#side note: the references were from the light novel illustrations so that's why they might seem different from their anime counterparts

[angievaldezart]

Commission for @taoofshigeru of Marika Kato & Gruier Serenity (Moretsu Space Pirates) dancing

Fun to draw & also reminded me that I really really need to check out Moretsu Space Pirates

[ghostietoasty]

Why Sherlock Holmes FGO is Sus: Theories and More

Before I begin, I’d like to give thanks to my wonderful friend for all the points, art, and info searching that have been made to produce this piece, I can’t appreciate you enough for the effort you put in. 🥺🙏💕

Alright now on to it!

INTRODUCTION: Humble Beginnings (Identification of the Abnormal)

If you’ve played the app Fate/Grand Order for a while you’d know about the Heroic Spirit we first encounter in a hole within Camelot’s dessert whilst going to the Atlas Institute. Smart, handsome looking, and sharp enough to discern our True Name, this man of mystery has been seen as an oddball by many long time players of the game. There are many aspects about him that raise doubt about his credibility, is he truly what he wants us to think he is? That servant is Sherlock Holmes (Ruler) and there are many theories about him having some secrets, about him either being a Foreigner class, Beast class, or something else entirely. We are attempting to catalogue all this information in one place for maximum clarity.

SECTION 1: Other Character’s Reaction (First Impression is the Best Impression) *WARNING LOSTBELT 1 AND 2 SPOILERS AHEAD*

From the first encounter in Camelot right until the end of Lostbelt 2, there are many instances of characters reacting to his presence in….interesting ways.

Bedivere, when first coming in contact with Holmes in Camelot says that "I suppose I've never really been good with people like him. He reminds me of Merlin."

It could refer to the mysterious manner in which both Holmes and Merlin conduct themselves, but better to keep in mind that Merlin is a Grand Caster, and that he manifests as a servant due to specific circumstances (he is not dead).

In Camelot, Mash assumes that Holmes must be Caster class and that the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have been biographies penned by Dr. Watson under a pen name. Holmes corrects her, saying that: "My true identity, my essence, is slightly different from what you may think. And sad, but that is not the purpose of our gathering here today."

This dilemma is also present in the Sherlock Holmes Trial Quest (which mostly tackles the debate of whether he's a fictional character or someone who actually existed). Holmes has a line where he says:

"Ah, yes. I mentioned I was a Caster. Forgive me, I lied."

This is however immediately followed up by:

"A jest. My apologies. I couldn't help myself." 

This sort of backpedalling raises a doubt as to whether he was really Caster class before, so the nature of his former class is still a mystery. He later mentions that his Ruler class is the World telling him that not all illusions and dreams need to be laid bare.

When meeting with Salieri in Lostbelt 1, Holmes introduces himself as such:"I'm Sherlock Holmes, Chaldea's administrative advisor. I became a servant through unusual means, just like you."

Salieri was only summonable as a servant  because of his reputation caused by the fact that he killed Mozart. He is under the effect of Innocent Monster. It can also be said that Salieri is a lostbelt servant and is significantly more sane than he would have been in a normal summoning, that was the unusual summoning that Holmes was refering to. Does this mean Holmes is not from Proper Human History? 

Sigurd (who's under the control of Surtur), while attacking us in Lostbelt 2 says this: "So, a human and two Heroic Spirits. No, wait. Neither of you are pure Heroic Spirits, are you? You've both got something else mixed in. Hehe, hybrids then. Interesting" 

This is in reference to Holmes and Mash, who are alongside the master at this moment. Mash is a demiservant (human+servant) hence the "Hybrid" comment makes sense, but Holmes? What is the "something else" mixed in with Holmes?

Later in LB2, Holmes requests the assistance of Scáthach-Skadi in beating Surtur. Skadi says that normally she would never pay mind to what a mere Heroic Spirit had to say but: "...but in your particular case…I sense wisdom in those beautiful eyes. You remind me of Baldr, god of light." Quite a bit later, she also has this to say:"Perhaps those piercing eyes of yours in fact surpass Odin's? Mystic Eyes, perchance? ….No, that's not it. They merely reflect your wisdom born of human history's cumulative accomplishments."

She says that's not it, but the fact that it was the first thing she thought of shouldn't be ignored. 

Baldr is the god of light. Holmes' attacks consist of beams of light, and his cane lights up when he's using it in battle.

In Norse legends, Odin is said to have sacrificed one eye to the spring of Mimir in order to get ancient wisdom, the ability to perceive everything in the world. 

SECTION 1.5: More Reactions (From JP Only)

Since it is JP only and there is no official translation for NA yet, this information cannot be 100% confirmed in any way. (Most of this is from Reddit translation done by fans). But as these are also important, it's best to put this information separate section.

Moriarty's interlude involves him finding a micro-singularity in London. At some point the transmission between Chaldea and the master gets cut and Moriarty reveals he created this scenario, made the singularity and everything to get one on one time with the master. He tells us not to trust Holmes. When the time comes, we as master should choose Moriarty over Holmes. 

It has to be kept in mind that Moriarty is not a good guy, he is a character created entirely to oppose Holmes so it is natural that he doesn't trust him. For all we know, it is just emotional manipulation. 

Moriarty's very nature is tied to being the antithesis of Holmes. Holmes might theoretically go against us for the sake of humanity while also trying to keep us safe (the master is in a way, a Watson replacement to him after all) while Moriarty would gladly let humanity burn for the sake of us but also for the sake of being completely opposite to Holmes and keeping his identity as such.

However he does raise valid points, how was Holmes able to rayshift? This part was never explained, and he also mentions that his hypothesis has a fatal contradiction in the fact that Holmes risked his life to save ours. What can be inferred from this is that Holmes is a good man and is on our side, but there is something very weird about him that should not be ignored.

In Lostselt 5 it is mentioned at one point that Zeus called Holmes dangerous, he mustn't look at Zeus or the other gods and that his eyes are enemies of the world.

It has to be mentioned that this is some heavy emphasis on Holmes' eyes (Skadi mentioned Holmes' eyes twice, and she was a god as well). Is it because of the nature of Holmes that he is the one that reveals all truth? Is that in some way detrimental to gods, magic and the world in general?

Recently, from Holmes' skill upgrade interlude there was a section about Holmes saying that he is always an ally of justice and that while he may be on our side, he is still capable of evil but it doesn't change the fact that he is our ally. Even then it seems he has some secrets that can't be understood by himself.

By now with the presence of Dr. Jekyll and Helena and their recounts on what happened, it is confirmed that Holmes was actually "alive"(?)

Some of the adventures penned by Dr. Watson were actually censored versions of the original happenings, which were magical in nature.

Holmes was traumatised(?) by Helena's death back when they were both alive. He swears he would never let that happen again. (remember what happened in lostbelt 2…)

It seems that Holmes himself is not fully sure of what is secret about him. Since he utterly dislikes talking about something without being 100% sure about it (this tendency of his has gotten us in trouble before) plus his general secretive nature, it can be said that this is why he wouldn't talk about that.

SECTION 2: Weird Things That Holmes Does (And Other Questions)

Heroic Spirits are anything but normal, but there are few servants who break the norm even further, and Holmes is one of them.

Holmes is able to Rayshift (presumably) from London, to Camelot, and then to Shinjuku. There are very few servants who are able to manifest themselves. 

Musashi also appears here and there, but it's not a deliberate choice on her part. She is not able to predetermine her next destination. 

Arthur travels from a parallel world to this world, but this is due to "chasing after a certain powerful antagonist, evil omen" - so he tells.

Beast class has the skill of Independent Manifestation which would allow the servant to manifest anywhere they'd want. Merlin, Tamamo Vitch and Shiki possess it. However, it has to be noted that Holmes' rayshifts have a significant toll on his saint graph, as he is unable to fight or defend himself by the time we meet him in Camelot. While normal Independent Manifestation shouldn't lead to the depletion of the user's saint graph. Holmes' class is unknown at the time of his rayshifting. 

At the time of summoning, Heroic Spirits usually reveal their class and True Name (there also are exceptions to the rule). At the time of his summoning, Holmes doesn't reveal his Class: "Are introductions necessary? I am a detective. If you were expecting a hero, my apologies...But if you wanted a detective or an investigator, you drew the right card."

In the case of EOR Servants whose names haven't been found, they reveal their class.

Who summoned Holmes? The only thing we know regarding his presence was that it was first clearly there when he tampered with information in London.

Holmes' illustrator is Yamanaka Kotetsu, who was also the illustrator of the beasts Tiamat and Goetia

The artists who design and illustrate the characters tend to do it in groups of servants who are related to each other in some way (Pako with Arjuna and Karna Chacha and Nobunaga; Miwa Shiro with Brynhildr and Sigurd). It is strange that Kotetsu designed only Holmes, Tiamat and Goetia.

(NEW ADDITION) It should also be noted that as an illustrator Kotetsu has had previous works in a Lovecraftian Guidebook and is also the artist to the Alien God Preistess, somewhat showing how their work leans more to the outerworldly.

SECTION 3: The Design

It is a very commonly noticed fact that Holmes' coat in his third ascension has a very similar shape to that of the Foreigner card artwork.

The pattern work on the coattails of the foreigner art and the inside (blue) part of Holmes' coattails have a very similar, if not exactly same pattern running down the entire length of it. The sphere summoned in Holmes' Noble Phantasm also has the same pattern on its sides and front.

There is a "fog" around Holmes in his third ascension, which is reminescent of the smoke in the card art. (Also can be the London smog).

The glowing section of the abdomen of the being reminds one of the metallic corset that Holmes wears. 

There are 4 notches of smoke on either side of the being (total 8), under their cape. If we stretch our interpretation, then it could mean Holmes' arms and the metal arms that he has is also equal to 8.

In that tangent, the shape of the coat is also similar to that of Saver class Buddha, the fantasy trees from Lostbelt 3 and 4, and the Shadows made by the 6th imaginary element.

The Endless Knot / Shrivatsa symbol on his shoulders is one of the many references of his connection to Tibet (faking his death after the Final Problem). It is an important symbol in both Jainism and Buddhism.

Some of its interpretations include:

The eternal continuum of mind.

The union of wisdom and method.

Since the knot has no beginning or end it also symbolizes the wisdom of the Buddha

the endless cycle of suffering or birth, death and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism.

The cane that Holmes wields has a pattern on its handle in the shape of a Prayer Wheel. 

However, we are not able to find the meaning behind the script on the cane. Both of us attempted to translate it but failed. If anyone can translate the meaning it would be greatly appreciated.

The holographic books in the base of the unidentified sphere have a pattern on their front that greatly resembles a lotus. 

In Holmes' third ascension, there are a number of magical circuits on his coat.

The circuits are almost only on his left side, with very few circuits on his right side. It's not like it was woven into it, were that the case the circuits would have been all over his coat in a more even distribution. It's almost like an impact radius.

The circuits are very similar to the ones visible on the title screen of the lostbelts, as well as the patterns seen on the fantasy trees.

CONCLUSION SECTION: Something's Up (It's Big Brain Time)

It's clear that something is very strange about Holmes, from his interactions to his design, it's clear that there is too much effort into throwing these hints that it's not just a red herring.

Is he a Foreigner? Beast? Counter Guardian? Some other unknown extra class? It cannot be said at the moment. Holmes' role as a revealer itself is dangerous to mystery and magic, so it can be anything.

 It is also not necessarily true that just because Holmes has all these abnormalities, that he will betray us, or is on the side of evil. When has there been a clear cut side of good or evil anyway? It can be argued that we are the villains in some way, as we bring about the end of these timelines to safeguard our own proper human history. 

Holmes has always been on the side of humanity and will continue to be, the question is what the reveal will be, why and how. That, only time and future chapters can answer, all we can do is speculate.

[sterling-silvers]

Star Wars: The High Republic #1 Review

In terms of the comic, the first issue is the definition of a C story – it is a 7 out of 10 because it is average. The simplicity and lack of depth is both the saving grace and condemning damnation of it.

The story follows a new, human Padawan called Keeve Trennis, who is revealed to be on the planet Shuraden, partaking in her final Jedi trial; result of which will be the deciding factor of whether she become a full fledge Jedi Knight. Chaperoning and assessing the trial is her Jedi Master, Sskeer – a Trandoshan – who is sporting one arm (more on that later on).

During said “final” trial, a swarm of giant alien insects – called Ridadi – pop out of nowhere and start stampeding toward a community of fairy like aliens, called Ximpi. Keeve makes an “audacious” choice to abandon her trial in order to save the village. One thing to note, is that she made a utilitarian decision during the course of her rescue, as did not attempt to save one Ximpi who was swallowed whole – she allowed the death of one to save the lives of many.

After relaying the situation those at Starlight Beacon’s, in particular Master Estala Maru, she is told to read the minds of the insects; in doing so, she gathers that these creatures normally using a magnetic homing beacon to guide their migration course – Starlight Beacon has thrown it off course and if Keeve were to fail to stop them here, they would eventually fly to the Beacon, itself.

Using a new lightsaber powered, Force attuned ship – a Vector – Keeve is able to steer the bugs back on course and off of the planet. 

As she reconvenes and recounts with her master, he takes her the Starlight Beacon. Thinking she is about to be expelled from the Order for failing the trial, a new Jedi Master, Avar Kriss – who, via Grandmasters Veter and Yoda, most recently was christened as the new Marshall of Starlight Beacon, officially promotes Keeve to the rank of Knight. As her valediction ceremony takes place on the Beacon, itself, we see Keeve shedding an emotional tear of joy. 

