says. Jesus said evil thoughts are very very much sins. I’ll give you a pass because maybe you haven’t been Catholic as long as Katherine has? Idk your backstory.

-Aaand now she’s wishing death on Bessie and her unborn baby and Lina isn’t disgusted? At least Katherine is feeling guilty. AS SHE SHOULD.

-”must it always fall to me to be magnanimous?” Katherine, you think only of yourself, for 23 out of every 24 hours. 

-”God wants me to be compassionate to Bessie because of my sins” God wants you to be compassionate because that’s how Christianity is supposed to work. It’s not very selfless of you to decide to be selfless so that you can get what you want. 

-oh wow look at that! She’s getting some self-awareness, i never saw that coming.

-”you betrayed Bessie” 5 points to Katherine of Aragon for standing up for Bessie when Henry screwed her over. Finally, some positive character development.

- MINUS 20000 POINTS FOR BABY STEALING

-WHAT THE FUCK

-is henry so dumb he thinks that baby is Katherine’s? Katherine was so obviously not pregnant

-When a baby’s born his skin needs to touch his mother’s skin so they can bond. They should have at least an hour’s cuddle time. Katherine of Aragon is literally traumatising a baby the very minute he is born. For her own selfish, selfish desires. 

[thecagedsong]

Cool, so one of my fandoms is having a really bad day, and since I care about Fablehaven until this monster of a fanfic gets finished, how about some wholesome meta? I don’t really care what the drama was about, so don’t tell me. We’re all a little high strung, and I tend to take disagreements personally in a way that I’m working on, and don’t need to be involved in. 

Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, who wants to talk about the Five crowns? Because I had a 14 hour car ride yesterday, listening to the second half of Evening Star and Shadow Plague, and I am so ready to let you all in on the code I cracked. I found the unifying magic diagram of the Fablehaven verse. The key to ultimate satisfaction, and if there was a magic research journal in universe, I would post this in and win the Top Magic Nerd of this Century award.  My goal is to make this as accepted canon as possible, because I am ridiculously right. No characters involved, so no drama except of the scolastic kind, relying on heavy references to canon. 

Ready? 

SO, I made a pretty big claim. But I’ve been toying with this theory since before Dragonwatch three came out. I need some reviews before I inform Brand Mull that I’ve cracked his secret and won the game. If this symbol isn’t on the spine of the Journal of Secrets, what is even the point. 

A good symbol does three things: identifies the pieces you are dealing with, helps the viewer reach a new understanding about the pieces, and map onto the cultural understandings of the audience. aka a cross with four quadrants of airplane, mitochondria, love, and toe nails is a terrible symbol. See common memes for usually pretty good symbols and graphs. 

So you got five crowns right? That means you have a pentagon and a five pointed star, and the biggest trick was figuring out where each crown went, and how they related to each other. 

Examine five-part belief systems, see where the crowns match, unifying symbol explains everything, move on. Easy.

NO.

You wanna know why?

BECAUSE FIVE POINTED STARS AS SYMBOLS ARE MORE WORTHLESS THAN AAA BATTERIES FOR WATCHING TELEVISION

Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, obviously they are very useful for things like organizing systems within a single body. Who functions as the head, the shield arm, the pivot foot, etc. But the point of that diagram is that they are equally important and dependent to every other part. Which doesn’t work when the different groups keep trying to break each other’s kneecaps (see b5: fairies v demons).

It also falls apart on the five-piece cultural scale. The most well-known 5-piece cultural scale is obviously the chinese elements: Fire Wood Water Metal Earth.

Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on those at all. But it all broke down on fire, TBH. Were dragons fire? But a large point was that their breath weapons weren’t always fire. Were demons fire? Even the ones covered in sludge. Were demons earth? Was the underking earth? All I got were fairies as water, in the end. If someone wants to give that a go, be my guest. 

I drew so many pentagrams trying to figure it out, and it never worked. No matter the arrangement, it never told me more about the crowns except that there were five of them. I was about to despair. 

But then the muses sang: The Forgotten Crown. 

(That’s the title of my thesis, btw)

Like I said, five pointed stars were trash for this system, but what if I added another crown, one that no one bothers to count, because by their nature, they can’t do anything. That’s right:

The Forgotten Crown of the Fair Folk. 

The symbol slipped into place like sharp pointy things into Warren. And now I can get to the real meta after sharing this image:

Isn’t it beautiful? After I cracked this code, I showed it to my little sister. She smiled contentedly, calling it satisfying. It is so satisfying. It speaks to so many levels of understanding. 

First, I depicted for you, we have the morality and the terrain triangles. 

