#mid merchant account

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How I got scammed

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

I wuz robbed.

More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And then he tried to do it again, a week later!

Here's what happened. Over the Christmas holiday, I traveled to New Orleans. The day we landed, I hit a Chase ATM in the French Quarter for some cash, but the machine declined the transaction. Later in the day, we passed a little credit-union's ATM and I used that one instead (I bank with a one-branch credit union and generally there's no fee to use another CU's ATM).

A couple days later, I got a call from my credit union. It was a weekend, during the holiday, and the guy who called was obviously working for my little CU's after-hours fraud contractor. I'd dealt with these folks before – they service a ton of little credit unions, and generally the call quality isn't great and the staff will often make mistakes like mispronouncing my credit union's name.

That's what happened here – the guy was on a terrible VOIP line and I had to ask him to readjust his mic before I could even understand him. He mispronounced my bank's name and then asked if I'd attempted to spend $1,000 at an Apple Store in NYC that day. No, I said, and groaned inwardly. What a pain in the ass. Obviously, I'd had my ATM card skimmed – either at the Chase ATM (maybe that was why the transaction failed), or at the other credit union's ATM (it had been a very cheap looking system).

I told the guy to block my card and we started going through the tedious business of running through recent transactions, verifying my identity, and so on. It dragged on and on. These were my last hours in New Orleans, and I'd left my family at home and gone out to see some of the pre-Mardi Gras krewe celebrations and get a muffalata, and I could tell that I was going to run out of time before I finished talking to this guy.

"Look," I said, "you've got all my details, you've frozen the card. I gotta go home and meet my family and head to the airport. I'll call you back on the after-hours number once I'm through security, all right?"

He was frustrated, but that was his problem. I hung up, got my sandwich, went to the airport, and we checked in. It was total chaos: an Alaska Air 737 Max had just lost its door-plug in mid-air and every Max in every airline's fleet had been grounded, so the check in was crammed with people trying to rebook. We got through to the gate and I sat down to call the CU's after-hours line. The person on the other end told me that she could only handle lost and stolen cards, not fraud, and given that I'd already frozen the card, I should just drop by the branch on Monday to get a new card.

We flew home, and later the next day, I logged into my account and made a list of all the fraudulent transactions and printed them out, and on Monday morning, I drove to the bank to deal with all the paperwork. The folks at the CU were even more pissed than I was. The fraud that run up to more than $8,000, and if Visa refused to take it out of the merchants where the card had been used, my little credit union would have to eat the loss.

I agreed and commiserated. I also pointed out that their outsource, after-hours fraud center bore some blame here: I'd canceled the card on Saturday but most of the fraud had taken place on Sunday. Something had gone wrong.

One cool thing about banking at a tiny credit-union is that you end up talking to people who have actual authority, responsibility and agency. It turned out the the woman who was processing my fraud paperwork was a VP, and she decided to look into it. A few minutes later she came back and told me that the fraud center had no record of having called me on Saturday.

"That was the fraudster," she said.

Oh, shit. I frantically rewound my conversation, trying to figure out if this could possibly be true. I hadn't given him anything apart from some very anodyne info, like what city I live in (which is in my Wikipedia entry), my date of birth (ditto), and the last four digits of my card.

Wait a sec.

He hadn't asked for the last four digits. He'd asked for the last seven digits. At the time, I'd found that very frustrating, but now – "The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue, right?" I asked the VP.

I'd given him my entire card number.

Goddammit.

The thing is, I know a lot about fraud. I'm writing an entire series of novels about this kind of scam:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

And most summers, I go to Defcon, and I always go to the "social engineering" competitions where an audience listens as a hacker in a soundproof booth cold-calls merchants (with the owner's permission) and tries to con whoever answers the phone into giving up important information.

But I'd been conned.

Now look, I knew I could be conned. I'd been conned before, 13 years ago, by a Twitter worm that successfully phished out of my password via DM:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

That scam had required a miracle of timing. It started the day before, when I'd reset my phone to factory defaults and reinstalled all my apps. That same day, I'd published two big online features that a lot of people were talking about. The next morning, we were late getting out of the house, so by the time my wife and I dropped the kid at daycare and went to the coffee shop, it had a long line. Rather than wait in line with me, my wife sat down to read a newspaper, and so I pulled out my phone and found a Twitter DM from a friend asking "is this you?" with a URL.

Assuming this was something to do with those articles I'd published the day before, I clicked the link and got prompted for my Twitter login again. This had been happening all day because I'd done that mobile reinstall the day before and all my stored passwords had been wiped. I entered it but the page timed out. By that time, the coffees were ready. We sat and chatted for a bit, then went our own ways.

I was on my way to the office when I checked my phone again. I had a whole string of DMs from other friends. Each one read "is this you?" and had a URL.

Oh, shit, I'd been phished.

If I hadn't reinstalled my mobile OS the day before. If I hadn't published a pair of big articles the day before. If we hadn't been late getting out the door. If we had been a little more late getting out the door (so that I'd have seen the multiple DMs, which would have tipped me off).

There's a name for this in security circles: "Swiss-cheese security." Imagine multiple slices of Swiss cheese all stacked up, the holes in one slice blocked by the slice below it. All the slices move around and every now and again, a hole opens up that goes all the way through the stack. Zap!

The fraudster who tricked me out of my credit card number had Swiss cheese security on his side. Yes, he spoofed my bank's caller ID, but that wouldn't have been enough to fool me if I hadn't been on vacation, having just used a pair of dodgy ATMs, in a hurry and distracted. If the 737 Max disaster hadn't happened that day and I'd had more time at the gate, I'd have called my bank back. If my bank didn't use a slightly crappy outsource/out-of-hours fraud center that I'd already had sub-par experiences with. If, if, if.

The next Friday night, at 5:30PM, the fraudster called me back, pretending to be the bank's after-hours center. He told me my card had been compromised again. But: I hadn't removed my card from my wallet since I'd had it replaced. Also, it was half an hour after the bank closed for the long weekend, a very fraud-friendly time. And when I told him I'd call him back and asked for the after-hours fraud number, he got very threatening and warned me that because I'd now been notified about the fraud that any losses the bank suffered after I hung up the phone without completing the fraud protocol would be billed to me. I hung up on him. He called me back immediately. I hung up on him again and put my phone into do-not-disturb.

The following Tuesday, I called my bank and spoke to their head of risk-management. I went through everything I'd figured out about the fraudsters, and she told me that credit unions across America were being hit by this scam, by fraudsters who somehow knew CU customers' phone numbers and names, and which CU they banked at. This was key: my phone number is a reasonably well-kept secret. You can get it by spending money with Equifax or another nonconsensual doxing giant, but you can't just google it or get it at any of the free services. The fact that the fraudsters knew where I banked, knew my name, and had my phone number had really caused me to let down my guard.

The risk management person and I talked about how the credit union could mitigate this attack: for example, by better-training the after-hours card-loss staff to be on the alert for calls from people who had been contacted about supposed card fraud. We also went through the confusing phone-menu that had funneled me to the wrong department when I called in, and worked through alternate wording for the menu system that would be clearer (this is the best part about banking with a small CU – you can talk directly to the responsible person and have a productive discussion!). I even convinced her to buy a ticket to next summer's Defcon to attend the social engineering competitions.

There's a leak somewhere in the CU systems' supply chain. Maybe it's Zelle, or the small number of corresponding banks that CUs rely on for SWIFT transaction forwarding. Maybe it's even those after-hours fraud/card-loss centers. But all across the USA, CU customers are getting calls with spoofed caller IDs from fraudsters who know their registered phone numbers and where they bank.

I've been mulling this over for most of a month now, and one thing has really been eating at me: the way that AI is going to make this kind of problem much worse.

Not because AI is going to commit fraud, though.

One of the truest things I know about AI is: "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

I trusted this fraudster specifically because I knew that the outsource, out-of-hours contractors my bank uses have crummy headsets, don't know how to pronounce my bank's name, and have long-ass, tedious, and pointless standardized questionnaires they run through when taking fraud reports. All of this created cover for the fraudster, whose plausibility was enhanced by the rough edges in his pitch - they didn't raise red flags.

As this kind of fraud reporting and fraud contacting is increasingly outsourced to AI, bank customers will be conditioned to dealing with semi-automated systems that make stupid mistakes, force you to repeat yourself, ask you questions they should already know the answers to, and so on. In other words, AI will groom bank customers to be phishing victims.

This is a mistake the finance sector keeps making. 15 years ago, Ben Laurie excoriated the UK banks for their "Verified By Visa" system, which validated credit card transactions by taking users to a third party site and requiring them to re-enter parts of their password there:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090331094020/http://www.links.org/?p=591

This is exactly how a phishing attack works. As Laurie pointed out, this was the banks training their customers to be phished.

I came close to getting phished again today, as it happens. I got back from Berlin on Friday and my suitcase was damaged in transit. I've been dealing with the airline, which means I've really been dealing with their third-party, outsource luggage-damage service. They have a terrible website, their emails are incoherent, and they officiously demand the same information over and over again.

