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kimnjss · 4 years

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plot twist!namjoon | a-z

⤑ series: plot twist

⤑ pairing: rapper!namjoon x rich girl!reader

⤑ genre: just smut talk.

⤑ rating: explicit. // unedited.

⤑ warnings: smut talk... (mentions of) shower sex, cum shots, brat taming, doggy style, reverse cowgirl... sex positions, hair pulling, masturbation, semi-public sex, roleplaying, oral sex (f/m. receiving), rough sex, use of toys, teasing...

⤑ A/N: literally not even a full day and i already miss them :( they were such a mess but sooo much fun ., ugh.

A = Aftercare (what's he like after sex):

While he enjoyed cuddling with you before going to bed, after sex was a whole different story. The act would have both of you all sticky and hot and Joon wouldn't be a fan in laying in that, he'd be suggesting sharing a bath before snuggling under the covers... which would most likely result in another round.

B = Body Part (his favorite body part of his and also yours):

It was no secret that Joon had an interest fascination with your back, especially when he was fucking you. But, what he liked most were the dimples at the end of the back, he'd often times find himself pressing his thumbs into them as he held you steady.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum basically...):

The two of you were not really a big fan of condoms and while you were great about taking your birth control, the pull out method had worked itself into your routine. Joon was either spilling out on your back or thighs and on special occasions, you'd let him finish on your face.

D = Dirty Secret (pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of his):

Despite the excessive amount of eye rolls he gives you, Joon is secretly very into the spoiled brat act you put on. There was just something about the annoyed pout and scrunch of your nose that he found cute, more so when he was denying you.

E = Experience (how experienced is he? does he know what he's doing?):

You both were pretty equally matched when it came to the bedroom, although, you were a lot more adventurous than him. Always coming up with new things for the two of you to try, but it never took much convincing to get him to experiment.

F = Favorite Position (this goes without saying...):

Doggy style. Reverse cowgirl. Anything back to chest. Even if you were starting off facing each other, you'd soon be shifting into the spooning position, his face nuzzled in the crook of your neck and his arms wrapped around your waist.

G = Goofy (is he more serious in the moment, or is he humorous, etc.):

Joon was pretty serious, but not so much that it made sleeping with him boring. He'd just get real concentrated on making you feel good and his entire focus would be on getting you to cum. Like in any other aspect of your relationship, you balanced each other out. You were playful and goofy enough for the both of you.

H = Hair (how well-groomed is he, does the carpet match the drapes? how does he like you?):

He didn't really care how you kept yourself, however you were deciding to look down there was however he preferred you to look. It didn't make that much of a difference to him in the slightest bit. The same went for himself, he'd trim up from time to time but it never really was at the forefront of his mind.

I = Intimacy (how is he in the moment, romantic aspect...):

Very, very, extremely romantic. Joon was very into the emotional part of sex even if he didn't really vocalize it. Loved holding onto your hand and looking into your eyes while he was inside of you. And if it's been a while since the two of you have been together, he'd be putting together a special night complete with candles, bubble baths and flowers to make up for it.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon):

Not really his thing. Even before the two of you were getting together, he wasn't really into masturbation. Found it boring, actually. He'd much rather be with someone and experience that connection, rather than just getting himself off.

K = Kink (one or more of his kinks):

He's got an extremely subtle brat tamer kink. Unrealized, but definitely present whenever you were pulling your tantrums and he had something to say about it. Sometimes, without thinking he'd do things that he knew would get a reaction out of you, just so he could do something about it.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do):

Anywhere the two of you could be alone without interruptions. He had given you shit about it before, but Namjoon wasn't opposed to fooling around in his studio with the door locked or even in your office when you weren't busy. Surprise blowjobs were his absolute favorite, especially if they were taking place underneath his desk while he was working.

M = Motivation (what turns him on, gets him going):

You're always very direct and vocal about what you want. Whether it being what you wanted him to do with you or what you wanted to do with him, there would always be a stiffness in his pants following your words. Paired with the need to be alone with you. He liked knowing that you wanted him the most.

N = NO (something he wouldn't do, turn offs):

There aren't many things that are off limits for Namjoon, but something he couldn't really seem to wrap his mind around would be roleplaying. Not like the two of you have ever tried it, but he knew that if you had it would end up being more awkward than anything. He'd have trouble staying in character and most likely would ditch the entire story-line and fuck you without the mention of it.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.):

Receiving. While he was not selfish when it came to oral, he liked it a lot when you were below him. You knew what you were doing and you did it so well, never failed to have his toes curling. He'd always return the favor, but was always perking up when you were offering to go down on him.

P = Pace (is he fast and rough? slow and sensual? Etc.):

Rough and sensual. It was no secret that he enjoyed all the romantic parts of having sex with you, but he was often mixing that with a bit of roughness. Hair pulling, tossing you around, hard thrusts, and sometimes biting were to be expected when he was losing himself in the moment.

Q = Quickie (his opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often... etc.):

Nope. Not a fan. They just annoyed him. Didn't see the point of speeding through things when you could very much take your time with each other. If you were suggesting a quickie, he'd be eliminating whatever reason it was you couldn't go and have proper sex. Then going to do that.

R = Risk (is he game to experiment, does he take risks):

Joon never really came up with new things for the two of you to try in bed, that was more something that you were into. He'd always be down to give anything that you were bringing to him a chance, at least once. While extremely different, the two of you happened to be into the same type of things... so there wasn't much to worry about there.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can he go for, how long does he last...):

He's pretty good at keeping it together, insuring that he lasts a bit longer than you so you're getting everything out of it. Pretty spent after two rounds, but after one quick nap or something to eat, he'd be ready to go again.

T = Toy (does he own toys? does he use them? on a partner or himself?):

No toys. Not that he was against them, he's just never really thought about adding them in to your sex lives. Just like everything else, though, if you were curious about it, or wanted him to use something on you, he wouldn't hesitate.

U = Unfair (how much does he like to tease?):

He likes to tease just enough so he's bringing out your bratty attitude. Simple things like denying you kisses or acting as if he wasn't interested, so he can see that pout take over your features. Sometimes, he'd keep you from cumming... but that never lasted long because he liked watching you cum a lot more than not.

V = Volume (how loud is he, what sounds does he make?):

Not that loud or vocal. He'd talk dirty to you from time to time or ask if something felt good, but other than that low grunts were the extent of his vocalization. He's usually a bit too focused to keep up with dirty talk, but you didn't mind either way.

W = Wild Card

He found it attractive when you were working hard. Especially if you were doing something that he knew you enjoyed, he liked the look of accomplishment on your face whenever you've completed something. And was never hesitating to reward you for your hard work.

X = X-Ray (let's see what's going on in those pants, pictures or words):

The guy wasn't tall just for show, that's a fact. Joon was an all around big guy and that translated down south as well. Not only that, he was thick too. And he knew it, took pride in the little gasp you'd let out whenever he was bottoming out for the first time that night.

Y = Yearning (how high is his sex drive?):

He was very good at matching your energy, so he wanted you just as much and as often as you wanted him. But, if you were dressed a certain way or paying a bit more attention to him, it would make him want you in some type of way. He'd be thinking of ways to shift things to the bedroom.

Z = Zzz... (how quickly does he fall asleep afterwards?):

Joon was hardly falling asleep right after sex, he'd want to get up and shower with you before getting comfortable underneath the covers again. There have been times he's fallen right asleep, but each times he's woken up in the middle of the night to clean off before going to bed.

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#namjoon #kim namjoon #namjoon smut #namjoon x reader #bts x reader #namjoon sm au #bts smut #🌬️ sm au #namjoon a-z

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random-thought-depository · 3 years

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The infamously corny Star Trek TOS episode The Omega Glory was on TV last night and I watched it. My ideas for how I’d rewrite it to make it less silly:

---

The Yang ancestral culture wasn’t literally the USA, it was just a society that looked kind-of sort-of like the USA in the same way some pre-Columbian American and ancient Indian societies may have looked kind-of sort-of like ancient Athens. That by itself would make the episode much less stupid, and you could keep most of the same basic ideas.

Since we’re not bound to absurd levels of parallelism anymore, I’d personally be inclined to make the Kohms light-skinned blue-eyed blond(e)s and make the Yangs darker-skinned with darker hair and eyes, and imply that the Kohm ancestral society was fascist instead of communist. Maybe sprinkle some symbols distantly reminiscent of Nazi iconography around the Kohm village. It’s not like there was any meaningful connection between the Kohms and communism anyway, and I feel this resonates better with a lot of the ideas the episode was going for. Admittedly, this is probably influenced by my own biases.

---

Basically swap the roles of Cloud Williams and his mostly silent female companion who doesn’t really do much.

Why? Let’s think about how Yang society might work for a moment. I’m going to say they’re horse-riding big game hunters, like the nineteenth century Great Plains native American cultures on Earth, because 1) that fits with the idea that they’ve been driven into marginal lands and had to become nomads, 2) if you want nomads capable of assembling armies of thousands of people it’s either that or Eurasian-style herders, 3) it fits with the “they’ve become like native Americans” idea. They’re very slow-aging, theoretically capable of living over a thousand years ... but if they’re like their precedent cultures on Earth they probably live fairly rough and dangerous lives and I think would probably tend to live only a few decades or centuries before dying in a hunting accident or battle or something like that. But... going by Earth precedent, it would probably be mostly the men who do the most high-risk activities of hunting and war, which might result in very gender-asymmetrical life expectancy patterns, where men tend to only live a few decades or centuries while women stay relatively safe and have a decent chance of living to be thousand year old ancients. This would be compounded by 1) a lower death rate would mean a lower birth rate for replacement rate reproduction, 2) they’re almost immune to infectious diseases, which would make childbirth in primitive conditions much safer, so that would greatly reduce the probable primary cause of death for women in such a society (childbirth complications). So I think it’s pretty plausible that they’d have a more-or-less matriarchal society where women have a lot of power because they live a lot longer and hence have a lot more time to accumulate experience and become repositories of culture (important for a low-tech nomadic society that will have a mostly oral culture!).

So, I’d gender-swap Cloud Williams; my version of her would a matriarch with a leadership position in her tribe because she’s one of its oldest able-bodied members, she’s got a thousand years of experience and she’s had time to memorize a lot of the oral histories of her tribe and become basically a living library. Why would such a person be anywhere near a battlefield? Well, “the oral histories of her tribe” would include a lot of war stories, with detailed and often basically accurate descriptions of tactics and strategy because that’s how knowledge of how to win wars against Kohms and rival Yang tribes is transmitted in her society. She’s a living tactical manual, so of course she leads her tribe’s warriors in battle.

She could have a companion who’s a big guy who doesn’t talk much and does the brute strength side of what in the episode is Cloud Williams’s role (fighting Kirk in the cell, ripping out the bars). Maybe he’s her grandson, and was captured with her because one of his roles in the tribe is to be her bodyguard in battle.

----

Related to what I just said, have a bit where Captain Tracey says that he expected the primitive and superstitious Yangs to be overawed by phasers, but instead it was almost like they have a recent cultural memory of war with modern weapons and war against technologically superior opponents and they quickly started using effective counter tactics. Given the explanation in the episode for the long lifespans of people on Omega IV (very strong selection pressure for disease resistance), none of the Yangs would actually remember the ancient high-tech Yang civilization and original war against the Kohms, but the generational transmission chains from a lot of presently living Yang matriarchs to that time might be relatively short. For a lot of the presently living Yang matriarchs shooting down Kohm helicopters with surface-to-air missiles and ambushing Kohm armored columns in mountain passes might be something like “my grandma’s time.”

----

The reason the “Eee Plab Neesta” sounds like gibberish is that Cloud Williams is reciting it in its archaic original language, which the living Yang language has evolved into mutual incomprehensibility with. The Yangs might have one lovingly preserved paper copy of their equivalent of the Declaration of Independence, but their culture is mostly oral, and they mostly preserve the “holy words” in the heads of the matriarchs, who memorize it and transmit it from mother to daughter exactly (“by heart”), being careful to get every syllable right so it does not become distorted. The oldest matriarchs can still speak the ancient language, but for most of the Yangs, especially the relatively short-lived men, it’s like me listening to somebody recite Beowulf in its original language.

This is more-or-less my headcanon for what’s going in the actual episode too: the “Eee Plab Neesta” is just the text in its original now archaic form of the Yang language, which the universal translator can’t translate because it doesn’t have a big enough sample to work on. I’d make that much more explicit though.

The way I’d handle the scene is to have Cloud Williams start to recite the Eee Plan Neesta, and then have Kirk ask her what it means and suggest that she try to translate it into the everyday language of the Yangs so all her people could hear it with understanding, and of course it wouldn’t be the actual Declaration of Independence but something different but with a similar spirit, something like this:

“We the people of these five colonies of the nation across the sea and seven nations of the original inhabitants of this land, establish a Union, which we found in and organize according to the following principles: that all people are equally precious, that laws exist by the consent of the people and to serve the people, that leaders serve the people and hold their offices by the consent of the people...”

Then have Kirk give his speech about how these words are meant for everyone and not just for chiefs and should be something shared among all the people and lived by and not something gatekept behind archaic language most people can’t understand. Have him reference the USA founding documents by saying that his world has something very similar and he knows from the history of his own world how world-changing these ideas can be and how precious they are.

----

Obviously you can’t do that “the Yangs try to find out if Kirk recognizes the holy words, and Kirk almost recognizes them but not quite” thing with this version, so the equivalent I propose is:

Kirk recognizes the original functions of Yang “holy relics,” i.e. relics from the ancient Yang civilization: one is part of a machine that once carried people through the air (it’s a snapped-off piece of a helicopter blade), one was a device for seeing far away things as if they’re near (it’s a broken pair of binoculars), one was a machine which people could use to talk to people who were beyond the horizon (it’s a broken-down cell phone), etc.. OK, the last thing is anachronistic for TOS, but if I were writing this as a fanfic it’s what I’d do.

Cloud Williams starts to recite a long epic poem the Yangs have that tells their entire history, to see if Kirk will recognize it. Of course Kirk doesn’t, but while the Yangs don’t have history books they do use visual textile art as an aid to memory and they’ve set up a big story cloth that depicts the narrative in the room and Kirk goes over to it and starts pointing to pictures on it and correctly interpreting them:

“Here, the Yangs were oppressed by kings. The Yangs rebelled and overthrew their kings and made a new nation that had no kings. After this the Yangs became very rich and very powerful, they built great cities. The lords of the Kohms were threatened by this and they used terrible weapons on the Yangs and invaded the Yang land with great armies. Here’s a Yang city being destroyed in an instant by a Kohm weapon. The Kohm lords were so threatened that they tried to destroy the Yangs’ whole way of life. The Yangs retreated to the bad lands and kept fighting. Here are Kohm flying machines attacking a Yang village, and a Yang warrior hiding behind a rock destroying one of those flying machines with a lance of fire. The Kohm lords couldn’t overcome the Yangs until they brought the Death Thirst to the Yang lands in a box and let it out. But that weapon had a life of its own, and turned against the Kohms, and almost destroyed them too. Only a few Yangs survived in the bad lands, and the Kohms claimed the good Yang lands and settled them. But the Yangs survived, they learned the bow and the lance, and eventually their numbers started to increase. The survivors lived longer than people had before; you interpreted this as a gift for the Yangs and curse on the Kohms by the Great Spirit, so that both might live to see you retake what was once yours. And little by little, you did retake what was once yours...”

----

One way to suggest the Enterprise crew making a positive difference on Omega IV at the end of the episode: have Kirk convince the Yangs to spare the Kohm civilians in that village.

The victorious Yangs are all set to give the last Kohms the Numbers 31 treatment, which is what they usually do when they overrun a Kohm community. Of course, Kirk is horrified by this, and he manages to use arguments involving the Yang “holy words” to convince the Yangs to be merciful instead. “Your own holy words say that every person is equally precious! Every person! That includes the Kohms too! If you really mean it, it includes the Kohms too! They’re no threat to you anymore! Did you fight for so long just for a chance to do to them what they tried to do to you? If so, how are you any better than them? Your own holy words claim to be for all people! Your own holy words say that all people are more alike than they are different, and all people are capable of appreciating the gift of freedom! If that’s true, then your holy words are for the Kohms too! That’s why the Kohm lords were so threatened by you, because they were afraid of what would happen if the Kohm people heard those powerful, good words! Tell the Kohms about your holy words!”