Morality triangle is the easiest, if you feel uncomfortable labeling drown-happy naiads as good and all demons as evil, congrats, thinking about the nature of good and evil is precisely what Mull was going for. Since I am suddenly one of those people, I’m going to be using the creation/destruction dichotomy, but acknowledge that both of those work. 

Fairies can be most easily understood when Kendra asked the Fairy Queen what she should do with her life. She’s an unlimited fount of the Fairy Queen’s own power, allowed to do whatever she wants, and the Fairy Queen tells her to nurture life. Be fruitful, put good things in the world, help people grow. Their goal is to create, their magic is defensive, beauty is wonderful for its own sake. The better you are at respecting and nurturing life, the stronger your magic is. Dryads are responsible for the whole forest, and throughout the series they are seen as more powerful and serious than fairies, which can make the plants they interact with grow and hamadryads, who are connected only to their tree. Certainly more powerful than the petty, waterbound naiads. 

Ganalus’s speech to Seth about his own nature is where you can understand demons in this world. They like to destroy and torture, they find amusement in things like plague and clipping live beings to their belts and dragging them around. They are driven by the need for more power and control. Their nature is to harm and break apart, and that has its place in this world, but we care about the stuff and people here, so mortals and fairies have got to keep these punks in check.

And of course, the Fair Folk. Here’s where this triangle gets fun. The worst of the worst gets to be Demon King, the best of the best get stronger fairy powers. That means the most neutral of the neutral get to be the leader of the Fair Folk. We’ve heard references to the main city of the Fair Folk: Selona, somewhere in Europe, and a mysterious exert that I’ve seen images of with Lord Dagrel that I’m trying to pin down. I’m posing that their powers come from being neutral. They talk about the terrible consequences of the last time they went to war, what if it the equivalent of their fallen state, when they break their neutrality, and changes them fundamentally. 

This breaks down the most, but they are the Forgotten Crown for a reason. They hold themselves apart from issues of the other crowns. No one even remembers that they have a crown, because as Seth and Celebrant have shown, who cares? They aren’t going to do anything about it. Everyone collectively forgot/don’t care about them. But their abilities are equal in strength to the others, but different in use, and less valued by those who have battles to fight. Their neutrality puts them exactly between good and evil, creation and destruction. They take the choice not to act, and there is power there too. 

Next is the Terrain Creatures. 

Sky giants control the sky, obviously. Thronis and his ability to control the weather, their height, while their feet are on the ground, far as we know, everything important happens in the sky. 

Underking gets under the ground, again, obvious. Different from the other two points of the terrain triangle in that there is a lot of creature classifactions in their domain, but think of how big the surface of the earth is, underneath it, all theirs. 

Dragons, they dwell in the sky and below the surface, putting them in both. Water dragons and Dromadus both primarily function beneath the surface, and their wings let them be in the sky. while not stronger necessarily than the other terrain crowns in their own domains, they are top of the food chain for the creatures living on the ground, and could probably take out the undead that venture near the surface, and I have high hopes for seeing a Sky Giant v Dragon in the next book. 

Cool, we got our organization of information. We learn something about them based on their placements within the triangles. But is that our symbol? No! Symbols are different than graphs, we should be able to squeeze ridiculous amounts of meaning from them, and we aren’t done yet. The two triangles map really, really well together.

What does the placement of the two triangles together tell us about the individual components?

a WHOLE TON. This is what makes this symbol the most satisfying, the triangles create two separate categorizations of their powers and abilities, but they inform each other. The morality of the terrain beings, and the domains of morality beings. 

Dragons run the whole spectrum from creation to destruction. We see a lot more of the destruction dragons, because our kids are in a war, but Raxtus hits really close to the Fairies and can heal and grow with his breath weapon. We also have wizards, who chose mortality for the ability to use magic to create. All the way to effing Navarog, honorary demon. They run every shade of the creation/destruction spectrum. We also see dragons that don’t depend on destruction because we know that there are some that agreed to behave if it meant they weren’t shoved into sanctuaries. 

Sky giants, the group we know the least about, are good enough that their queen was deemed able to be the caretaker of a dragon sanctuary, so no inherent thirst for destruction and chaos. But they run the neutral side of creation, they weren’t going to step in to stop the demons, they like magic and creating from what we know of thronis, but they fit right here. 

Underking - fall between neutral destruction. The underking wasn’t orchestrating the opening of the demon prison. They crave life, its a food source, but more than that, they want to endure. They might fall closer to demons in their taste for extinguishing life, but they need their wanting of life to continue existing. They might have individual prizes and desires for life, but because they depend on wanting life for their own continued existence, they will never organize themselves into taking over the world. Congrats, you’re only half as destructive as demons.