This morning, I got a scam email asking me for more information to complete my damaged luggage claim. It was a terrible email, from a noreply@ email address, and it was vague, officious, and dishearteningly bureaucratic. For just a moment, my finger hovered over the phishing link, and then I looked a little closer.

On any other day, it wouldn't have had a chance. Today – right after I had my luggage wrecked, while I'm still jetlagged, and after days of dealing with my airline's terrible outsource partner – it almost worked.

So much fraud is a Swiss-cheese attack, and while companies can't close all the holes, they can stop creating new ones.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to post about it whenever I get scammed. I find the inner workings of scams to be fascinating, and it's also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can't get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[sixth-light]

ok ok slightly feral post as promised.

first, some context setting: I think it's really interesting to analyse texts in terms of both what the author was trying to do (and whether they succeeded) and what they ended up doing (intentionally or not) and I think their cultural/historical context is vital if you want to do this. I'm not interested in whether Robert Jordan or the Wheel of Time are, like, morally correct in their politics or whatever. I'm interested in what the art is trying to do.

and the thing about Jordan, see, is that he projected this image during his lifetime of a Genial Older Man (see: beard and pipe) but he...wasn't actually that old! He was 42 when EoTW was published. He died at 58. He was a Baby Boomer publishing books at a time when Baby Boomers were the hip young generation taking over from stodgy WWII veterans (Gen Z: It Will Happen To You Too).

What this means is that he was a child and adolescent during the Civil Rights movement, in a then-majority Black city in the Jim Crow South*. He would have gone to segregated schools. The tertiary institutions he attended had only started to desegregate a year or two before he attended each of them. I think his war trauma in Vietnam gets a lot of attention because he did talk about it and also because that's a narrative we understand for white men, but I think we...skim over the impact on white men of growing up at this time because? Civil Rights only happened to Black Americans I guess? but it's his context too. Similarly, he was an adolescent and young man at the time the (white) feminist movement was really kicking off in the US. he was in his mid-20s when banks were first legally *required* to allow women to open accounts and have credit cards in their own names. he went on to marry a woman a decade older than him, who had left her husband to raise her son as a single mother while continuing a professional career in the early 70s; these were issues that must have been incredibly relevant for her.

and what we see in his writing is attempts to grapple with gender and race that are self-evidently of mixed success, but I think have to be contextualised in light of this period of immense change he grew up in. Think about the predominance of women as merchants and bankers in WoT, in the context of how recent their rights to even control their own money were in the US. The...everything...he was trying to do with the Seanchan, making them extra-canonically Southern American-coded. The Whitecloaks as the KKK (among other things, of course).

As an example, I think there's also something probably unintentional but fascinating in the way he presents the pre-Breaking Aiel: bluntly, they are a distinct ethnic group in hereditary servitude (always thinking about how that ancestor of Rand's in the Rhuidean sequence had to get permission from Mierin Sedai to switch to someone else's service so he could marry his girlfriend, this is...uh...super cognate to issues enslaved Black people faced). They're associated with agriculture through the Song sequence. And they're pretty much the ideal of what slave-owning Southern American culture WANTED enslaved Black people to be: completely happy to serve. Then, as the post-breaking Aiel, they become feared as a source of violence, which resonates with the way that enslaved people were feared by their slavers.

I don't think for a second that the intention here was to depict the AoL as a Secret Slavery Dystopia, I think we're meant to take the Rhuidean flashback sections pretty much as they read on the page. But I also think putting Jordan in his historical and cultural context does pose the comparison. Similarly, I find it really interesting that he positions Seanchan as riven by constant revolts and uprisings (because it's a fascist slaver regime) but he never ever goes so far as to link enslaved people in Seanchan (damane and da'covale) to those revolts and uprisings, even though that is fundamentally the deep fear *for real and obvious reasons* of all slavery-based societies.

Or then there's the changes to the Two Rivers in the books - like, both then and now I think it's actually pretty radical to present an influx of Muslim-coded refugees of colour as a thing that enriches the Two Rivers both socially and economically. Various characters are wistful that it's changed, but they don't think it's bad. The text here is really clear that welcoming the Domani and Almoth Plain refugees is both morally right and beneficial. And this is in a book being written and published shortly after the first Gulf War.

There's so many more things like this where I just have no real idea what he was trying to do on purpose and what was accidental and what was fun for him in fiction but did not necessarily link at all to his real-world political beliefs. but gosh it's interesting to turn over and poke at.

[absolutebl]

Hello! In the latest EP of I Feel You Linger in the Air, Yai addresses Jom as Por Jom. Jom seems surprised but I have no understanding of what Por means so it's significance is lost on me. Perhaps you can help shed some light? Also, how was Yai addressing Jom before?

Por/phor honorific in Thai - I Feel You Linger in the Air

I'm glad you asked it so I don't have to.

I have not encountered it before in BL.

Any of the the Thai language spies still out there wanna weigh in?

I did some poking around - but I could be way off base. Still this what I discovered:

Por is a paternal honorific, luang por is used for respected monks.

So I am assuming this use is relatively old fashioned (the reason we don't hear it often in our normal BL) and either one step more intimate or, more likely, one step more respectful than no honorific. Possibly scholarly?

I'm thinking all this has to do with Jom's demonstration of education. Yai has figured out that one of the reasons Jom doesn't belong and cannot fit in with the servants is that he is more educated than a peasant, which adds up to him being originally from a high status and wealthy family, especially speaking English and having travelled (he has a non-Chang Mai accent).

There is very little Thai middle class at the beginning of the 1920s since trade is being dominated/dictated by the West, or Chinese merchant operations, and Siam is a monarchy. So for a nationalize Thai citizen it's either military, landed gentry with trade operations (like Yai), military, or... none of the above. This changes, especially in the south, throughout this decade (as it did in other parts of the world). So there is a rising bourgeoisie going on in the background but it's not that obvious in Chang Mai at this time.

What this means to Yai is that Jom's family either got wiped out or politically entirely disenfranchised possibly as part of the 1912 attempted coups (or even WWI)? This would be mystifying for Yai because Jom doesn't act like he comes from a military family at all. So his background and status is very confusing for Yai, but Yai does know one thing...

Jom is NOT lower class by the standards of Yai's temporal worldview and existence.

For a young man to be educated and yet entirely alone is very dangerous and suspicious. Also, let's be clear, Jom doesn't look or act like a laborer. He red flags "cultured" all over the place.

Yai is paternalistic and caring towards Jom out the gate because Yai has a big ol'crush but also because he recognizes "his own" is trying to survive while isolated and scared. Yai wants to rescue Jom.

Some Historical Context for I Feel You Linger In The Air

I love history and so here's some quick info that any Thai watcher would likely know, but you might not... ready?

Remember:

Burma (Myanmar) to the west is occupied by the British.

The French hold Vietnam to the east.

Everyone is bickering over what would become Cambodia & Laos.

China occasionally gets involved from the North (also, lots of immigrants from China at this time accounting for a large percentage of the merchant/middle class)

Eventually, Japan would invade during WWII.

In part, The Kingdom of Siam was kept a "neutral" party because none of the surrounding colonial powers wanted to risk offending any of the other players in the area.

Siam re-negotiated sovereignty in 1920 (from USA) and 1925 (France & Britain). But during the time of this show (mid to late 1920s) it was back to it's customary type-rope balancing act of extreme diplomacy with the allied western colonial powers that surrounded it. Recognizing that Thailand was never colonized, it's boarders were constantly nibbled at and it was "ambassador-occupied" off and on by Westerners whose military backing and exploitive business concerns simply outmatched the monarchy, especially in the technology department (as well as by reputation on the global stage at the time).

In other words, the farang in this show (James & Robert) are bound to be both the baddies and the power players of the narrative.

The king of Siam at the time (Vajiravudh AKA Rama VI) was initially somewhat popular but also regarded as overly extravagant since Siam was hit by a major postwar recession in 1919. It should be noted that King Vajiravudh had no son because he was most likely gay (which at the time did not much concern Siamese popular opinion, EXCEPT THAT it undermined the stability of the monarchy).

He "died suddenly" in 1925 (age 44) with the monarchy weakened and succession handed off to his younger brother.

In 1932 a small circle of the rising bourgeoisie (all of whom had studied in Europe, mostly Paris), supported by some military, seized power from the monarchy in a practically nonviolent Siamese Revolution installing a constitutional monarchy.

Siam would then go through: dictatorship, WWII, Japanese invasion, Allied occupation, democratic elections, military junta, the Indochina wars, communist insurgency, more democracy and popularization movements, multiple coups, more junta, more monarchy, eventually leading us to the somewhat chaotic insanity of Thai politics we have today. (Which is, frankly, a mix of monarchy, junta, democracy, egocentric popularism, and bribery.)