So Cloud Williams agrees to make a merciful and peaceful settlement with the “last of the Kohm places,” let it integrate peacefully into Yang society with no further bloodshed and no abuse inflicted or spoils taken. And then Kirk says “If you mean your words of freedom, your work didn’t end today, it’s just starting. Build good seaworthy boats that can cross the ocean, and send people to the Kohms across the sea, so they can hear your words of freedom too! The words of your ancestors are for them too! You’d never be able to conquer them, but they can hear your words!”

#Star Trek #fanfic ideas #cw: Nazis #kinda #cw: genocide #I read/watch something

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vajranam · 3 years

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Dzogchen And Bodhicitta

THE UNION OF DZOGCHEN AND BODHICHITTA

The approach I take to Dharma practice is very simple, yet this approach should not be taken to undermine the profundity of the Buddhadharma. This approach is based on the instructions I received from my own root Lama, Khenchen Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche, the experiences I have had in my life, and many long years of study and solitary retreat.

It is my conclusion that the style of Dharma practice that the great yogis and practitioners of India and Tibet have relied upon up until now has been holistic in nature, and I believe that this approach is still the best one to take today.

Logically speaking, the Outer, Inner, and Secret Teachings are fundamentally interconnected and should be adopted and practiced as one path. In fact, they are so fundamentally interconnected that it is actually difficult to give Teachings on one without including the others. This interconnection - along with the "Union" which is the perfect, uncontrived view and the "Union" which is the nature of mind itself-is what I like to can the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta.

Often, when people hear the words "Outer, Inner, and Secret Teachings," they want to associate them with one concept or another, such as the three vehicles of the Hinayana, the Mahayana, and the Vajrayana.

When translated from Sanskrit, the words Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana mean the "lesser, great, and indestructible vehicles," and "vehicle" refers to the method or the path used to cross the ocean of samsara.

But associating the Outer, Inner, and Secret Teachings with distinct concepts is not what I have in mind. In fact, associating the Teachings with concepts is precisely what can lead us away from putting them into practice properly. This is because as soon as we begin to talk about the Dharma in terms of duality, it becomes exclusive, such that one necessary component can easily be dismissed, ignored, or subordinated in terms of importance to practice.

This suggests that the Dharma is not holistic in nature, but instead that each practitioner may be selective about what they study and practice, thus putting some Teachings into practice while neglecting others, on the basis of assumptions made about the importance of different aspects of the Dharma.

The same thing has happened since the introduction of the Buddhist Teachings into Western pop culture. Many of the more subtle ideas of Buddhist thought, whose understanding requires deep explanations and years of contemplative experience, have been reduced to sound bites and images: simple ideas that are easy to digest and seem easy to realize if we could just remember them.

These packaged ideas appear to be spiritual in nature but have lost the essential meaning conveyed by the Teachings as a whole. One example of this is the commonly spoken idea that "I `.verything is One." '

This idea has its basis in the nature of "suchness," or reality "as it is," which is quite a profound state of realization.

However, it has been taken out of context and oversimplified. It is like a beautiful, empty shell that is not capable of pointing us in the right direction or providing us with the means for realization.

In order to truly understand the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta, the Dharma as we have come to know it in the West has to be fundamentally reconsidered.

The Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta is the path in its totality, a synthesis of the Teachings without losing any of the meaning.

Although it is useful in other situations, for this particular discussion, associating the Teachings with dualistic concepts would only distract us from their essential meaning. We must take up the entire path as an interconnected entity of which every single part is given equal importance.

This is actually the true meaning of the word "Dzogchen," which can be translated literally as "the great perfection." Some people interpret this to mean that the nature of mind is perfect, or that the realization gained from the Teachings is perfect, and these things may also be true. But actually, Dzogchen is perfect because it is all-inclusive; it is the totality of the path that leads one to realization.

Rather than present the Dharma as a linear path as is often done in many foundational texts, I would instead like to present it here as three facets of an interrelated system whose parts must be practiced simultaneously if they are to lead to the perfect result.

These three facets are the Outer, Inner, and Secret Teachings, which are distinguished as separate elements only by the cognitive construct of words, and which completely encompass the wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. But before I go any further, let me tell you about some of my own experiences with the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta.

From the time I was born, my parents and I lived with a Dzogchen yogi called "Lama Chupur." He was the kind of yogi we call a drubtob in Tibetan, or in Sanskrit a siddha, or great adept-a yogi who has realized the view of Dzogchen and reached the stage of magical accomplishment.

In fact, Lama Chupur's name means "flying over water," and he was given that name after he was seen flying over a wide river near my village. He was the kind of yogi who had spent his whole life wandering around Tibet in search of the Teachings, and he had been the heart student (in other words, had received the entirety of his masters' knowledge and Teachings on realizing the nature of mind) of two of the greatest drubtob masters of his time. So maybe that can give you an idea of what kind of yogi Lama Chupur was.

Lama Chupur came to live in my village after the changes in Tibet. My parents were his students. He recognized me as a tulku (reincarnate Lama) from a young age, after which he raised me as both his child and his student.

I spent my childhood days in his constant presence, witnessing him and taking instruction from him. I remember that at first glance he did not seem to be meditating on anything special at all. When he gave Teachings, as he often did to the many pilgrims and village people who came to see him, he always gave Teachings on how to generate Bodhichitta and never even mentioned the Secret Teachings.

There was a kindness about him that is very difficult to convey with words. He had a marvelously good heart that marked you indelibly whenever you were with him.

Although his words and his ordinary appearance suggested that he was meditating solely on Bodhichitta, sometimes when I looked at him I felt something welling up inside of me.

I could tell instinctively by his gaze and the posture he assumed, as well as the clear quality of his mind, that his meditation was much deeper than that. It was not until I was older and had begun to study with my own root Lama, as well as other Lamas who were staying in retreat in Tibet, that I realized that Lama Chupur had been practicing the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta.

Lama Chupur's story is not unique. My own root Lama, Khenchen Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche, was regarded by many Tibetans as the highest authority on the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the heart student of more than ten renowned Lamas and is the fourth in an unbroken lineage of heart students of Patrul Rinpoche.

Yet, many people did not realize the profundity of his meditation because of his humble appearance. Up until the time of his passing, he spent most of his time giving Teachings on Bodhichitta and always presented himself as an ordinary practitioner.

But as his heart student who spent more than twenty years under his guidance, I had the chance to experience his transformation. I can say with certainty that I witnessed my own teacher attain the fruit of the Teachings in this very life.

When Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche passed away at the age of ninety-two, he attained a sign called "Heart, Tongue, and Eyes," which is one of the signs of highest realization that comes as a result of the Dzogchen Teachings. In fact, it is the same sign that came when the omniscient Longchenpa passed away hundreds of years ago. Of course, I did not know the method my teacher used until he gave me the secret oral instructions of our lineage. It was then that I realized that he, too, relied on the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta.

Finally, Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche once told me the story of an ordinary old man who lived in Kham, Tibet. He was a poor man with only the clothes on his back who lived in a stone house near a pilgrimage site that many people would circumambulate.

Nothing at all about this man seemed special. He was so ordinary, in fact, that until he died, no one even knew his name, much less thought of him as a great Dzogchen yogi. Each day this man would get up, beg for food, and then spend the day saying mantras and holding a Prayer Wheel that he slowly turned in circles.

I cannot tell you how shocked his countrymen were when this simple old man attained rainbow body, the sign of one of the highest accomplishments of a Dzogchen practitioner. When my teacher told me this story, I knew once again that the old man's realization had come from practicing the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta.

In my studies, I have read scriptures about yogis who attained the result of the Teachings, but I have also occasionally come across stories of yogis who did not. I always wondered why these yogis did not attain the realization promised by the scriptures even though they spent their whole lives in solitary retreat as they had been instructed.

But as I examined further, I realized that they had neglected to practice the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta and had fallen into the wrong view Thus, it was not their heroic effort that had failed them, but rather the view and style of practice they had undertaken from the outset.

Especially in this day and age, there are many kinds of meditation we can choose to practice. But meditation does not have some inherent quality that promises to rid us of self-attachment, which is the only way we can achieve liberation.

Rather, whether or not we achieve liberation depends solely on the type of meditation we choose to practice and the diligence with which we proceed. Thus, the yogis who did not attain liberation practiced a style of meditation that did not rid them of self-attachment, but rather led them to develop negative habitual tendencies and eventually take a lower rebirth.

Working with the mind is an extremely delicate art; we must be very careful not to make a mistake about what and how we practice.

This text presents my own holistic view of the Teachings, the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta, as passed on to me by my Lamas, as well as developed through my own contemplative practice and study of the Buddhist canon.

In this unprecedented time where so many are able to benefit from practicing the Buddhist Teachings, I urge you to practice the Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta and attain the results promised by the Teachings. Pray this text bring benefit to beings everywhere.

-Anyen Rinpoche

The Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta

by Anyen Rinpoche

Translated by Allison Graboski

Snow Lion

#wisdom #spirituality #mindfulness #meditation #religion #buddhism #zen #self care #visualization

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magic-and-moonlit-wings · 4 years

Text

Backstory timeline for ‘Becoming The Mask’

Since I’m Not Using The One From Wizards

Notes: not every Trollhunter will be listed

Eight million years ago: First trollish writing appears. Trolls have culture and oral history prior to this point, but this was when literacy became a thing; or at least, the earliest written documents that survive to the present day date back to this time.

Mentions of ‘Trollhunters’ appear in these early writings. ‘Troll’ can be used to mean ‘a member of the species’ but it can also be used to mean ‘a member of a particular tribe’.

Hunter Trolls are nomadic and travel alone or in small bands between various tribes, fighting monsters like Nyarlagroths.

Being a Hunter is a self-appointed job. There can, therefore, be more than one Trollhunter at a time, but there can also be periods without any active Trollhunters.

The Trollhunters are mostly young adventurers who want to see the world and fight things.

Some Trollhunters are trolls who were banished from their home tribes, and are taking the only job that allows them to continue interacting with other trolls.

Some are basically running protection rackets. (“Nice cave you have here. Be a shame if it got infested with monsters.”) These Hunters usually get taken down at some point by another Trollhunter who isn’t running a protection racket and takes offense at the Hunter reputation being besmirched.

Because Trollhunters travel between different tribes, sometimes they get commissioned to escort other travelers, or go to dangerous places and retrieve magical/medical ingredients.

Trollhunters begin to be called upon to mediate inter-tribal disputes; if there is a Trollhunter who has saved both tribes involved in said dispute, they are therefore a neutral party that both sides are willing to trust.

Six million years ago: Mediating inter-tribal disputes becomes an expected part of the Trollhunter job, even if they’ve never dealt with either tribe before.

It becomes a faux pas for a Trollhunter to try and refuse a request for aid.

Because most of these jobs are dangerous, a member of one Trollhunter band invents a grit-shaka, a talisman that takes away fear. The resulting recklessness proves fatal for almost every wearer.

This is the origin of both “Trollhunting Rule Number One, always be afraid”, and the expression “the fearless are the first to die”.

That band of Trollhunters decides to start calling themselves Ga-Huels (“adventurers” in archaic trollish) instead of Trollhunters, so other trolls will stop asking them favours when the band passes through their territory.

Four million years ago: The Ga-Huels expand enough to become a tribe in their own right. They continue to be nomadic rather than permanently settling somewhere.

Their typical pattern is to move into another tribe’s territory, conquer the locals, demand tribute while there, and then move on to the next place.

The Decimaar Blade is invented and magically bound to the Ga-Huel leader. (Decimaar means “authority” in archaic trollish.)

It can be wielded by any member of the tribe, and only by members of the tribe, but only summoned or dissipated by the leader. The link will be passed down to anyone who manages to kill the leader using the Decimaar Blade. If the leader dies another way, the sword chooses its own successor.

The sword also gives its wielder the ability to look into people’s minds, intended to give the wielder a heads-up to sneak attacks. The “mind control” feature came about as an accidental overload of this power.

One million years ago: The Ga-Huels officially start referring to their leader as a Warlord.

500-300 thousand years ago, by current estimate based on fossil evidence: Homo sapiens diverges from other hominids.

Six thousand years ago/circa 4000 BCE: Trolls discover that there is a surface, rather than the whole universe being rocks and caves and magma.

Quag, of the Wumpa tribe, meets and befriends Merlin and Morgana. They study magic from each other. Morgana starts doing research into how to allow trolls to withstand sunlight, on the theory that this could also enhance her Shadow Magic, which is weakened at certain times of day.

Some of the Wumpa tribe form a settlement on the surface, under the leadership of Quag (now their king), and rename themselves the Quagawumps.

More trolls begin visiting the surface after discovering how tasty the animals are. Most trolls do not yet distinguish between humans and any other surface animal.

The Ga-Huels begin actively displacing trolls with territories near the surface, in the interests of claiming the best bases of operation for hunting parties. They start to be referred to as Gumm-Gumms.

“The fearless are the first to die” starts to be used as a taunt instead of strategic advice, becoming “the brave are often first to die”.

Gunmar is born and quickly becomes known as a powerful and dangerous wizard. He kills King Quag when the Ga-Huel attempt to conquer the swamp.

Merlin learns (or remembers, from conversations with Quag) that a Trollhunter cannot refuse a call for help. He approaches the only active Trollhunter of the time, Gorgus the Great, to ask her to protect humans from Gumm-Gumms.

Merlin builds the Amulet of Daylight. Designing and assembling it takes a few decades.

Because he doesn’t have Shadow Magic, which is necessary to allow trolls to touch sunlight, he cuts off Morgana’s hand and forearm to melt down and infuse into the metal.

Tethering the artifact to one person at a time and letting it choose a ‘worthy successor’ is based on the enchantment structure of the Decimaar Blade.

Merlin adds a few safety features, such as the amulet not choosing whoever killed its last bearer as the new bearer; no one being able to wield the sword except for the summoner; and it being possible to steal the Amulet entirely (in case he ever had to take it back from the Trollhunter).

He also adds a language translation enchantment, so the troll who carries the Amulet can talk to humans.

Gorgus accepts the weapon and armour, but continues referring to herself as a ‘Trollhunter’ rather than ‘the Champion of Daylight’.

Morgana’s research into how trolls work allows her to create an animate stone prosthesis for herself. She swears revenge on Merlin.

Five thousand years ago/circa 3000 BCE: Spar the Spiteful is the called as the second Champion of Daylight. He wasn’t a Trollhunter before that and does not want the job, but is magically stuck with it.

Gorgus is annoyed at Merlin for not telling her that her soul would be trapped in the Amulet to watch over and occasionally advise her successor. It is unclear if Merlin knew this would happen but she suspects he did.

Spar meets an Akiridion, on Earth for reasons unspecified. He helps jump-start her spaceship by pushing it off a cliff after the local humans throw a spear through the Daxial Array. (Scene from the Trollhunters spin-off comic, The Felled.)

The Gumm-Gumms begin to use the Darklands as a permanent base of operations, with Killahead Bridge giving them rapid access to the surface. Killahead is one of the earliest examples of trolls using bridges as portals.

Morgana experiments with transmuting stone to flesh and back again. She invents Creeper’s Sun toxin and its antidote during these experiments.

2000 BCE: In the course of her experiments, Morgana finds a way to 'pause’ the development flesh or living stone, and to restart the process later.

(This is eventually used to keep the Familiars from aging in the Darklands, and the Changelings from aging until they get Familiars.)

She uses this to give herself eternal youth on top of her wizardly longevity.

Humans begin launching counter-attacks at the less dangerous troll communities on the surface, intended as retaliation against the Gumm-Gumm raids.

Even though trolls can now tell humans are capable of more complex reasoning than most other surface animals, these attacks encourage anti-human sentiments, so eating humans remains common even among troll tribes that don’t actively hunt them.

1000 BCE: Morgana begins to consider the merits of an Eternal Night, which would allow her to access her full level of power at any time rather than the fluctuations in power that the day-night cycle brings.

0 BCE/CE: Maddrux the Many becomes the Trollhunter. There have been a few others between Spar and Maddrux. By this point it is more-or-less forgotten that ‘Trollhunter’ was once a job title that had nothing to do with the Amulet of Daylight.