This is interesting as, I thought it was the padawan’s master that would knight them but, this seems not to be the case. Even more curiously, the Jedi do not exclaim “May the Force be with you” but, “For Light and Life”. At the conclusion of the comic, we see Sskeer alone in his chambers screaming “No!” at the top of his lungs.

As forementioned, this debut issue is the epitome of a C story and as so earns it’s 7 out of 10. This is my first introduction into Cavan Scott’s writing and, so far, it is subpar at best and candidly amateurish at it’s worse. The narrative was very telegraphed at times and makes mistakes that are unbecoming of a writer given this caliber of material to work with. Writers like Greg Wiseman, Kyle Higgins, and or David F. Walker would not be making these kinds of errors – Marvel might need to call them to take over.

In the same vein, Ario Anindito’s art is decent but, could be better. It’s not as crisp as I think it should be and looks like it needed another render. Artists like Dan Mora, Stefano Caselli, and especially Doc Shaner would have delivered an efficient job as opposed to the sufficient one Anindito is giving.

It’s vexing as honestly, there is something there in terms of Keeve Trennis in terms of both her character and design.

I am more than fine with a protagonist that doubts themselves because that is a manner in which we are able to learn with them, and there is definitely an avenue to explore with a newly dubbed Jedi Knight still working on finding her niche in the Order. Reviewers, like Thor Skywalker, are not so keen on her having these kind of thoughts and emotions but, it makes sense to me. One of the eventual downfalls of the Jedi was that they were trying to negate their emotions as opposed to controlling them. Keeve showing self-doubt illustrates her struggle to regulate her emotions but also that allows herself to feel the doubt work through it.  Nonetheless, it seems as if we, the reader, have missed an arc and or development with this character – I think it would have been more apt to show her in the Order working her way to the trials as opposed to the last hour of her last trial AND her becoming a Jedi Knight; this is reinforced by the alleged rapport and pedestal she puts Sskeer on – it’s more tell than show and a comic book is meant to show.

In accordance with this self-doubt, she also has the quirk of cursing. This is interesting, albeit jarring because of the era she is in – the High Republic has been presented as the apex of the Order and as so, I thought that meant this would be the time where the Jedi would be the most dogmatic and adherent to their traditions and mentality.

Her design yields the same jarring aspects, once you go beyond the superficial facet. At first glance, it’s very attention-grabbing; young Black woman with half her head shaved on one side, utilizing two lightsabers – holstered on her chest – that she can combine into a dual-sided lightsaber. However, once again, this seems to be out of place given the time period and temperament of the era. Does it make sense for a Jedi in this era to be so bombastic in their look, particularly when it comes to her hair? Seems like a better fit for a time of REVIVING the Jedi Order as opposed to them being at their APEX.

In the Light of the Jedi novel, it is said that Keeve sees the Force as a tapestry – a massive piece of art that spreads across the universe. This is a really nice take on the Force and I hope it gets expanded on with her character in this series – it certainly could attest to aspects of her design, such as her hair. I haven’t really seen Star Wars characters interested in art aside from Sabine Wren, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Alva Brenne; now we have a character who the Force IS art for her. Granted, this aspect of hers has not been seen and or mentioned in the comic and it SHOULD be as this is the formal DEBUT of this character for many people.

The issue gets some major points off, as well because:

1.  Keeve’s uses her lightsaber to not only slow down descent but to stop the fall completely.

This is cardinal sin that follies in the mechanics and use of how lightsabers work. This happens nine pages in and broke my immersion within the issue - immediate red flag.

At best, an argument could be made that because this is set 200 years before the Skywalker Saga these sabers are weaker than their future counter parts and therefore not as potent in terms of lethality but, this is me – the fan – writing for the writer. Star Wars (or its content creators) simply do not get that luxury anymore. Plot holes are to be called out by the consumer and filled in/addressed by the writer; plain and simple.

2.  There is a general lack of references and or footnotes to other material – particularly to the current books and comics – that would have given context to some of the events and tools used in the comic. Prime examples of missed opportunities to seed this world cohesively take form in Sskeer’s missing arm, the Ximpi themselves, and the Vectors.

The High Republic, as a whole, was marketed ongoing multimedia project and as so, interconnectivity should be the prime focal point of this serious. Continuity is key ESPECIALLY when they’ve thrown out the old canon and are new canon. The tools are there – USE THEM!!! The book – really Charles Soule in general –  is doing the heavy lifting of world building and establishing many of the characters – the least Scott can do is alley oop these layups.

3.  As mentioned earlier, Keeve uses a Vector to as the driving force to solve the problem but, there was no footnote and or reference to the fact that this was a special kind of ship. Moreover, the use of the Vector has already broken the canon that has JUST been established for it – Vectors are powered by the Jedi’s Lightsaber, the hub changes color to that of the lightsaber that activated it, it is steered by the user’s ability with Force, and there should be no autopilot and astromech droids there to guide it based on the fact that these innovations are rare within the galaxy in this era.

Why add these parameters if the creators that be are not going to adhere to them?

Ultimately, this issue threatened to be interesting. If this is the modus operandi of the series as a whole… making good on the threat will be the difference between triumph and downfall.

[davidmann95]

For definitely no reason whatsoever, in response to nothing specific, can you rank the DC Multiverse Earths and tell us a bit about why each is in its place on the list?

Were this in response to an article, I could assure that I generally enjoy the writer’s output perfectly well from what I’ve seen and was absolutely baffled by the bizarrely selective research that went into it. Anyway, I hope you feel guilty enabling the amount of work I put into this truly ridiculous task by the end.

Cliff notes for the relatively uninitiated: that gorgeous monstrosity up above is The Map Of The Multiverse from the miniseries Multiversity, presented as a series of concentric circles bordered by the ‘Overvoid’ that all of reality is suspended in (and framed in such a way as to make clear it is the white of the pages comics are printed on). You go inwards from the borders of creation - moving moreso with each sphere from abstraction to the realm of the physical - to the Monitor Sphere in which once lived the near-omnipotent, now nearly extinct Monitor race that observed and maintained the multiverse, into the Sphere of Gods where the various beings of myth and divinity dwell, and into the innermost sphere where ‘we’ live. The 52 Earths you see within aren’t the whole of the multiverse but the ‘local’ 52 worlds, with infinite other Earths dwelling in their own dimensional pockets; all these universes actually exist in the same three-dimensional space at the same time but suspended in a higher-dimensional substance called ‘the Bleed’, and vibrating at distinct frequencies. Also there’s a ‘Dark Multiverse’ that’s cosmologically speaking ‘beneath’ the map, disintegrating half-formed potential realities that new proper universes are culled from. There’s a lot more to it than even all of that, but that’s enough to explain what’s up with these.

My ranking here is obviously subjective, but mostly comes down to a mix of ‘how cool is this Earth’, ‘how much would this Earth be worth using again’, ‘how well does it work in the context of being part of a shared multiverse’, and ‘do I seriously see creators unearthing any of this Earth’s potential down the road’. Also, Earths 24, 27, 28, 46, and 49 aren’t here, as they’re among the 7 Unknown Earths on the map that were left behind for future creators to define; 14 and apparently 25 have since been revealed.

64. Earth 14

A worthy bottom-place entry, Earth 14 is at the top of the Multiverse Map, and is shown as physically different from the other Earths, seemingly vibrating as if in two places at once; map co-designer and illustrator Rian Hughes suggested in an interview the intent was that this was where new universes entered the multiverse. Instead, ending up the first Unknown Earth to be revealed after the doors were opened to other creative teams, it was shown as a generic dystopian world home to a ‘Justice League of Assassins’ that were quickly dispatched by a generic cosmic threat. A monumental tribute to contextual ignorance and creative laziness.

63. Flashpoint

This is one of several Earths I’ll touch on that exist in neither the ‘local’ nor Dark Multiverse, but has directly crossed over or been framed in reference to the currently operating version of the DC Universe and so is probably worth a mention even if I’m not going over every Elseworlds and Imaginary Story DC has ever published. Another dystopian world, in this one an attempt by The Flash at fixing a change to history resulted in an Earth torn apart by war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman, where Cyborg was America’s greatest hero and Kal-El was held captive his entire life in a military bunker rather than becoming Superman. Aside from the prospect of a Thomas Wayne who became Batman when Bruce was gunned down as a child rather than vice-versa - resulting in him being pulled into a recent Batman run after this worlds’ destruction, the reason for this Earth’s inclusion - absolutely nothing of value came of this or the stories tied into it, such that astonishingly in spite of being the impetus for one of the biggest DC reboots of all time with theoretically an entire revised history to play with, essentially no one cares about this anymore.

62. Earth 1

The site of DC’s standalone, bookstore-market oriented ‘Earth One’ graphic novels. The incredible tunnel vision of marketing these for that purpose with titles that exist in reference to their multiversal structure aside, the Green Lantern book is the only one of those I’ve heard about being even kind of good; the rest top out at an interesting failure in Wonder Woman, with a standard forgettable failure in Teen Titans and truly flabbergasting misfires in Superman and Batman. Even Multiverse Map co-designer and writer Grant Morrison described this Earth in a blurb as having a history ‘in flux’, implicitly permitting the reader to believe it’s something else if they really want to, but as it stands in spite of the theoretical wide-open possibilities the foundations have already been built on salted Earth.

61. Watchmen

Home to the cast of characters of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal miniseries. Crossed over with the DC Universe 30+ year later in Doomsday Clock, which clearly intended to set up this world as one ripe for future stories and development rather than a singular text, but instead misinterpreted, stripmined, and otherwise nuked essentially everything that might have had one interested in exploring it further in the first place (in spite of the source text’s very definitive conclusions to all major narrative threads and characters). The only reason this is not ranked even lower is the possibility that the upcoming, as-yet untitled Watchmen project by Tom King and Jorge Fornes might manage to dredge something out of this.

60. Earth Negative 11

The first of the Dark Multiverse Earths here, a gender-flipped Earth where Bryce Wayne generically altered herself into an Atlantean in order to do battle with Aquawoman and the forces of Atlantis. As the Dark Multiverse worlds we have seen thus far are described as being borne of Bruce Wayne’s fears, it’s odd that as opposed to the ‘want of a nail’ scenarios shown on all others, this includes the additional twist of making Bruce a woman, yet does nothing with that. Anyway, this is a very clear product of the Dark Multiverse’s debut in Dark Nights: Metal wanting an evil Batman to correspond to each member of the Justice League, and it’s the oddest, most perfunctory of the lot.

59. Earth 34

Home to the heroes of the Light Brigade, defenders of Cosmoville, this is an Earth meant to evoke the classic creator-owned superhero comic Astro City. However, as Astro City is itself made up of archetypal signifiers yet isn’t meta about its usage of them, being defined by its storytelling principles rather than the shared universe it builds up in the background, there are essentially no stories to be told here that couldn’t be told with the regular heroes of the DC universe. Which is a shame, those are some neat character designs.

58. Earth Negative 12

A Dark Multiverse Earth where believing Wonder Woman killed in a battle with the war god Ares, Batman took up the deity’s helm in hopes of redefining war, instead being corrupted by it and becoming an unstoppable monster. There’s basically nothing here.

57. Earth Negative 44

A Dark Multiverse Earth where a computer program meant to replicate Alfred after the butler’s untimely death, attempting to protect its charge, takes control of Batman by way of mechanizing him and turns Gotham into a digital nightmare. A little more on-point than the previous entry, but still not much here.

56. Earth Negative 22

A Dark Multiverse Earth where Batman is finally pushed into killing the Joker, but the Clown Prince of Crime secretes a particularly potent Joker Toxin upon his death that corrupts the Caped Crusader into a second Joker known as The Batman Who Laughs, who slaughters his way across his universe before ultimately making his way to the ‘main’ DCU. The prospect of a Batman/Joker combination is interesting, but an origin for the ultimate corrupted Batman ‘he got drugged into going bad’ falls short.

55. Earth Negative 32

A Dark Multiverse Earth where Bruce Wayne moments after his parents’ deaths was judged worthy of a Green Lantern ring, but having only his hatred of crime rather than the discipline and morality he would come to develop becomes the murderous terror of the underworld, with even the Corps unable to stop him when he manages to force the darkness of his heart through the ring into ‘dark constructs’. Another ultimately throwaway Earth, this at least illustrates the properties of the Dark Multiverse in an interesting way: the constructs he creates aren’t something that’s ever been indicated as being possible or even sensible with the ‘real’ Green Lantern, but as this is a world literally made of nightmares that’s irrelevant.

54. Earth 39

Home to the United Nations superspies the Agents of W.O.N.D.E.R., who operating using super-technology with eventually deleterious side-effects. A pastiche of the obscure T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, it’s hard to imagine anyone with much to say about them wouldn’t simply wish to write an actual comic about them under the current rights-holders, though the concepts described in Morrison’s provided information are enticing.

53. Earth 41

A riff on several of the superheroes published by Image Comics over the years, they’re worth having around for the occasional heroes of the multiverse groupshots for your big crossover comics and Dino-Cop turned out to be charming, but it’s doubtful someone with a big Spawn story in them for instance would use Spore as their outlet.

52. Earth 9

All I know about this is that this is a ‘what if superheroes really changed the world’ Earth, and when those are a dime a dozen, the additional conceits of the names of the various characters not at all corresponding to their traditional backstories and attributes, and being the brainchild of creator Dan Jurgens, are far from enough to sway me. I understand there are some fans out there who may heartily disagree, to be fair.