(source)

[probablyasocialecologist]

The notion of a cooperative world effort to decarbonize that excludes the world’s leading producer by far of clean energy resources is bound to be a self-defeating exercise. China already accounts for the vast majority of the world's investments in clean energy technology and the cost efficiencies that have accrued from them, but US foreign policy is bent on locking China out of global markets for these and other advanced products, literally at all costs. In the near to mid-term this will drive up prices for these products for everyone by forcing producers to make them outside of the global productivity frontier in the China-centered value chains of East Asia. Far from helping it, the destabilizing effects of US foreign policy will impede the project of decarbonization by dramatically raising its cost.

Jamie Merchant, The Economic Consequences of Neo-Keynesianism

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter XXX | On Friendly Terms

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings: memory loss, referenced suicidal ideation, body horror AO3:Lost Kin | Chapter XXX | On Friendly Terms First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Chronological Notes: Quirrel arrives on Hornet's doorstep. Quirrel travels a lot slower than Hornet can. Mainly by virtue of not being able to fly. She may have forgotten to account for this. (She also has forgotten a lot of social niceties. For instance: how to greet someone who knocks at your front door.) I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the addition of Quirrel's POV. Truthfully, he's been a new sort of challenge, but I think he makes a good foil to the other two, and it looks like he'll be a regular feature of this fic going forward!

○

It had been a long day.

Several days, in fact, although life underground tended to blur those lines into oblivion. It had been mid-afternoon by Quirrel’s sleep cycle when Hornet left him staring after her over the placid surface of the lake, only a faint, dying ripple caused by the breeze of her passing to show she had even been there.

By the time he collected himself and his belongings—which amounted to pulling his nail out of the ground and sheathing it again, with as little thought directed toward the action as possible—and traveled deeper, the light had gone in the City caverns.

He stopped for the night, then spent most of the next “day” attempting to reorient himself and identify the best route to take, as well as looting several promising areas for supplies. Hornet had not exactly left him with a wishlist, but he was clinging to his vague desire to be helpful as meagre warmth against the cold wasteland in his mind.

One would think having one’s memories restored would make a mind feel full, crowded, even, but it was only emptier than ever.

Quirrel spent a second night near the King’s Station and continued onward once the light returned, with a few stops to forage for a meal before he made his way across the upper bridges and began his search of the houses in the nobles’ quarter.

He was already tired. Returning to the City always required several days’ adjustment, as the artificial light cycle appealed to some time in his species’ distant past, when his ancestors had lived aboveground.

Or… had he returned to the city more than once? The word always in the phrase he had just used made him question.

He supposed it was likely he had lived outside the city and returned to it before. His knowledge of the light cycle’s effect on his physiology suggested so. The Archives had had no such convenience, the acid tubes glowing their soft, flickering green whether the scholars were awake or asleep.

His occupation must have required him to venture into the city periodically, for him to remember so much when he arrived. He could recall the locations of some streets, had been able to head straight to the merchants’ district for supplies, and several times found himself standing in front of buildings that seemed hauntingly familiar. Certain places seemed to roll out before him in his memory, neatly marked and delineated, like a map stretched beneath his feet.

The nobles’ quarter was not one of those places.

So far, his search had been fruitless, yielding only ruined interiors, smashed windows, and a persistent stench of mildew that clung to his kerchief, despite it being soaked many times over, handily reminding him via the constant dribble of rainwater down his back.

He missed the weight of her mask on his head, he missed the effortless motion of his nail in his hand, he missed the dreamless sleep, the monotonous days, he missed when everything had been easy—

Quirrel shook himself, spraying water in an arc from the beaded tassel under his chin, and approached the next house.

Hornet’s directions had the parameters of a logic puzzle. If she had thought it important to tell him that her house had no curtains, that detail should have made it stand out from the others, but it did not. There were dozens of houses whose curtains had simply given up over the years and now lay in puddled heaps on the floor, each layer adhered to the next in a mass of fibers that would rip the whole thing apart if anyone was foolish enough to pick it up.

The stasis had failed in strange and varying ways. Some places in the kingdom were untouched, as if the bugs who lived there had simply walked out one day, leaving their belongings where they lay, and never returned. Often in these places he half-expected to find a cup of cooling tea on the table, or blankets still warm upon the beds.

And then between one stride and the next he would be in another time entirely, the road pitted and crumbling beneath his feet, houses slumping in on themselves, every veneer of civilization rotted away. If he stared too long, these structures stopped looking like structures at all, their purpose slowly eroding until what had once been mansions, theatres, libraries, hospitals, were indistinguishable from the carved cavern walls.

Part of him marveled that a kingdom as vibrant as he now knew Hallownest had been could vanish so completely into obscurity. Ravaged by its gods, haunted by their wrongs, shambling onward in a mockery of life, black regret and blinding rage pooling in its footsteps…

He let out a shaky sigh and tore his gaze away, ignoring the sense that the house continued staring at him after he turned his back. He wasn’t likely to find Hornet in that ruin.

From what he knew of her, she did not seem like the type who would tolerate a door with no lock, or a house with no door—of which he had seen plenty. Broken windows were likely also out of the question. With these generous boundaries set, he had still been wandering for hours, and had had to search eighteen—now nineteen—houses, his throat growing scratchy from the smell, and the brace of tiktiks over his shoulder becoming steadily less and less fresh.

This one looked promising so far. There was no light in the windows anywhere, but said windows were curtainless, and it was in better condition than the two on either side of it. Not the most lavish accommodations, but serviceable. Certainly better than where he’d spent the night.

He knocked.

He would open the door regardless of whether anyone answered, at least to browse through the house and find anything worthwhile, and to ensure he hadn’t missed her by chance. Still, knocking was a courtesy—and a precaution, as he didn’t think it wise to startle someone who could skewer him at thirty paces.

His attempt to find her had turned into more of an ordeal than he expected. It could hardly have been more difficult than if she’d been a fabled princess of lore. At this point, if and when she opened any of these doors, he was half expecting a demand that he answer her riddles three.

The door banged open, with a tremendous crash of doorknob against wall.

Quirrel jumped back. His hand landed on his nail hilt before he registered the bright red and pure white of Hornet’s silhouette, and remembered that this was a spectacularly bad way to greet her.

He let go of the nail as if it burned him, despite every instinct screaming that he draw it. That had nearly doomed him once before, and he recalled all too well the silver comet-streak of the needle she held now, as it split his vision and impacted the mask atop his head with a bone-jarring shock of spell against spell.

Not an experience he ever cared to repeat, unless it was on friendly terms, and he had a running start.

He had thought this meeting would be on friendly terms. After she had confessed to him, with the suppressed panic of a swimmer who’d lost sight of shore, that she did not know what to do. But she did not move, did not speak, did not even lower her needle.

At least no riddles were forthcoming.

Quirrel drew breath to speak, to apologize for his tardiness, to re-introduce himself, anything, and she interrupted him.

“Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door in his face.

Rain washed down his mask. Droplets jumped in the puddles. Quirrel’s hand hovered in midair, above his nail.

Hornet opened the door again, after far too short an interval to have done anything meaningful except, perhaps, put down her needle—which she notably had not done.

“Come inside,” she said, breathless, and any joke or quip he might have made slipped back down his throat. He swallowed and stepped forward, over the threshold, and she shut the door behind him.

He had no time to register more than the dimness of the room before Hornet threw the bolt, hissed “Stay here,” and left him blinking in the antechamber.

Curiosity sprouted like a weed in his mind, but anything other than inspecting the little he could see through the doorway seemed like a dangerous prospect. He adjusted the weight of his catch on his shoulder, then pulled off his kerchief and wrung it out, tying the damp fabric back on over his antennae.

Blue light lay in a hazy rectangle on the stained, rumpled rug at his feet. When he paused to listen, Hornet’s voice carried from the next room, tone urgent but soft, and she paused before resuming, though he’d heard no answer in return.

Had she not been expecting him?

He grimaced. He had told her about his plans after leaving the lakeshore. Plans like those didn’t tend to inspire confidence in one’s ability to keep appointments.

A rustle of cloth announced Hornet’s approach. She had put down her needle, this time. He bowed when she stepped through the doorway, though not as deeply as before—if she preferred her given name to her title, she might not want that title acknowledged in other ways, either.

“I do apologize for the delay.” He straightened, hand still resting on his chest-plate. “In my defense, I needed to restock my supplies, and your directions left something to be desired.”

She closed her eyes briefly, black eyelids flickering shut over dark brown lenses. “You apologize far too much.”

And you don’t apologize at all.

He stifled the response, though not before his mandibles twitched. His reflexive tendency toward gentle teasing had already proven unproductive with Hornet.

Before he could find anything less pointed to say, she spoke. “I did not know… when to expect you.”

An apology, of sorts, though the unspoken if stung like venom.

“Have I arrived at a bad time?” he asked, tentatively, with a glance over her shoulder at the visible sliver of parlor.

A sigh hissed through her fangs, and her gaze dropped. “There are no good times.”

“Ah.” He looked away, staring at one of the astonishingly boring portraits on the wall behind her. The ache in his arm demanded his attention, and he straightened, proffering the fresh—or slightly less than fresh—kills. “I’ve been told it’s Deepnest tradition to offer dinner to a hunter. These were dressed and cleaned this morning, though I fear they’re a bit waterlogged now.”