300 CE: Orlagk the Oppressor becomes the Gumm-Gumm Warlord and names the wizard Gunmar the Skullcrusher as his top general.

400 CE: Maddrux the Many dies and is succeeded as Trollhunter by Araknak the Agile.

Late 400s-early 500s, the time period to which Arthurian legend dates back: Rise and fall of Camelot.

500 CE: Morgana proposes an alliance to the Gumm-Gumms, giving them magical items and cutting them in on her ‘Eternal Night’ plan, in exchange for them giving her trolls to experiment on.

530 CE: Deya is born.

600 CE: A plague ravages Deya’s village. Her newly-hatched brother is one of the dead. The villagers are weak when humans attack, and most of the surviving trolls are killed.

Deya survives the plague and the raid. Since she is small and ‘harmless’ at the time, she is taken by the humans, who rename her ‘Callista’ and raise her as an exotic pet.

She picks up their language, but her ability to speak is seen as a charming quirk rather than a sign of intelligence.

800 CE: ‘Callista’ runs away and tries to find more trolls.

Vendel is born.

900 CE: ‘Callista’ finally meets other trolls for the first time since she was in her eighties (the trollish equivalent of a human 5-year-old). Her clumsiness with social niceties gets her the nickname ‘Calamity’.

A series of negative coincidences happen in various places she tries to stay, and she gets a reputation among other trolls for being bad luck. The nickname ‘Calamity’ gradually becomes a more deliberate insult.

Mid to late 1100s: Usurna and Gunmar secretly make an alliance.

Merlin meets a young con artist named Hisirdoux Casperan, realizes the boy has actual magic as well as slight-of-hand, and takes him on as an apprentice.

Although eating humans is still not something most trolls think is morally a big deal, it’s also starting to be more trouble than it’s worth, so avoiding humans becomes more typical.

Early 1200s: Usurna becomes Queen of the Krubera.

A troll scholar named Bodus attempts to study the Gumm-Gumms, creating The Book Of Ga-Huel. He learns some old Ga-Huel magic during his work to make his book self-update as their tribe’s history progresses. Due to overall troll sentiments about Gumm-Gumms, Bodus himself becomes feared and distrusted.

1200-1300: AAARRRGGHH and Stricklander are born (exact dates undecided) and taken by the Gumm-Gumms. AAARRRGGHH is raised as a soldier and Stricklander becomes one of the first successful Changelings.

Mid 1200s: The Trollhunter, Tellad-Urr the Triumphant, cracks under the never-ending demands placed on Trollhunters to resolve every petty little problem, and starts working with the Gumm-Gumms, becoming known as Tellad-Urr the Terrible.

1297: Angor Rot asks Morgana for help in protecting his village from the Gumm-Gumms. Morgana responds by taking Angor’s soul and magically enslaving him. She also magically pauses his aging, so he’ll perpetually be in his prime while hunting down the Trollhunters.

1350s: Angor Rot kills Tellad-Urr the Terrible and absorbs his soul.

1360s: Gogun the Gentle, the Trollhunter after Tellad-Urr, dies peacefully in his sleep. Gogun is the first Champion Of Daylight not to die in combat.

1380s: Angor Rot kills his second Trollhunter.

Deya learns her birth name when she is called by the Amulet. Trolls are still not particularly welcoming of her, but they stop actively driving her away.

Early 1400s: Blinky is born. (Exact date undecided, but he is in his 600s in the present day.)

Skarlagk, daughter of Orlagk, is also born.

Enough Changelings exist that the Janus Order is formed.

Mid 1400s: Testing the limits of how mutable she can make living stone, Morgana creates the first Polymorphs; Changelings who do not need a Familiar to take on human form. Because this is more difficult and has a higher death rate than making ‘standard’ Changelings, she only makes a few of them.

Late 1400s: Deya goes on her quest to punch Merlin in the face for being chronically cryptic. (Scene from the Trollhunters spin-off comic, The Felled.)

Non-Gumm-Gumm trolls learn that Changelings exist. Gaggletacks are discovered.

Trolls start making more active efforts to conceal their existence from humans, partly to avoid encounters with Changelings and partly because human weaponry continues to improve.

Early 1500s: Gunmar kills Orlagk and becomes the new Gumm-Gumm Warlord.

Gunmar loses his eye in the fight. Merlin has a vision of the Triumbric Stones being the key to defeating Gunmar, so he gathers them and hides them in places he thinks will be safe until he figures out how exactly that will work.

AAARRRGGHH internally questions how safe it is to remain on Gunmar’s side, since AAARRRGGHH is now at the same rank Gunmar was before overthrowing Orlagk and therefore Gunmar might start viewing AAARRRGGHH with suspicion.

Mid 1500s: Skarlagk the Scorned begins recruiting Gumm-Gumms for a coup, intending to kill and replace Gunmar to avenge her father.

Jim, Nomura, and Not Enrique are born, kidnapped, and made into Changelings.(Nomura is older than the boys, but only by about twenty years, which isn’t much for trolls.)

Bular is also born.

The Dishonourable Bodus learns of the Triumbric Stones and records that there is a way to defeat Gunmar. Stories about the hypothetical ‘Eclipse Sword’ begin to spread. Gunmar has Bodus and his students tracked down and killed, and all found copies of his work destroyed.

After burning Bodus’ Final Testament, Stricklander reads and memorizes the riddle about where to find the “three forces elemental” which make up “a shadow’s bane”.

Deya hears that Merlin found a potential way to defeat Gunmar and is annoyed that he hasn’t told her about it, but right now she doesn’t have time to track the wizard down and punch him again.

1582: The Gregorian calendar is established.

Late 1500s: AAARRRGGHH deserts the Gumm-Gumms. To prove himself trustworthy to Deya, he gives her crucial information about the location and function of Killahead Bridge, the Darklands’ main access point to the surface.

Anticipating an attack after AAARRRGGHH’s desertion, Gunmar leaves Bular in the care of the Janus Order.

Deya seals the Gumm-Gumms in the Darklands.

Merlin seals Morgana in the Heartstone and decides to take a nap for the next few centuries.

Early 1600s: Morgana figures out how to siphon Merlin’s magic.

Skarlagk openly turns against Gunmar. Many Gumm-Gumms resent being trapped in the Darklands, which makes recruitment easier for her.

Gunmar begins mind-controlling more and more of his soldiers. This increases the rate of desertion among those not being mind-controlled.

The Janus Order beings trying to gather and rebuild Killahead Bridge.

1620: The Mayflower sets sail, with trolls stowing away ... somehow.

1630s: The trolls find the Heartstone and settle under what will become Arcadia Oaks.

Birthstones which were carried along during the migration begin to hatch. Draal is one of the first trolls born in Heartstone Trollmarket.

AAARRRGGHH makes contact with the Krubera for the first time since his infancy.

Dictatious, who was too close to the bridge and pulled into the Darklands by accident, is found by Gunmar’s forces. He swears loyalty to Gunmar to avoid being mind-controlled or killed.

Gunmar decides that, if Dictatious was able to survive the Darklands alone for as long as he did, he must have potential and be worth keeping around.

At the age of 1100, Deya the Deliverer is killed by Bular.

Unkar the Unfortunate is called as the Trollhunter and killed by Angor Rot before Bular even knows who the new Trollhunter is.

Late 1600s: Unkar’s successor is also killed by Angor Rot, but successfully traps him before dying.

Their successor is killed by Bular, who assumes the Trollhunter he just killed was Deya’s successor.

On Gunmar’s orders, as conveyed through a Fetch, Usurna makes contact with a few Changelings, who begin spying on trolls instead of humans and reporting to her instead of Bular.

Gunmar’s eye is passed from Usurna to the Changelings to the Janus Order.

The head of the Janus Order is aware that there’s at least one non-Changeling troll besides Bular who still serves Gunmar but isn’t in the Darklands. The head does not know Usurna’s name and has never met her in person.

Bular does know Usurna’s identity, but has never had the opportunity to meet her in person.

Through Usurna, who got the information from AAARRRRGGHH when he told the Krubera about how he left the Gumm-Gumms, the Janus Order learns that Killahead Bridge is now ‘locked’ by the Amulet of Daylight, and the Amulet will be necessary to reopen it.

Stricklander begins building a fake Amulet on the hypothesis it can work as a ‘lock pick’.

1700s: A branch of the Janus Order located in New Jersey discovers a Heartstone. Rather than turning it over to Gunmar, they desert as a whole, making it look like humans discovered them and the Changelings gutted the base to destroy any evidence of what they were doing before getting wiped out.

The Changeling deserters rename their group the Jersey Devils, after the local legend.

1850: California becomes a state.

Kanjigar becomes the Trollhunter.

Stricklander becomes the leader of the Janus Order.

1859: Nomura is assigned to a Familiar. She will later resent that she “just missed” the Renaissance.

1875: El Rancho Arcadia, the town that will become Arcadia Oaks, is founded. (Year and original town name seen on a sign on the final page of the spin-off comic The Secret History Of Trollkind.)

1876: Nomura, with her Familiar’s family, attends the first ever performance of Peer Gynt.

1877: Phonographs are invented. Stricklander buys one for personal use and Morgana communicates with him through it. All Janus Order bases are equipped with phonographs as soon as possible.

1900: Nomura and Draal meet and attempt to date.

1903: The Janus Order finds out Nomura has an ‘in’ with the Trollhunter’s son and she is instructed to try and steal the Amulet. Strickler gives Nomura the fake Amulet in case she can swap it for the real one.

Nancy not-Domzalski-yet is born.

1909: Carla Fontaine, leader of the Jersey Devils, accidentally encounters her ex-lover Tiffany Archenn, who is still in the Janus Order and thought Carla was dead. Luckily their relationship ended on good terms, so Tiffany is willing to keep Carla’s survival a secret and Carla is willing to accept her promise.

1914-1918: International warfare erupts, which will come to be known as ‘World War One’ after humans have a second one; at the time it is called ‘The Great War’ and ‘The War To End All Wars’.

Teenage Nancy probably-not-Domzalski-yet acts as a spy near the end of this war, taking advantage of her youth to avoid suspicion while running information.

1920s: Draal figures out Nomura is a Changeling but doesn’t let her know he’s figured it out. He starts “sneakily” trying to convince her to change sides, which gives away that he knows.

Nomura gives Draal a grit-shaka, expecting him to do something stupid under its influence that can be used to lure Kanjigar into a trap.

Things end badly, but surprisingly no one actually dies in the fallout. Draal sees Nomura escape, but does not correct his father when Kanjigar assumes she’s dead.

Trollmarket knows there was a Changeling trying to get in, but are under the impression Nomura was on her own, and that therefore they don’t need to worry about more Changelings.

Early 1950s: Dr Bernie Sturges begins working at Area 49-B, keeping an eye on what the humans are up to there on behalf of the Janus Order.

Nancy Domzalski has a surprise pregnancy. She and her husband Horace name their son Ralph.

1970s: Barbara is born. (Exact date undecided, but she’s in her mid-to-late twenties when she has her son.)

Early to mid 1990s: Barbara meets James Lake at college. They marry shortly after graduation.

Late 1990s: Bernie Sturges is discharged from Area 49-B for questioning policy decisions one too many times. They remain under surveillance because they know so much classified information, and are suspected of being involved in Stuart of Durio’s escape. (Bernie was not involved in that escape but did regularly object to the base’s treatment of prisoners.)

After several years of working as a painter, Barbara decides to go back to school to become a doctor.

James decides to get Barbara pregnant, expecting her to change her mind about going back to school once they have a baby, with the reasoning that “this whole ‘doctor’ thing is just because she wants someone to look after,” and “if I ask her not to go back to school, then I’m the asshole, so she needs to feel like it was her own idea.”

2000: James Lake Junior is born. Three months later, he is swapped for a Changeling who comes to be known as ‘Jim’.

2001: Mary Wang’s parents, Thomas and Laurel (names inspired by the character’s voice actress, Lauren Tom), get divorced because they have incompatible money-management techniques.

Laurel is very cautious with spending and meticulous about saving, believing in putting money aside for a rainy day; Thomas expected her to "be less of a penny-pincher" after they got married and pooled their resources.

Thomas is very relaxed about money, believing if you have it then you might as well enjoy it; Laurel expected him to "be less of a spendthrift" once they got married and had a fiscal responsibility to each other as well as themselves.

Once their finances are untangled, they get along much better, and the divorce is a friendly one.

2002: Ralph Domzalski and his wife win the state lottery. They put most of the money into savings but also decide to go on a cruise around the world, leaving their two-year-old son Tobias in the care of Ralph’s mother. They are lost at sea during a storm.

2003: Nancy Domzalski turns 100 years old.

2004: Darci Scott tells her parents she feels more like a girl than a boy. They do some talking with her and some research on their own, and help her to transition.

2005: Nancy and Tobias Domzalski move into the house across the street from the Lakes. Jim befriends Toby mostly because it draws attention from concerned adults if a child appears to have no friends.

James Lake Senior abandons his wife and son.

Several months later, Jim brings the unassembled bike kit James gave him to the Janus Order base and throws the pieces through the Fetch.

Nancy sets Toby up with regular therapy appointments with Dr Tiffany Archenn, because Nancy believes in preventative maintenance as part of mental health.

Mary Wang’s mother remarries. Premarital counselling happens this time around to make sure they’re on the same page about things like money. She and her wife, Jennifer Smith, each leave their names unchanged.

Jennifer Smith, a Changeling, puts heavy-duty protection spells on every building where her wife and stepdaughter spend a significant amount of time and any items they frequently have with them. The spells are applied in such a way that you have to be checking for protection spells (or set them off) in order to notice them.

2006: Jim realizes he genuinely cares about Toby, and gives him a spot on Jim’s mental list of “humans to try keeping alive”.

Barbara starts learning krav maga. In these classes, she meets and befriends Zelda Nomura.

2008: Bernie has been away from Area 49-B long enough that the surveillance is beginning to slack off.

2012: Since James Lake Senior has been “missing” for seven years, Jim is able to have him declared legally dead.

Barbara graduates medical school and becomes an emergency room trauma surgeon.

Summer 2015: Since Mary is about to start high school, her parents finally agree to let her have a cellphone. Jennifer adds yet another protection spell to the device; it’s a good anchor since Mary will presumably have it with her at all times.

Claire and Jim both attend a fundraiser for Arcadia's hospital. Claire sees Jim dancing with Barbara and is charmed and intrigued at the sight of a boy her age who is unembarrassed to dance with his mother in public. (Idea taken from the first spin-off novel, The Adventure Begins.)

September 2015 - June 2016: Toby develops a friendly acquaintanceship with Eli Pepperjack.

Jim is polite, in the interests of not driving Toby away by preventing him from having other friends, but wary because of Eli’s conviction there is something supernatural in Arcadia and his determination to uncover it.

Eli picks up that he is more ‘tolerated’ by Jim than ‘liked’, which makes Eli feel awkward and suspect Toby feels the same way and is just better at hiding it. Toby and Eli never progress past “friendly acquaintances” into “friends”.

Jim and Claire are partnered in several school projects. Like Toby and Eli, they become friendly acquaintances. Jim makes a note of how often and how fondly Claire speaks of her little brother once Enrique is born.

August 2016: Bernie Sturges fakes the death of their current human identity and temporarily moves into the Janus Order base while setting up a new one. (Sometimes Changelings have overlaps or gaps between identities, to muddy the trail if someone tries to track them.)

September 2016: Kanjigar dies. Jim is called as the Trollhunter. Fanfic begins at this point.

#Becoming The Mask extras #backstory #long post #Trollhunters #alternate universe #My Fanfiction #Tales of Arcadia #TOA novels and comics #3Below #toaWizards #Changeling Jim

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humansofhds · 3 years

Text

Don Abram, MDiv ’19

“In the same way that the Black Church has been queer through its very existence—by operating on the undersides of power, by existing in the margins, by advocating for the least of these—me advocating for LGBTQ rights is simply an extension of that tradition. It is an extension of that Black, freedom-loving tradition. I want to be able to walk congregants through this as we center the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ folks in the Black Church.”

Don Abram, MDiv ’19, is the founder of Pride in the Pews, a nonprofit that seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of queer Christians in the Black Church.