51. Earth Negative 52

Another Dark Multiverse throwaway Earth, this time one where a Batman shattered by losing his various partners taps into the Speed Force so that he can finally be everywhere at once to stop all crime. This is distinct however in that he achieves this by defeating The Flash, chaining him to the hood of the Batmobile, and driving it so fast their atoms explode and merge, which is thoroughly rad and gets it big-time bonus points next to its contemporaries.

50. Earth 37

An Earth based on the DC works of creator Howard Chaykin, its conceit of being a world that progressed technologically far faster than our world but culturally remains decades behind us is interesting, but I’m not much of a fan of his work that I’ve read and most of what’s been drawn upon here doesn’t seem to have much of a following.

49. Earth 30

The world of Superman: Red Son, where Kal-L landed in the Ukraine and grew up to become leader of a global Soviet Union, before realizing he had deformed humanity’s development and faking his death. Leaving Earth in the hands of a Lex Luthor who while still very much a bastard found public approval in America for fighting Superman, Lex ultimately led Earth into a utopia that over time fell into complacency and became its universe’s version of Krypton, Jor-L (Luthor’s distant descendant) and Lara sending their baby back in time to survive and establishing a predestination loop. While several elements of the DC Universe are present in a limited capacity that could in theory be expanded on, Superman and Wonder Woman are the only superheroes of long-term note and both their stories are very much concluded, seemingly leaving little to do here except have the Superman with the hammer and sickle logo show up in event comics.

48. Earth 6

The world of the Just Imagine Stan Lee Created The DC Universe series, where the father of the Marvel Universe rebuilt several DC figureheads from the name and a few pieces of imagery up. The results were mixed at best, but a series of gorgeous artists involved in the projects mean the characters certainly look interesting even if it’s hard to imagine creators going back here in any meaningful capacity.

47. Earth Negative 1

A Dark Multiverse world where Superman turned on humanity for reasons unknown, and Batman deliberately infected himself with the ‘Doomsday Virus’ to gain the properties of the hulking monster and defeat his former friend. Now numbed to human emotion and vulnerability, this Batman hopes to spread the virus as to make humanity similarly indestructible, as well as shield them emotionally from what he has come to see as the false hope Superman represents. This Batman didn’t end up a major figure in the same way as The Batman Who Laughs, but the conceit is killer and I hope someone picks up on it one day.

46. Earth-52

A universe somewhere outside the local 52, a ‘remnant’ of sorts of the main DC universe circa 2011-2016 prior to cosmic revisions resulting in the current setup. A world where superheroes had emerged approximately 5 years earlier and home to lots of dudes in very dumb battle-armor, most fan-favorite stories from this era have been carried forward into the current history, and its unique version of Superman under Grant Morrison - a socialist crusader in a t-shirt and jeans who battled corrupt institutions and cosmic supervillainy in equal measure - was depicted as set loose from his world after 2016′s continuity changes as a defender of the multiverse. While a significant part of DC history both in-universe and publishing-wise, there wouldn’t seem to be all that much left here worth exploring.

45. Earth 2

A world where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman alone represented the first wave of superheroes, they nobly fell in battle repelling an invasion of Earth by Darkseid. In time a new generation would emerge that were modernized, youthful iterations of the Justice Society of America, the superhero team predating the Justice League in DC’s publishing history. While the logline’s an interesting one and the successor to Superman Val-Zod debuted to some acclaim, for the most part this reinvention didn’t end up received well by either new or longtime fans, and a last-minute overhaul where this bunch was transplanted into a rebooted world without superheroes probably didn’t help. You still see them in crossovers and there are promising concepts, but this world seems basically dead.

44. Earth 50

When Lex Luthor ascended to the presidency and soon thereafter executed The Flash, Superman snapped, executed him, and took over the world alongside his allies as the Justice Lords, until they were ultimately overthrown by way of a parallel universe Justice League and a repentant Lord Batman. A Better World unequivocally rules, but given this is supposed to be those specific versions of the Lords rather than a new iteration, it’d be weird to see them up against any universe other than the DCAU. And, well...

43. Earth 12

The DCAU, currently world of Batman Beyond and a future Justice League. The DCAU, you may be aware, extremely rules, but is also somewhat redundant in this context - the ‘regular’ DCU already has all its core components without too much aesthetic differentiation, and there’s already frequently a Batman Beyond in the future of said universe. It has its unique attributes that make people love it, it’s cool that it’s here, but on the macro scale it’s too clean an adaptation to bring much to the table to crossovers and whatnot, and you’d never see any further stories told there otherwise as really being part of the DCU cosmic landscape so much as a comic tie-in to the TV show.

(Also it’s odd this is placed here with the Justice Lords Earth as if to go ‘it’s secretly been part of the 52 all along, you just never noticed when it only crossed over with the one other!’ when there were two other parallel universes in the DCAU.)

42. Earth 43

A nightmare world haunted by the once-heroic, now vampiric Blood League, the obvious potential would be for this world to function as DC’s equivalent to Marvel Zombies. Recently however DCeased has come to fill that position, and while this world in practice if not concept skews more closely towards that source material as the former heroes still have vestiges of their old personalities - in theory distinguishing it as its own spin worth keeping around - it’s hard to imagine most takes on ‘Justice League but monsters’ won’t come out under the DCeased banner for the foreseeable future.

41. Earth 40

A world of pulp villains made to oppose Earth 20, these guys are simple but a hoot.

40. Earth 35 aka the Pseudoverse

More analogues to analogues, this time of the Awesome Comics characters largely defined by Alan Moore in Supreme. This opens up the promising vista of ‘DC if it were designed by Alan Moore’, but in practice as demonstrated by his work with both DC and the analogues these mimic, that would just be...well, good DC comics, which you don’t need a whole extra universe for. The notion of this as a universe artificially created by Monitor ‘ideominers’ however both gives it a unique place in the multiverse, tackles its status as a pastiche in a unique way, and gets back to ideas of the power of imagination in both Supreme and Moore’s other works, so it’s likely there could be something to be done here.

39. Earth 11

A bit of a study in contradictions. This is seemingly a rather straightforward ‘gender swap’ Earth with Superwoman, Wonderous Man, and so forth. Also, its version of Star Sapphire implied it’s not subjected to constant crises in the same way as the main universe it mirrors, maintaining a greater degree of consistency in the process. At the same time however it’s mentioned that the Amazons rather than leaving Man’s World for Themyscira shared its technology and philosophy with the world, changing it forever, suggesting a far different world from what we’ve seen in glimpses here. Until it decides one way or another whether it’s a simple mirror to the regular DCU or a radically different take, it hovers in a state of uncertainty.

38. Earth-2 aka Earth Two

The original version of Earth-2, home to the DC Universe of the 1940s with aged versions of Superman and company and the original Justice Society of America. The first take on a DC universe that would progress in something resembling ‘real time’ rather than keeping the headliners as perpetual twenty-to-thirty-somethings, this was also the birthplace of heroes such as Power Girl and Huntress. I’m of the perhaps controversial opinion that this is a concept that was explored better in later takes: there’s a sense here that the largely forgotten follow-up generation eventually introduced, with the exception of the two heroes mentioned above, will never really matter in the same way as their still fully-active predecessors in spite of ostensibly taking over the family business, meaning you never quite actually get what you want here, which is to see a DC where things meaningfully change and move on - well into his middle age and his mentor’s death long behind him, Dick Grayson is still Robin. Add in the odd, ignominious demise of the original Batman and its Superman’s odd eventual fate - which slide from bizarre to intolerable if you accept the frequent implication that these are meant to be the original versions of them from the 1930s - and I can’t help but think the enjoyable high concept was never realized as well as it could be here.

37. Earth 4

The Earth of the characters of Charlton Comics who would go on to inspire Watchmen, this initially seemed like one of the most promising worlds after its debut in Pax Americana drew perhaps the most pronounced critical acclaim of any single issue in the past decade as the site for creators with something to say to work with Watchmen without actually touching that property. Now, however, Watchmen itself is in the mix: most wouldn’t reasonably go here while the material they’re truly referencing is now freely available (especially those simply wanting to draw fan attention by visibly playing with those toys, the way Earth 4 sidestepped) even though that world itself is now massively compromised past the original text, and with the ‘Watchmen Earth’ no longer an option and the characters themselves - if cleaned-up, more mainstream versions of them - existing in the DCU proper, this world’s role seems to have been largely stripped from it. I have to imagine there’s still potential here for those with the talent and commitment though.

36. Earth 44

A world where in the absence of natural superhuman beings, Doc Tornado created a Metal League of robot superheroes to protect the Earth. A promising concept definitely worth a few stories.

35. Earth 15

Once a perfect universe destroyed in a rampage by another Earth’s Superman, it was artificially reborn through the will of Countess Belzebeth - a cosmic vampire - as a copy of the Prime universe with the Green Lantern Corps replaced by Belzebeth’s despotic Blackstars, the uncertain and bitter heroes of this universe warped through the lens of Belzebeth’s perceptions of them had no chance against her forces. While its inhabitants are a bit samey what with all life having been subsumed into the diamond will of Blackstar Controller Mu, the idea of a conceptually weakened DCU being turned into an army against the rest of the multiverse makes for a terrific threat, and the prophecy of the ‘Cosmic Grail’ (a Green Lantern power battery lost somewhere in the multiverse) and that the First Lantern of the multiverse Volthoom hail from its original incarnation lend it some extra mythological weight.

34. Earth 32

A mashup world hosting the likes of the Justice Titans, Young Justice International, and the Doom Society. A world that’s home to Aquaflash will probably never have an ongoing all its own, but plenty of stories, miniseries, and even a brief line of comics have been based on mashup characters before, so there’s plenty of proof of concept for this being able to endure.

33. Earth 23

An Earth where Batman (naturally) is the only white guy on the Justice League, and Superman is not only President of the United States in his secret identity as Calvin Ellis, but the leader of the multiverse-spanning superteam Justice Incarnate. It reads like Morrison trying to do his idealized take on an ‘Ultimate DC’, a more diverse and politically engaged superhero landscape that doesn’t scale down its big ideas in turn, and if I were ranking it at the time it was introduced it would go much higher. The problem is that its version of Superman is modeled after Barack Obama, and that guy isn’t President anymore (and for that matter his legacy seems to grow more complicated by the year). As a result the vibe goes from triumphant to wistful mourning if not outright bitterly ironic, and that’s a needle that would have to be threaded before doing any substantial work here.

(Also, since several Justice Leaguers here rather than being made black are replaced with various black counterparts they’ve had over the years, that means Wonder Woman here is the 70s Amazon Nubia. And, uh, that name is something that would have to be...something.)

32. Earth 19

Steampunk superheroics; superhero period pieces are usually fun, and this is built on a foundation of pretty Mike Mignola art (though confession that I’ve never read Gotham By Gaslight), so sure, this one has potential.

31. Earth 18

Same as above but cowboys instead. This gets extra credit because cowboys mesh better with superhero conventions, and the additional twist of this world being frozen in history by the Time Trapper, forcing them to approximate modern technology with 19th century resources.

30. Earth 31

A post-apocalyptic waterworld where humanity is protected by Captain Leatherwing and assorted other pirate superheroes. Another ‘superheroes but in another genre’ setup, the post-apocalyptic, environmental twist makes it unfortunately more relevant than its peers, though I don’t think it’s quite the best end of the world as we know it on the list.

29. Earth 42

Home to the adorable, innocent world of the chibified Little League...secretly robots unwittingly enacting an endless stage play for the malevolent being known as the Empty Hand, running scenarios of his devising in preparation for a coming war with the rest of the multiverse. It’s a neat little multipurpose world, able to be played both as amusing contrast, or as parody whether light-hearted or cynical, in their endless ‘playtime’.

28. Earth 7

Formerly home to counterparts of the heroes of Earth 8, it was shattered by the Empty Hand’s forces and its desiccated cities made his throne, the zombie hordes that were once its champions his armies. The ‘Ultimate Marvel’ to Earth 8′s Marvel proper (and now Marvel Zombies), the idea of the broken remains of the cool version of the cool superhero universe as the lair of the ultimate evil has a certain appeal.

27. Earth 52

The last of the Earth 52s on this list, this newly added 53rd core Earth is home to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight books. Much as the reception to it over the years has become...mixed, at best (for my money Dark Knight III is the only one that’s not at least bad in a very interesting way, and even it still has its moments), the surprised generally positive reception to the most recent entry in Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child suggests there’s still life in this oddball corner of the cosmos yet.

(Fun fact: this was Earth 31 in a previous version of the multiverse, and Morrison intended it to be included as such in Multiversity - hence why Earth 31 is made up of inky scratches on the Map - but Miller requested he not since he wanted to keep his domain separate from DC’s ongoing storylines. Instead he agreed later to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s use of it in Dark Nights: Metal as DKR is famously Snyder’s favorite comic, bringing it in as Earth 52.)

26. Earth 47 aka Dreamworld

Where the Love Syndicate of Dreamworld dwells, baby: all is groovy. It’s incredibly specific in both era and theme, but a psychedelic universe with heroes to match invites tons of possibilities.

25. Earth 10 aka Earth X

It’s the Nazi Earth that sucks. It has superheroes who unnervingly are about as well-intentioned and effective as the standard set in the New Reischman, opposed by the few remaining dregs of the Freedom Fighters led by Uncle Sam; only their Kal-L, Overman, once Hitler’s weapon, truly understands the scope of the atrocities that led to their ‘utopia’, having grown a conscience too late and ever-aware that no feat in the present can ever redeem the oceans of blood on his hands. You can do horrifying introspective stuff with them as in their Multiversity chapter, you can tell Freedom Fighters stories like the recent miniseries, or you can just have the Justice League show up to fight the Nazi Justice League. A Nazi world is a standard one in multiverse stories for a reason, you don’t get easier targets.