She reached slowly forward, fangs working under her mask with evident surprise. Or anticipation—he had very little experience reading spiders, let alone the single known spiderwyrm. Either way, she took them, her motions betraying a caution he had done very little to inspire. “Who told you that?”

His mouth opened before he realized he had no answer. He’d obviously expected to have one once he did so, but the fact that his muscle memory was intact did not mean the rest of it was.

The silence stretched awkwardly before Hornet hoisted the string of kills and appraised them. “I accept,” she said, and weighed them in her hand before lowering them again. “They are… appreciated.”

Her other hand clenched and reopened, feeling, perhaps, the lack of her weapon, and then disappeared somewhere under her cloak as she seemed to notice herself fidgeting. “I have little to offer in return, I’m afraid.”

“I take vanilla and honey in my tea,” Quirrel said, deadpan, wondering how he knew that, and Hornet snorted, and he was left feeling as if he had won something, though if the prize was her amusement, it faded after a short moment.

“It has been a long time since I had a front door to knock on,” she began, and stopped.

“Which might explain your reaction,” he offered, generously.

Damn it. He hadn’t been able to stifle it this time, and it earned him a glare. “This situation is… less than ideal,” she said stiffly. “My hospitality will be somewhat lacking. This house was only a temporary shelter of mine; I was not prepared to stay here for long periods.”

Until? he wondered, but kept his mouth shut. She was here, she had let him in; she would explain sooner or later.

“I require very little,” he returned, accepting what seemed like yet another roundabout apology. “I have lived on the road for far too long to need much.”

Hornet nodded, but did not look him in the eye. Embarrassed? Lost for words? She did not seem like the type for either, but despite her insistence that there were no good times, he had the sense that he had interrupted something, that his arrival had tipped some kind of scale, and she was now fumbling to rebalance.

Her fangs worked under her mask again, pale points flashing, though not in a threat, as it seemed to be when she lifted her chin to display them. They tightened into a grimace as she reached a conclusion she did not appear to be happy with, and she whispered an oath under her breath, one he could honestly say he never expected to hear in the mouth of a princess.

“You must do exactly as I say.” She raised a hand to forestall a protest he had not intended to utter. “For your safety, and my own, and that of my sibling. I do not ask this lightly.”

“Understood,” he said, and she eyed him, and he resisted the urge to elaborate. Verbose as he could be, his word held the most weight when he spoke simply, and after a moment she nodded and continued.

“I do not know how my sibling will take your arrival. I have told them you are a friend, and that I trust you, but I am still unsure how much they understand, or what might cause them to react.” Her next exhale was shaky, and she hastened to speak again. “Wounded as they are, they are still strong, and quicker than they look. I advise that you stay to the opposite side of the room, near the hearth, unless I tell you to approach.”

Perhaps this should not intrigue him as much as it did. He almost wished he had peeked through the doorway, if she intended to delay him in the entry much longer.

Before he agreed to this latest set of conditions, she forged onward. “In addition, please refrain from asking questions. I will explain later, but… they should need to sleep soon. I shall be happy to answer whatever you ask then.”

“Agreed.”

She looked as though she had expected him to object. He did not, but she let the silence stretch for a moment longer before she believed it.

Taking a hesitant step toward the parlor, she halted, then spun around again. “And perhaps it would be best if you left your nail out of sight. I don’t know what they might do if you appeared to threaten me.”

She looked truly apologetic for this request, in a way she had not for the others. Perhaps that made sense, if he imagined someone asking her to part with her own weapon.

“Appearing unthreatening is no trouble,” he said with a half-laugh, drawing his nail and leaning it against the door frame. His gaze lingered for a moment before he yanked it away. His next words warbled a little. “Rather the inverse is usually true.”

“Hm,” Hornet responded, and the way she scanned him head to claws made him want to laugh again, warm amusement washing over chilly regret.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, after a long moment where she didn’t move.

“No.” She shook herself, and when she turned away there were spikes bristling on the back of her neck, pushing at the collar of her cloak.

Fascinating.

He thought she might conjure yet another reason to delay him, but instead she stepped through the doorway, and after a deep breath, he followed.

He immediately amended parlor to great room; the ceiling soared up into the second story, with tall arched windows on the opposite wall that looked out onto a rather lovely rain garden. The floor and walls were bare, without any of the customary carpets and hangings, though the imprints were still there, ghosts of luxury hastily stripped away. A collection of towels and linens hung from every available surface, and an unlit chandelier dangled crookedly from the ceiling’s apex.

And on the floor in front of him—

“Oh,” he said, and then, when all other words failed him, “Oh, my.”

 The creature lying atop the pile of mattresses and pillows would have turned any head in Hallownest in their prime. For a moment he could perceive nothing but the size of them. Curled slightly on their side, knees bent, arm draped across their abdomen, they made at least two of him, and their lower legs were still hidden under the ragged blankets bunched at the end of the bed. Their mask was another wonder altogether: horns pure white and triple-pointed, sweeping improbably high and coming to a gentle point at their muzzle, the seamless shape interrupted only by a pair of tapered black eyeholes that showed nothing but darkness beneath.

That, and the jagged crack that tracked through one socket, splitting their jaw and the base of one horn before curving out of sight behind their head.

Quirrel blinked. As if the crack in their mask was a flaw in the spell, his stunned daze fell away, and his next breath was sharp, almost a gasp, though he caught it and cut it off. He had the sudden urge to hold himself still, to stifle every sound, as if anything he did might hurt them, any action shatter them the rest of the way.

Their shell was scored with cracks—narrow slashes, deep punctures, shallow fracture lines that webbed from points of impact. Lower on their body, he thought he saw the subtle rippling patterns of offensive soul-spells branded into their legs. Not even their arms had been spared—

Oh, no.

What he had taken at first for a scrap of ratty fabric across their left shoulder was their skin. No shell, not even fragments—it was simply gone. As was their arm; he could see a shallow dip where the socket should be, but nothing else remained, the structure so withered and eaten away that he would be hard-pressed to identify much more.

Horrified as he was, he could not look away, though his gut twisted queasily when he noticed that the shell at the edges of the wound was deformed and roughened in a way he had only seen on burns from acid or extreme heat.

Their arm had not been cut or torn off. It had melted away.

When his gaze finally went to the blisters pushing through the cracks in their chest, the other wounds made an awful sort of sense. His hand dropped to his side, falling through empty air when he failed to find the hilt of his nail.

Hornet. Hornet had asked him to leave it behind.

He took a deeper breath to still the sudden hammer-pulse of fear in his chest. She knew what she was doing, she had lived in this kingdom far longer than he had, she would surely have the sense not to ask him to step weaponless into a room with someone infected.

The Hollow Knight had not moved, and neither had Quirrel, still just inside the doorway, within reach of his weapon and escape. If they had intended to slaughter him, they could have done it by now, and easily—regardless of the fact that Hornet stood in the way, half-turned to keep both of them in view, spikes bristling beneath her cloak, one hand held halfway out, as if to halt an altercation.

Held out not toward her sibling, but toward Quirrel.

He choked on a brief surge of indignation. What was he meant to do against that? If they wished to kill him, they simply would.

He had wondered before whether he could best his traveling friend—the other vessel—in combat. As their encounters grew more frequent, and he had more cause to observe them, he had come solidly down on an answer in the negative. The most he could hope for was to assist them, to be on the same side of whatever conflict arose at the time. He was not fool enough to fight a force of nature.

They had been a fourth this size. If that.

Hornet was glaring fixedly at him. He could only hope she wasn’t capable of injecting venom through intimidating looks as well as through more traditional means.

Quirrel pushed the fear back. Again. Spread both hands, away from his sides, and empty. She relaxed a touch, and he nodded at her.

Then he took another breath, and looked back at the Hollow Knight.

Despite the instinctive push to run, to fight, to do anything but stand still, he made himself do just that. Made himself exist with the impossibility of it, waiting for the answer to reveal itself.

He had never seen injuries this extensive on a bug that was still living.

His first assumption had been that the infection was keeping them alive. It certainly had the capacity to do so, if some of the more grotesque husks he had seen were any indication. Physical symptoms did not manifest in those who were not mentally infected as well; one preceded the other, in every case he knew of, and the condition progressed until the individual was fully taken over, prey to the whims of the murderous rage that had poisoned their dreams.

Hornet’s sibling did not seem murderous. Or enraged. They lay in exactly the same position they had been in when he stepped through the doorway, as if frozen in place, for all the world like he was a threat to them.

And perhaps he was, he thought, remembering his first impression that any move he made might break them into pieces. Hornet certainly seemed to think so. Although if they were not dead already, he doubted anything he could do would kill them.

It broke all the accepted patterns of the infection, but the Hollow Knight was alive, unchained, both infected and not. Their chest pulsed with rot, swollen sacs of orange pressing their wounds open, but their eyes were as clear and dark as the bottom of a well, fixed firmly to his face, waiting for whatever they clearly expected him to do.

Clear and dark did not mean empty, however, and the intensity of their gaze pressed against his mask like a cold hand, leaving no doubt that something there was watching him. Closely.