A Call to Identity and to Faith

I grew up on the far South Side of Chicago, and I was raised by a single mother and a very active Jamaican grandmother. Every Sunday I attended a hand-clapping, toe-tapping Black Church right down the street from my house, within walking distance. I attended every Sunday, initially reluctantly because I didn’t like waking up in the morning. I would come up with a myriad of excuses and reasons for why I could not attend on Sunday, including not being able to find matching socks or not being able to find the right tie. It never worked.

At the age of 14, I was called to preach. I moved from the pews to the pulpit, which was really a paradigm-shifting change, especially in the Black Church, wherein the Black pulpit is often centered over and above other positions and places in the congregation. At the same time that I was called to preach, I was also introduced to my sexuality. But what I knew instinctively was that I could not embody both of those identities without losing both my community and my calling.

So to put it simply, I did not embody both of those identities, at least not on Sunday mornings. When I would preach in my church or go to different churches for revivals, I was a straight preacher. Outside of the four walls of the Black Church, I was able to explore my queerness – still in the shadows, but not nearly as tucked away as when I was in the pulpit. Frankly, I didn’t have an opportunity to explore the theological foundations I was brought up under until I arrived at HDS. That was the first time I was able to take a deep dive into toxic theologies, unpack them, and reconstruct a theology that spoke to the fullness of who I am. And I did all of that from within the radical Black religious tradition.

I was reading folks like James Cone and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as folks like Fannie Lou Hamer—all of these amazing scholars who took seriously the Black Church as an institution. Not just what transpired at the spiritual level, but the ways in which the Black Church showed up in the public square. And the Black Church historically showed up pursing justice and pushing back against systems of oppression. I was able to reconstruct this theology and I loved it. I was able to reconcile my faith and my sexuality. There was no distinction between the two. I saw them as inextricable.

An Invitation In

I would also travel back home, to the far South Side of Chicago, to the same old hand-clapping, toe-tapping Black Church, where folks did not have access to the same sort of conversations I was having at HDS, or to the same thinkers or luminaries who were engaging in prophetic critique of Black Church theology. I wrestled with how to invite my church into these conversations around the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality.

At HDS, we didn’t talk a whole lot about how to translate what we were learning, or how to engage in conversations with folks who didn’t have access to that space. And that’s really where Pride in the Pews emerged. I wondered, how might we think of a sustainable way to engage congregants, on the South Side of Chicago and in cities like it across the country, in these conversations that are central to our theology and our understanding of ourself as an institution? That is where it began.

And then came the George Floyd murder, after which I was protesting. Alongside me were Black pastors and clergy, and they were chanting along with me, Black Lives Matter. My immediate retort was, does my life matter to you? As a Black queer man who shows up Sunday after Sunday to a sanctuary where my sexuality is demonized and condemned? I realized that now is a great time for the Black Church to recommit itself to pursing justice for all people—for those who exist at the margins of society, for those who are on the underside of power. I launched Pride in the Pews in the hopes that in this particular socio-political moment, we would be able to take a deeper dive into our commitments and the way we carry them into the world.

Different Faiths, Same Justice

Religious communities like the one I come from—Black Baptist, fundamentalist communities—are quite skeptical of “out-there,” liberal places like HDS. There’s this fear that you’re bringing folks of all different faiths together, and they’re just going to steer you away from Jesus. Steer you away from God. But what I found was that being in conversation with Buddhist, agnostic, and atheist colleagues, with folks who practice Indigenous African religious traditions, did not bring me away from my faith, but actually brought me closer to it. My colleagues were asking questions and framing the pursuit of justice in ways that pushed me to ask, how might Jesus see this? In doing so, it actually gave me permission, or offered an invitation, for me to think more critically about the values that I hold as a Black Christian—and more specifically, a Black, Queer Christian in the Black Church.

For me, this was an opportunity to take a deep dive into my convictions, both theological and philosophical and spiritual, and begin to ask the scary questions. The questions that would lead to answers that I didn’t already have. Being willing to engage in that humble inquiry, that audacious questioning, presented an opportunity for me to say, ok, let me re-imagine the way I’ve interpreted the gospel. Let me reimagine the way I understand harm and violence and white supremacy and homophobia.

I got to the place where I was able to see both my queerness and my faith as inextricably connected, but also where I was able to go broader than that. I was able to say, when I’m talking about the injustices caused by queerphobia in the world, those are intimately connected to white supremacy. Those are intimately connected to patriarchy and homophobia and transphobia. These things are not separate and independent from one another. What we are really talking about is interlocking systems of oppression. My colleagues from different faith traditions and I, we were able to work together and agree on the fact that we should be pursuing justice. We should be doing good in the world. Whatever it is that we deem ministry or our calling or the philosophical tenets that we subscribe to, it should all work toward a world where we are safer, more whole, and more free.

“Can I Get a Witness?”

I started Pride in the Pews not only when this country was confronting a racial reckoning that was catapulted by state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies. It also happened when we were seeing unprecedented and historic attacks against the Black community, with a specific emphasis on attacks on the rights of trans-folks to exist. At the same time as we saw this racial reckoning, we saw these concerted attacks across the country on LGBTQ folks. That’s the intersectional context that Pride in the Pews emerged into. That intersectionality makes Pride in the Pews so powerful. We recognize that we’re fighting on multiple fronts. We’re fighting for our right to exist as Black people, and we’re fighting for our right to exist as queer-embodied people. For me, that context was key. It gave this push power.

Context is important. Since I’m trying to reach folks in the Black religious tradition, any content that I create, any story that I tell, any voice that I lift up, needs to reside within that tradition. One thing that is central to our tradition is storytelling. It is with this in mind that we started with the Can I Get a Witness Project, which aims to capture the stories of 66 Black Queer Christians within the Black Church. Whether it’s my enslaved ancestors who didn’t have access to the scriptural texts to be able to read them, who accessed the word of God through story; or whether it is my African ancestors who were passing on sacred religious traditions, not by writing them down, but through word of mouth—that oral tradition is rich. That’s the one I’m centering in this project.

When we’ve collected all 66 stories, we hope to take all of the wisdom, all of the insights we’ve been able to gleam from our conversations with Black queer Christians, look at the trends and salient points, and turn that into a curriculum. A curriculum that is shaped and fashioned by the Black religious tradition.

The Black church was born fighting systems of oppression and dehumanization. I want to bring that history in. I want to bring in the history of folks like Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was the first Democratic politician in this nation’s history to ever advocate for LGBTQ rights. That’s a part of our tradition. And I want to bring in the history of Dr. King, the freedom fighter, truth-teller, and table-shaker who decided to speak truth to power, and in doing so, lost his life. These are the traditions we are part of. I want to lift that up and say, in the same way that the Black Church has been queer through its very existence—by operating on the undersides of power, by existing in the margins, by advocating for the least of these—me advocating for LGBTQ rights is simply an extension of that tradition. It is an extension of that Black, freedom-loving tradition. I want to be able to walk congregants through this as we center the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ folks in the Black Church.

We are going to turn some of these stories into case studies. We are going to read and hear the stories of the Black queer folks as sacred texts. We’re going to take them seriously, to wrestle with them, and to create tools that combat queerphobia and transphobia and homophobia as it shows up historically in the Black Church context.

A Call to Action

I would like to invite folks to participate in the Can I Get a Witness Project. If they identify as Black, Queer, and Christian, we’d love for them to be a part of this work and of this project. We have just over 30 folks that we’ve interviewed, and we have just over 30 to go. And of course, for all the allies out there who don’t identity as Black or Queer, you can support us by following the work that we’re doing, contributing financially to the work we are doing, and sharing our work. Our work will spread by the willingness of folks to share their stories and to open up those spaces where liberation and love do not abound, so that we can make it abound.

Interview by Gianna Cacciatore; photos courtesy of Don Abram

#harvard #Harvard Divinity School #Black Church #queer #christian #faith #chicago #Religion #large

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gothamincarnate · 4 years

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Interacting with d/Deaf muses (and d/DHH people)

for d/Deaf people reading this: I am HH but only recently Deaf so I am mostly speaking from that perspective and things I’ve heard from others in the Deaf community. If I am wrong on any point let me know. reblog this with corrections or simply send me an IM.

for hearing people reading this: like I said, my experince is incredibly personal as are most people’s navigation of Deafhood or deafness. don’t take this list and just assume it’s law. this is only tips. most of all be respectful to the individual.

putting it under a cut for length and so that i can append & correct it as needed.

I said I wasn’t going to “how to write a Deaf muse” but this needs to be said-

do not make your character d/Deaf only in a side verse. It is a lifelong thing for us.

there are people who are late deafened so chronologically this could be done, especially with regards to the Deaf journey.

but it should not be done as a side verse.

this is not to say that writing a Hearing character as Deaf is bad! In fact, I encourage you to. my main muse is Deaf Batman and I enjoy exploring his character in Deaf culture and deafness as a disability.

HOWEVER, his deafness is part of every verse that I have with him.

the reason for this is that, well, d/Deaf people face communication barriers every day and it’s not something we can take on and off for convenience. even with assistive devices we are still deaf.

Interacting with d/Deaf people in real life:

deaf & Deaf are two different things. feel free to google explanations on this.

do not question a person’s decision on how to self identify as d/Deaf or HH. if someone is being harmful then let someone who is d/Deaf handle it

a hearing person cannot give themselves or others a sign name even if a Deaf person gave them a sign name. if you want to change a namesign, ask another Deaf person. there are a rules and a required amount of fluency. It’s not just a nickname.

let the person you’re talking to set the course for using asl if at all. some of us are oral to varying degrees or use aids that work for us. many are bilingual, which means many will switch back and forth as needed when interacting with people. many even text or type instead.

there are varying degrees of hearing loss, not everyone is fully deaf. some are even hearing but use sign as their primary means of communication and therefore can be considered Deaf

lip reading is nearly impossible and takes a lot of concentration, mostly only get a few words because your outer lips only count for 20% of how we talk.

there’s also listening fatigue where is pretty self explanatory. don’t assume we even like lipreading. it’s difficult

don’t turn your face or bend down if we’re trying to have a conversation. it’s a visual language which means we need to watch your expressions and you need to watch ours.

do not, I repeat DO NOT! stare at anyone using ASL. it’s RUDE to watch us just because it’s “interesting” to you.

do NOT come up to use and sign the three words you know and walk off, don’t sign at us at all unless you mean to have an actual conversation.

stop calling ASL beautiful. Yes, it is beautiful for a lot of historical and cultural reasons but if hearing people just think its’ “beautiful” it because it’s highly visual

many go without listening aids for a variety of reasons, don’t ask about it unless the person offers you to ask them

some people are culturally Deaf & some people want nothing to do with it

some people prefer to consider deafness a disability and this is mostly an intracommunity issue, do not correct a deaf person on this

I know you have been meaning to learn ASL. Stop telling me that every time I use ASL or talk about it. It’s frustrating. Either learn it or don’t. If you really care about the ASL user in your life you’ll learn it.

do not, like never if you can help it, say “never mind” or give up when the person is asking you to repeat yourself. many of us have spent our whole lives hearing that. we deserve communication just like everyone else.

do not give a three word summary or say “i’ll tell you later”, it’s incredibly hurtful and singles us out and deprives us of a spot in the conversation

many people who use ASL use it out of a need to communicate, it’s not something we can just take for fun

Interacting with Deaf muses (not “how to write a Deaf muse”, do research for that)

hearing people cannot give themselves a namesign. do not give your hearing muse a namesign. don’t even give your d/Deaf muse a namesign. ask someone’s who a d/Deaf RPer to help you if you really want to.

some Deaf people don’t have namesigns

namesigns can change depending on who’s talking to who about what or as a character grows up. it’s not the same as a nickname but there can be nicknames in asl if established

if your character is holding something in their hands and needs to use ASL there are options. Have them tuck it in their arm or set it down. Have them use it when they sign as part of the sign. Though this requires fluency in sign. You could also have the character use one handed signs but this requires both fluency and knowing kind of what the person is talking about already like a friend or family member

if the character is holding something they can’t set down easily or at all for some reason. they will be unable to communicate with someone who is unable to hear until the object is set down. this happens in real life as well.

it takes 3 years to become conversational but if you are honestly trying most will be patient enough to fingerspell a lot

some people sign fast. asking them to slow down is frustrating to us but some will. it literally depends on the individual’s personality and past experiences

sign users often have accents due to what they learned or didn’t learn or growing up in a certain area or simply their personality. you can give your character a sign accent but like, put thought into why it’s the way it is. did they learn from a hearing teacher or a Deaf teacher?

consider the space your characters are in. siging space is a big bubble around your head and chest. this means you need to be able to hold your fully extended arms to the side and above your head. ASL users will stand a farther apart so that they have room to sign in front of them and watch the other person’s signing back.

yelling in ASL is louder and farther away, possibly looser due to being upset. ‘whispering’ takes a few extra steps like huddling or walking away.

I prefer to just translate it to English than try to gloss it or write out every sign. Taking into consideration the visual and physical, positive and negative aspects of ASL, you can still translate it to English

if you have your character obviously speaking or communicating ineffectively for some reason make sure to let the d/Deaf mun is okay with it. we already have Dinner Table Syndrome in real life, some don’t want to RP it. it’s like trans people don’t want to RP misgendering even if it “makes sense in context”

ineffective communication can include: a character mumbling or turning away. wearing a mask. not being able to see the person’s torso and face. an environment dim lighting.

if a hearing person corrects you, run it by a Deaf person first because there are hearing people who learning Deaf culture incorrectly and will white knight for us for no reason

if your character isn’t from Amercia they might not know ASL but another form of sign. Think of it like an English person learning a a language with similar roots. some words are shared or rather obvious many aren’t because it is literally an entire different language that developed

#here you go.#please reblog it uwu

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languagebraindump · 4 years

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Translation – what they don’t tell you about the job

Thanks, lovely @poenavictoria for contacting me! You gave me an idea for a post!

I majored in translation, and it’s not like I thoroughly hate it, but there are so many things about it that make me think that I should’ve chosen a different major altogether.

Let’s start with the positives:

1. You can learn a lot

Translation requires not only broad theoretical knowledge of translation strategies and procedures but also the so-called “content knowledge” that is gained through practice, studying, or simply through constant exposure to the translator’s craft. The more “content knowledge” a translator has, the easier it becomes to make a decision. Your language skills improve as well; however, the speaking skill is the one that suffers the most (unless you translate orally).

2. Remote working

It has its pros and cons. If you’re single (or living alone) and no one is bothering you, then remote working is kind of fun. You’re your own boss, and you decide which part of the day is the best part to get things done. If you have a family, then working from home can be challenging. You’ll get distracted so many times that at some point you’ll start looking at coworking spaces or thinking of renting your own office (If you don't make enough money, this might a problem).

The only thing I truly like about translation is learning more natural language alternatives in my target languages. If you don’t know how to talk about certain topics in your target language, it’s good to see how natives talk about them; what words and phrases they use. Translation gives you access to a great number of texts that aren’t normally out there on the Internet.

Now, the things I don’t like about translation

1. Your translation can change national attitudes

Yeah, I know, it sounds so serious. How can one person change the whole country’s perception of a particular issue? Let’s say you’re translating a text on a very sensitive issue such as racism. Words carry more meaning than people think, and each person has their own connotations with particular words. You live in a country where racism has never been a thing because the population is 99,99% white. People know about racism because they’ve seen it on TV, but they have never experienced it themselves. You can either domesticate the text (make it sound like someone from your country wrote it) or foregnize it (show the author’s culture). You will either make the text sound bland (because how people who have never experienced racism can use accurate phrasing to talk about it) or make it sound emotional (which might sound strange to your target readers because racism has never been a thing, and they will wonder: “What’s the big deal?”)

2. Your interpretation can affect your clients' decisions

Whether it’s a sensitive issue or a financial issue, your mistake or wrong interpretation can lead your clients to wrong conclusions, which in turn might cost them lots of money or reputation. If you’re translating technical stuff, making mistakes in machinery manuals can even result in a horrible accident, let alone medical documents.