The morality on the terrain is much easier to see blatantly. Fairies have wings, but in no way do they control the sky, and they live on the ground. Demons...I’m sure some of them fly, but they tend to prefer caves like Granulas and pits like Jubaya and Kurisok. Prefer the night, though the light doesn’t harm them. Fittingly, the Fair Folk do not have the ability to fly on their own, and they live on the ground, not under it. 

sO SATISFying how those fit together. Are you weeping yet? This is harmony on the organizational level. 

But I claimed this was the perfect symbol, the ultimate. There is one more layer describing how every piece relates to every other piece, per the best symbols. 

Opposites

This is the least defined level of interaction, and each line is unique, while still being opposite its counterpart. We’ll start with the ones we have the least information about and go from there. 

Demon/sky giant: We know nothing, at the moment. They have never commented on each other, and have never interacted. Why didn’t sky giants show up to the Zzyzx party? Who knows! So I’m going to speculate here, and propose that they just really can’t stand each other’s presence. Demons stay away from sky giants, because giants are way bigger than them, and it is hard to feel powerful when you only come up to their knee, and sky giants don’t like demons because...eww, demons. 

Fair Folk/Dragon: We know that there are Fair Folk at all seven dragon sanctuaries. We know that the Fair Folk were there long before the sanctuaries were created. Fair Folk neutrality let both parties trust the dragons to part of their watch. It also seems that Dragons have a very difficult time staying neutral. We’ve seen a lot of flavors of dragon, but the one flavor we haven’t seen, possibly by its nature, is a neutral dragon. The closest we came was Dromadus, who was an abstaining pacifist for two books, but kept lending help to the innocent and those aligned with the innocent. His neutrality broke literally the week someone asked him to break it.

 Fascinatingly, the talents of the Fair Folk are actually the closest analog to the breath weapons of the dragons. One unique ability, can be augmented by training, can do something unique to the characteristics of the user. This is enough to make their uses of magic foils for each other in ways that they can’t be with the other races. In fact, they take human shape, their wizards act a lot like the talents of the Fair Folk.

Their final opposite string: physical appearance. Fair Folk are attractive (symetrical) humans. Dragons are hulking reptiles of scale and claw meant to let everyone who can see them know who is the top predator around. Fair folk are disarmingly beautiful. 

Fairy/Underking: The dichotomy that we know the most about because it’s the one the protagonists find themselves on opposite side of. I could double the length of this post talking about these opposite foils, but this is already ridiculously long, so I’ll keep it brief. Consult upcoming thesis for full analysis.

Most obvious aspect of this line? They literally cannot co-exist, one must overpower the other. Nova Songs are consumed by darkness, while crown-fueled Kendra literally turns the undead into bones and dust. The darkness and light can’t balance like the demon cursed area + Fairy shrine stone did in Shadow Plague, there is no middle ground.

While fairies and demons make the creation-destruction spectrum, Fairy and Underking make the Life-death line. Unicorns, who have so much life and youth that lectoblixes overdose to death on them, and the undead that give up the joys light and live to continue. Because Death lasts as long as life. 

And finally my favorite line of opposites, their crowns functions in exactly the opposite ways. The under-crown does not share power. It accumulates, you become one of consciousness of the crown. They swallow you up, and you will never take power from them. They will continue. Meanwhile the Fairy crown has had several owners, as identified by Risenmay in dw2. And the Fairy Crown shares magic in a way that the other crowns don’t. The fairy Queen shared her magic with Kendra, yes, but she also shared it with her husband. All the male fairies fell with the Fairy King, turning permanently into imps. Unless the Fairy Queen isn’t being honest about how that happened, that meant that the male half of the kingdom was under the authority of her husband when he fell. Which makes sense for this crown. One person can’t make a new person on their own, they have to have a male and a female genetic coding. For the crown that is all about creating and preserving life, that power isn’t meant to be wielded alone. The Fairy crown can share, can give, while the Undercrown can consume and take. They are complete opposites in this.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading through this preliminary thesis. Counterpoints, additions, and commentary are welcome. I want to flesh this out a little more before sending my transcendent, beautiful, unifying symbol to Mull and have him announce that I have officially cracked the code. Really tho, the fact that I can pull this together into a unifying symbol is pretty cool in terms of Mull’s worldbuilding. 

Well...only works if he acknowledges the forgotten crown. Dragonwatch 5: the Crown of Selona. I can’t wait. 