His gaze flicked to Hornet, and once again he resorted to the exact opposite of his instincts. Moving slowly, he stepped around the edge of the room until he reached the furthest point away, then sat down on the hearth, resting his back against the chilly slate.

Truthfully, it was the last thing he wanted to do. But if the two godspawn in the room both insisted on eying him as if he might explode, it was one of the few unequivocally unthreatening actions he could think of.

He couldn’t exactly relax, not with those two dark gazes pinned on him, but it did feel good to sit after hours of walking.

Hornet, after a further moment of tension, seemed to accept that Quirrel and her sibling were not going to fly at each other’s throats. She expelled a breath that shook slightly and stepped closer to the vessel, sinking to her knees near their head, turning her gaze away from Quirrel to nervously check them over.

The Hollow Knight did not follow suit, their attention remaining fixed in his direction. He thought he detected motion behind their mask, though when he stared into the darkness, that was precisely what he saw—more darkness. Dark in a way these caverns never were, with the remnants of kingslight still lingering. Dark as few things ever could be, dark as true blindness, or the inside of a grave.

Quirrel shook himself. His thoughts rarely trended so gloomy, though he recalled a similar effect when confronted with the unwavering gaze of his small friend. Odd, that two creatures with such vast outward differences would inspire such similar—and uncharacteristic—reactions.

Few had the chance to meet more than one vessel. Did that make him lucky? Unlucky? He certainly would not wish to give up any of his other encounters; they were rare, fleeting things, all the more precious for their infrequency, and no less meaningful for all that the only words spoken had been his. The weight of the little vessel’s presence made them an exceptional listener, and the tilt of their head as they stared up at him with those fathomless eyes, waiting for him to continue, made him wander farther afield in the conversation than was normal, even for him. To meet someone who seemed to drink in his every word, to soak up every moment in his company, was water in the desert, a gift in a kingdom otherwise defined by its emptiness.

Hornet was speaking softly, her hand resting on the bed just in front of the vessel’s mask, fingers stretched out and open, as if waiting for her sibling to place something in them. The Hollow Knight did not seem to be listening, all their focus narrowed to Quirrel, and after a moment she exhaled and sat back, though she left her hand where it was.

Quirrel opened his mouth, remembered Hornet’s prohibition on questions, and shut it again. Still, when the silence stretched on with no indication that she intended to break it, he cleared his throat.

She jumped a little, more of a twitch than anything, and her sibling’s breath caught, a soft whine that he had not fully noticed falling silent and then resuming. Now that he was listening, he could hear them breathing, though only by the horrible wet catch in their lungs, a sound he had only ever heard described as a death rattle.

Perhaps he was only digging the hole deeper, but he had her attention now, at the cost of startling her, and he was loath to waste it. “If… if there’s any way I can help…”

Hornet sat motionless, staring at the floor. With every moment that passed, Quirrel was surer that he should not have spoken. She looked as though she was holding something in, clinging to composure by her clawtips.

How long had she been here, caring for her sibling alone? He had thought she looked exhausted at the lakeshore, but if possible, she looked even worse now, her shoulders curling forward and masktip dropping until it nearly reached her chest. He knew she had heard him; her fangs parted as if to answer, but she said nothing.

“There is a kettle by the fireplace,” she mumbled after a long pause, sounding as if the words had been dragged out of her. “And clean water and shellwood in the kitchen.” She turned to look at him. “These wounds need washing, though I will not be able to finish the job tonight. While I am doing that, I will tell you what I can.”

Grateful as he was, silence still felt like the safest bet. He nodded to Hornet, then stood without a word and picked up the kettle, feeling the Hollow Knight’s eyes follow him all the way to the door.

○

Taglist: @2amtime @moss-tombstone @slimeel Send an ask or reply to this post to be added to (or removed from) the taglist!

[scotianostra]

On September 14th 1507 Edinburgh merchants were granted exclusive privilege of running a printing press.

Another one with dates that differ by a day or so, but all agree it was mid September 1507 thatJames IV granted a Royal Patent authorising Scotland’s first printing press.

You will no doubt be surprised that the printing press with moveable types wasn’t invented by a Scotsman. However, Scots have certainly made good use of the technology since it was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, around 1439. It was a good fifty years after Gutenberg’s monopoly was revoked before a press found its way to Scotland. By the arbitrary Incunabulum date of 1500, when around a thousand printing presses were in operation throughout Western Europe and had produced anything between eight and twenty million books, Scotland still lacked a press of its own. Nevertheless, the Scots hadn’t been idle bystanders as many were educated in France and elsewhere and brought back printed books from the Continent. That’s not to say that Scotds had not made use of this new invention, Some sought out the printing press on the continent and had books published there. It should come as no surprise either that in France some Scots were also employed in the new profession of printing and it was one such Scot who had served his apprenticeship as a printer in France, Androw Myllar that brought the art back to his native country.

Myllar was an Edinburgh bookseller who imported books from England and France, where he learned the printer’s craft in Rouen. When he arrived back in Scotland in 1507, Myllar gained the financial backing of Walter Chepman, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant trader and a man who appears to have had the ear of the King, James IV. Chepman also seems to have gained a lot of the credit for Scotland’s first printed books, but then, he was the money man.

When Myllar went into partnership with Chepman, the two men established Scotland’s first printing press, the building was in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, the building is long gone but the pic shows a plaque marking where it stood. Scotland’s first printed books are known as ‘The Chepman & Myllar Prints’, the earliest of which is dated the 4th of April, 1508, which was an edition of John Lydgate’s ‘The Complaint of the Black Knight’.

Sometimes when searching through sources for my posts I find out other little snippets that connect to other posts, like in the article “Printing Comes to Scotland” which you can read on the link below, I learned that there was an account of The Battle of Flodden made on an early printing press, it is titled “The trewe encountre or Batyle don betwene Englande and Scotland” and while it may have been printed in London, it does give an insight into early bias in print. In the pamphlet it claimed that around 10,000 Scots were put to the sword at Flodden, this figure is used a lot but most historians discount the amount now, but the bias is not in that number, the pamphlet claims that the Earl of Surrey lost only a few hundred at the battle. Now I hark back to previous posts about how good the English are at keeping records, most recently in my post regarding Sir William Wallace’s murder, well records of the payroll show that Surrey, the English commander, lost two-fifths of his own retinue, even with these figures available, Wikipedia, which I look at every day, still states that English losses were a mere 1,500 of their 26,000 army, you do the maths, yes it was a massive defeat for the Scots, but it was a bloody hard fought battle with large casualties on both sides.

Pics are the plaque on the Cowgate, the second an early example of Myllar’s work, the windmill is apparently a pun on his surname.

[jaimebluesq]

For the prompt thing, I really like all your Nie sect headcanons! Do you have any more--perhaps focused on Huaisang & Mingjue and their brotherly bond?

Thank you for the ask/prompt! :D

I think for quite a while after their parents died, the relationship between Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang was in a really difficult place because a) NMJ now had to run their sect, and b) NMJ now had a 9-yr old brother who needed a parental figure, and he was the only one left despite only being 15. It was a huge balancing act and he made a lot of mistakes, made even worse by the fact that NHS began acting out. This is one of the initial reasons why NHS began fighting back against saber training – before then, he looked up to his big brother and wanted to be just like him (even though physically it just wasn't going to be in the cards), but after NMJ became sect leader, NHS only ever saw him at meals and whenever he got into trouble... so he got into trouble more often, and every time he ran away when it was time to train his saber, NMJ would go and find him and bring him back, and he'd see his brother again.

As NHS grew up, running away from practice became less and less acceptable. What NMJ could tolerate from a 9 year old was different from what he could tolerate from a 12 year old, and yet they were still stuck in that cycle of NMJ getting busy, NHS instinctively needing his brother's attention, NHS acts out, NMJ fetches him and gets angry, goes back to work, and rinse/repeat. Something had to change or else they would come to a head which would negatively affect their relationship.

It's funny that the very thing that saved them was the very thing that made them so different. NMJ is a very straightforward man, you always know where you stand with him, and he just doesn't have much patience for political games. Oh, he does his best to play them because he HAS to, but he doesn't like it, and isn't as good at it as he knows he should be. NHS, on the other hand, will put on a smile for you one moment and plot to sneak hot peppers in your supper the next just because you insulted one of his birds. What ended up happening was that NHS had really gotten into trouble and NMJ didn't feel like he could let his brother go unsupervised, so NMJ was forcing him to remain at his side when he was meeting with officials in the Great Hall. Mid-way through one merchant's account of why they weren't able to fulfill Qinghe Nie's order for more materials for their saber blacksmiths, NHS tugged at his brother's sleeve and whispered “He's lying, Da-ge.” NMJ called for a short recess and talked with NHS in private, asking him why he thought that. It was a mix of NHS' instinctive ability to read people and rumours he'd heard from the kitchen staff that were contrary to what the merchant had been saying. When they went back to the Main Hall, NMJ confronted the merchant who folded eventually, admitting they “may have exaggerated the difficulty a little bit”.