3. The money is not as good as people think

English is a global language right now, and not everyone will need a translator’s service. There’s google translate, online forums where people ask for help, HiNative, Discord servers, and many more such platforms where people do “so-called” language exchanges and translate random stuff for free (professional translators use them as well). If you’re an advanced user of English (or any other language), then what are the odds that you’ll commission a professional translator to translate things for you. This applies to other languages as well. From my own experience, I can tell you that your offer really needs to be attractive and you really need to work fast to earn as much as you can.

4. Some things simply cannot be translated

I’m talking about cultural differences. That’s the part I hate but also love about translation. You learn so much about the world and how people spend their holidays, what they celebrate and eat, and many more. It is not fun when you need to put such differences into words. How to describe it accurately, so people know what you’re talking about and feel the same as the people from the source culture.

5. You need to socialize

Wait… what? Yeah, you need to make connections, preferably with people who work in different fields. It’s not like a translator knows everything. They don’t. There are times when they are presented with texts that they don’t even understand in their native languages simply because the subject is not a common thing to talk about, yet they need to translate it. First, you need to understand the contents yourself, and while the Internet has answers to pretty much everything, sometimes it’s better to ask someone for explanations in person, so they give you more accurate answers and examples.

6. The translation market

has its own rules. While most would-be translators think that they will translate novels or interesting articles, the reality is different. Graduates of university degree programs in translation end up translating birth certificates or car documents, invoices, and such. Landing a job in a publishing house is extremely difficult. The other thing is commissioners killing translators' creativity. After so many years of studying and practice, some commissioners might want you to translate in a specific way (you know a better way, but oh well, the customer comes first) and you need to adhere to their wishes because... money.

When you start studying translation, you'll learn more pros and cons. These are the tip of the iceberg, but I hope it gave you a brief overview of what to expect from the job.

#translation #langblr #studyspo #translator's job #translation major #the reality of everything #the reality of a translator's job #my teaching

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beloved-judged · 4 years

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The inexpressible

This is going to be a bit... fragmented.

I should say, up front, that one of my degrees is an MFA--poetry and creative non-fiction. I have a license to poet, to be abstract and playful with language, and training in recognizing the internal structure of meaning as it is presented in language use.

I also took an absolute ass load of rhetoric courses, eventually taking Greek coursework (in addition to the mandatory Latin) in order to read the texts left us by various rhetors and their historians side-by-side with their translations.

I do language. It’s a different brain than I use on the daily in programming (and in fact, they’re oppositional for some subsets of use), but I’ve proved to the satisfaction of an academic committee that I can language just fine, even convincingly.

A confluence of events today: my papa releasing a blizzard of podcasts in the last two days, re-reading Snow Crash, and a bunch of random events have lead me to spend the last few days contemplating language.

It’s going to be here because it applies to the things my papa has been talking about.

When you choose to speak, take for granted you have already lost a lot of meaning--to render a situation into language is to make decisions about what it is, how it is, and how others may understand it, all of which are bound to your individual understanding (as well as whatever social rules, ideas, etc you have absorbed, because we’re not islands.) To make those decisions is to decide what is important and relevant, what others may understand, and what you want others to understand.

And to make those decisions is to decide not just what’s included, but what is omitted. This starts the second words come into play and before it, in the language we are inculcated with.

The latest podcast my papa released is a parable about one of the founding fathers of Sufism, which I will spoil and say the moral of the story is that the presence of someone who has achieved enlightenment is just as important as any attention they might give you (and in some cases, to not give attention at all, so as not to feed the ego.)

The presence, without language--to exist within eyesight and hearing, without direct interaction.

In Snow Crash, the author plays with an old, old dichotomy: religions of the book (that is, legalistic religions which base their principles on a written text which is required to take a form which does not permit as much individual interpretation) versus cultic religions, in which enlightenment is achieved through individual experience and is not subject to being ruled or shaped by the contents of a text.

Christianity is, at best, a mixed bag by that criteria, but tends toward a religion of the book rather than a cultic religion--as it is practiced in many places, it has elements of personal enlightenment, but is checked (at least in theory) against the text of the Bible, which is considered the authority on what it is and means to be a Christian. Again, in theory. This may not be true of individual Christian groups, churches, or Christians and it does not matter if it is true. Christianity bases itself on the Bible as a general rule.

A religion of a central text, against which all things are (supposed to be) checked.

One of the most haunting reads in my rhetorical studies was The Phadreus--a dialog on the nature of rhetoric (the art of persuasion). In the book, which is arranged as a long dialog, Socrates is talking to Phadreus about the nature of language, persuasion, and what makes a good versus a bad rhetor. There is a whole section where he talks about the relationship between writing and speech in rhetoric, remarking that he does not trust writing to do what it is supposed to do (to serve as an aid to memory, to make the idea immortal). He remarks that to read and write a thing is inadequate to produce experts, and that expertise requires something more in terms of experience and inspiration.

Or to put it a slightly different way: you might be able to write down instructions on how to do a complex thing, but the instructions by themselves are not going to make someone capable of performing the task well.

And, as he remarked, all too often when we commit something to writing, we promptly cease to make the effort to remember it--remembering becomes a problem of the medium we write in.

We wrote it down, now it’s the paper’s job to remember it.

This can, as he points out in The Phadreus and elsewhere in the texts produced by Plato during that period, lead to the state where people can take their speech--that is, the things produced from their mouth--and treat it as if it does not belong to them, as if, because they are quoting, they no longer ‘own’ the words they speak, and thus are not bound to the consequence of them.

You can see an awful lot of this in white, academic, and main cultures: if I’m quoting someone else, it’s not my fault. If I am sufficiently careful to quote, I can get away with saying all kinds of things and have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be held accountable for it.

In primarily oral cultures, as a quick side note and by contrast, what you say (the promises you make) is a profound reflection of you as a person, and you will be held accountable for it. Everything that comes out of your mouth, you own, and there is no shield of ‘just quoting’ or ‘just saying’ to save you from suffering the consequences of your speech.

Magic, where it concerns speech, often appears to me to inherit from that understanding of the word. That which issues out of your mouth is a spike, affixing you to consequence, that you cannot wriggle out of.

Trusting in the written word also, as Socrates points out, tends to lead to the state where the writer thinks they have been clear, and the reader thinks they have understood, but neither are right: the written word does not lend itself to clarity, but to deceptive equivocation. The appearance of clarity, but only if both parties do not think deeply or ask much of the interaction, and part of the inability of the book to produce experts has to do with the absence of expertise and inspiration to enforce clarity.

I find that is much on my mind--where we find clarity. I have about twenty years of training in academia, in finding clarity in books. I would be hard-pressed to count how many books I’ve read, even by genre. It is where my mind is ... comfortable. A confluence of training and natural inclinations.

The experts with whom I might study to understand rhetoric, say, are dead and dust in the ground, in some cases for thousands of years. They cannot be present with me, and while there are plenty of modern scholars with whom I might study, I am unlikely to ever have the chance to do so.

There is something tied to presence, something which governs learning. In Snow Crash, which is very much propaganda for literate societies, the idea that there is a pre-verbal experience of understanding or something that defies the ability to be verbalized within literature structures, is a virus analogous to herpes: something that represents an invader of the ordered, literate body, which subverts it and irreparably harms the health of the body and the mind.

Without the book to govern thought, all is madness, and those who are trained in specific kinds of literacy (in the case of Snow Crash, technical literacy) are susceptible to a madness which burns out their ability to think and their identity, their ability to appear rational to the literate society around them. They become as individualized as an insect, which is to say that they have no individual identity.

That is where I am going--to that non-verbal place. It’s a thought that fills me with anxiety, but also with relief. I cannot touch rationality but to notice irrationality in it, the vital absences which compose the underpinning of rationality, both in language and in concept.

Language is a slippery bastard.

Vodou is a cult, by the definition of the majority religion (Christianity), and by definition in general, in that it has no centralized authority (no pope), no central dogma (a Bible, say), and relies on individual experience with the divine (in possession, inspiration, or through witnessing a possession.) It is also a community-driven religion: mutual support, mutual aid, mutual living. It has authority figures (the priests), but the authority structure is very localized. A priest is the priest for his or her temple, not for every vodouizant everywhere. Authority is recognized, but not universal.

Atop that, it is also very much an oral culture: you are absolutely responsible for your words.

In my experiences with possession so far, both partial (someone else was using my body and I could witness but not interfere) and complete (black out), it has been a place where all my literacy, all my rationality (and I used to teach logic), all the things I would call my identity, were pointless. Either gently but firmly pushed aside, or gone altogether with the rest of me. And I have never, in my experience of being partially possessed, spoken.

Moved? Sure. Expressed something? Yes. Performed feats? Yep.

Fully possessed, however, I’m told my body has done a lot of speaking.

But the literate qualities of myself, the parts writing this entry, were either absent or entirely beside the point. It is not an easy thing to flirt with the destruction of these parts of myself. It’s deeply, deeply discomforting to recognize that where I am going, I am not. Where I am going, all that I am now will be beside the point.

Existential panic, I think, is about right.

What am I, without language? What remains in those spaces?

I cannot enjoy the wine of oblivion without reaping it--I cannot enter the waters of the void in meditation and not expect to have to perform the work necessary to come back and swim it.

What words, what shapes, what law is written on me in such places?

I hope the lwa will forgive me for being afraid.

The more I see of what I will be losing, the more... frightening the cost becomes. The fear of becoming a babbling adept, the fear of losing my ability to appear rational in rational society, the loss of those years building expertise.

The loss of myself, those endlessly reflecting mirrors of structure so painstakingly cultivated, and I know my papa would say “no, not yourself. What you think you are” but it is not entirely comforting.

And if I lose this, this speaking self writing these words...

And if I lose...

I struggle at this price. Does it seem dramatic? Only because this is the bastion I have spent my life defending against the attacks of family, colleagues, and a world determined to tell me that women cannot be rational.

I have been beaten for knowledge. Repeatedly. For daring to ask questions. I have been forcibly excised from academia, because I could not find enough support to defend myself against harassment. I have given up relationships and exposed myself to constant, crippling criticism and the many cruelties of people who found my presence intolerable. I have given up meals, a bed under my head, clothes, love, children, and the acquisition of wealth to know. There has been no easy path to knowledge for me, no family poised to encourage and protect, no social matrix to provide support.

This is the next price I will have to pay. Just a pound of flesh from nearest my heart.

What will be left of me, this babbling self ironic in the drive to cage in language what ultimately dissolves it?

I do not know if I can pay it. I can only... make myself try because I will keep my word.

And because anything else will never be enough.

My love, my love, the crown of my soul, papa, patron, master--you scare me.

#vodou #language

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terramythos · 4 years

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TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 24 of 26

Title: A Choir of Lies (2019) (A Conspiracy of Truths #2)

Author: Alexandra Rowland

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, First-Person, Unreliable Narrators (Plural!), Female Protagonist, LGBT Protagonist

Rating: 9/10

Date Began: 8/24/2020

Date Finished: 9/07/2020

Three years after A Conspiracy of Truths, Ylfing finds himself disillusioned and alone. He’s seen how a story can crumble an entire nation, and is unsure if he wants to continue on his path to being a Chant-- a professional wandering storyteller.

Taking a job as a merchant’s translator in the canal city of Heyrland, Ylfing’s new employer soon realizes his penchant for storytelling, and he grudgingly agrees to use his gift to sell stars-in-the-marsh, an exotic flower. Ylfing’s stories soon cause a frenzied demand for the flowers, and entire fortunes become tied up in contracts for them. However, an unforeseen disaster looms that could ruin the lives of thousands, and Ylfing must decide whether he can rise up to fix his mistakes, or let the city destroy itself.

I can’t save everyone completely. But maybe I can mostly save a couple people, or save most people a tiny bit. It’s one little thing, and that’s better than nothing. That’s always better than nothing.

Minor spoilers under the cut.

Full disclosure: I had a hard time getting into A Choir of Lies. Reading the first section of the book was an exercise in patience. Basically, the book has two protagonists. One's Ylfing, a fan favorite from A Conspiracy of Truths. Ylfing seems much different than his last appearance; it's obvious something major and/or traumatic happened between books. He's depressed, disillusioned, and directionless, questioning his life and decision to become a Chant, a wandering storyteller. He's a far cry from the optimistic, happy-to-a-fault character from the previous volume. The book itself is sort of a journal of his daily experiences living in a canal city called Heyrland (think fantasy!Copenhagen). On the other hand, we also have a new character named Mistress Chant, who has somehow obtained this journal, and provides ongoing footnote commentary about Ylfing and the events he describes. It's almost identical to what Shriek: An Afterword does, and like before I think it's an interesting tool to portray different, often opposed perspectives. It becomes obvious that Mistress Chant doesn't like Ylfing much, and her comments on his early depression and struggles are brutal. While she has a point, she often comes off as harsh and antagonistic. So... there's one character in a depressive funk that, while relatable, is not very fun to read about, and the other is a sarcastic and angry character criticizing everything he does. I found it difficult to really connect with the leads or the story because of this. At first. Boy am I glad I stuck with this one. Despite my early struggles, this book is one of those rare gems that not only gets better over time, but completely redeems and justifies early "flaws". While there's multiple reasons for this, the simplest and most notable is catharsis. (Holy hell is this book cathartic to read). A Choir of Lies is at its core a very optimistic book. One of the central theses is that even the most irredeemable person can do "one little thing" to improve or change the world. It's great to see the characters bite the bullet, overcome their issues, and improve as people. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, more "you have to put in the work to do the right thing and become a better person, even if it's an ugly and difficult process." Of course the first section of the book is tough -- it’s meant to be! The contrast is beautiful as you progress further in the novel. Ylfing makes a terrible mistake in the book that potentially ruins thousands of people’s lives, and he's so caught up in his depression that he cannot or will not take responsibility. Yet after a revelation or two, he realizes he HAS to do something about it, and fights tooth and nail to do so. It's such a departure from A Conspiracy of Truths, in which the main character is caught in an unfortunate situation and does everything he can to save himself, everyone else be damned. It's interesting to see the previous book through a different lens, one which portrays the protagonist as an incredibly selfish character rather than someone struggling to survive a bad situation. Chant doesn't appear in this book, but basically everything about him is cast in a much different light. For me Mistress Chant was difficult to like at first, but she mellows out and entertains alternate points of view as the story progresses. It's satisfying to see her admit that Ylfing is right about some things, and how happy she is when he finally asserts himself and does the right thing. You can see why she and Ylfing don't like each other, but by the end it's bittersweet because you can also see how they could have been friends under other circumstances. I loved the general ideas on storytelling, like the importance of creating a "good" story even if it's not the true one, and how such a process can help one heal and cope. Or even the power of writing a story down versus purely oral tradition, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. That kind of stuff. Like the previous book, there's an emphasis on the literal Power of Storytelling and its ability to change fortunes and futures, but with a more grudgingly optimistic take.

It also helps that I read A Choir of Lies at a time when I really needed it. I'm in a similar position to Ylfing right now. I really don't know what to do with my life, and I'm pretty depressed with the state of the world. While it's challenging to see my situation and coping methods as selfish, I think that's an honest assessment and it really made me think about where I am and what I'm doing. On the other hand, there are so many looming disasters right now in the real world that mirror the conflict in this story. Every day I see people do the wrong thing, the selfish and inhumane thing, and it's mentally taxing and demoralizing. Reading a story in which people initially suck, then do what they can to help others and address their mistakes, is inspirational. It's a reminder that people as a whole can still do good despite (and sometimes even because of) their selfishness. It makes me more optimistic about the future. Overall I liked A Choir of Lies much more than A Conspiracy of Truths. It is a standalone sequel that can be read without the previous volume, as most of the context from that book is well explained. While this isn't an action packed fantasy novel, the characters feel much more involved in the central conflict, which was my main issue with the last book. I liked the more cerebral ideas of storytelling, potential, and the ability to do the right thing as told through a fantasy lens. According to the author notes this was a tough one to write, but I think they did an excellent job and really improved on the general idea and concepts of the previous book.

#taylor reads #9/10 #2020 reading challenge

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sagebodisattva · 4 years

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The Universe Doesn’t Give a Shit About You

You know, one thing that has become seriously irritating nowadays, is this whole “the universe is doing something for you” shtick, that’s apparently become the latest favorite new age meme, currently making it’s rounds on the internets. Take a look at this stuff.

(A variety of examples are shown.)