24. Earth 5G

The DC universe that’s...sort of here and sort of not. Doomsday Clock and other upcoming stories appear to be shifting us over to this, but in most of DC’s line of titles the leap hasn’t taken place yet. As we haven’t seen the bench of successor heroes apparently primed to take over only so much can be judged, but the vast changes suggested by the new ‘official timeline’ that’s been leaked suggest a bizarre attempt at incorporating as many of their editorially-favored biggest hits as possible into a bizarre selective mishmash, without particularly serving the status quos any of the constituent characters said history is meant to bolster (with the exception of Wonder Woman, now framed as the first superhero, which would at least be interesting and a deserved bolster to her profile if there were any particular impression her new standing would be meaningfully followed-through on), while also not only reinstating the mutually destructive retcon of the JSA as preceding Superman, but taking the absurd extra step of actively presenting them as his inspiration. Of course we haven’t seen it in practice yet, and at the end of the day good stories will surely still be told here, but the foundations here are about as shaky as they’ve ever been for the ‘core’ DCU as a wholehearted capitulation to placing dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s over the actual narrative logistics of making a shared universe function smoothly.

23. Earth Negative Zero aka Betwixt

A world where those whose senses of self entire disintegrate fade away to seeking to feed on those still well-defined, this bears similarities to the realm of Limbo where ignored superheroes reside, but with just enough conceptual differences and a hellish, malleable twist that makes it the best thing anyone’s come up with to date to do with the Dark Multiverse.

22. Earth 48 aka Warworld

While its iconography is rooted of all things in castoff characters from Crisis On Infinite Earths and no-hopers from Countdown To Final Crisis, the actual conceit here of a world where literally everyone and everything is a superhero that operates by superhero rules, a world built by the New Gods as defenders of reality, is wide-open and tantalizing.

21. Earth 38

Another major shot at a DCU that aged in real time, this version has its own idiosyncrasies but far more of a sense of forward momentum and meaningful change, with the original Superman and Batman still leading the pack one way or another but successors to both them and the rest of the heroes truly stepping up. Also the predominant hero of the 21st century is Knightwing, the grandson of both Superman and Batman who has only partial Superman powers but also Batman training, which is just really cool.

20. Earth 3

The good ‘ol classic evil mirror universe, where strength is the only law, the forces of evil always win in the end no matter how bright the day may become, and thus the Crime Syndicate operates as it pleases. It’s never quite as interesting as you want it to be - its villains are largely one-note - but its warped societal and cosmic rules, and that each character has a handful of twists on the mythology of their counterparts rather than being an exact (if morally inverted) duplicate, means it could easily one day come to live up to its obvious potential in the right hands.

19. Earth 21

Here, most superheroes were forced into retirement after World War II by McCarthyist paranoia, but at the dawn of the 1960s the few remaining and a new generation are emboldened to step back into the light, spearheaded by the Justice League of America. DC: The New Frontier is a modern classic, with a direct standalone follow-up virtually out of the question; as it doesn’t quite lead into the world of the actual 1960s DC Comics either, its sole function in its capacity as a world in the multiverse is as a 60s ‘period piece’ Earth. Given that’s where most of the architecture of DC as we now know it was built however, that’s hardly a problem.

18. Earth 26 aka Earth C

Funny animals are fun, and in a superhero universe that means you get superhero funny animals, courtesy of Captain Carrot and his amazing Zoo Crew. What’s not to love?

17. Earth 22

While time has somewhat dimmed the acclaim that originally surrounded it, Kingdom Come and its tale of a Superman coming out of retirement alongside his allies to try and reign in an out-of-control new generation remains a landmark moment in the genre, and in many aspects still holds up. Unlike many stories of its stature this world has always played nice with the mainline universe in terms of guest appearances and crossovers, including works by the original creators Mark Waid and Alex Ross, and as the most iconic and conceptually expansive work to date set in a DC universe that has joined in the march of time, that makes it a prominent and useful one to have around.

16. The Antimatter Universe of Qward aka The Reversoverse aka the Anti-Verse

The original dark flipside of DC reality, this has occasionally also played home to the Crime Syndicate - and their best stories by far, to boot - but mainly serves as a home base to the Weaponeers of Qward and occasionally Sinestro. While largely unexplored it has a massively central place in DC’s cosmology and the birth of the multiverse, the glimpses of a society of pure evil in early Silver Age Green Lantern and JLA: Earth 2 are far more fun and interesting than anything seen in Earth 3′s history, it’s about to get even more room under Morrison to find definition, and as the ultimate mysterious Forbidden Realm of the DCU the possibilities could be essentially endless in the right hands.

15. Earth-1985 aka Earth One

The DC universe of 1956-1986, and the dragon an entire generation of creators have spent their livelihoods chasing as the ‘classic’ iteration, as evidenced by one of them flat-out confirming it still exists somewhere out there. While that makes it frequently redundant when the main DCU is trying hard to mimic its feel - a few divergent notes such as Maggin’s idiosyncratic take on latter-day Superman and its version of Jason Todd aside - the prospect of a DCU that remained in that mold forever to a greater or lesser extent even if time may have moved forward could, in principle, free the main universe to go off in wildly different directions, knowing this image of DC always exists in its own space to return to when so desired rather than actively turning the current status quo to face backwards.

14. Earth 17

The Atomic Knights of Justice quest across the radioactive landscape of Novamerika in a world decimated by nuclear was in 1963 in search of Earth 15′s Cosmic Grail, their only hope against the coming of Darkseid. A mashup of the Justice League with the protagonists of one of the most fascinatingly bizarre comics of DC’s Silver Age in the Atomic Knights, a mythic quest, and most relevantly “What if Fallout had superheroes?” leaves this feeling like it’s just waiting for its moment to shine.

13. Earth 8 aka Angor

Known across the rest of the multiverse as the protagonists of the Major movies and comics (as opposed to the sub-imprint Essential Major reflecting Earth 7), in actuality the non-actionable champions of Angor - the Retaltiators, the G-Men, the Future Family, and The Bug, among others - are as real as any other superheroes, and while they struggle under the weight of both mistrust by the general public and frequent in-fighting, they’ve thus far protected their world from threats global, universal, and multiversal alike. The Big Two having stand-ins for each other is a longstanding tradition for good reasons: it not only allows for crossovers where the legal stars don’t align (and adds an extra fun shock of recognition whenever the reader realizes what’s happening), but provides each of them an ongoing version of those archetypes to play with within the confines of their own narrative, whether as contrasts or bending them to fit the tone of a very different shared universe than they were originally created for.

12. Earth 16 aka #earthme

The world where every sidekick, super-son, successor, and short-lived ‘new generation - of HERO!’ at last seize their moment in the sun...in a world already saved by their predecessors, with little left to do but lap up lives of super-celebrity and wish for one, just one little alien invasion or immortal tyrant to justify their existences for them. The best of DC’s futuristic/what-if-time-mattered alternate Earths in my opinion, taking to its logical conclusion the notion as stated by Morrison in interviews that as the Justice League will stick around as long as there are evils that need fighting, the ever-present promise of the torch being passed could only ever truly, permanently take place in a world where the job was already redundant. Playing as it does with in-universe history, real-life publishing realities, celebrity culture, generational divides, and the question of what being a superhero even means sans the usual confrontational justifications, it’s by its nature only going to become more expansive and interesting a commentary as time goes by and the regular DCU goes through its cycles of reboots, rebirths, and returns to form.

11. Pocket Universe 54471

Exactly what you see: Superman made a little pocket universe a half mile wide to go fishing in and he was gonna take Bruce and Dick there for the former’s bachelor party, and he knows about and/or created at least 54470 others. It’s absolutely delightful not only in its own right, but as an opening of the door to what the multiverse can mean in DC comics as a sci-fi idea generator beyond riffs on existing properties, while still being presented with a distinctly DC sense of playfulness.

10. Earth 45 aka Earth 45™

The origin of one of the best Superman villains of all time in Superdoomsday - the Superman idea in a world without him brought to life but twisted by committee into a murderous living brand - a horrifying corporatocracy standing for all Superman and company are meant to stand against, and an enduring threat with the world still in shackles and those in power still able to dream to life whatever vision they please of absolute power to be wielded in their name.

9. Earth 36 aka Terra

Justice 9, the defenders of Terra - or I suppose Justice 7 now after the losses of Optiman and Red Racer, though how long does that matter in a superhero universe? - is the most interesting of the direct analogue groups for my money. Technically speaking they’re another twice-removed set like 34 and 35, standing in for the heroes of Big Bang Comics, but given my understanding is that there’s no major “Like the DC heroes, BUT” twist in that book the way Astro City and Supreme have other than a retro ‘good old days’ bent (which definitely isn’t the case here with at least two queer members), Justice 9 basically function as direct analogues for the Justice League...in the same comics as the Justice League. To me, that’s actually fascinating: one of the most useful elements of stand-in characters like this is the ability to tap into the iconic power of archetypes without the familiarity surrounding the actual figures, in the way Planetary for instance uses just enough distance from the source material to make a couple dozen decades-old pop culture touchstones feel completely new, and this implements that approach to the material to the DC characters with heroes who can actually themselves team up with DC proper. As many approaches as could be taken with that though, that potential alone probably wouldn’t be enough to shoot it this high up the list if not for a major additional factor: in the same way that in the old-school DC universe the heroes of Earth-1 had comics reflecting the adventures of the heroes of Earth-2 long before learning they were real in another universe, DC Comics are published on Earth 36. Aside from the neat trick of putting our leads in the same position as the Golden Age heroes, it means Justice 9 grew up with the Justice League as their heroes in the same way as us the audience before becoming heroes themselves, and then they grew up to learn they were real. These folks absolutely deserve to become multiverse standbys.

8. Earth 51

The Earth where all Jack Kirby’s ideas live as a single cohesive world and adventure. No further justification is needed.

7. Earth 13

A world of occult danger where DC’s traditionally superheroic magical figures such as Zatanna and Deadman are given the full Vertigo horror treatment, while the more intimidating and morally dubious figures such as Etrigan and John Constantine get logos and codenames. Not only an expansion but an offputting inversion of one of DC’s most acclaimed corners, this oddball bunch could bounce off of the capes and tights crowd as easily as your Shadowpacts and Justice League Darks, in ways no other team from any corner of the multiverse could.

6. Earth 20

Pulp champions of a 21st century that remains aesthetically moored in the early 20th, of the handful of Earths converting DC standbys into different genre territory in the local 52 the homeworld of the Society of Superheroes hits hardest, given the role the likes of Doc Savage and The Shadow played in that time shaping the conventions of superheroes as we know them. Add the wealth of concepts presented in their oneshot and the decision to hew away from the traditional Justice League riffs of parallel Earths, and of all the truly new worlds introduced in Multiversity, Earth 20 is the one that most feels like it could support an ongoing all its own.

5. Earth 29 aka Htrae

You gotta have Bizarro World. You just gotta.

4. Earth 33 aka Earth Prime

The in-universe representation of our very own pale blue dot. Whether it’s the birthplace of Superboy Prime where assorted DC creators had to deal with a visiting Flash and Superman throughout the 60s and 70s, meta games with the various incarnations of Ultra/Ultraa, a looming threat yet also victim in need of rescue through the eyes of Justice Incarnate, or the unwitting home of the ‘Superman’ or ‘Batman’ of Kurt Busiek’s off-center takes on the characters in Secret Identity and Creature of the Night, over the years DC has shown a decent amount of restraint in not going back to this particular well too often unless someone has a really clever tale to tell, and as a result it has maybe the single best batting average of all the ‘parallel Earths’ that have been regularly returned to by DC over the years. Give yourselves a hand, folks!

3. Earth 5 aka Thunderworld

Home not to ‘Shazam’, but Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family in all their glory, a technicolor world playing by the rules set down by Otto Binder and company where a superhero can literally battle planets and the most dangerous villain of all may be a very, very mean worm with glasses, a place of dream logic and childish innocence even by the standards of superhero comics. Captain Marvel at his best is one of DC’s most iconically potent players yet many seem to agree that much of his woes in recent years have come down to trying to find a unique space for him in the DCU proper. While I don’t know that it’s at all impossible to make that work, it’s certainly true that Marvel as he was originally presented doesn’t quite make sense in that world, whereas back in his own he keeps a flavor entirely unique to himself and his partners, whether for solo adventures or teamups with the heroes of the other worlds, playing it straight or examining some of the unsettling implications established by Thunderworld or finding a new way to make it work. Much like Bizarro World, it’s simply a locale the place doesn’t quite feel whole without.

2. Earth 25 (?)

While I’m a bit dubious on it definitely being Earth 25 in the core 52 based on interpretation of an offhanded line from Mr. Terrific (it has a multiverse all its own!), the fact of the matter is that America’s Best Comics came roaring out of the gate as proof of its own title, and basically didn’t stop until it ended. A couple after-the-fact Tom Strong miniseries (containing perhaps the most singularly cowardly hack move in the history of shared universe comics in undoing the end of Promethea) can’t detract from the core ABC lineup being made up of some of the most singularly clever, gorgeous, and heartfelt superhero titles to hit the stands, pretty much the platonic ideal of what you want books like these to look like. If this universe can hang around in any capacity at all until someone god willing picks them up again in a big way, it’s a win in my book.