After that, NHS spent more time with NMJ when he was meeting people – at first it started with just little tugs and whispers to let NMJ know NHS thought something was off, and over the years, they developed a whole vocabulary of looks and gestures so that NHS could communicate things to NMJ without anyone else being any the wiser. They kept it a secret between the two of them because NHS began to feel confident enough to let NMJ know when he suspected something of one of NMJ's advisors, captains, or disciples.

The only person to ever find out about this unique facet to their relationship was Meng Yao.

[46ten]

John Adams and Hamilton, briefly

A closer examination of Adams’s use of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, especially Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, reveals a striking and underappreciated originality in Adams’s political thought. As Luke Mayville has powerfully demonstrated, Adams’s preoccupation with aristocracy - and its malignant twin, oligarchy - in the Defense and Discourses reveals not a fondness for, but rather a grave fear of, oligarchic power in American society. While democratic republican reformers like Jefferson believed that America would weed out the roots of ancient and corrupt oligarchic institutions and cultivate the seeds of a truly meritocratic and virtuous elite, Adams was doubtful. According to Adams, the deep, social psychological roots of authority would give rise to a “natural aristocracy” not of the wise, talented, and virtuous, but rather of the beautiful, well-born, and wealthy. What is more, this national aristocracy would not only survive, but thrive if left unchanged, all to the detriment of the republic. Adams approached moral philosophy as more than an academic guide to the human psyche. He made it a crucial link between the “phenomena of social life and the problems of political power” that enabled him to advance a unique conception of oligarchy. 

Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism by Glory M. Liu (2021).

[I may add to this post later, as I have been wanting to do a longer post summarizing/explaining why the Hamilton/Adams relationship was the way it was.] 

To understand the differences between Adams and Hamilton, one first has to start with an understanding of the differences between the New England colonies, the Middle/Mid-Atlantic colonies, and the Southern colonies. (American schools start teaching about the differences between the colonies in elementary/middle school - so I’m not sure if the very crude summary that follows is even necessary - and there are entire books on this topic). These were separate societies. (Leaving out the Southern colonies) we have the Germans, Dutch, and English in PA/NY/NJ/DE vs the Puritan descendant Massachusetts colonists. The founders of these colonies were different groups of people: they differed economically, in religious beliefs, in the structure of society, in attitudes on a range of subjects, etc. A ‘tolerant’ society focused on profit - the Dutch traded weapons to the Native Americans that they in turn used to raid NE towns - vs the fiercely independent and religious communities of NE. A people who saw themselves in America seeking freedom (NE) vs disparate peoples in America seeking profit (Middle). NE did not have farmland that could support large agricultural operations - family farms were most common. In contrast, NY/NJ was governed by a slave-owning, Dutch and English aristocracy, heavily involved in trade of wheat (the breadbasket of N. America), fur and lumber for West Indian sugar. William Duer, who marries into the Livingston family, spent part of his early adulthood running his family estate in the West Indies; an entire branch of the prestigious Cruger family were NY-West Indian merchants. This latter group pushed Hamilton to the forefront of national politics. 

The anger NEnglanders held against the Middle colonists for their interactions with Native Americans (the French and Indian War played no small part in hatred) and their bias based on moral deficits lasts straight through the AmRev - Albany was considered practically a den of sin by NE soldiers, who also, of course, were horrified to be under the charge of Philip Schuyler. One of the reasons for Schuyler’s removal as commander of the Northern Dept was exactly this political concern. When we read several accounts of Schuyler as aristocratic, this is NE bias at work, too, against a ‘Dutch’ large landowner, wealthy slave holder, and prominent trader of West Indian goods. 

And then Hamilton enters the picture. Adams may have disliked him because he’s an upstart - someone who rose very quickly in the early national political scene through his support from and for the Dutch slave-owning aristocracy, while Adams labored for decades supporting the nascent country with a political philosophy he found far more principled - but there were also real differences in interests and philosophy. And AH did very little to reduce any suspicion. Hamilton seemed to have decided fairly early on that Adams was not of sufficient skill or integrity - and just plain did not share the same profit-loving beliefs - to play a major role in new government, so he undermined Adams, even when wholly unnecessary. (Not to say that Adams was particularly adept in his roles as V. President and President, either.)  Adams regarded Hamilton’s economic plans as harmful to the poor (they were) and designed to further enrich the wealthy (they did). Adams absolutely recognized Hamilton for the warmonger he was.

Hamilton meddles almost immediately against Adams - ensuring that he’d get few electoral votes in 1789, when the election of Washington wasn’t even in question. He wanted Adams to lose the election of 1796, throwing his support behind Pinckney instead. With an aim of not disrupting the continuity the new nation experienced under Washington, Adams kept most of the same cabinet members, only to have AH use those members to run the gov’t behind Adams’s back. Let’s not even get into AH’s machinations during the Quasi-War. In a long list of ways, Hamilton was duplicitous towards Adams before outright challenging him. And then Hamilton had the nerve to claim a superior moral character to Adams in 1800 in his pamphlet shared with other members of the Federalist party. There was a lot of underhandedness going on from AH. This again is an example of Hamilton’s invincible belief in his own rightness. 

That said, Adams had no extraordinary interest in Hamilton’s personal life beyond the fairly common staunch Calvinist point-of-view that a deficient family background brought about a deficient moral character, void of virtue and reason, and therefore unfit to lead. Nor was Adams singular in his concern about the talent, reason, and virtues - the character - of major political players - these concerns take up a lot of ink in this period of time because of the prevalent moral and political philosophies. Who should be leaders? Who should vote? To the extent that Adams shared the common Federalist belief that a natural aristocracy was composed of men reliant on reason and virtue, Hamilton, by way of his illegitimate birth in the West Indies, was never going to fit the ideal. And Hamilton certainly lived up (or down?) to that negative reputation of being primarily interested in benefiting the wealthy and the well-born, and then a confirmed adulterer. But Adams could be fairly publicly moderate with men with whom he held private disagreements (Franklin!). He even seems to have had a good opinion of Philip Schuyler, as I recall one of the things Adams wanted to do was to name Philip Schuyler and others holding the rank of General at the time of the end of the AmRev to positions of formal leadership in 1798-99, and was baffled at Hamilton elevating himself and all his cronies. 

Once Hamilton was dead, Adams (who turned 70 in 1805) seemed to enjoy making up additional gossip about him - we have no record, for example, of anyone else stating that Hamilton was an opium addict. We also have no record of anyone else stating that Hamilton was having affairs with all his sisters-in-law. But Adams also wasn’t publicly publishing this stuff - it’s in his correspondence to select others. 

All that said, Adams really should be more popular than Hamilton - Adams really was an anti-slavery Founding Father; though he was not an abolitionist, he offered them his support. He was closer to a political moderate (in modern parlance) than Hamilton. And he rightly identified the oligarchic plan that underlay the High Federalists’ vision, although he certainly wasn’t a populist, either. 

There’s a lot more historical context than just personality differences between personages. And there’s a lot more understanding of political and moral philosophies of the time that is needed before speculating about the whats and whys of Adams’s behavior (or speculation about Washington’s reactions to additional speculation). Warning, lecture here: Folks have dedicated their professional lives to understanding some of these topics, and we need to show greater interest in what they have found and reframe our opinions accordingly. 

This is horribly brief and reductive and I can already see the simplifications that will lead to errors, and I may expand on it later, but it gets some general thoughts down. 

[rockislandadultreads]

Happy Independence Day!

Brothers at Arms by Larrie D. Ferreiro

In this groundbreaking, revisionist history, Larrie Ferreiro shows that at the time the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord the colonists had little chance, if any, of militarily defeating the British. The nascent American nation had no navy, little in the way of artillery, and a militia bereft even of gunpowder. In his detailed accounts Ferreiro shows that without the extensive military and financial support of the French and Spanish, the American cause would never have succeeded. France and Spain provided close to the equivalent of $30 billion and 90 percent of all guns used by the Americans, and they sent soldiers and sailors by the thousands to fight and die alongside the Americans, as well as around the world.

Ferreiro adds to the historical records the names of French and Spanish diplomats, merchants, soldiers, and sailors whose contribution is at last given recognition. Instead of viewing the American Revolution in isolation, Brothers at Arms reveals the birth of the American nation as the centerpiece of an international coalition fighting against a common enemy.

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

The Second Founding by Eric Foner

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.

Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

1776 by David McCullough

In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence—when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King’s men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.

Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams, David McCullough’s 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American history.

[hassingperry05]

It’s easy to treat customer support as an afterthought-until you need access to your funds and your account has been frozen for seemingly no reason. Going with a third-party payment processor option over your own merchant account means you might have to wait a bit longer to get access to your funds. Below, we walk through how a third-party payment processor works, the pros and cons of using one, and how to go about choosing the best one according to your business needs. The Square platform also tracks live sales and inventory which enables a business to keep track of payment updates, inventory levels, and sales opportunities. This enables it to unify all your sales data. There is a template that will add data to the Checkout model upon a successful completion of the checkout process. Of course, a lot of the logistics of when and how your funds can be accessed will depend on the third-party processor or merchant account provider you choose.