[gduncan969]

God’s Green New Deal

Nehemiah 9:6  You alone are the Lord; You have made heaven, The heaven of heavens, with all their host, The earth and everything on it, The seas and all that is in them, And You preserve them all..

If there’s one thing that has coalesced into a multinational global crusade these past few decades it’s the environmental movement which has grown from its early roots in the 1960's to become a major concern of people, governments and news media across the globe.  We are hearing a lot  about the “Green New Deal” with its dire warnings of global disaster and urgent pleas that if we don’t fix things, we are all doomed.   Indeed, according to many, we may already be too late!  The devastation mother nature has suffered at the hands of her greedy children whose insatiable appetite for more and more “stuff” is destroying the planet, will require trillions of $ being spent to clean up the mess before we can return to some semblance of the pristine purity mother nature enjoyed before we humans started multiplying across the planet and fouling the nest she provided us to live in.  That seems to be the view of most environmentalists and unfortunately many Christians have swallowed the lie.  Yes, the lie!  Firstly, there is no “mother nature” and she has provided nothing for us to live in because it has never belonged to her and still doesn’t.  How arrogant must we be to think that mere men (and that’s a biblical term that includes women) can seize control of and change what has always belonged to God who reassures us He will look after it.  His promises are true and when He promised to “preserve them all” he didn’t add any conditions such as “provided man doesn’t foul up My plans”.  In several places He reminds us who owns it all (Psalm 50:10, 11) “For every beast of the forest is Mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the mountains, And the wild beasts of the field are Mine.”  He is not about to sit back and let us mere mortals destroy His creation.  In Genesis 1:28 He gave humanity the mandate to:

∙ Be fruitful and multiply; ∙ fill the earth and subdue it; ∙ have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

With roughly seven and a half billion of us now living on earth, we have certainly been fruitful and multiplied.  We now occupy every corner of the globe with the exception of Antarctica and perhaps Canada where most of the country, stretching over five time zones, has 90% of its population of  37.8 million living within 100 Km of the US border and the remaining ten percent sprinkled over the 3000 Km of wilderness to the north.  God also commanded us to subdue the earth using a Hebrew word whose root meaning is “to tread down” and from this, “to bring into subjection”.  In other words, we are to bring order into the chaos of the natural world caused by Adam’s sin.  The story goes of a gardener who was in his garden when a stranger came along and complimented him on how beautiful his garden was.  “Isn’t it wonderful what a beautiful garden a man can create with a little help from God?” he said to the gardener.  “Indeed”, said the gardener, “But you should have seen this place when God had it all to Himself!” Mother Nature, despite the beauty in the natural world, has not created many gardens and there’s a lot of subduing still to be done.  Paul describes the natural environment in this way: “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” (Romans 8:22) revealing that the world we now live in is one which is struggling like a woman in labour to birth a new world free of all the violent forces that seek to destroy it: the floods, the earthquakes, the plagues, the storms, the forest fires and the law of the jungle.  There’s a new world waiting to be birthed where “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the young goat, The calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them.  The cow and the bear shall graze; Their young ones shall lie down together; And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.  The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole, And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den..” (Isaiah 11: 6 - 8) but this world cannot come until “the revealing of the sons of God... because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” (Romans 8: 19 - 21).  Every believer needs to understand that God has not abandoned His creation to the polluters and that whatever ills the environment may be suffering from—whether natural or man-made—God has not handed over ownership or the future of planet earth to man. He has given us dominion (same root as subdue) over every living thing but we exercise that authority as under God who will preserve them all!  The present environment is destined for destruction, to be replaced with a new earth and a new heaven  and the only way we can “save the planet” is to pray fervently for “the revealing of the sons of God”, those living in the “glorious liberty of the children of God”.   That’s you and I and every other believer who has received Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.  We cannot allow our focus to be diverted away from man’s most pressing need of a Saviour to a planet’s pressing need of a cleanup..