1. Earth 0 aka Prime Earth

The extant version of the main DCU for at least a little longer, it really does feel like more than just about any version before it - at least for my money - they finally got all their ducks in a row, albeit right before blowing everything to hell. Most of the stories you really want to still have some sort of weight for the major characters are still in play to be built on, and most of the stories that clearly needed to be dropped are dropped. The cosmology’s fleshed out and expanding, the big names mostly work as they should ideally work while still heading into new territory, the JSA is mysteriously somehow around in the past without interfering with the primacy of Superman and the Justice League as the first known superheroes (a mystery that will never be resolved now due to the current reboot; damn shame) and the Legion of Superheroes have a new coat of paint, and there’s room for stories cosmically massive and intimately personal and utterly bizarre throughout the line rather than there being a single overriding idea of what these books should be. It may not be the perfect DC Universe by any means, but it’s a real, real damn good one, and of course without that thing, none of the rest of these universes would have been there in the first place.

[zhongchuusimp]

Deemo Last Dream Part 2

Holy shit is part is long. And yay I managed to finish this part. School was tiring, im addicted to reading tensura. The will to read is stronger than the will to translate ;w; and the will to not do anything is stronger than both. my addiction to reading other novel will likely hinder my translation 

Im aiming to post a translation update weekly(every sunday) and also with illustration too! (Im using my book for reference on when the illustration appear) 

Side note save meeee Tensura is nice to read, im neglecting my other novels and my sch projects

Alright alright time for me to shut up and let u guys enjoy the story, once again please pardon any grammar mistakes from me! ><

Again everything is Alice’s first person view  

Translation after the gif ! Enjoy!:D 

2m

(Waa…!)

This tree is truly incredible. When I woke up from my dream, that small little seeding that was growing from the huge root have already grown to be as tall as Deemo.

(It wasn’t even watered…!)

Perhaps the light shinning in the room might have some hidden power. To ensure that the tree did grow at unbelievable rate, I blinked a few times. Along with Deemo’s smoothing play, I danced around the tree.

--Then, to my left the room door was opened.

♩

(I still don’t know how this door opened…. Let’s just go in and check, even though I’m a little scare…)

I slowly entered the room on the left through the small crack in the opened door. In the room, it was illuminated by dim yellowish light from the old light bulbs. The bookshelves that occupied the wall extends to the celling filled with thick books that seems difficult to read.

(This is…the book room.)

In the dim room, I focused on the books on the shelves which I realise it’s all English. As I don’t even know the book name, I can only stand and stare at the number of books in this room.  During this time, when a sudden wave of sleepiness hit, I felt a weird presence.

(It couldn’t be…yokai…?)

I turned my head to the direction of the presence despite feeling scared. In the end, at the table placed in the deepest part of the room, was a girl in white mask and cloak that cover her completely. Her height seems to be around the same as mine. That girl –let’s just call her masked lady first—was emitting a scary yet weird atmosphere around her.

(Who is she…?)

I was shocked by her weird presences and internally, I don’t dare to believe the fact that other than me and Deemo, there’s someone else here.

(I thought there was only me and Deemo…)

I don’t know where this place is… I thought this place only have me and Deemo. With mask lady in the picture, I was confused. If I were to ignore her in this three-person world, it would be weird. After a slight hesitant, I tried to converse with her.

“Hello, may I know what’s your name?”

Thinking carefully, it might have been a weird question. After all, I do not even remember my own name.  

“….”

Rarely mustering up my courage to speak, as if the mask lady did not hear me at all, there was no reaction from her. I stood there for a few moments and the result is still the same.

(What is this?)

Feeling like I have been invalidated, I felt a deep pang of sadness. At the same time I feel masked lady have some differences with yokai –for some reason I feel afraid of her existence. Trembling, I bought my face closer to her mask. And then from underneath the mask came a hiss-hiss- subtle snoring sound.

(Masked lady seems to be sleeping…)

What…

Right after a sigh of relieve, at this moment I heard a [kaaa-] sound and the door opened. Deemo who have already finished his performance, with a emotionless face –even if I say so, but he still did walk in to the room with an emotionless face. Deemo must have been worried why I have not return to the big tree room for so long, so he came looking for me.

Deemo stood at the door for a while, then using his round moon like eyes, look towards me and masked lady. To Deemo, it should have been the first time he has seen masked lady, but he doesn’t seem shocked. He stepped into the room and raise his hand to the top of the shelve and easily took out a very thick book. Sitting on the small broken root that seems more suited for me than him, he started reading the book.

(Deemo…what book is he reading…?)

While observing the book on Deemo’s hand, I took the opportunity when Deemo is reading to once again explore the room. Not only that the room is dim, but there were also books scattered all over the floor too. I need to be careful when I walk. Then following the thought, I tripped over a book that was on the floor. Just when I lose my balance and fall, a piece of paper that was on the shelve caught my attention. I hurriedly grabbed a nearby shelve to balance myself and slowly approach that paper.

“dprsdfrctr? ? intrcrbrlhmrrhg?” *

 *[TN note: I have no idea what dprsdfrctr refer to but somewhat due to frctr I assume its related to fracture, likely skull fracture. While intrchbrlhmrrhg likely refer to internal hemorrhage (due to int and hmrrgh), which is to say internal bleeding, its deadly due to the heavy loss of blood internally]

 Due to the dimness of the room, I can’t make up any of those words. But written on that light yellowish paper were words I was unable to read…could it be cursive writing…

(What is written on it….)

Tilting my head, I try to understand the meaning of the words and touched the paper lightly.

Then, the moment I touch my paper, I accidentally dropped it. Because from the paper, I felt a sense of warmth… That feel like as if it come from the bottom of the heart that kind of warmness.  

When I picked up the piece of paper, it felt as if I was in contact with human skin, surrounded by an incredible feeling that I did not know of. From the corner of my eye, I saw Deemo close the book and slowly walked out of the book room.

(Is he going to play the piano again…?)

[TN words: for a moment I typed pain instead of piano HAH]

Ever since coming to this world, I slept a lot. But Deemo was the opposite he doesn’t sleep nor rest and continues to play the piano.

(Is it really fine for Deemo to not sleep….?)

For some reason, I got worried and followed Deemo out of the book room.  In this dimly lighted room, just when I reached the door, I was tripped over by something on the floor. The amazing thing is that the fall wasn’t painful, But what did I tripped over…. I looked at the side of my leg, it wasn’t a book, it was a chest shape container.

(….Let’s open it and see!)

Looking at the shape, with excitement brewing I extended my hand to open the chest. But no matter how much I budge it, it wont open. It feels like it has been glued together tightly. Thinking for a bit, to open a chest, it would require a key like object.  

(Deemo is he hiding anything…?)

Looking around I couldn’t find any key like object. I was disappointed as couldn’t open the chest that I have found. I sighed and sat on a giant book. Then when looking towards the deepest part of the room, I noticed that under the table where masked lady was, covered by the red tablecloth was a piece of yellow paper.

(What could it be…?_)

To avoid waking up the masked lady, quietly and slowly I pulled out the piece of paper and realised that the piece of paper contains a lot of musical noted arranged together. This paper no matter how it looks, is a piano score. By just staring at the score I won’t know what kind of music it is.

♩

Taking the music score with me I quickly left the room and head for the tree room where Deemo is.

“Deemo, I found a music score, would you play it for me?”

I happily passed the new score I found to Deemo.

That time….it may have been just my imagination, Deemo look like he was very happy.

[theyearoftheking]

Book Fifteen: Cycle of the Werewolf

“But she plans to leave the Mills by summer...this wolf business has begun to scare her...”

I don’t know what I was expecting with this strange little book, but it sure wasn’t what I read. Truth be told, it was a delightful (and relevant!) way to spend an hour on an airplane. 

BTW: I’m not a monster trying to passively spread Coronavirus all over the world. We had booked a trip back in January, and when we left for NOLA, they were not advising against travel. And I drank plenty of alcohol to kill any and all germs in my system. And then I poured some Tito’s on my hands to make sure they were completely disinfected. That’s how it works, right?

Calm down, people; I’m totally kidding.

 I wouldn’t waste good alcohol that way. 

Anyway, Cycle of the Werewolf is more of a graphic novel, with each chapter a month of the year that Tarker’s Mills, Maine, is terrorized by a werewolf. Each chapter is full of quirky little illustrations, and tales of how the werewolf has killed another resident.

This illustration really had me pause for a second; it looks like the ultimate battle of good vs. evil. So much of our world is drawn in black and white these days. If you believe THIS, you’re obviously against me. If you believe THAT, you’re on my side and an ally. There is very little room for middle ground right now. Whether it be the presidential election, Trump’s presidency as a whole, and even people taking sides about Coronavirus. 

If you leave your house and potentially spread germs, you’re a MONSTER and you obviously hate humanity. If you stay home, you’re obviously buying into fear and panic. Maybe there’s some middle ground. Maybe there’s some gray area for us to all come together in. 

But I think we can all agree anyone buying fifteen cases of toilet paper and not leaving any for families in actual need is a real asshole. Ha! No pun intended, but now totally intended.

Yes, I got all of that from just the one illustration. Steve, he really makes my brain work overtime. 

So, then we get to July. And then shit gets more real. 

“They cancelled the Fourth of July. Marty Coslaw gets remarkably little sympathy from the people closest to him when he tells them that. Perhaps it is because they simply don’t understand the depth of his pain.” 

I think a lot of people wanting to drink green beer and listen to some bagpipe music this past weekend can relate to Marty’s plight. 

Marty is a plucky kid, he’s wheelchair bound and pissed about missing out on fireworks. But his bad-ass Uncle Al shows up with some contraband fireworks for his favorite nephew. Marty waits until everyone goes to bed, and then sneaks outside to light them off. Marty is putting on the fireworks show of his dreams when the werewolf appears! Marty doesn’t think twice, and throws a firecracker right in the beast’s face. 

Boom, bitches.

Sadly it doesn’t kill the wolf, just blinds it in one eye. But score one point for the good guys. Marty tells the police what happened, and describes the beast as having one eye. The police scoff at this. The only one-eyed man in town is Reverend Lester Lowe. It can’t be!

Spoiler: it is. 

Marty starts sending him charming little anonymous notes urging the Reverend to kill himself. Or leave town. Or maybe kill himself. The Reverend is confused, he has no idea why someone would send him such horrible notes! He’s got a little bit of the Jekyll/Hyde thing going on. He has no idea he’s actually the beast going around killing everyone. 

Oops he does it again.

But don’t worry, Marty’s got a plan. Christmas time rolls around, and he asks Uncle Al for a shotgun and silver bullets. Uncle Al asks the requisite amount of questions, and then makes his favorite nephew’s Christmas dreams come true. 

The werewolf appears on New Year’s Eve, Marty shoots it, the end. Peace and sanity is restored to Tarker’s Mills.

I think I speak for everyone when I say I hope our current pandemic situation doesn’t last until January. Although, it’s exactly what my food and alcohol hoarding husband has been dreaming about. We might finally find the bottom of our chest freezer, praise the Lord. 

No Dark Tower references, no Wisconsin references; just good old graphic novel pandemonium. But it was a fun, quick read. My eleven year-old has been asking for a Stephen King book, this might be the perfect one for her to start with. 

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 14

Total Dark Tower References: 10

Book Grade: B-

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

Different Seasons: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

The Dead Zone: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

Cycle of the Werewolf: B-

Danse Macabre: B-

The Gunslinger: C+

Pet Sematary: C+

Firestarter: C+

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Christine: D

Next up is The Talisman, one of my all-time favorites. Jack Sawyer is bae. As I type this, I wonder if I’m going to be working next week, and how quickly I’ll be able to read it. 

In the meantime, be kind to one another. Leave resources behind for people who need them more than you. Donate a few jars of peanut butter to the local food pantry. Offer to host a (small) homeschooling co-op with your neighborhood parents. Wash your hands, use sanitizer, and sneeze into your elbow. 

This could be the moment that elevates our level of humanity again. I for one am all in on that movement. Who’s with me?

Long Days and Pleasant Nights,

Rebecca

[altcomics]

THE MOVIE BLACK PANTHER was released in February of this year. The same month, Herman Bell—formerly of the Black Liberation Army, an underground Black Power group composed of members of the Black Panthers—was up for parole after forty-five years in prison. Black Panther grossed $241.9 million in its opening weekend, netting a handsome profit for Walt Disney Studios. Bell’s hearing was delayed and culminated in an unusually long deliberation period, but he was eventually paroled in mid-March. Fifteen other former Black Panthers remain in prison; some have died while doing time, and all have experienced abuse and torture, including solitary confinement and beatings. At the time of writing, New York’s police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, was fiercely contesting the decision on Bell’s case, hoping to have it revoked.

The grotesque spectacle of police and politicians scrambling to deprive a seventy-year-old man of freedom because of their abstract fear of Black violence looks more vivid in the light of the movie’s release. The accidental convergence of the two events shakes up old ghosts, or it would if the air right now weren’t already so thick with them. Black Panther director Ryan Coogler’s first movie, Fruitvale Station (2013), concerned the murder by police of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, and happened to open the same week George Zimmerman heard the news that he would face no legal consequences for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Five years later, a political turn that we can at least partly credit to the organization and concept Black Lives Matter—inaugurated by a popular hashtag shortly after Zimmerman’s predictable lucky break—has opened so much new discursive ground in US political and cultural life that Black Panther felt not only possible but inevitable. Of course, it was not. The movie, rooted in Black history and reaching confidently and unironically for mass-market appeal, is extraordinary. To lift an aphorism from the first lines of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow: “It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station, 2013, Super 16, color, sound, 85 minutes. Second from left: Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan).