If you are transferring funds, you should never have someone on your MID, and it should not be accessed by unauthorized persons. These reserved funds are used to prevent negative balances due to disputes and fraud on your Stripe account. Finally, risk factors differ between a third-party processor and a merchant account provider. MerchACT is a specialized high-risk payment processor with proven account experience. Take some time to learn which payment processors can do that. It’s automatically saved and prefilled next time. In most cases, it’s an instant process once you provide your business information and connect your business account. Setting up a merchant account with Stripe is easy and only takes a few minutes. Third-party processors group your funds with hundreds if not thousands of other merchant funds into a single account. Fees can differ significantly between payment processors. It’s also accepted in all major currencies and by most major mobile payment providers including Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and others. Stripe Terminal allows you to accept any major debit or credit card in any country. Entry level business owners and smaller merchants often begin with a PayFac at startup to accept credit card payments, via online shopping carts or similar. Merchants benefit when their products are easier to buy. Konbini payments are one type of asynchronous payment; they’ll be captured hours or days after the order. A merchant account is a type of business bank account that lets businesses accept and process electronic card payments. It makes it easy for startups and growing small businesses to securely manage card payments without having to wrestle with the technical backend setup to make it all work. We’re so sure that Stripe is the right choice for online businesses that we built our plugin, WP Simple Pay, to integrate your WordPress site exclusively with Stripe. Is a third-party payment processor right for your store? If you’re optimizing for convenience, low fees, and minimal hassle, a third-party payment processor is the way to go. And unfortunately, payment aggregators almost never handle chargebacks in their favor. Shopify Payments handles payment processing at industry standard rates, but it adds a customer service component and helps with credit card chargebacks. Accepting paypal business merchant account and debit cards with Stripe Terminal is simple because the payment process is based on a card reader. Online payment processing has become a popular form of transacting, giving customers the ability to easily pay with a debit or credit card. A lot of providers will advertise a blended pricing option (a combination rate that includes payment gateway fees and merchant account fees) but this is rarely the best deal for merchants. Do either of these companies have hidden fees or transaction costs that sway the balance? Keep in mind that some third-party processors might offer lower transaction fees, but might also require a higher monthly payment or offer limited customer support. As you scale, you’ll hit a point where depending on a third-party payment processor might not be the most cost-effective choice. Usually, third-party payment processor accounts are easy to open. Because there are so many merchant service providers, you will have a wide range of options to choose from. Shipping address. Delivery options. electronic merchant services ’re able to accept credit card payments as well as other popular payment options seamlessly. Every payment method used the same two APIs abstractions: a Source and a Charge. Some charge a monthly fee plus a percentage of card payments based on whether it’s an in-person or online transaction. Fees. Chase charges 2.9% plus 25¢ per transaction on each ecommerce purchase.

[enkisstories]

You can take the deviant out of Park Avenue, but not Park Avenue out of the deviant - confronted with the reality of having to work for a mining & lumber company now, Daniel’s first impulse is to negotiate his wage and an advance.

Curtis: “So I understand you want to get today’s wage up front?”

Daniel: “No. For all of November! And not just me - all of us! Plus, our contracts will get back-dated to November 1st!”

Curtis: “Not gonna happen. November 15 it is. Mid-month, fifteen days. No advance.”

Daniel: “Alright, I'll concede. Fifteen days, paid in advance.”

Curtis: “I understand deviants are more than mere machines. You have hopes and dreams... so you should like hearing me say: Dream on!”

Daniel: “Maybe I was a bit too forward? In this case let’s talk our sign on bonus first! Three monthly wages is customary, but I think with what you are getting in us, twelve are more like it!”

Curtis: “Your what? A sign on bonus for some trash I picked up at the DPD? Getting airs here, spare parts? Who do you think you are to make demands like that?!”

Daniel: “Good question! I am the closest thing to the last remnant in this world of John Phillips’ y-chromosome! As such I won’t let a small scale timber merchant haggle me down! I’m prepared to do this all day, and it won’t be me getting up first from the cold. - By the way, I’m faster than you. Running away won’t help you.”

Curtis: “I don’t know about this John Phillips, but you are a son of a bitch!”

Daniel: “Oh, is that so? Who’s YOUR progenitor, huh?”

Curtis: “Dorothy McGavin, second daughter of Logan McGavin, head of the american branch of clan Gow! We practically built this city up after the English took it from the French!”

Curtis’ words imply that his family has enabled the car industry to no small degree. And Daniel’s human family had owned a car dealership with a driving school on the side... In a way, they owe Curtis’ ancestors their wealth.

But the man is neither looking nor acting the part of an old money scion. He is only a spare, just like Daniel hadn’t really been considered a part of the family by his owners. In this, human and android are scarily alike.

Daniel does his best to cover his emotions up by a haughty retort:

Daniel: “I probably wouldn’t brag about having co-founded Detroit of all places... What did your other parent bring to the table?”

Curtis: “My f... father?”

Daniel: “Uh-huh!”

Curtis: “I don’t have... one of those.”

Daniel: “Divorce kid?”

Curtis: “Nope. Never had a dad. Gramps Logan filled the role, sort of... after driving away my sire.”

Daniel: “So you never even knew the man? Like, you grew up with only half of a family? Oh my god, Curtis... I had no idea! Really not!”

Curtis: “Can I unsubscribe from your endangered species list, please? You’re pathetic!”

Daniel: “You never had... a father... Oh, Curtis...”

Curtis: “Could have been worse. I could have been John’s and the result of his sterling parenting.”

Daniel: “No joke.”

Curtis: “Now let’s go! The trees aren’t cutting themselves.”

Daniel: “I won’t cut trees for you for the promise of maybe getting a compensation at the end of the month!”

Curtis: “You won’t have to. It just dawned me what position you’re much better suited for. Hint: It’s neither accounting nor negotiation.”

[mostshipshape]

The Sailors of the HMS Pickle (Player Characters)

Ladies, Jewels and Gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present the sailors who will be sailing with us on this voyage!

Second Lieutenant David Price (He/They) From a respectable family with many naval heroes in its ranks, David hopes that he can acquit himself honourably. He is the second son of a retired Commander (who served in a minor role in a famous naval battle). On his mother's side he has Bharatan ancestry, and some of his family have also migrated to The Land Upon The Shell. A capable seaman, he longs to travel to exotic places, and he always has novels in his standing bed-place or sea-chest.

Midshipman Lena Wright (She/They) Lena is a no nonsense midshipman in her mid 30s who has little interest in gaining promotion, for she is far too attached to her fellow lower officers. She has been known to help out in the infimary, especially with the movement of the injured, on account of her being a large woman with impressive strength, making carrying sailors an easy task. Despite her lack of ambition, she is well respected as a leader amongst her fellows, and is often seen as something of a mentor to the younger midshipmen. She is particularly close to the surgeon, Susan Ibbot, especially with her her habit of scooping up injured sailors, but nothing has happened between them…. yet.

Chaplain James Tillbury (He/Him) Son of a book printer and a composer, Reverend Tillbury is well-versed in classical texts and has a love of music. He spent ten years taking care of his home parish and his parents, before moving to the coast after their death. He sailed for two years aboard the HMS Guard where he had very good relations with the crew, both those religious and otherwise. On his next voyage, too, he hopes to help and inspire, rather than evangelize.

Gunner Bryn Morgan (They/Them) Raised as part of a middle class merchant family with a significant amount of trade in arms, powder and ammunition, it was always anticipated that Brynn would take over the family business. However, the experience of being trained in mercantile ways in their adolescence was so soul-destroyingly dull that they became desperate to escape to a career that offered more danger and adventure. Now a Gunner on the HMS Pickle, they have once again crossed paths with First Lieutenant Lawrence Davies, once a midshipman whose clandestine romance with a rating lead to a brutal flogging for a young Bryn and a kind transferral for the poor, seduced Davies. Now, Davies does seem quite fond of Bryn's talented cooking, but is that all there is? In Bryn's spare time, their favourite hobby is drawing but they aren't very good at it. They also enjoy cooking, for which they seem to have a special talent. They are very professional in relation to their role, but have a furtive, secretive nature that leads other to think of them as dependable but a bit shifty. They are strongly driven by emotion and a desire to assuage the loneliness they have always felt at sea.

Carpenter Minna Peggram (She/They) Minna hails from a lineage of carpenters - there is always at least one Peggram fixing a hole or building a coffin in every single one of the world's seas. She was the carpenter's apprentice to her mother on the HMS Fidelity before and plans to take her own successor under her wing, be it her natural child or some scrappy rascal picked up along the way (rumor has it that Peggrams are not born, but made, though the former is true for Minna). Still, all Peggrams have an aura of wirey strength and unruly hair to them - Minna, a red mop of curls, is no exception.