Does this mean we believers should sit silently by while watching the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we grow our food in become un-breathable, undrinkable and inedible?  Not at all but as one who has spent the final 25 years of his professional life working as an environmental consultant analyzing soil, water and air for contaminants, I have grown very skeptical of much in the environmental movement.  To a very large degree the politics has overtaken the science and the truth has been buried in the morass of hidden agendas but one thing is for sure, the more fearful the prediction, the more popular it becomes and the more government regulations are created to control it.   All this is perfectly in line with today’s post-modern/woke/cancel culture where truth is entirely subjective and there is no absolute truth (no God).  I can’t remember ever being asked to explain why I concluded that a piece of land or body of water or an air quality was ‘contaminated’ or ‘polluted’ because I didn’t have to.  My report already explained that the level of contaminant found exceeded the maximum allowable level set by the government and therefore a very expensive cleanup was necessary.  Few people ever asked me to explain how the government calculated the maximum limit and I was glad they didn’t because it  would have been embarrassing to tell them.  Many limits have been set on a basis that if a child eats a spoonful of the soil every day for a year and more than one child in a million develops cancer, the soil is contaminated!  That may make us all feel very safe but it also makes the allowable limit extremely low and the chances that your property is contaminated becomes extremely high in which case you are likely bankrupt since your property is now “contaminated” and worthless.  I’ve lost count of the number of my clients who were financially ruined by these insane limits set by governments anxious to portray themselves as environmentally responsible while at the same time being attacked by the environmentalists to lower the limits even further.  Worse still, my analysis of the soil was based on analyzing a teaspoonful of dirt from here and there across their property and applying the results to the entire site.  That’s equivalent to taking a poll of a government’s performance by asking five people for their opinion and publishing the results as a factual representation of how they are doing.  The sample size is far too small to be representative of the whole but environmental consultants are stuck with the problem because the labs cannot handle more than teaspoon-sized samples!  Thus, our reports should be taken with a large grain of salt!

All of us believers have a personal responsibility to care for what God has entrusted to us and that  includes being environmentally responsible but what that means to each of us can only be determined between ourselves and the God we serve, not by governments and others with agendas.  If we keep heading in the wrong direction I fear  the environmental movement will quickly descend to the common-denominator answer to the world’s environmental issues—population control!  If humans are the cause and we can’t control them then we need to remove them.  To some extent, this has already started through the abortion laws which have seen the murder of over 50 million babies in the US alone.  In my darker moments I have often quipped that the solution to the problem of excessive levels of carbon dioxide in the air is to get all the doom-saying environmentalists to hold their breath for 10-15 minutes but then I’m reminded that Christ died for them as well as me so, instead, let’s pray that they all become “sons of God” and enter into His glorious liberty.

[itsbenedict]

i just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, which holy dicks, might have been my game of the year if persona 5 hadn’t also come out this year. spoiler-heavy impressions (in the form of chatlogs with zero) under the cut:

god damn this game is just fun to play all the sneaking around and shooting stuff is really satisfying, and it feels great encountering some new machine that you don't know how to handle, and figuring out how to deal with it the balance is just right- strong machines can fuck you up, but nothing's a one-hit kill- if you fuck up, you get to chug health potions and run like hell until it loses interest, and then you try again it welcomes and rewards experimentation you organically develop strategies for taking them on stuff that seems intimidating and impossibly hard at first eventually becomes easy- not because you leveled up and got stronger numbers than it, but because you've done this before, you know how to dispatch these things in a matter of moments the giant crocodiles- scary, but you can knock off two thirds of their health by igniting their blaze canisters, and then play keepaway with their easily dodged ice blasts while you chip off the rest with easy headshots the swarms of hawks- overwhelming at first, but they completely flip out if you shoot two fire arrows at them, and you can keep them all downed while you work on taking them out the giant charging desert bulls- a couple ice bombs from the sling more or less immobilize them and make them take massive damage you always start terrified, trying different ammo on different weak points until you find something that works and then you feel like an invincible badass despite not really being any stronger in absolute terms

Zerovirus: that's the good shit

Benedict: it reminds me of the witness, in that you progress and gain abilities by learning systems and getting good, rather than by getting abstract experience points and leveling up i mean, you do level up, but it's just more health mostly

Zerovirus: health, more inventory, better harvesting abilities is what i think it was? and some jump ambush skills

Benedict: it's health and skill points the skills are pretty cool- none of them feel mandatory, but they all make something slightly easier like one gives you a few seconds of bullet time to line up a shot- it doesn't let you do anything you couldn't before, but now you're more likely to succeed and then there's the stealth melee takedowns that i barely use because everything in the fucking game notices you if you get too close no matter how quiet you're being for the same reason, i haven't used overriding since the game made me for a quest early on my advantage is in staying far away and hidden and able to disengage at will getting in close is always such a bad idea

Zerovirus: on the other hand, i'm pretty sure eventually you can override t-rexes and just watch kaijus fight

Benedict: oh yeah the cauldrons the first time i encountered one of those was incredible like, okay, here's a post-apocalyptic wilderness, but OH GOD TETRAHEDRON SPACESHIP ZONE

Zerovirus: were they disorienting for you as a player?i kept getting lost watching the lper navigate them they were really damn cool though what a great total environment change