And that’s just a small sampling. And this isn’t just a case of a few isolated incidents. This type of sentiment is everywhere now; seemingly having become all the rage among many aspiring spiritual truth seekers.

“Depressed? Cheer up. The universe is horny for you!”

By first appearances, making references to the universe seems to reflect a more scientifically based position, although, I don’t think these seekers really mean it in a scientific way. Essentially, these new age universe worshippers are just former theists, who probably finally realized the complete absurdity of that position, and so now, have shifted their heels over to pantheism; that is, a doctrine which identifies god with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of god; which is basically a veneration of nature. And, as we all know, mother nature is pretty much a cold, predatory, discriminating bitch; so I’m not sure why anyone would associate nature with a benevolent god.

I know, god loves you so much, he allows evil to rack you to the core on purpose. It’s a test, right? It’s all part of his divine plan. God just wants to see if you will curse his name when he makes times get incredibly tough. It’s a Job type of deal. He’s forcing you into a position of struggle and suffering, all so he can wage a bet with the devil over whether or not you will be disobedient. Isn’t that just so cool of him? Now you get to show god just how loyal and subservient you are to him, despite all the abuses he hurls at you! That’s such an enviable position! The one true god loves you so much, he tortures you as a demonstration of just how much you worship and obey him. That’s what love is. And just think of how lucky you are! He picked *you* as a guinea pig in his twisted self aggrandizing experiment! He chose YOU! This would make such a great reality TV show!

Heaven and Hell productions, presents...

“The God Fucks Me Factor.”

Ah yes, it would be, so nice. Because god takes great pride in your blind obedience, you know. And he’s a very jealous god, if you can believe it. So what’s going on inside your head is of supreme importance him! You must think that you believe in him, then confess it with thy lips, and then go down, and perform some lip service on the godhead. You should show great pride in being a slave. It’s a feather in god’s cap. And now, can be more fully realized with the advent of pantheism. It’s theism, with a pan. It’s pantheism.

Famous 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was really captivated by the idea of pantheism, and his many philosophical contemplations on the subject is largely responsible for ushering the position into modern day prominence. Pantheists do not celebrate a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god, but rather, accept all gods into worship, because they view god as everything. An ideological stance that can become quite problematic, to say the least.

Throughout history, pantheism has been a belief system that, in one form or another, tended to be the most common default faith practice among the many various indigenous peoples from around the globe. It’s the same ideologic methodology that the pagans of Europe used to practice; that is, before Rome came along and forced Christianity deep down into every person’s every available orifice. And you should always keep this historical fact in the forefront of your mind. Your Abrahamic belief system is the result of a Roman soldier raping someone’s great great great great grandma and grandpa with a big middle eastern theological strap-on dildo. Don’t you ever forget that. Your whole modern day spiritual life was originally founded on a theological psych-rape. Your precious sacred religion was passed down to you through your family being raped. And it’s no coincidence that Rome, an arrogant empire dead-set on conquering the entire world, found Christianity to be quite compatible with their grandiose ambitions. And that should tell you something about the core fabric of the Abrahamic cult religions.

So, pantheists believe that god is everything. All inclusive, with no exceptions. No standards or filter necessary. This includes every kind of concept; even the stupid ideas and majestic fantasies, floating around inside our heads. And this also includes every kind of object or person to have ever existed, no matter who or what they are. This means they are ALL god, whether it be a virus, a parasite or an infectious bacteria, whether it be a machine gun, cocaine or a dildo, whether John Wayne Gacy, the unabomber or Adolf Hitler, they are all but different forms of an ambiguous enigmatic god! He’s so complex, you can’t even fathom him. He’s got value and purpose so profoundly beyond your puny logic, you can’t even question him.

And not only is every kind of object or person a manifestation of god, but guess what? With pantheism, ALL the different gods, are god as well. It’s not that some gods are valid, and some gods are not, or that maybe all gods are completely full of shit, no! In fact, it actually quite the opposite, I’m afraid. Now, all different gods are actually the one same god. Every so called “god” is graciously welcomed into pantheism with open arms. Whether Yahweh, Zeus, Horace, or the great honorable bull testicle god, all of them are just different manifestations of the one same god!

Yeah. You know, when it gets right down to it, I don’t have any issue with the whole “god is everything”, bullshit, but, uh, to say the least, I think these concepts might be just a little *too* inclusive for most of the population’s tastes. They’re simply not palatable to their delicate tongue’s tender sensibilities, and they therefor much more prefer to perform oral worship on a single god head. Who am I to stop them?

But the concept of a universe is just so much better then a god, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s a better false substitution. The idea of the universe as a higher power is more soothing then the idea of a god as a higher power. This particular surrogate for the truth is just so much more secure and comforting. But in the end, it’s the same exercise. The idea that something ELSE in the field of perception is the responsible agent. In fact, most of this pantheism business just seems to be a matter of replacing the word “god” with the word “universe”, and calling this a new ideological position. Are you confused? Well, worry not! I will gladly give you a little taste, and bestow upon you three prime examples.

Quote:

“Never trust anyone completely but God. Love people, but put your full trust only in God.”

Lawrence Welk.

Nice. Which now becomes:

“Never trust anyone completely but the universe. Love people, but put your full trust only in the universe.”

Quote:

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sweet. But could also be stated:

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is the universe’s handwriting.”

Quote:

“Man has to start with something and then develop it - he cannot ever make anything from nothing, only God can do that, and call forth the creation.”

Margaret Weston.

Awesome. But let’s not overlook:

“Man has to start with something and then develop it - he cannot ever make anything from nothing, only the universe can do that, and call forth the creation.”

See how it works? Just about any dialogue about god could still hold water when replacing the word “god” with “the universe.” So it’s really not all that much of a novel position. It’s just a convenient one-size-fits-all philosophical cure-all. An ideological placebo. And I’m not one who is much impressed by Dues Ex philosophy, which is what any type of theology basically is, including pantheism.

For those of you not familiar with the term, “Dues Ex”, it is derived from the term “Dues Ex Machina”, a Greek phrase, which translated means, “a god from a machine”, and is usually employed as a literary device, wherein an explicitly complex seemingly intractable problem in a plot narrative is suddenly inexplicably solved by the addition of an unexpected character, object or situation. Think the eagles coming to save Frodo from uncertain doom in the fiery volcano of Mordor. Basically, it’s a cheap fast way to tie up the loose ends of a difficult quandary. It’s ideological laziness, and quite frankly, has no place in philosophy, in much the same way that theism has no place in philosophy.

And by the way, speaking of the “a god from the machine” thought experiment, it reminds me that, when it comes to gods and machines and ghosts and men, philosophers have gotten the whole thing all wrong all along. A god may emerge from a machine, but if it does, bear in mind that both the god and the machine are equally sourced from the pure mind. And this is the part people just can’t seem to understand. Though-out history, philosophers have always deeply contemplated the idea of “a ghost in the machine”, but that’s because most philosophers think they are a physical creature living in a physical environment. But it’s a huge lie. There is no ghost in the machine. What you actually have, is a machine in the ghost; as, there is no such thing as physicality, and a “deterministic mechanical universe”, is just an abstraction. What you call “physicality”, is a denser mental state; and to attribute this mind-space into an idea of objective locality is just plain falsehood. It’s just plain wrongheaded.

And it doesn’t matter if you include the “self”, as god, because this “self”, is still an attribution. The egoic character that you’ve associated an identity with, isn’t a self, so this is still in the same realm of falsehoods. Illusion is everything on the screen of perception; including the physical body, and all it’s supposed psycho-biological properties. Wherein is any universe?

So that’s pantheism; which, I’m not all that partial towards, due to it’s attributional psychology, which shares the same central backbone as orthodox religion. Why would it be any different with pantheism? The responsibility is still elsewhere, hence the power is elsewhere also; so it matters not that you’ve replaced an anthropological deity with celestial chemistry. Same excrement, different poop chute. And that’s the same reason why, that if a truth seeker were to take a purely scientific position considering the universe, it wouldn’t be all that much different then a theist or a pantheist viewpoint.

“How’s that?”

That’s right, Charlie. As previously stated, a purely cosmological scientific viewpoint; that is, the idea of the universe as some grand cosmic physical context of exterior space consisting of a mixture of different objects and chemistries, is just that: an idea. In other words, also completely full of shit. There is no “universe”, existing, anywhere. And that’s why, the universe doesn’t give it a shit about you. There’s no vibrating strings out there governing some law of attraction that brings forth metaphysical emergent properties when you energetically match a frequency. No. What you really have, is just an IDEA of a universe, which is not really located in a space-time continuum, but, only imagined as a location in a mind-space continuum.

If you can understand this basic fundamental, then you may have finally grasped one of the basic truths of reality.

#philosophy #Universe #signs #pantheism #pantheist #Baruch Spinoza #God

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pelleas-at-castle-nox · 4 years

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DID

For the Record, I’ve recently accepted that I have DID, multiple personalities. There’s... 8? In total so far, and I’m pretty sure that’s it. I’d like to introduce them all, in the order they made themselves known, as that is how we like to be approached! 1: Conrad (He/Him) Conrad is a short, anxious black and white tuxedo cat. For the longest time, Conrad took care of a lot of the main responsibilities of existing day to day, like going to work and managing finances, things like that. He’s on something of a forced vacation, after a panic attack that lead to a breakdown, Conrad is taking a back seat to everything to recover from the stresses of dealing with unemployment and covid. 2: Sirj (He/They) Sirj is the one in my icon, a large purple and black fox bear with pink hair. It’s hard to nail down Sirj’s personality and relationship to the greater whole. but he’s kinda closer to being another “main” personality. If you’ve interacted with me before, chances are it was Sirj.

3: Red (He/Him) Red is a fox, uh, he’s less connected to his physical manifestation in the room so far, but basically, he’s a hot headed Alter who’s very good at controlling our body physically, which is probably why he’s more interested in representing himself in the meat space than online or conceptually.

4: Cecil (Faunette) Cecil is a plant/fruit based creature, who struggles very much with communication. Cecil can’t speak or type, and can only be understood by using gestures and pointing to things, or by being translated for by another Alter or even another friend who can understand Cecil’s unique “Cecil Language”. Cecil very much identifies with the fact that Faunette is Autistic, and accepts that’s part of why Faunette can’t talk. Still, Cecil is very expressive and loves being part of conversations, even if Faunette is a little nervous about how much extra work it can be to communicate with Faunette.

5: Ckat (She/Her) Ckat is a sparkledog Sergal, she knows she has dark but colorful fur, and is very fond of her appearance conceptually. She’s very talkative, but isn’t very good at doing so online, her preferred medium is speaking orally. She’s very present for voice chats, but has recently experimented with texting. She also sleeps a lot! and is difficult to summon, usually only coming out when a conversation gets particularly lively

6: Soleil (She/???) Soleil is a long haired rabbit girl, with glasses and a gentle smile. She is very adept at speaking with and for the other personalities, and is Cecil’s go to for when Faunette needs someone to translate a particularly wordy thought. She is doing her best to not define herself based solely on her relationship to the other Alters, and to come into her own. She likes the old school emoticons, especially ^w^

7: Glenn (He/Him) Glenn is a maned wolf who is very authoritative, and honestly sometimes borders on Problematic. He is also the one writing all this, and is getting better at getting along with the other Alters and accepting that this is a real change in our lives and that we’re no longer going to be pretending we’re not a bunch of different personalities in one body’s head. I’m a little sour that the main body gets to be called Sirj, but we all agree it’s a cool name it’s how we’d like to refer to our physical form. (EDIT FROM THE GOBLIN, GLENN LIKES TO TALK LIKE HE’S A LORD OR SOMETHING, LIKES THAT FLOWERY ANTIQUATED LANGUAGE SHIT AND HE’S REALLY WORRIED HOW IT COMES OFF)

8: The Goblin (He/Her) The Goblin is a 3 foot tall bat with green fur, and is not in fact /actually/ a goblin. Much like how Cecil can not speak or type, The Goblin can not speak or emote, and can in fact only communicate online via texting. She envisions herself in a room filled with computer monitors and wires, but like Soleil is very good at speaking for some of the other alters, in an online capacity. She also prefers to type in all caps!

From this point forward, in an effort to help ourselves be more distinct and understood, whenever we reblog something on Tumblr, we will do our best to tag it with whichever one of us is the one who thought it was worth reblogging. Additionally, I will be trying to be more active with posting on here, and possibly on Twitter as well. For now, this is all I wish to say, if I’ve sent this to you, it’s my way of trying to help you understand me a bit better! Thank you if you took the time to read it, and if not, then it doesn’t really matter what I put down here because you would have never gotten here anyways.

#dissociative identity disorder #did #Conrad #Sirj #Red #Cecil #Ckat #Soleil #Glenn #the goblin #Furry #Identity #Me #Glenn wants to experiment with typing in the tags he's kind of an boomer in some ways :P

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gnosticgnoob · 5 years

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An Excerpt from Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson:

...the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker can think about virtually anything, that the earth is suspended on the backs of infinite turtles or that the Earth is hollow, or that the Earth is floating in space; comparative religion and philosophy show that the Thinker can regard itself as mortal, as immortal, as both mortal and immortal or even as nonexistent (Buddhism). It can think itself into living in a Christian universe, a Marxist universe, a scientific-relativistic universe, or a Nazi universe—among many possibilities.

As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. ...The Thinker thinks that the sun moves around the earth, the Prover obligingly organizes all perceptions to fit that thought; the Thinker changes its mind and decides the earth moves around the sun, and the Prover reorganizes the evidence.

"We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points (1). Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us (2). The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties (3)." — Persinger and Lafreniere, Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events

(1) events or actions, i.e. verbs, not nouns.

(2) models or maps, static things; nouns not verbs.

(3) brain hardware and software.

We will consider the human brain a kind of bio-computer—an electro-colloidal computer. The brain appears to be made up of matter in electro-colloidal suspension.

Colloids are pulled together, toward a condition of gel, by their surface tensions, and surface tensions pull all glue-like substances together. Colloids are also, conversely, pushed apart, toward a condition of sol, by their electrical charges, because their electrical charges are similar, and similar electrical charges always repel each other. In the equilibrium between gel and sol, suspension maintains its continuity and life continues. Move the suspension too far one way or another, and life ends.

Any chemical that gets into the brain changes the gel-sol balance, and "consciousness" is accordingly influenced. Thus, potatoes are, like LSD, "psychedelic"—in a milder way. The changes in consciousness when one moves from a vegetarian diet to an omnivorous diet, or vice versa, are also "psychedelic." Since "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves," all of our ideas are psychedelic. Even without experimenting with diet or drugs, whatever you think you should see, you will see—unless it is physically impossible in this universe.

All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it. The model can clarify the muddles, but the model is never the muddle itself. "The map is not the territory"; the menu does not taste like the meal.

Every computer consists of two aspects: hardware and software. (Software here includes information).

The hardware is concrete and localized, consisting of a processor, display, keyboard, disks, etc.—all the parts you can drag into the shop for repair if the computer is malfunctioning.

The software consists of programs that can exist in many forms, including the totally abstract, that can be "in" the computer in the sense that it is recorded in the CPU or on a disk which is hitched up to the computer, or even exist on a piece of paper, as in a manual; in these cases, it is not "in" the computer but can be put "in" at any time. A program may even exist only in my head, if I have never written it down.

The hardware is more "real" than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time—if it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different computer.

The hardware is inside the human skull. The software, however, seems to be anywhere and everywhere. For instance, the software "in" my brain also exists outside my brain in such forms as, say, a book I read twenty years ago, which was an English translation of various signals transmitted by Plato 2400 years ago. Other parts of my software are made up of the software of Confucius, James Joyce, my second-grade teacher, Kanye, Beethoven, my mom and dad, Richard Nixon, my various dogs and cats, and anybody and any-thing that has ever impacted upon my brain.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

We want to know, then, how out of this universal software ocean a specific person emerges.

Each set of programs consists of four basic parts:

Genetic Imperatives. Hard-wired programs or "instincts."

Imprints. These hard-wired programs which the brain is genetically designed to accept only at certain points in its development known as times of imprint vulnerability.

Conditioning. These are programs built onto the imprints. They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning.

Learning. This is even looser and "softer" than conditioning.