Carpenter's Mate Gwilym Parry (He/Him) Gwilym Parry is following in his father's footsteps by serving in the Navy, and he's proud to continue the tradition (no matter that one could learn to Be A Man on land with a lot less chance of dying). He is his family's third child and first son. He's a kind fellow of 24 with a penchant for spotted neckerchiefs and reading as much poetry as he can get his hands on. Gwilym is always ready with a smile to lift up his crewmates when the seas are rough or the brass gets too big for their britches. Don't underestimate Mr Parry! That unassuming face hides a true moral character--though perhaps let's not discuss the particular politics behind those morals on board, eh?

Cook Jacques "Jack" René Anne Laplace (He/Him) A committed Gallian revolutionary, Jacques reluctantly defected--much to his patriotic sister's disapproval--after Empress Josephine Bonaparte's rise to power. (Prior to the Revolution, he had been a pastry chef--skills which, though perhaps a bit refined for shipboard fare, ensure that he at least knows his way around a kitchen.) Although he now serves Gallia's enemy, he hopes to one day return to a restored Gallian Republic. His Gallian background made him unpopular on his previous ship, HMS Amphitrite, so this ship is an opportunity for a fresh start.

Landsman Jean-Heron Toussaint (He/Him) Suspected of harbouring Royalist sympathies, Jean-Heron left Gallia to avoid being caught by Agents of the Revolution. A gambler at heart, he has staked everything on his plan of volunteering for the Loegrian Navy, in the hopes that he will gain some recognition upon the return of the proper Queen.

[leohtttbriar]

"Perhaps one of the most arresting moments in Carmilla occurs just before the titular vampiress’s arrival. Upon returning from an evening walk with her father, Laura encounters her two governesses tittering like schoolgirls beneath the celestial splendor of a full moon. One of them—Mademoiselle De Lafontaine—relates the tale of her cousin, a sailor on a merchant ship, who once fell asleep beneath such a moon.

He had awoken, she claimed, “after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek with his features horribly drawn to one side; his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.” She speaks, then, of the “odylic and magnetic influence” of the night and the moon.

The concept of odic forces—the pseudoscientific philosophy of a pervading, electromagnetic life force in all things—was very much in vogue in the mid-nineteenth century. While Veronika never espoused or studied odology, she did adapt her governess’s dogma in a very specific way: she believed that, in her dreams, she shared a physical space with certain other dreamers: fellow citizens of a shared “dream-city.” It is believed by Lucia Trect and other scholars that this accounted for her instant and profound love for Marcia. That is to say, she believed that even before they met, they had occupied the same dream-city; and she believed that such a thing was as close to fate or destiny as you could come.”

"You Are Mine: Obsession, Odylic Influences, and LeFanu's Carmilla," by Carmen Maria Machado

[elamarth-calmagol]

OC Advent Day 16

Miscellaneous rescued and adopted Men

Elrond has a habit of adopting children, both Men and Elves.  (Dwarves don’t let their children be raised by outsiders, so they wouldn’t have any dwarf children for more than a year.)  Here are two.

Name(s): Olodir means “dreaming man”.

Appearance: undetermined

Age: now dead, lived at Rivendell from age 10 to 72, about a hundred years ago

Heritage: Dúnedain

Olodir was a child of a wandering Dúnedain family who was severely autistic and intellectually disabled.  He was the kind of person who didn’t have a sense of danger, and he didn’t have any form of communication to tell people he was hurt.  On a farm, he might have found a job, but on the road, he could wander off anywhere and get into anything.  His family eventually made their way to Rivendell, where Elrond agreed to take him in and keep him safe.  Over time, he learned to work in the garden with Faelon and use some basic sign language.  His family couldn’t visit more often than every several years, but the elves always made sure to update them on how he was, down to his nieces and nephews and their children, who hadn’t even met him.  Elves don’t have a great sense of generations.

Free to use this character!

2. Name(s): Currently unnamed because I haven’t established Dunlending names yet

Appearance: brown skin, black hair, black eyes

Age: now dead, lived in Rivendell from age 14 to 26, about 1,500 years ago

Heritage: Dunlending

In the mid Third Age, when there were still traders traveling up and down the Greenway, Elladan and Elrohir found a Dunlending girl who had been either kidnapped or bought by one of the trade caravans and was being horrifically abused.  They took her back to Rivendell, where she was adopted into their family.  It took her a long time to recover, but she eventually moved to Tharbad, married, had children, and did accounting work for one of the merchants.

Free to use this character if you approve her name with me!

[quotesfrommyreading]

In ancient civilizations, debt repayment was a promise secured by the body. In India an unpaid creditor could show up at his debtor’s door, sit on his doorstep, and stay there, indefinitely, publicly starving to death until he was given what he was owed. In Egypt, a debtor pledged their repayment on the dead body of a loved one.

You could maim someone according to ancient Hindu law, and if that did not yield repayment, you might take his cattle, his sons, or his wife — or simply enslave or kill him. The same punishments were allowed according to ancient Roman law, with an addendum: A debtor who was killed for unpaid debts might have his body divided for creditors, sliced up proportionate to the amount of each one’s claims. A severed head for the largest debt, I guess, and just a foot for something smaller. This Roman law would spawn the “pound of flesh” Shylock seeks to collect in The Merchant of Venice and all the cultural references it, in turn, generated. Though this grotesque form of accounting has little documentation, debt slavery was common.

So, too, was debt imprisonment, which existed in the barbarian kingdoms that followed the Roman Empire in the West. Still later, as feudalism declined, the Catholic Church encouraged and enforced imprisonment for unpaid debts. Those debtors who died without leaving enough money to cover their remaining debts were denied a Christian burial, their very bodies unwelcome on holy land.

Debtors’ prisons followed colonists from England to the Americas, where they remained in practice until the mid-1800s. According to many of the colonies’ laws, sentences had no fixed length: One could remain incarcerated for a month or years, whatever amount of time satisfied the creditors. While the prisons’ upper-class debtors were often assigned well-lit rooms where they could write or paint, the poorest prisoners slept in the cellar, sometimes sitting in near darkness day and night, hungry and cold, threatened by disease. In this case, the punishment was not labor or mutilation, but isolation and stagnation: a body left alone to rot.

  —  Debt Demands a Body

[scotianostra]

On September 14th 1507 Edinburgh merchants were  granted exclusive privilege of running a printing press.

Another one with dates that differ by a day or so, but all agree it was mid September 1507 thatJames IV granted a Royal Patent authorising Scotland’s first printing press.

You will no doubt be surprised that the printing press with moveable types wasn’t invented by a Scotsman. However, Scots have certainly made good use of the technology since it was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, around 1439. It was a good fifty years after Gutenberg’s monopoly was revoked before a press found its way to Scotland. By the arbitrary Incunabulum date of 1500, when around a thousand printing presses were in operation throughout Western Europe and had produced anything between eight and twenty million books, Scotland still lacked a press of its own. Nevertheless, the Scots hadn’t been idle bystanders as many were educated in France and elsewhere and brought back printed books from the Continent. That’s not to say that Scotds had not made use of this new invention, Some sought out the printing press on the continent and had books published there. It should come as no surprise either that in France some Scots were also employed in the new profession of printing and it was one such Scot who had served his apprenticeship as a printer in France, Androw Myllar that brought the art back to his native country.

Myllar was an Edinburgh bookseller who imported books from England and France, where he learned the printer’s craft in Rouen. When he arrived back in Scotland in 1507, Myllar gained the financial backing of Walter Chepman, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant trader and a man who appears to have had the ear of the King, James IV. Chepman also seems to have gained a lot of the credit for Scotland’s first printed books, but then, he was the money man.

When Myllar went into partnership with Chepman, the two men established Scotland’s first printing press, the building was in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, the building is long gone but the pic shows a plaque marking where it stood. Scotland’s first printed books are known as ‘The Chepman & Myllar Prints’, the earliest of which is dated the 4th of April, 1508, which was an edition of John Lydgate’s ‘The Complaint of the Black Knight’.

Sometimes when searching through sources for my posts I find out other little snippets that connect to other posts, like in the article “Printing Comes to Scotland” which you can read on the link below, I learned that there was an account of The Battle of Flodden made on an early printing press, it is titled “The trewe encountre or Batyle don betwene Englande and Scotland” and while it may have been printed in London, it does give an insight into early bias in print. In the pamphlet it claimed that around 10,000 Scots were put to the sword at Flodden, this figure is used a lot but most historians discount the amount now, but the bias is not in that number, the pamphlet claims that the Earl of Surrey lost only a few hundred  at the battle. Now I hark back to previous posts about how good the English are at keeping records, most recently in my post regarding Sir William Wallace’s murder, well records of the payroll show that Surrey, the English commander, lost two-fifths of his own retinue, even with these figures available, Wikipedia, which I look at every day, still states that English losses were a mere 1,500 of their 26,000 army, you do the maths, yes it was a massive defeat for the Scots, but it was a bloody hard fought battle with large casualties on both sides.

Pics are the plaque on the Cowgate, the second an early example of Myllar’s work, the windmill is apparently a pun on his surname. Want to know more about the history of Printing in Scotland? Check the link here http://textualities.net/duncan-glen/printing-comes-to-scotland