Benedict: no not really so far they're pretty linear anyway they'd be cooler if the reward for completing them wasn't "now you can do that thing you never do to more things"

Zerovirus: just do the one that lets you do that thing to t-rexes it's entirely viable to go for an override playstyle with sufficient bolas and big boss monsters to hax i mean, you have the bolas, right the.. i mean, the ropecaster the thing-what-lets-you-tie-robots-down-and-make-them-easy-killings

Benedict: oh, right i uh haven't used that either like at all, i haven't tried it yet

Zerovirus: dude try out the ropecaster the ropecaster is what makes override viable as a playstyle it's basically 'shoot it three times in any part of its body to totally immobilize it for a few seconds' (bigger ones might need more than three i think)

Benedict: honestly i haven't thought about it much since my other weapons are so cool, but huh i think the reason i didn't try was because it seemed too good to be true "yeah, this thing you just shoot and it stops the enemy"

Zerovirus: no dude the ropecaster is easily the coolest weapon really locking down enemies is super effective well, that and setting up wire traps and just letting your enemies walk right into them that one never gets old either

Benedict: i use the tripcaster... probably not as intended

Zerovirus: ==>?

Benedict: like you're supposed to put it in an enemy's patrol path so they walk into it but the problem with that is they're usually around other enemies and if you go in to capitalize, you'll get ganged up on

Zerovirus: what the lper i watched did was set up like eight traps in a ring around himself and then make lots of sound and just watch the mobs walk into his death circle it was, frankly, really amusing

Benedict: i tried that once- it failed because i tried it on sawtooths, who, uh they jump. over. the wires. and kill you. oh my favorite enemy to fight right now is ravagers they're huge and scary, but it's so easy to kill them one tearblast arrow to the exposed gun pick up gun fucking annihilate everything in sight there's only a few things that really bug me about this game so far one is that the voice actors are way better than the writers, and it feels so weird hearing good voice actors try to breathe life into really fucking tedious dialogue there's been maybe two characters with more than one personality trait

Zerovirus: the plot of this game isn't super deep or anything don't worry about it too much it's very hollywood robot apocalypse scifi

Benedict: yeah, i'm not- i'm here for the cool robot hunting the game does some pretty ham-fisted stuff to explain why the player is the only one who can do a quest 90% of the time it's "this area is taboo, and everyone but you is too superstitious for some reason" also: the inventory screen is bugged out wrt the little exclamation points to indicate you have new shit i can't discern a pattern, they just seem to be placed at random 

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

Benedict: so zero you told me not to worry about the writing, the plot isn't super deep or anything but holy fucking shit almighty horizon zero dawn got so damn cool i think my gripes with the writing early on were a product of how the nora suck they're an offensive native american caricature, a bunch of nature-worshipping tribal dimwits with more superstitions than brain cells as soon as the writers stopped writing the nora, the writing improved immensely and i'm pretty much almost done with the plot at this point i reached zero dawn and went and heard gaia's message in all-mother mountain and holy fuck this plot got so cool i honestly wasn't expecting explanations for stuff the beginning of the game got me thinking they'd be more interested in treating the whole sci-fi backstory as a mythology for the world like yeah cauldrons make machines, they're like, some fuckin factory whatsit the Mysterious Ancients made instead of what i got, which was several extended sequences of crawling around in ancient ruins and getting a meticulously thought-through backstory through audio logs and stuff my jaw was hanging open for like the whole zero dawn facility section "no, they didn't stop the robot apocalypse halfway- they let it play out until the robots ran out of biomass to eat and reduced the earth to a lifeless hunk of rock, and then deployed a friendly AI to re-seed it with biological life" holy shit incidentally: holy FUCK was the Hades subsystem a phenomenally shitty idea hey gaia try this: if you fuck up, reset things yourself!! you don't need an autonomous ABSOLUTE DEATH GOD that fucking takes over your systems and fights you for control!! it was just such a terrible plan that it breaks my suspension of disbelief a little with all the audio logs in the zero dawn facility with candidates second-guessing and questioning the entire project, no one thought to bring up "hey, maybe the WIPE OUT ALL LIFE AGAIN adversarial subsystem we're building carries a few inherent risks" the conflict here kinda seems like a diabolus ex machina, honestly they could have easily just had Hades be an accidentally reactivated Horus unit- the Faro robots kind of already have a wipe-out-all-life directive that would make perfect sense technobabble your way into saying the Faro plague hacked Gaia somehow, and boom but fucking Hades the whole conflict driving the plot is the equivalent of the supervillain who builds a big red self-destruct button on his machine that aside, this game's plot has turned out to be really fucking cool i came close to tears a few times in the zero dawn facility humanity's best and brightest having various visceral reactions to the shock and despair of the project's nature god damn was that one of the coolest reveals i've ever had in a video game i'm really pleasantly surprised by how much detail it gave me- it really made "find out what the fuck is the deal" the player's central motivation i think the nora shit in the beginning got me expecting that their worldview would be more or less validated by the narrative but now i come back to the starting area to save all their asses, and it becomes abundantly clear that these people are small and backwards and the world is so much bigger than them likewise the moment where fuckin whatshisname dadmurderer captures you and puts you in the sun-ring right on the heels of all the huge plot reveals he's standing there monologuing about prophecy and the sun and how important he is and following what i'd just gone through, it was so, so pathetic to watch this half-naked thug go on and on about how this, this moment of knocking me out and capturing me for some gladiatorial shit, was the most important moment in the world and i'm just sitting there shaking my head at him like, dude, you ain't shit. you ain't even in the vicinity of shit.oh, you've got a corrupted behemoth for me to fight, totally unarmed? don't make me fucking laugh, i eat that shit for breakfast (sorta took the wind out of sylens' rescue at the end when whathisface sicced two corruptors on me) (like dude i had this. two corruptors is god damn child's play.) i'm so fucking overpowered right now, i've completed every single sidequest save the armor one, where i still need the core from the last area oh, corrupted thunderjaw pinning down the entire nora tribe? Y-fucking-AWN ice bombs plus actual bombs, dead in two minutes not that the combat has become boring- attacks still hurt, i have to dodge and get the fuck out of the way and heal off hits that take off more than half my bar, it's really tense- but i can always heal, can always dodge, there's a great rhythm to attacking and dodging and attacking and dodging