The primordial imprint can almost always over-rule any subsequent conditioning or learning. An imprint is a species of software that has become built-in hardware, being impressed on the tender neurons when they are peculiarly open and vulnerable.

Imprints are the non-negotiable aspects of our individuality, establishes the limits, parameters, perimeters within which all subsequent conditioning and learning occurs.

Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is "formless and void"—like the universe at the beginning of Genesis. As soon as the first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void.

The growing mind, alas, becomes trapped within this structure. It identifies with the structure; in a sense, it becomes the structure.

This entire process is analyzed in G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form wherein he writes about the foundations of mathematics and logic. But every sensitive reader knows that Brown is also talking about a process we have all passed through in creating, out of an infinite ocean of signals, those particular constructs we call "myself and "my world."

Each successive imprint complicates the software which programs our experience and which we experience as "reality."

Conditioning and learning build further networks onto this bedrock of imprinted software. This brain circuitry makes up our map of the world. It is what our Thinker thinks, and our Prover mechanically fits all incoming signals to the limitations of this map. We shall divide this brain hardware into 8 circuits. The first four of the circuits are "antique" and conservative, they exist in everybody (except feral children).

The Oral Bio-Survival Circuit. Imprinted by the mother or the first mothering object and conditioned by subsequent nourishment or threat. It is primarily concerned with sucking, feeding, cuddling, and body security. It retreats mechanically from the noxious or predatory—or from anything associated (by imprinting or conditioning) with the noxious or predatory.

The Anal Emotional-Territorial Circuit. Imprinted in the "Toddling" stage when the infant rises up, walks about and begins to struggle for power within the family structure. This mostly mammalian circuit processes territorial rules, emotional games, or cons, pecking order and rituals of domination or submission.

The Time-Binding Semantic Circuit. Imprinted and conditioned by human artifacts and symbol systems. It "handles" and "packages" the environment, classifying everything according to the local reality tunnel. Invention, calculation, prediction and transmitting signals across generations are its functions.

The "Moral" Socio-Sexual Circuit. Imprinted by the first orgasm-mating experiences at puberty and is conditioned by tribal taboos. It processes sexual pleasure, local definitions of "right" and "wrong," reproduction, adult parental personality (sex role) and nurture of the young. The development of these circuits as the brain evolved through evolution, and as each domesticated human brain recapitulates evolution in growing from infancy to adulthood, makes possible gene-pool survival, mammalian sociobiology (pecking order, or politics) and transmission of culture.

The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit. This is imprinted by ecstatic experience. It processes neurosomatic ("mind-body") feedback loops, somatic-sensory bliss, feeling "high," "faith-healing," etc. NLP and holistic medicine consist of tricks or gimmicks to get this circuit into action at least temporarily.

The Collective Neurogenetic Circuit. This is imprinted by bio-chemical - electrical stresses. It processes DNA-RNA-brain feedback systems and is "collective" in that it contains and has access to the whole evolutionary "script," past and future. Experience of this circuit is numinous, "mystical," mind-shattering; here dwell the archetypes of Jung's Collective Unconscious—Gods, Goddesses, Demons, Hairy Dwarfs and other personifications of the DNA programs (instincts) that govern us.

The Meta-programming Circuit. This consists, in modern terms, of cybernetic consciousness, reprogramming and reimprinting all other circuits, even reprogramming itself, making possible conscious choices that best exercise our faculty of free will.

The Non-Local Quantum Circuit. This is imprinted by shock, by "near-death" experience, by extremely rare bizarre-seeming trans-time perceptions often labeled as "precognition", etc.

#psychology #self-help #sociology #philosophy #epistemology #robert anton wilson #fnord

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saltoftheplanet · 5 years

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Why I’m skeptical about the Final Fantasy VII Remake

I’m skeptical that the remake will be good because there will be a lot of changes that will impact the direction, tone and narrative of the game, and Square Enix’s track record suggests to me that those inevitable changes will destroy and undercut what was special about the original game.

An essay breaking that down piece by piece is under the cut.

There will be a lot of changes

The remake will represent a huge and doubtlessly beautiful graphical update. With these updates, however, comes the need for a variety of new directorial decisions. For example, how should the camera behave during cutscenes? Who should they frame, and how? What will their body language and facial expressions show? Now that all the cutscenes will be voice acted, what tone will characters speak familiar lines with?

Likewise, the game is switching to a third-person, over-the-shoulder view. The original FFVII used a fixed camera and prerendered backgrounds to create a world that felt rich, full, and often cluttered. Every level will require redesign to account for the new way of moving about the world, and the amount of assets required to create the same feeling and to direct your attention in a same way will be exponentially higher. Likewise, there will need to be changes to account for the new combat system, as stages will need to be designed for both exploration and combat in many cases.

The episodic format of the game will necessitate changes to the pacing. Successful episodic games excel at creating self-contained rising and falling action and narrative arcs within each episode. Conversely, Final Fantasy VII was plotted and paced as a single complete narrative. Either the pace and order of events will need to be changed to make each episode stand strongly on its own, or the episodes on their own will be gawky and suffer pacing issues as they are pulled out of context from the greater whole.

Finally, the narrative itself will change. We have yet to see a verbatim line in each of the trailers, so the script itself is being rewritten, and with it many nuances will change. Square has stated point-blank that story changes are on the table. Finally, the compilation of Final Fantasy VII and the various Ultimanias released over the years have added a variety of changes to the narrative and to the lore. The teaser trailers we’ve seen so far have been in-line with the Midgar we see in Advent Children, itself a massive change to the famously ambiguous ending of the original game.

Direction and tone will be affected

All of these changes will not be neutral. In just about every decision of how this story is retold, some things are necessarily going to be emphasized and de-emphasized. Each of these decisions will carry and shift meaning in subtle ways. In that sense, the remake should more truly be considered an adaptation.

Examine the opening of FFVII; a meandering view of the stars fades into Aeris’ face. A single long shot pulls back to the city of Midgar. The tone here is mysterious, and the amount of time dedicated to the environment equals or surpasses the time spent on a character. This direction in cinematography echoes the game’s focus, as it is very much a story about the interplay between the characters as they exist inside of larger, overwhelming forces and environments.

The remake does have the opportunity to give us more meaningful cinematography in its cutscenes, but it may also make directorial decisions that change the meaning or impact of scenes. Especially likely is an increased focus on the characters and the action, and implicitly, the “cool” factor of both of those things, seeing as how the Remake and Square Enix as a company largely foreground great visuals and cool sequences. There’s absolutely room for that, of course, considering the bike scene in the original - but the broader point here is that no intervention can be neutral, and the Remake will inevitably have a different focus from the original.

One influential decision the writers have made is in their audience. All promotional material thus far has been aimed squarely at “returning” players, with no explanations offered for newcomers. What we’ve seen so far is in line with the marketing material - they are not simply trying to recreate FFVII as it was, but also tap into our collective sense of familiarity about it. The direct engagement with an expected audience means they will likely try to recreate the feeling of the experience rather than the experience itself, which would then necessitate certain story changes to keep things surprising or mysterious. This approach will inevitably widen the gulf between the remake and the original game.

SquareEnix’s Track Record

SquareEnix has been behind many beloved games, but they are not the company they were when they released FFVII. Their track record over the past decade, maybe even closer to the past 15 years, has been one of spotty quality, half-baked ideas, poor execution, and a narrative flexibility that suggests a lack of commitment to telling a story with singular vision and protecting the integrity of that story. Whatever your opinion or personal enjoyment of more recent Final Fantasy entries, they objectively lack the clarity and direction that made older entries of this series so beloved. To be completely clear, it is not that I believe these stories could never get there; it is that I’m keenly aware of the fact that they came short.

But more relevant than Square’s entries in the mainline Final Fantasy franchise are the entries to the Compilation of FFVII. These, two, have come with a variety of directorial changes that the new format and technology demanded. They’ve built their own lexicon that will likely be drawn upon in the creation of the remake, and that bring subtle changes along with them. For instance - Advent Children’s visually spectacular fight scenes introduced us to the idea that the characters were all able to leap vast distances and perform acrobatics mid-fight, and we’ve seen this idea carried forward into all subsequent entries of the series, even though it’s somewhat at odds with the more grounded, cyberpunk tone of the original game that earmarked these kinds of superhuman abilities as specifically unusual.

That may seem like a minor quibble, but I would argue that it’s a series of minor changes that have led to the difference in tone and focus between the compilation and the original game, and it comes down to a variety of directorial decisions that continue to be pertinent. For example, in Advent Children, the writing team made a decision to base Cloud’s character around what people would most remember from the game, and decided that would probably be the Cloud that we see at the beginning of the game. This decision was in play as early as his cameo in Kingdom Hearts, and for as inconsequential as it may have seemed then, it’s carried a rippling effect with it. By choosing to write the character in a way that they felt most fans would recognize, they also chose to downplay the growth and the specific quirks that wound up making that character interesting - a repeated issue with many of the characters.

Likewise, because the compilation prioritizes its returning Final Fantasy VII fans, it also tends to prioritize fanservice and recognizable, digestable moments over the overarching narrative of the world of Final Fantasy VII. One memorable example would be a cute Yuffie cameo in the midst of the Wutai War in Crisis Core, a war we are told repeatedly was extremely brutal and which actually destroyed Yuffie’s home and embittered her for years thereafter. The result is a story that’s at odds with itself due to tonal and character inconsistency. The prioritization of a quick moment of familiar joy robs the character of her impact in the long term, and this pattern is repeated for many other characters throughout.

Of course, the compilation has changed more than tone and framing of characters, and has also contributed several ideas to the world of Final Fantasy VII that are now in play. For example, the idea that upon death, people return to the Lifestream, whereby their spiritual energy is used by the planet to create new life. This is a distinctly animist idea that the Compilation has leaned away from, as they cannot cameo dead characters if those characters have since been reincarnate as trees. The compilation has since introduced the notion that a person’s soul and consciousness not only stays intact, but that they can come into contact with the living - an idea that’s fundamentally at odds with the themes of life, loss, death, existentialism and uncertainty that are extant in the original game.

Finally, though not least significantly, Polygon’s An Oral History of Final Fantasy 7 reveals that the reason Advent Children and subsequently the compilation was created was to save Square Enix from financial ruin, not to continue the story for its own sake. It is important to acknowledge the reality that Final Fantasy VII is bankable, and the reason for the remake to begin with may very well be that bankability rather than a good faith intention to retell a story that touched many. The episodic nature of the release does nothing to help that faith, nor does the fact that initial development was outsourced to a third party.

What was so special about FFVII

“So what?” you might ask. Even if there are a ton of changes, and those change the direction and tone of the game, does that really mean it won’t or can’t be good? To that - the jury is out. But I don’t particularly care if the FFVII remake is a good video game - I care if it’s a good representation of FFVII.

I admit without reservation that FFVII is, to use a technical term, anime trash. It has lots of rule of cool sequences that keep the game light, bits of spotty translation, and narrative stumbles. It is not a perfect work. But there is a reason why it was enduring; there was meaning to it, and that meaning was what made it special and unique.

FFVII was a ponderous game. It seldom presented an idea without later exploring and unpacking it. Its characters are seldom what they appear, the mission they undergo is hardly as noble as it seems, and what you expected to happen simply didn’t. It’s rife with deliberate ambiguity and doesn’t work overly hard to explain itself. Its story is shot through with uncertainty, about identity, faith, morality, justice, and every other waymark we use to navigate our life. Its most memorable moments rest in the loss of that certainty, and its most triumphant in the character’s perseverance regardless.

Though FFVII is primarily remembered and beloved for how it made people feel, it wasn’t written to be deliberately provocative or emotionally manipulative. The story was deeply impacted by a real-world loss, and the mandate of the team at the time was to convey that loss for how it truly felt, without the celluloid gloss and tropes like a dying speech that have since proliferated through the compilation. There was an honesty, an integrity and a complexity to this story that caused people to argue in earnest that it was the first video game that could truly be considered a piece of art.

I think the ephemeral nature of these qualities often leads people to conclude that FFVII is mainly loved due to “nostalgia,” but that’s a dismissive take that fails to acknowledge the deliberateness and consistency of its themes and ideas. The same care has very obviously not been given to any of the subsequent FFVII games.

In other words: this was never going to be an easy game to remake. A remake worthy of standing on the same pedestal as the original would require the same careful dedication to thematic consistency and integrity, to tone and feeling as the original. It would require careful thought to the impact and presentation of each of the monumental changes demanded by the new technology and platform.

Square-Enix has yet to do anything to suggest that it is up to this task. I have tremendous empathy for the development team that is taking on this task, but that doesn’t mean I have faith in their ability to really, truly, pull it off.

#final fantasy vii #final fantasy vii remake #ffvii #e3 #ff7 remake

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johnson614610616-blog · 5 years

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Secular Renaissance Music

The effect completely different genres of music can have in your thoughts, body, and neighborhood. Then there is promoting. Bossa nova - Portuguese for "new wave" - gained forex, in line with Brazilian music historian Ruy Castro, when it appeared in an advert for a 1958 multi-artist live performance put on by Grupo Universitário Hebraico do Brasil. World music was hashed out in 1987 at an business meeting. It was meant only for www.goodreads.com a quick advertising and marketing campaign to pump non-Anglophone musicians in retail spaces they may not in any other case fit into, solely to remain an acknowledged, if unwieldy, category. Radio formats generally impose themselves on the music. AOR is a US abbreviation for "album-oriented radio" (later "rock") coined in 1972 by Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart's consultancy agency for the FM rock radio stations that may outline extremely-slick center-American rock: Styx, Boston , Aerosmith. In practise, it often translates to "definitively pre-punk".

Hip-hop emerged in the Nineteen Seventies and ‘80s in response to conservative government insurance policies that created a poverty disaster within the interior metropolis. Hip-Hop eliminated the melodic and harmonic elements of earlier musical types and targeted instead on rhythm and vocals to create a totally new musical fashion. Though it was a singular new musical type, Hip-Hop nonetheless had a strong hyperlink to the African oral custom with its fast wordplay, complicated rhyming, and storytelling strategies. Rappers used this new musical fashion to call attention to the internal-metropolis plight, criticize political figures, categorical ambitions, and promote themselves (Sullivan, 2001)." Like older musical styles, Hip-Hop served to present African Americans a voice in a tradition of oppression, in addition to to create cultural ties between individuals inside the African American community. In the highlands of Tibet, for centuries, it was commonplace for farmers to sing a particular type of track to their yaks. The melodies had been intended to coax the yaks to supply extra milk, praising the sheen of their coats and the great thing about their horns. The actual combination of tones was mentioned to have particular powers to chill out the yaks and get the milk flowing. As we speak, solely a handful of outdated-timers nonetheless remember these songs; youthful herders merely don't be taught the music, distracted by the pop songs coming in over the radio. And when the previous-timers die, more than likely the songs will die as effectively.