Frank B. Wilderson III writes in Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonism (2010) that he is “interested in Black filmmakers of the 1970s . . . not as auteurs, or brilliant individuals, but as cinematic prisms.” Coogler is a great filmmaker, using in Black Panther the same gifts for the kinetic and emotional that gave Creed (2015), his contribution to the “Rocky” franchise, such unexpected depth and swagger. But we will have to follow Wilderson’s example and take him as a prism, especially because the films Wilderson spoke of also coincided with a profound political turn:

I propose that the specter of the Black Liberation Army—and by specter, I mean the zeitgeist rather than the actual historical record of the BLA— provides us with both a point of condensation for thinking Black people on the move and a structure of articulation between the unflinching movement of Blacks, politically, and the unflinching fantasies of Blacks, cinematically.

Cover of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four, no. 52(Marvel, July 1966).

This is because these filmmakers lived at a special time in history: “special because it culminated in an embrace of Black violence which had not been seen before.” The novelty of the BLA, or at least of its spectral presence in the zeitgeist, was its use of violence. The incomparable Black Panther, which is based on a fiction first dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the July 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, is still marked by its origins today, long after a backlash against the Black and communist revolutionary violence of the ’70s left the would-be revolutionaries of today hyper-surveilled, facing highly militarized police forces, and subject to psychological difficulties wrought by the state’s attempts to persecute the revolution by wrecking communities and spirits.

But chance moves the world, as does the stricter machinery of value and fate. The movie’s marketing exploited the title’s ostensible reference to the Black Panthers, but the connection is mostly accidental: Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the political organization in October of the same year the character first appeared in Fantastic Four, borrowing the name from a panther logo used by the Alabama-based Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The ambient availability of the phrase black panther as a symbol for groups of Black people is illustrated by the 761st Tank Battalion, a World War II unit of African American soldiers who fought a “continuous 183 days at the front,” collectively received some three hundred Purple Hearts, and were later described by their general in the following terms: “Individually they were good soldiers, but . . . a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.” They too were nicknamed the Black Panthers. As the writer Derica Shields notes in an upcoming book, black panther is not a species of cat; it is a designation for a black cat of any type. “The melanistic color variant of any big cat species” is how Wikipedia puts it. The word pantheralso means “black cat,” so black panther is a tautology, a black black thing. Blackness pushes the animal out of its category, perhaps even out of the category of the animal. Blackness cleaves—as in joins and splits—the human and the animal. What a magic property!

Black Panther Party poster featuring cofounder Huey P. Newton, 1968. Photo: Blair Stapp/Library of Congress.

I HAVE NOTICED many times in public and private life that people often hesitate for a beat before enunciating the word black, as if the simple syllable were too hard to pronounce, too much to say. As if they wanted to prove Wilderson—who is often accused of being too emo or dramatic in his Afro-pessimism—right. Black Panther comes trailing this too-muchness as a birthright, crowned by a single now-famous line of dialogue: “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.” It’s spoken to the first Black Panther, King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), by the second, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), an American-born challenger to the Wakandan throne, who is the blackest thing in the movie. The line echoes—with a certain amount of noise and distortion imbued by more than forty years of political disappointment—the spectral presence of the BLA in the output of ’70s Black filmmakers. The idea that death is preferable to bondage, and, relatedly,that those held in bondage are in a sense already dead, animates the political violence that Wilderson (following Sylvia Wynter) sees as emerging from the fact that white society positions Black people outside of the Human, in the ontological position of the Slave. Wilderson writes, “The question of political agency began to go something like this: What kind of imaginative labor is required to squash the political capacity of the Human being so that we might catalyze the political capacity of the Black?” Blackness opposes humanity insofar as humanity, as it’s politically constructed today—a partial allocation, easily forgotten at the border or in a wrong neighborhood—opposes life. For Wilderson, Black death-in-life opposes white-capitalist life-as-death, whose poison seeps into the tiniest particles of the world.

On his side, the Black insurrectionist has Nothing—the embodiment of nothing, the nothingness of the world.

The grinding reality of the death cult under which we are living is why people cry at the scene where Wakandan planes bust through the force field separating Wakanda from the rest of the world, revealing the country’s bustling cityscape untouched by the horrors of history. Not me, though; there’s just something in my eye. “This never gets old,” says the new king of Wakanda, as the vista of a world without pain opens up before him.

Ryan Coogler, Black Panther, 2018, 4K video, color, sound, 134 minutes. Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan).

WHAT IS TO be done for the rest of the world, the pained world? The struggle between the two Black Panthers, Killmonger and T’Challa, allegorizes a tension between insurrectionist and reformist politics. The reformer has reason, pragmatism, and a chance of a career—he has the world and worldliness. On his side, the Black insurrectionist has Nothing—the embodiment of nothing, the nothingness of the world. T’Challa seems to halfway recognize the truth in Killmonger, who arrives in the fantastical Black kingdom of Wakanda with the full force of reality. But no sooner has T’Challa regretted murdering his revolutionary shadow side than he is off to the United Nations to announce a Wakandan education and outreach program. In the Marvel Universe, the United Nations works perfectly, exactly as it set out to in 1945, but everything in this world is like that: Killmonger as a Black insurrectionist has at his disposal not only the metaphorical and spiritual material of blackness, but also a weaponizable manifestation of it in the form of the Wakandan metal, vibranium, which he has forcibly repatriated from a British museum. Magic and technology are indivisible. No sooner has a true hero conceived of his quest than its materials spring into his hands. The apoliticality of the superhero movie is in the inevitability of success. The supposed apoliticality of Afro-pessimism, according to its critics, is in the inevitability of failure.

Soldiers from Dog Company of the 761st Tank Battalion check equipment before leaving England for combat in France, 1944.

T’Challa is emphatically not in the position of the dead, but, like those already dead, he is invulnerable to violence. His sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), presents him with one of her inventions, a new outfit for his superheroic activities that absorbs and channels the energy of blows and bullets. Wearing this suit, he is almost completely immune to physical attack. I didn’t think of ’70s Black cinema when I first saw Black Panther, but I did think about the specter of Black political violence. In C. L. R. James’s visionary 1938 history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, he describes early attempts at mass uprising, some of which invoked spiritual assistance. During an attack on Port-au-Prince, the twenty-one-year-old slave leader Hyacinth “ran from rank to rank crying that his talisman would chase death away. He charged at their head, passing unscathed through the bullets and grape-shot.” His followers were predisposed to be brave, and fought “without fear or care” of the bullets fired at them: “If they were killed they would wake again in Africa.”

We give

Black Panther

this intensity of attention not because anyone necessarily sympathizes with its aims, but because it’s

so good

.

In another passage, James describes an extraordinary scene from late in the revolutionary war. A division of the Black army, led by an officer named Capois Death—“so-called on account of his bravery”—attacks one of the failing French army’s few remaining strongholds:

Capois led the assault . . . shouting “Forward, forward!” The French . . . drove off the blacks again and again only to see them return to the attack with undiminished ardor. A bullet knocked over Capois’ horse. Boiling with rage he scrambled up and, making a gesture of contempt with his sword, he continued to advance. “Forward, forward!”

The French, who had fought on so many fields, had never seen fighting like this. From all sides came a storm of shouts. “Bravo! Bravo!” There was a roll of drums. The French ceased fire. A French horseman rode out and advanced to the bridge. He brought a message. . . . “The Captain-General sends his admiring compliments to the officer who has just covered himself with so much glory.” Without a shot fired from the blacks, the horseman turned and rode back to the blockhouse and the battle began again. The struggle had been such a nightmare that by now all in San Domingo were a little mad, both white and black.

Ryan Coogler, Black Panther, 2018, 4K video, color, sound, 134 minutes.

The Haitian Revolution, which took place between 1791 and 1804, was the complicated heart of an era of intense political and social upheaval that inaugurated what we understand as modernity. If the French and American revolutions are more celebrated for what they supposedly tell us about freedom, that’s partly because what they tell us about freedom is more palatable, and partly for the usual reasons: Eurocentrism and plain racism. The image of French troops applauding the bravery of the Black army while prosecuting a war founded on their subhumanity felt consonant with Black Panther, not the movie exactly, but the event. Black panther has, through “the unflinching movement of Blacks, politically,” become a thrilling phrase, while those who moved unflinchingly remain in prison, and the object of their movement—liberation, not of the bourgeois bearers of race like me, but of the ghetto and the slum—feels distant. But all revolutions were nearly inconceivable before they happened.

Kant thought that enthusiasm for the French Revolution among people whom it affected only indirectly was proof of a “moral disposition within the human race.” Does enthusiasm for a fictional Black Panther in a country that jails real ones prove anything? A long time after the beginning of the revolution in 1791, we are all still “a little mad.” In an era of white-supremacist panic, as the police and their allies work to deny Herman Bell his freedom, visions of Black power are capable of moving audiences to wonder.

Page from Le Petit Parisien, December 20, 1908, depicting the Haitian revolution. Illustration: Paul Dufresne.

IN A FAINT ECHO—farce this time, not tragedy—of the war anecdote above, we give Black Panther this intensity of attention not because anyone necessarily sympathizes with its aims, but because it’s so good. The movie is a faultless example of the fantasy blockbuster, from script to shots to costumes and set design. Reeling from my first viewing, I wondered if this was how people felt in 1977 after they first saw Star Wars.

Reduced to its bare bones, the superhero genre usually features an extraordinary individual or small group of extraordinary individuals who are faced with some kind of dilemma. (The dilemma, in which character faces off with fate, is the screenwriter’s primary means of evoking the ambivalences and contradictions of real life; of course, in the movies, as sometimes in life, character often becomes fate.) Circumstances call the extraordinary individual out of retirement or seek him out in obscurity; perhaps, in a weird militaristic fantasy that even the recent mechanization and long-standing misery of war has not ended, he is just so good at fighting that the struggle can’t be won without him. Through guile and force, he triumphs against his enemies and receives love and admiration, though he remains essentially alone.

Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Captain America: Civil War, 2016, 2K video, color, sound, 147 minutes. From left: Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Vision (Paul Bettany), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and War Machine (Don Cheadle).

In the kickoff to this latest phase of Marvel movies, Captain America: Civil War (2016), infighting breaks out between the superheroes when the United Nations demands oversight and control of their activities. In one of many plot twists, a bomb goes off at the UN and kills T’Challa’s father, making T’Challa the new Black Panther. Amid the background of the heroes’ paranoia and aggression, the simplicity of T’Challa’s quest—to apprehend the person responsible for his father’s death—cuts through. The script is self-conscious and thoughtful about its genre: We see superheroes confronted by the mothers of people they killed as they went about killing the bad guys; we hear about cities left in ruins by their heroic actions. The movie’s critique of the nationalism and machismo of the classic superhero tradition is so evident, it’s like watching something collapse into itself.

Following the tradition of undoing tradition, Killmonger’s presence in Black Panther ruptures the superhero conceit and multiplies the meaning of the movie’s title; his intervention produces two Black Panthers in the same movie, making sense of the title’s lack of definite article: Black Panther, not The Black Panther. The camera articulates the disruption to the natural order of things, so that as Killmonger approaches the Panther’s throne, we see him upside-down and rotating upright. Even the movie’s premise is askance from the superhero model of individuated power: The Black Panther is an ancestral title, not a happy accident. Killmonger doesn’t care; he is here, full of revolutionary fervor, to burn the bad world to the ground.

Contemporary reproduction of the United States Army 761st Tank Battalion’s military patch.

If the presence of the Black Panther T’Challa in Civil War renders bankrupt or irrelevant the political strivings of the white superheroes, then the presence of the Black Panther Killmonger in Black Panther is what renders bankrupt or irrelevant the strivings of the Black Panther. Although the Black revolution has been deprived of means, it is kept alive as an image. For what purpose, the future will find out, and in the meantime the present lives by its light.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer based in New York.

[beneaththetangles]

BtT Light Novel Club Chapter 11: True Tenchi Muyo! Volume 3 (Washu)

Welcome, dear readers, to the eleventh meeting of our Beneath the Tangles Light Novel Club. Up for discussion today is what is perhaps the least of the three True Tenchi Muyo! novels, but also the most satisfying in a number of ways. While Jurai and Yosho filled in important gaps that advanced the story of Tenchi Muyo!, Washu feels almost mid-story, a volume that raises more questions than answers while being the first of the books to focus on one of the main girls, and a fan favorite at that—the enigmatic genius, Washu Hakubi.

Framed in a unique way—reminiscent, actually, of the Mihoshi Special—the story begins by reminding us of “Hello Baby!”, the episode where we first got a glimpse into Washu’s sensitive side and learned that her back story was perhaps far fuller than we first imagined, far longer and deeper than any of the other girls’. The way into this tale is through none other than Mihoshi, who begins to regale the Masaki household with a family story that transitions into the main one, not realizing that her family’s account is part of Washu’s also.

Like the others in the series, Washu is a quick and exciting read. It is an absolute thrill to read about Washu’s childhood (or second childhood?) and her early years at the Academy. The story humanizes Washu, who in the original OVAs often flows between an absolutely lovable caricature of a mad scientist and a wise, ethereal being (note: only a very bit of her chousin origin is discussed here); the novel catches her during a time of innocence. In fact, the story really could be described as Washu’s loss of innocence, describing a journey from her years as a caretaker among orphans through education and her greatest loss, the one that still haunts her in the present time, as seen in “Hello Baby!” Covering so many years, the action often moves too fast and doesn’t necessarily feel like one big, coherent piece, though perhaps it wasn’t meant to—Washu continues to expand the world of Tenchi Muyo, which would of course later become larger and even more vast than fans would have imagined.