[phaylenfairchild]

Kanye, Flat Earthers and the Rise of Free Thinkers

That’s a fancy term, isn’t it? It’s actually a dangerous trend. Here’s why.

People who self-identify as “Free Thinkers” are growing in numbers at an alarming rate. From the perspective of a casual observer, these individuals parade themselves as an elite collective that have taken the proverbial red pill. To them, we live in a complex machination, a Matrix like world where all of us who possess a conscience- but not an elevated consciousness- are merely drones. We’re tendrils acting with uniform behaviors and our thoughts are not independent, but instead a reflection of some great hive mind that they, themselves, have managed to unshackle themselves from.

Everything is a lie, if you ask a Free thinker. The moon landing never happened, the Earth is flat, global mind control is plaguing society, wealthy lizard people are influencing the political direction of the Nation. To be fair, not every Free Thinker subscribes to all of these campfire conspiracy theories. Some adopt a decidedly different tactic and attempt to legitimize their attempt to swing away from reality using faux science and pack mentality. They find pockets of people who claim the Free-Thinker badge and spoon feed each other misinformation, propaganda and radical hyperbole as they enable each other’s further untethering from logic.

Throughout the decades, Free Thinkers came in various forms; Some were simply anarchists, interested in mostly in rebuking power and authority figures. Some were social rebels fighting against man-made traditions, cultural constructs and heavily embedded world views we accepted without resistance. They regarded themselves as uniquely informed and inarguably correct. With that gift of awareness that eluded most others, they perceive themselves as superior to the rest of us simpletons; Us worker ants trapped in a never-ending mechanism of primal habit and indoctrination, effectively blind to our own slavery of automated responses and thought.

There is something disturbing about today’s emergence of those who dub themselves Free Thinkers and that lies in the fact that they are functioning based on emotion, not thought, not logic, not facts. Science is abandoned, truths are a burden and reality, as it irrefutably exists doesn’t anymore thus is open to debate. This deviation from reason; This departure from the tangible world and its myriad of functions- they shirking of these things they embrace as a form of liberation.

It’s not liberation. It’s a wanton desire so impermeable that they have accepted a grotesque distortion of a fantasy in order to cope with adversity or appear as if they’ve been delivered some vast insight into the secrets of the universe that science has somehow missed altogether. They know things that even the most intelligent of our species clearly missed as we are prisoners of a singular structure. We do what we are allowed. We think within the boundaries of the thought police. We fear being detached from some make-shift mother organism and developing our own self governance or manifesting an unaided perspective or untainted opinion.