Setting a different precedent, Friedrich Nietzsche's views on music are a byproduct of his basic philosophy of tradition. Nietzsche initially defends the prevalence of certain strains of European classical music. He praises composers whose irrational genius provides the Dionysian energy wanted to correct the rational excesses of European tradition. Nietzsche finally reverses himself. In an extended assault on Richard Wagner's operas, he rejects the continuing worth of the great" fashion that characterizes artwork music. In what quantities to a reversal of Kantian aesthetic priorities, Nietzsche praises Georges Bizet's broadly in style opera Carmen (1875) for its triviality and simplicity (see Sweeney-Turner). Nevertheless, most philosophers ignore Nietzsche's protection of sunshine" music. Usually, many people imagine musical preferences reflect characteristics such as age , character , and values A 2003 study published in the Journal of Persona and Social Psychology discovered people who find themselves open to new experiences tend to favor music from the blues, jazz, classical, and folks genres. Those who are extraverted and agreeable" are inclined to prefer music akin to pop, soundtrack, spiritual, soul, funk, digital, and www.audio-transcoder.com dance. While these studies prove personality does affect musical tastes, Rentfrow and his colleagues on the University of Cambridge within the UK are curious as to whether there are other psychological mechanisms that come into play with regards to musical desire. When information or an expertise includes a range of senses, it is firing off a variety of electrical and chemical brain triggers. The extra triggers fired, the stronger the quick notion is, and the more seemingly the knowledge or expertise will transfer from our sensory notion into our quick-term reminiscence. That is one cause why it is easier to remember the lyrics of a track than to recite a poem. And it is why we do better remembering music lyrics if we hear the music playing - even if just in our heads. Our mind is retrieving a wide range of sensory cues. There are many different types of jazz dance, every with its own traits and influences. On the whole though, jazz dance has at all times been associated with fashionable tradition and it has changed over time in parallel with the music and kinds of standard leisure. Presently, many alternative types coexist, as well as various degrees of fusion with other genres. Some important figures in the historical past of jazz dance are Katherine Dunham, who reinforced the connection between jazz dance and its African origins; Bob Fosse extremely influential determine within the growth of dance in films, and Matt Mattox , who developed his own technique based on ballet training. The L.A. beat scene never really gets sufficient shine for its affect on future bass — however scan the playlists of most future bass DJs and also you're more likely to discover more than a few tracks from Brainfeeder, New Los Angeles, WeDidIt and different Low Finish Idea-affiliated imprints. Among the artists on these labels, the one whose music provides the clearest hyperlink between the beat scene and future bass is WeDidIt's RL Grime, who found his own again door More suggestions into the scene by juxtaposing pretty, almost ethereal melodies and pitch-shifted vocals with hard-hitting, trap-influenced beats as far back as 2011, when he was known as Clockwork. At the moment, impeccably produced, anthemic tracks like his recent "Reims" point the best way toward future bass's, um, future. XXXTentacion, 20 YouTube subscribers: 10.6 million SoundCloud followers: 2.6 million Instagram followers: 14.3 million Launched his first tune on SoundCloud in 2013 after spending time in a Florida youth correction centre. Called rap's most controversial man" by Spin magazine, he was recognized for his downbeat lyrics and quite a few brushes with the regulation and feuds with other artists, together with Drake. After being murdered in a theft on June 18, 2018, his single Unhappy! went to primary on the Billboard Sizzling 100. Rolling Stone journal mentioned he left behind a huge music footprint".

However the recipe to your Discover Weekly playlist is much more sophisticated than that. Spotify also creates a profile of each user's individualized style in music, grouped into clusters of artists and micro-genres—not simply rock" and rap" but wonderful-grained distinctions like synthpop" and southern soul." These are derived utilizing know-how from Echo Nest, a music analytics agency that Spotify acquired in 2014, which learns about rising genres by having machines learn music sites and analyze how varied artists are described.

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dailyaudiobible · 6 years

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01/04/2019 DAB Transcript

Genesis 8:1-10:32, Matthew 4:12-25, Psalms 4:1-8, Proverbs 1:20-23

Today is the 4th day of January. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It is great to be here with you for our 4th step of 365 steps that will take us all the way through the Bible. So, if we just keep doing what we’re doing and getting together like this every day we’ll go through the entire Bible this year as a community, which is what we've been doing successfully for the last 13 years. So, this is our 14th time that we've come to January 4th. So, let’s dive in, we’ve been, like I said at the beginning of the year, we’re kind of moving into this year and kind of getting comfortable and finding our way and our space and what's going on here. And, so, we’ve been talking about the different books that we've begun. Like, we began the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, we began the book of Matthew in the New Testament. So, we’ve talked about those books. We talked about Psalms yesterday. And, so, when we get to the Proverbs reading we'll talk about Proverbs and then we’ll be moved in, we’ll be moved in at least into the books that we’re reading until we reach a new book. So, from the Christian Standard Bible, which is what we’re reading this week, Genesis chapter 8 verse 1 through 10 verse 32.

Introduction to Proverbs:

Okay. So, we’ve come to the book of Proverbs and this is the last book we need to kind of move into and understand what we’re reading about until we come to a new book, like I said at the beginning. The Proverbs...we need to fall in love with the Proverbs because it is an invaluable book of ancient wisdom, but not because it ancient. It's wisdom that has stood the test of time and it's practical and it has been practical to the human experience for thousands of years. So, this is the wisdom of the ages. And, so, we should have a relationship with that, we should get to know it because it will instruct our lives as we move through this year without a doubt. So, in the structure of the Old Testament, which is where Proverbs is located, Proverbs is the main book in what is called the collection of wisdom literature. And the other books in the wisdom literature would be Ecclesiastes, Job and part of Psalms. And these portions of Scripture are called wisdom literature because they're more intended to speak a direct lesson rather than be a narrative where the reader follows a story and then kind of gleans the meaning from the outcome of the story, which is how much of the Bible is. The wisdom literature speaks directly to what it's trying to teach and most of the Proverbs are attributed to the great wise man and King, Solomon, although there are a couple of other voices involved that lend their wisdom to the Proverbs. And it seems that the Proverbs may have been collected all along but weren’t really put into a collection until the time of around Hezekiah who was also a king. And most scholars think that some of the Proverbs could even predate Solomon and they were a series of oral traditions or oral wisdom that have been handed down. And we each have oral wisdom in our lives, things our parents told us, things that our grandparents told us, but this would've been wisdom that was wide-spread and it had been handed down from generation to generation and then finding its place into a collection Proverbs. So, Proverbs obviously is in the Bible, so it obviously has religious connotations in everything that it says and the first part of the book is the wisdom of God speaking in first person directly to the reader in a feminine voice that is identified as the voice of wisdom, which is what we're hearing. Now that we’re four days into this, this is war hearing now. And Proverbs addresses the human experience and it transfers direct wisdom to what we, as human beings, experience both in our interpersonal relationships with each other, in our relationship with God, in our relationship with ourselves, what's going on inside of us and it gives us the ultimate roadmap to life. It is truly the ultimate book of wisdom and the greatest collection of wisdom that mankind has. Whatever you do, the book of Proverbs tells us, whatever you do get wisdom because wisdom is more valuable than anything else. If you have wisdom everything else can be achieved and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So, I mean even that little...like that's two sentences right…there so much there that we can meditate on it all day long. That's how potent the book of Proverbs is. And, so, with that said, Proverbs chapter 1 verses 20 through 23 today.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word. We thank You for another day in it. We thank You for…I mean…we’re covering some serious ground in these first few days as we just set sail and as we continue to move out into the deep, we can already feel You drawing us in. Some of us are intrigued. We’ve never really read the Bible before. We know some of the Bible stories but we’ve never read any of it in its context, we've never actually read the stories from the Bible, we’ve just heard them our whole lives. Some of us are becoming intrigued and even falling in love with other portions of the Bible that we've never really experienced before, maybe the book of Psalms, or maybe the potency of the book of Proverbs has just never really dawned on us, that we could turn to this one book with 31 chapters in it that will tell us everything we need to know about how to deal with just about every situation we will ever encounter in our human lives. And, so, we see that there's a lot more to this story than maybe what we thought and this book that we thought was so difficult to understand and so unapproachable all these years even though we've believed that our eternity is based upon what is taught in this book, maybe it's not so unapproachable after all. Maybe what we're finding is a true friend, a friend that will speak the truth to us only and never lie to us. And, so, Holy Spirit, come, plant the words that we’ve read from Your word into our lives this day and every day as we move forward, that we submit ourselves to this discipline, we commit ourselves to taking this step day by day, every single day of this year. And we look forward to all that You will speak to us, all that You will reveal to us, and all that You will change within us because of this rhythm. Come Holy Spirit we pray in the name of Jesus we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, its where you find out what's going on around here. So, like I have said every day of this year and like I will say every day of this year, stay connected. And this is one of the places to find out what's going on. All the links to everywhere that you can interact can be found at dailyaudiobible.com. Now, we just talked about the book of Proverbs. And, so, one of the other things that I should mention as we’re moving into this year is the companion programs to the Daily Audio Bible, the sister programs that exist as additional resources to help you immerse herself in a relationship with the Bible. And a couple of those would be the Daily Audio Bible Psalm and Daily Audio Bible, Proverbs. And, obviously, your listening to the Daily Audio Bible and what we’re doing in community here is moving our way through the entire Bible, which will include Psalms and Proverbs, but we've also created Daily Audio Bible Psalm and Daily Audio Bible Proverb as companions. You know, maybe your big meal of the day, spiritually, is been listening to the Daily Audio Bible, but you need a snack, you need…like you need to immerse yourself in this and these companions would be great. Daily Audio Bible Psalms is simply going through the book of Psalms as we do on the Daily Audio Bible but it's only the Psalms, and we switch translations every day and you can just move through the Psalms, takes about five minutes a day for you to get some more of the Psalms into your heart and mind. Daily Audio Bible Proverb goes through the entire book of Proverbs in a month. There's 31 chapters and so we read a chapter a day. Some of the days…or some of the months…we don't get to Proverbs 31, but the idea is a chapter a day and this takes two minutes…two minutes a day invested every day of this year and you will be pouring the unfiltered wisdom that has stood the test of time throughout all of recorded history and is thought to be one of the greatest pieces of literature of mankind and can you pour this into your life in a couple of minutes a day. And then when you actually need wisdom you will have wisdom because you're in a relationship with wisdom and wisdom is speaking to you every day. Two minutes a day, like a pretty good deal since that's all you have to invest is a couple of minutes of your day. So Daily Audio Bible Proverbs is a great companion when you’re listening to Daily Audio Bible at night or in the morning or on your way to work or at lunch or whatever you do…you know…that’s your rhythm, you set and establish that rhythm and then you find another place for two more minutes to pour wisdom into your life and watch what it does when you do. Of course, Daily Audio Bible Psalms, and Proverbs aren't the only companions. There are many ways to go about this. My daughter China, whose been reading along, reading the Bible for the last 10 years, this is her 11th year. So, since she was 10 years old she's been reading the Bible every day and she went through Daily Audio Bible kids and then she launched Daily Audio Bible teen and then she wasn’t a teen anymore and so she's kind of grown into her calling, which is Daily Audio Bible Chronological, going through the Bible chronologically in a year. So, in the order in time that things happened. From the Daily Audio Bible, from what we’re doing here, we’re doing Psalms, you know, Proverbs we’re doing Old Testament, we’re doing New Testament, we’re moving through and we certainly place a high premium on context but the Daily Audio Bible chronological goes through the Bible in the order that happened in time. There’s also Daily Audio Bible Kids. So, going through the New Testament by kids for kids. It’s great for on the way to school, it’s great for bedtime. Check it out. And there's Daily Audio Bible Teen. So, through the New Testament for teens by teens. There is Daily Audio Bible in Española. So, if Spanish is your native language there is a whole community that has been doing this for nearly a decade now every day in Spanish just like we do at the Daily Audio Bible and they have also the Proverbios. So, Proverbs in Spanish or Psalms in Spanish just like we have in English. If Japanese is your native tongue, then you can go through the New Testament with the Japanese team or Arabic through the Bible in Arabic or through the Bible in French. And our French team has mimicked what we do at Daily Audio Bible, going through the Bible in a year in French but they also Proverbaes. So, they also have Provers in French or Psalms…sorry I don’t speak French...so sorry for you French folks. That's why we have brothers and sisters who are passionate about their native language. So that's available in French. We also have Daily Audio Bible Portuguese and Chinese. So, you can check out all of those channels if those are your native tongue's, but if I English is your native language then certainly encouraging you. You have the Daily Audio Bible, but the Proverbs and the Psalms are also available. So, three times a day you can kind of go to the word and put it in your life without...I mean…you can do all of this in the time that you’re gonna waste listening to other kinds of entertainment. So, maybe focusing on your spiritual life this year is gonna radically transform some things and these are some of the resources that are available.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link that’s on the homepage. I thank you profoundly. We are a community, and this is a community experience and what we've done for this, these 13 complete years and now into our 14th, what we've done we've done together and that we’re here because we've done this together. And, so thank you for your partnership. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'm gonna keep telling you that. And those of you that have been around, you know I'm gonna keep telling you that because I know that some of you, this is the only time you’re gonna hear it today. And I’m gonna keep telling you that until maybe you believe it. You are not alone on this journey. You are loved, and we've been a community who has loved each other well. So, that's it for today and I am Brian and I do love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

This is Chris from South Carolina and I just want to say…just reach out and say thank you to the DAB family, to Brian and Jill and his family for this wonderful ministry. I found this at the beginning of the year and this is my first full year and I have faithfully listened to this every single day and it has given me comfort during a very hard time this year. And I called in a couple of times asking for prayer requests for my marriage. I continue to ask for prayer for my marriage. I’ve been married for 30 years now. We are separated and I’m just…just praying that God would just restore my family and restore my marriage and I just want to say that this is a wonderful ministry and I have enjoyed it so much and I am wishing everyone a happy new year and for great blessings to come within the 2019 year. I am looking for great things to continue to happen. So, God bless everyone and thank you very much. Goodbye.

Hi Daily Audio Bible, this is Rebecca from Michigan, I know I haven’t called in a long time, it’s December 29th and December 24th I had to put my dog down because her heartbeat was 40 and they’re supposed to be 120 and she had fluid building up in her lungs and fluid going in her tummy…stomach…and I think she’s was dying. Anyway, she was 12 going on 13 and I just cried my eyes out because that was my walking buddy, my friend. So, this year I just want God to bless me with new friends, A new friend that will make my heart strings fly, give me the closeness to the Lord. I want to find me a walking friend because that’s what my dog did for me, she was my walking buddy and know people, they’re not the same as a dog but I really don’t necessarily need another dog. I just want some new friends, I want a new friend even if it’s a boyfriend, a girlfriend, I don’t care, but I just want some friends that I can hang out with that are godly Christian people because I’m single and a lot of the churches, they kind of don’t pay attention to the singles. I’m usually sitting by myself in church. So, I just want some friends. Please, ask God to bless me with some godly Christian friends. That would be awesome even if I have to get a non-Christian friend to introduce them to DAB, that would be great.

Hello Daily Audio Bible family, this is my first time calling but I’ve been listening for years. I am specifically calling in response to Yvonne in Chicago who left plea for prayer on 11 November for God’s direction and her obedience for that direction. Yvonne, I heard your prayer and I am praying for you. Your call resonated with me because I’m Yvonne from Tampa and our stories are similar. I too went through a divorce many years ago and I went through a major career path change as well. I currently have a godly man for a mate and my career path change has turned out better than I expected. I just wanted to encourage you sister, our God is so good and even if His answers are as we expected or desired His plan is so much better than ours. As I lift up your circumstances I just wanted you to know that I am playing for you daily. Please call back and let us know how things have transpired and how God is working in your life. I listen daily and I pray for the DABbers regularly. Thank you, Brian for this wonderful podcast and for all of the people behind the scenes that put together this platform. It has changed my life and I know so many others. This is Yvonne or EV for short from Tampa. God, bless.

Hello this is Sherry from Kansas, I did not hear the program Brian said that the word for the year was to “Maintain” or “Maintain” and when I heard that from a friend my heart sunk because I thought, oh know, that means were not going anywhere, we’re not going to move from where we are, but I looked at the definition of maintain from Merriam-Webster and it’s really strong. It’s a much more strong word and I thought it was. It means, number one to keep in an existing state, to preserve from failure or decline. Number two to sustain against opposition or danger, to uphold and defend. Number three, my favorite, to continue or persevere in, carry on, keep up. Four, to support or provide for, to sustain. And number five, to affirm in or, as if in an argument, to assert or to take a stand. And I realize that my position in Christ where I am, all of these apply to this. I need to make sure that I preserve from failure or decline. I have to sustain it against opposition or danger and I have to uphold and defend. I have to continue and persevere in, I have to carry on, I have to keep up, and I have to take a stand and assert what I believe in and what my righteousness in Christ and my position in Christ stands for. So, I just wanted to say, good word, the word “Maintain” and it is something that we need to meditate on and focus on the coming year. And thank you Brian for that word. Bye.

Hi, this is Paul in Kansas. I’m just listening to the 30 December broadcast and I heard Sharon Victorious, asking for prayer. Sharon is grieving and feeling alone, and she wonders if she can make it. Father, I lift up Sharon to You and I ask that You would comfort her and sustain her in her grieving. I pray that Your Holy Spirit would fill her and that Your love would fill her and drive out all of her feelings of hopelessness. I ask that Your love would fully invade her being and drive all the harmful things that she has been thinking. Lord, please give Sharon hope, please let her she how much we all love her and deemed her. In Jesus name. Amen.

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