But enough from me—we want to jump into actual discussion. As we finish this series (the first we’ve completed!), I invite you all to answer the following questions in the comments. Feel free to answer some, all, or none, instead focusing on some other aspect of Washu which you’d like to discuss:

In what ways do you better understand Washu after reading this novel?

Do you see Mihoshi’s relationship with Washu differently after this novel?

Why do you think Washu prefers to stay in the guise of a child after the events involving her family and into the modern day?

Is Washu a more or less compelling character after you’ve read the novel?

Did anything surprise you about Washu’s backstory?

Do you understand Mikamo‘s decision to leave home with Mikumo?

Did Washu make the right decision at the end of the book?

Jeskai Angel, our newest club member, also read along. Having never read the previous installments in the series nor watched the show, it presented a great opportunity to look at Washu as a standalone novel. I asked him some questions from that perspective:

TWWK: Was the novel confusing since you had little context for it, having not read the other novels or watched any of the anime?

Jeskai Angel: I found the novel less confusing than I feared it might be. The very beginning features a bunch characters I’m obviously supposed to know already, but the bulk of the book focuses just on Washu and introduces new elements or characters just fine. There were occasionally other things that an experienced Tenchi fan was expected to know (light hawk wings or whatever???), but it wasn’t a big deal.

TWWK: All the light novels are surprisingly accessible, contributing greatly to the larger canon and containing plenty of fan service (the big connection you wouldn’t know, and that which set the Tenchi community on fire when it first was published decades ago now, was Mihoshi’s relationship to Washu), but working as stand-alone works. I’m glad it worked that way for you!

Jeskai Angel: I assume the big revelation that Mihoshi’s is Washu’s great granddaughter? Interesting.

TWWK: Yes! Though an astute viewer might surmise that Mihoshi had a special relationship with Washu, it was still incredible to find out that they’re related, and comical as well, since they’re on quite opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum. But onto the content of the novel! What are your general impressions?

Jeskai Angel: I think I most appreciated the humor. There was a hilarious line about cooking potatoes in a munitions factory early on, more humor as the story went on (Washu going faster and faster every time she had to run anywhere). I found the book’s overall pacing a bit odd. Sometimes you’d get a super detailed fight scene, for example, then other times the narrative skips months or years into the future with hardly any summary. It wasn’t bad, just a bit perplexing. The book also tried to cover an unusually long span of time (at least compared to other light novels I’ve read that take place over days or months at the most), which I suspect accounts for some of the peculiarities. The book also lacked resolution — specifically, it made a big deal of Washu’s mysterious origin, then dropped the subject and never came back to it. I’m sure her true nature has been explained in some other element of Tenchi media, but in the context of this book it felt weird.

TWWK: Those are good points. Vol. 3 certainly rushes through a long period of time, and is especially speedy toward the end. The mysteries about Washu, too, feel strange within a self-contained book. I guess it would be a surprise to tell you that the mysterious jewels are connected to Washu’s actual being—she is one of the three chousin, goddesses who created the universe of Tenchi Muyo. And coming back to her, did you find Washu’s story to be compelling?

Jeskai Angel: Compelling is such a squishy word, but yeah, I’d say the story was adequately compelling (enough that I wanted to read to the end, at least). The author was successful at portraying Washu as smart without making every other character a buffoon, which not all books with would-be clever protagonists pull off. And Washu turned out to be a really noble person (at least as far as this story is concerned?): her tireless efforts to see son again, plus her love great enough to let him go because she believed that was in his best interest, is quite impressive.

TWWK: Speaking of Washu’s intelligence, I wanted to get your take on this as someone also in this world—what did you think of how life was presented at the Academy versus your own experience in academia?

Jeskai Angel: In real life, grad school isn’t nearly as…hmm…zany as Washu’s experience. Also, I received some really generous financial aid, but the Juraians (sp?) took the idea of the graduate fellowship to pretty crazy extremes. I just wish real-life history PHDs were valued as highly as Juraian philosophy students. LOL. The emphasis on independent study is definitely true to life, however. That’s how writing a dissertation is, but even before that, college involves a lot of unstructured time that requires self-discipline to use.

TWWK: Interesting, though I imagine your FAFSA package didn’t provide a cavernous laboratory or office spaces, or a hundred maids and butlers!

Jeskai Angel: Yeah, my fellowships let me afford a small apartment, not a mansion or astronomical observatory.

TWWK: Alright, one more question and then I’ll give you the chance to talk about anything else you’d like. If this was just a one-volume work, what would you title it?

Jeskai Angel: Probably just “Washu.” Or maybe “Washu’s Love”? Nice ambiguous title with multiple meanings.

As for other thoughts inspired by the book… Can I just take a moment to rant about what a scummy coward Washu’s erstwhile husband was? Let me get this straight: you marry a woman, but are too cowardly to tell her your real name. You marry this woman, but instead leaving father and mother to cling to her, you still prioritize dear old dad’s political situation ahead of your wife. You marry this woman and have a kid with her, but instead of telling her you’re abandoning her and why, you just disappear with your son and never communicate your wife / your son’s mother ever again. And then when you this woman has come to visit, you hide so you won’t have to face her. Am I missing something? Is this guy not scum? He seems as much a jerk as Washu seems a noble, loving hero. I feel sorry for both this guy’s wives.

On a totally different note, the idea of wooden space ships makes no sense but sounds super cool. The casual reference to self-mutilating surgery as if it’s normal and reasonable (i.e. gender “reassignment”) was a little disturbing. The equally cavalier mention of porn was likewise problematic. It reflects the acceptance of porn as normal that I’ve noticed in various anime. If pornography is really as normal as Japanese media seem to imply, that says their society has serious trouble. Not that America has anything to boast of…

—

And that’s it for us this time around! We highly encourage you to pick up the volume if you haven’t yet, and Jurai and Yosho as well, which I would describe as better written works and nearly as compelling. And stay tuned next week, as we announce our twelfth (!) selection for the BtT Light Novel Club!

Featured illustration by スギシン (reprinted w/permission)

[podcastcoach]

15 Things Podcasters Can Learn from Joel Osteen

I was in Houston for the Spark Christian Podcast Conference where I was speaking. It was a great event for the first time out of the gate and I met some really cool people. My buddy Sunny from the IPN asked me if I wanted to go see Joel Osteen who runs the largest church in America and is also an author and someone I refer to as "Happy Jesus Man." Jole is incredibly successful (his church is the building where the Houston Rockets professional basketball team played. It's a stadium that holds 16,800 people).  I have listened to Joel on and off over the years. I went to feed my spiritually, but I was also there to observe and look for the clues of his success. You don't get this big without doing something right.

Time Codes

01:08 Spark Christian Podcast Conference Review

02:38 What Podcasters Can Learn from Joel Osteen

30:52 How did you get over your self Doubt?

41:10 Free Webinar on Equipment

42:19 Have you surveyed your audience?

Joel Started As A Geek

Joel was the technical person in his church working with his father. He was the lighting tech and worked for his Dad.

Joel Did Something Different

There is a style of preaching in the church known as "Hellfire and brimstone." This is where you explain to your audience that if you don't accept Jesus you are going to Hell where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Instead of peaching about the horrors of Hell, Joel went to the bible and found all sorts of scriptures that point out how God wants you to prosper. Some have deemed this the prosperity Gospel, and because it's different than what people previously did, this has its critics. This has not swayed Joel from his message. He is covering the bible the way he wants to.

He Makes it Easy for First Time Visitors

Sunny and I had walked into what appeared to be a side door, and weren't exactly sure where to go. It was easy to identify who the staff was and we just walked up and said, "Hi this is our first time here." The worker knew exactly what to do and before I could blink I was given to a person who was giving me a tour of the building and explaining that there was a book store and if I wanted to buy anything Joel would sign it at the end of the night. He then escorted us to fourth-row center stage seats. I felt lucky. I felt special. The sanctuary was beautiful. They had cool lights in the ceiling and an amazing backdrop behind the band, and a choir made of people of every shape, size, and color.

He Honored The Heritage of the Church and What They Believed in

He played clips of his father who started the church and acknowledged those who came before him. Oh, I'm sorry this isn't for you...

It's for the academy of podcasters. Let's move on.

It Was a Well Oiled Machine

There were no lags in the presentation. You didn't see the praise band ask, "He should we move on to the missing thing" and then someone says "Yeah, let's do the missing thing. Let's roll the mission intro." When the song was over, the mission people came out, the spoke about a conference that had just wrapped up. They introduced the video about how they were helping with Ebola in Africa and the video clip came on. Everyone knows what was next.

They Through in a Curve Ball

Their band did two praise songs (very upbeat - very easy to sing along) that engaged the audience. Then one of the soloists on the stage snuck into the audience at the end of the song. She then launched into an old Christian classic "Nothing but the blood" from the back of the auditorium so the people in the back now get the same view as those in the front. Most music performers pull this trick in concerts. They went back to singing more songs from the front of the stage.

Pacing and Anticipation

This is a great tip for those narrative style storytellers. They kept the service moving with the music, but about five songs into their performance their backdrop which looked like the galaxy with millions of stars started to reveal the word JESUS in big bright letters as the band hit a crescendo. The place erupts into applause, the band plays louder, hands are raised into the air and as the final notes of the song fade out Joel Osteen takes the stage and opens his message with prayer.

Everybody Knows and Does Their Part

The band multiple guitar players, keyboardists, and hundreds of backup singers, they all worked together to deliver the song in the best way that connects with the audience. The security for Joel was extensive. They were very good and kept him safe while allowing people to meet and greet him after the service. If you have a show with a host and a co-host someone is driving the show and someone is color commentary.

Know Your Point and Back It Up

Joel's message could be boiled down to this. "When you're in a bad situation you should still help others who are having problems." All of these scripture references helped illustrate his point. This is similar to the book I recommend Secrets of Dynamic Communications: Prepare with Focus, Deliver with Clarity, Speak with Power by Ken Davis.

Explain Things with a Personal Story

After sharing some examples from the bible, Joel explained a story about hos his Dad was trying to raise money for a new auditorium but heard about a smaller Spanish church had run out of money for their church and this "Half a church" was just sitting there gathering dust. Even though Joel's Dad needed the money for his project he gave it to the smaller church. Anytime you can make your point with a personal story, I recommend you do it. This gives your audience a chance to get to know you.

Joel Was Vulnerable

At the end of the story about Joel's father, Joel explained how he is still benefiting by the step his father took. In the middle of the sentence, he paused, tried to say the sentence again, and again he had to stop. His emotions were deep in his thought. He put his hands over his eyes and turned his back to the audience. He said, "I'm sorry yall, I cry to easy, and I cry too much. Nobody booed. Nobody shouted, "HOW UNPROFESSIONAL" and instead they cheered him on. He turned back around with his red eyes, and grabbed a tissue and wiped his eyes. I can't find another way to explain it besides saying this was a "real" moment, and instantly felt more connected with him.

Later in the service that I watched on Sunday (where he did the same service), he started one line and said, "Did I say that right? I'm going to say it again."

Joel Knows His Why and It Aligns with his Call To Action

Joel's goal is to get you to know Jesus and accept him. At the end of the service, he has a call to action to accept Jesus.

He Promotes Subscriptions and Makes it Easy

During the service and at the end, they put a link to their website on a giant screen with mentions of their podcast.

Joel is a Collaborator

I see on his website he is doing a service with Kanye West.

He SERVED His Audience

At the end of the night, he went through hundreds of people meeting them, signing books (or not) and treating each and every person like they were his favorite person in the whole world. He had his crew borrow their phone and snap pictures so they could share it on social media. So they could easily share what a great time they had a Lakewood church. By the time he had made it to me, there was talk he might shut down the line as it was long. He made it through. He was visibly tired. He had just performed a service and was probably feeling the dip as the adrenaline of preaching in front of thousands of people had left his body, but instead of instructing his team to send us home he waved us in knowing it would just add another 30 minutes or so to his evening. Whenever you have a chance to meet your audience to do it and say thank you.

How Did You Get Over Self- Doubt To Start Your Podcast?

12:56

Dan Kreiness of the Leader of Learning podcast uses himself as a target audience member. If it holds his attention, it probably holds someone else's attention as well. 

John DeRosa of the Classical Theism podcast likes the idea of having guests. If people didn't want to listen to you (they do) they might listen to your guests. 

Paul Cheall from Fighting through World War II change the question from nobody would listen to Would they? His downloads are getting a few downloads a day (it features memoirs from his Father). 

Holland Webb grom The Afterword podcasts didn't care about others opinions. They did it to have fun talking to each other and if other people want to listen - fine. 

Thomas from Novel Marketing had my favorite answer, "When you love your audience more than you care about your own pride you will take steps to publish your show."

Free Webinar: The Right Podcast Gear

Joing the free webinar on 2/26 at 7 PM to get all of your questions about gear answered. 

see http://www.schoolofpodcasting.com/webinar

Question of the Month for March 2020

42:25

If you surveyed your audience, what was the biggest thing you learned? If you didn't survey your audience (or a focus group) why not?

Answer at www.schoolofpodcasting.com/question

  Check out this episode!

[cris-en-alicante]

The Insecurity Of History - Paul Virilio

To live every instant as though it were the last – that is the paradox of futurism, of a futurism of the instant that has no future. We might note that it also spells the decline in the propaganda of an endless Progress that, only yesterday, still fueled the history of past centuries. That history is now so wired, so hysterical, that it even claims to foresee actions, the reality of events that have not yet occurred. You’d think that, tomorrow, we’ll be able to construct an actual “History of the Future” – thanks to long-term forecasting. Such micro-narratives would impose themselves on the millennium of the avowed facts, as if the perspective of the real time of instantaneity suddenly annulled all durability. For, thanks to certain software programs and the modeling they allow, the mythology of futurism is even gearing up to renew the myths of our origins and of antiquity.