Many times we dismiss those who self-identify as “free Thinkers” as wild haired neurotics living in houses of tin foil. Some might say that Einstein was free-thinker, or Benjamin Franklin who went out into a lightening storm with a kite connected to a conductive wire. Bystanders surely though that was indisputably crazy. Maybe you could argue that Da Vinci whose genius allowed him access to experimentation and the development of new concepts. None of them dismissed reality, but by their very acceptance of it, they maneuvered to re-shape it.

These are not the Free-Thinkers of today. Today, free thinkers are, in fact, eager to place themselves in the shackles of control while convincing themselves that they’re actually absolving themselves of them. Kanye West, for example, a black man who has often defined himself as a free-thinker, aligned himself with his own oppressor. He deliberately omitted all cogniscence of social conditions in an effort to appear rebellious and exalted when he was actually handing his own fate to a man who, historically, would have refused him basic human rights. He expressed absolute disinterest in was was unquestionably bad for him- and all black Americans, with the intent of appearing separated from those of us who sat in disbelief.

“You wouldn’t do this, but look at me, everyone is telling me not to, but I am! I don’t do what everyone else does! I’m not a sheep! I’m a free thinker!”

No. You’ve been radicalized enough to declare yourself your own enemy. That’s not being a free thinker or indicative of any heightened awareness; That’s self sabotage. That’s intentionally wounding yourself while the world watches, hoping that we’ll believe your proclaimed divinity will keep you alive as you bleed out in front of a man who would have happily done that on your behalf. Abandoning common sense, refuting what we know to be true or false to aggrandize yourself isn’t free thinking… that’s one letting their own ego obstruct their judgement. It’s not innovating new concepts or ideas. It’s not pioneering new paths or demonstrating things we have never before seen or considered.

Gay or Trans Republicans, black people joining groups of white nationalists, people insisting the Earth is flat just to feel they’ve gone against the grain and that somehow makes them special. Listening to flat-Earthers attempt to provide evidence that the planet is disc-shaped and the shocking confidence they have in their presentation of a shared delusion is not only bizarre, but deeply disturbing.

The fact they have developed their own organization to legitimize their ostentatious ignorance and people have subscribed to it is only evidence of an inherent need some humans have to be, not just informed, but specially informed, like Moses standing atop Mount Sinai receiving a Godly message. They want to be recognized as a people set apart from the rest of us… just because it provides them a message or a purpose. It turns an otherwise ordinary life experience into an extraordinary mission of delivering what we now call alternative facts.

Many who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election viewed themselves as free-thinkers. That superhero-like free thought gave them the courage to rebuff their responsibility to their fellow Americans, to break the establishment, which they accept as bad, and turn it on its head. It was all about the ego of influencing change via the power they recklessly wielded at the polls. Vote for the reality television star, they thought, he’ll destroy the system and set us all free from ruin. Trump brilliantly played to that demographic; Those whose ego inevitably hamstrings their discernment. They operated under the impression that they were Trump’s chosen. The promises he made appealed directly to their prejudices and fears. He represented everything that went against what we know to be good; Equality, due process, freedom of the press and he conjured up a monolithic adult version of a boy’s club in a tree house. The red hat grants you access. It is the equivalent of the white hood, but they don’t see it that way. Falling into ranks behind a chest thumping tribal chieftain of the Republican party wasn’t flipping the middle finger to the system or executing free thought… it was, despite what they’ll tell you, an abandonment of civility and refusal to co-exist peacefully with others as they see themselves as superior. Because Free-Thinkers all see themselves as operating on a different plane of wisdom and expanded knowledge… in this case, we’re all left to pay the consequences for the mass hysteria the ensues.

There is an undeniable confusion that free-thinkers suffer from, and that is their inability to tell the difference between being an individual and being a revolutionary. Revolutionaries were the true free thinkers. Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers, Rosa Parks, Sylvia Rivera, the people who changed the world by changing minds and expanding our scope of appreciating the experiences of those who are not like us. They weren’t peddling conspiracies or burning down their own houses to demonstrate on behalf of those who would have done it for them. They did express free thought by shedding dismissing knowledge and suppressing their awareness of social evolution to give credibility to those who hoped to thwart it. They fought for a better world and an improved quality of life. They were not these absent-minded, hate motivated rebellious teenagers who balked at things like research, hard-line evidence and preached against a common good, they were indeed revolutionaries who challenged social injustices they knew were corrupt and removed them of their self sovereignty.

Free thinkers want to set themselves on fire to push back against those they deem controllers. Revolutionaries simply want to empower and inspire the rest of the world to make it a better place. They were devoted to a cause, as where free thinkers are mere followers of a mythical design and devoted only to self interest.

In the end, they only hurt themselves. We must rely on the revolutionaries to save us from the self appointed free thinkers.

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