A recent anecdote might serve to illustrate this “phase transition” in History: at the beginning of the Year 2010, Bernard Accoyer, then president of France’s Assemblée Nationale, protested against the excessive use, by the French government, of a speeded-up process that limits both parliamentary chambers’ examination of proposed new laws to a single reading.

“We can’t go on working this way – not if we want decent laws and decent democratic debate,” Accoyer declared, adding that he would not hesitate, if the need arose, to resort to the possibility of opposing the emergency process in question by siding with his opposite number in the Senate, Gérard Larcher. “A good law,” Accoyer concluded, “requires an incompressible period of time for reflection.”1

The current legislative frenzy actually introduces the inertia of real time, a paradoxical inertia that results from the sudden acceleration of common reality.

In these very early years of the third millennium, the polar inertia produced by the instantaneity of interactive CONNECTIONS (LIENS) is actually poised to supplant the fixed-property inertia of PLACES (LIEUX) – including the most representative places of legislation and the law. The whole of historicity will then find itself shattered by this “distortion of competition” between the past and the future that is so detrimental to the present, with the NANOTECHNOLOGIES of the infinitely short term already taking the place of the traditional chronologies of the medium and long term of past days, years, and centuries.

All of this undermines the sovereignty of History – and the sovereignty of all anteriority, with it. So, following the age of territorial insecurity comes the age of the insecurity of History and its tripartite division, PAST – PRESENT – FUTURE.2

·   ·   ·

This reversal of values, we might note, has already affected space. At the close of the last century, geopolitical strategists were, in fact, turning reality inside out like a glove and asserting that, forever after, the exterior was to prevail over the interior. Today, it is in the order of time that this turnaround is being accomplished, as posterity is primed to dominate all anteriority. Hence the sudden insecurity of History that now complements and completes the insecurity of a territorial sovereignty now threatened on all sides – from above, by its expansion, and from below, by its regional fragmentation. Hence the “repeat delocalization” we are currently witnessing under the pretext of globalization, along with the impact of a process of externalization – outsourcing – that is increasingly untethered to any practical reality.

In any case, the current debates between historians over MEMORIAL LAWS, codified bills dedicated to the memory of specific victims of historic crimes, clearly point to the damage done by “progress” regarding the notion of historical anteriority and its great narratives, which are in the process of disappearing. What is rising to the fore in their stead is what certain people are already calling the “great national novel.”

So, what we are now seeing, after the topographic and geometric effraction of distances, is the anachronistic effraction of the time intervals required for effective knowledge as well as for memory of the facts. FRACTALIZATION of physical expanse is coupled with fractalization of durations relative to the CONTINUUM of a general History that’s in the process of being instantaneously obliterated.

Let’s hear what Winston Churchill had to say on the subject, when, on May 13, 1940, he addressed the House of Commons. If a battle between past and present is allowed to break out, Churchill said, there will be “no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.”3 In other words, we’ll lose the future.

We know what came next: Great Britain as a space did not suffer the insult of occupation, but only because the British leaders avoided a chronopolitical battle over the TEMPO of the Battle of Britain.

That was an odd lesson in history; but it was also a lesson in geopolitics, in which the perspective of the CHRONIC temporality of events was undefeated by the prospect of the panicky instantaneity behind a “futurism” whose fascist origins were all too obvious, starting with Marinetti’s tracts celebrating the Great War as “the world’s hygiene.” The cult of the acceleration of history ended appropriately enough for the futurists in the Blitz, that lightning war of the failed invasion of the sky as well as of the British Isles.

As for us, if in the near future we let some Museum of the History of France settle permanently, whether in Paris or somewhere else, we will very swiftly find ourselves occupied – and extremely preoccupied. . . . Maybe we are already?

·   ·   ·

HERE is no more. Everything is NOW, and the HIC ET NUNC of days gone by is about to disappear completely from the horizon of history. In his recent vade mecum, French public- intellectual, economist, banker, and top-tier consultant Jacques Attali recommends “living every moment to the hilt as though it was the last.” Attali even goes as far as declaring, “Since time is the only really rare commodity, it is now the only one worth being saved.” That is why, he reckons, it is urgent “to focus on every instant.”4

A symbol of a fatal inertia, this verbatim account illustrates perfectly the inexorable nature of this delirious futurism that deconstructs all chronology and, with it, the melody line of history as well as the great narrative of our common memory. This is what really lies behind France’s recent spate of memorial laws and the growing threat to territorial identity of a nationality that is no more self-evident, in the end, than the geopolitical sovereignty of the legitimate national state. And this, in a globalized world constantly traversed by internal exiles in a closed-circuit exodus of just-in-time flows of people that some are already referring to as the migratory offensive of sustainable mobility in the 21st century – TRACEABILITY now being imposed on each and every one of us. This is why “magnetic portals” have been installed in ports and airports, along with “smart corridors” for passenger identification that are endowed with full-body scanners to strip search all those bodies in endless transit. We all know that where there’s a wall there has to be a door; but the only real difference between this wall and the old fortified wall that surrounded a city is the virtual nature of the contemporary enclosure of postmodern times, as well as the clinical radiography deployed at the main entrances of our current borders.

This may help us to understand the reason behind the Sarkozy government’s plan for a future Museum of the History of France, which would be a sort of health clinic for times past completing the one for times present, memory of which fades so quickly now, with a real danger of amnesia due to the fragile supports for the dead memories of our computers.

Then again, let’s not forget that the eternal present of Einsteinian relativity is not the same as the present that ruled the day, when light was still distinct from darkness. It is the real instant, confirming what Dietrich Bonhoeffer claimed last century: “Technology has declared war on the day.”

Contemporary with the Blitz, that verdict beautifully defines the probable translation of the “illuminism” of the Ancients’ sun worship into the “instantaneism” of the techno-worship of the postmodern people we’ve all become.

We’d actually do better to swiftly abandon the grand illusion of a future Museum of History and substitute, in its stead, a Ministry of the Times, a great ministry of the relativity of both the weather (le temps qu’il fait) and of passing time (le temps qui passe), time now passing so quickly. AEROPOLITICS would then cleverly complete the CHRONOPOLITICS of the time behind the GEOPOLITICAL interactivity of our real-time communications.

Thanks to such administration of duration and of the time needed (le temps qu’il faut) to act conscientiously and not just interact with telecommunication tools, the ecology of the weather (le temps qu’il fait) would take on a “natural” intelligence that’s currently in the process of being discriminated against, as though it were outclassed by the feats of the “artificial” intelligence of computer programs and handy software that can do anything, and soon, undo anything . . .

Such a great ministry of Times Management would manage the vital rhythms of the weather and not just the environment; it would be a ministry of Space Management, overseeing a space that is now exhausted not only in its biodiversity but also in its chrono-diversity, with seasonal shifts in climate being erased; as well as in its geo-diversity, with the differences in and extent of country landscapes being similarly erased. For the pollution of time distances now completes the pollution of substances, water, air, fauna, and flora; and the current domination of the real time of exchanges over the real space of the continents ends, as we see, in inertia. More precisely, it ends in the “moment of inertia” of the interactive CONNECTION (LIEN), an instant inertia that will shortly take over from the “fixed-property inertia” of PLACES (LIEUX) in a sedentariness that, all the same, goes back all the way to ancient times.

In the face of this astronomical shattering of our emploi du temps, our daily regimen, the shattering of a continuum that’s about to go from being postmodern to become “post-historic,” we can legitimately ask ourselves about the INTEMPORARY amnesia of technically oriented civilization. The proposed ministry of the relativity that is restricted to our incredibly cramped planet would, in fact, open up a new avenue for hope, the hope of allowing for the kairos, the right moment for action and not just interactive reaction – that future “ghetto of CONNECTION” in a substanceless addiction that will soon supplant the “ghetto of PLACE” of age-old sedentariness on a telluric planet that’s decidedly too small for technical progress, just as it is too small for the profits of a capitalism unleashed by the systemic crash of the NANOTECHNOLOGIES of instantaneity.

It all ends, ultimately, in the “great lockdown” of History, the unanticipated renaissance of a new form of sun worship, one requiring sacrifices that are not only human (sociological) but rural (ecological). In other words, it ends in the inevitable revival of the illuminism of light through the illuminism behind the instantaneism of light’s limit speed. That is the new absolute of a god who clearly doesn’t play dice, but happily dons the ridiculous castoffs of the “Sun King” – or of Jupiter, god of the sky and of light, but also of thunder and lightning; divinity of this truly stunning, and not just explosive, instantaneity of a demandingly secular age. An age in which mono-atheism outpaces the nihilism behind the death of the gods, with the renaissance, the new age, of a late form of sun worship in which the speed of electromagnetic waves lights up, through its radiation much more than its rays, the radiant future of progressivism. This triumph of mono-atheism is particularly marked by the construction in Geneva of a circular (subterranean) cathedral, which is actually a 27-kilometer racetrack, destined to discover, at the end of the race, “God’s particle,” the HADRON – at the risk of ending in the obscurantism of a “black hole.” Such an accident in knowledge would no doubt put an end to the demand for experimental physics and thereby the exact sciences, promoting instead the eternal return of the magical thinking of the Pythagoreans of the digital and other programmers of handy software that can do anything.

·   ·   ·

So, it’s all too easy to see that, with the latest electronic illuminism, transhuman societies of the animal species are metamorphosing into hybrids of the plant species as they in turn become HELIOTROPICAL and photosensitive, “object-oriented” through the framing of point of view, and captured by the interface-to-face confrontation of the multiple screens of an environment that’s suddenly gone interactive.

We might now have a better sense of the havoc wreaked by progress in a KINEMATIC energy of instantaneous transmission, which has come to complete the KINETIC energy involved in the transport of bodies in the era of the industrial revolution that preceded the very recent information revolution produced by telecommunications. The kinematic energy involved in being carried away in the age of interactive synchronization rounds off the “reality effects” produced by the kinetic energy involved in the physical movement of individuals, at high speed.

“Just-in-time-zero-stock”: that slogan of large-scale commercial distribution today beautifully describes the mutation in the initial form of inertia, that of fixed-property settlement, into a final inertia, that of the instant or, more precisely, the “moment of inertia” in the interactivity that now defines our relationship with the world. A world globalized by world time, thanks to the restrained relativity of (instantaneous) exchanges. And this relativity leads not only to Einsteinian restriction, but to the ecosystemic reduction of the time distances of the star that carries us and supports us (with greater and greater difficulty), the original ark, EARTH, which the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl told us couldn’t move, since speed is not a “phenomenon” but the relationship between phenomena. For the temporal compression of interactivity is equivalent to the telluric contraction of the planet of living beings: this incredibly “Down-to-Earth” star of the QUICK, the live (vif), where the acceleration of the QUICK, the swift (vite), in the VOID (vide), has now become the primary issue for an ecology that is political – not transpolitical, as those pure disciples of the cult of the speed of light in the vacuum (vide) of deep space, the illuminists of the Last Day, would like to have us believe.

In the end, the major issue for the third millennium is indeed the issue of the regime of periodicity in an “aeropolitics of time” that would not, all the same, negate the geopolitics of the original settling of the EARTH and the CITY, that has turned into a WORLD-CITY, THE ORIGINAL ARK OF TOMORROW. Here, a metaphor springs to mind – of ocean navigation, with the invention of, first, the mechanical clock and, then, the onboard chronometer.

If the sky is indeed a monumental clock, that doesn’t make it easy to decipher, despite the compass and the sextant and ASTROLABE. For if we can calculate latitude by observing the height of stars above the horizon, longitude, on the other hand, can’t be verified except by considering the time difference between two different points of the globe. That requires the use of the chronometer, whereas the “wheelhouse hourglass,” very like a speedometer, merely showed a ship’s speed, with the aid of a log, that invisible lifeline lying submerged at the end of a piece of string, graduated in knots.5

Surely we can’t fail to see the enormous time difference that exists, today, between our at once untimely and interactive practices – practices involved in supersonic transport and instantaneous transmission – and our daily life, now so exhausted, so deprived of the intervals of time needed for reflection and responsible action. This is to say nothing of the “casino economy,” that infernal machine that is impossible to stop before a SYSTEMIC CRASH, the shipwreck of the original Ark, occurs, leading, this time, to a chaos we can well imagine. . . . A Chronic UTOPIA, or a topical UCHRONIA, as some people might call the future birth of a great Ministry of the Times or, more precisely, of the weather (le temps qu’il fait) and the time needed (le temps qu’il faut) here below, in the depths of a foreclosed world. A world that would, in the end, deserve this AEROPOLITICS of the periodicity of what is vital for chronophage societies, keen to crash, tomorrow, into the CIRCULAR time barrier at the end of the tunnel of LINEAR historicity. CERN’s “Great Hadron Collider” in Geneva has become the perfect symbol of a postmodern return of illuminism, the illuminism of the cult of light speed for a history operating in a different time zone to all common reality.

So, if we can just hang on a little while longer, the known world of our memory might well fade from the control screens of History and disappear, seemingly inadvertantly.

[reconditionedenginespeciali-blog]

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It is as at home in suburbia as in the Serengeti and has the benefit over most of its rivals that you would be able to order it with seven seats. Plus this is the only compact household-sized quality 4x4 that's actually rugged sufficient for weekends and holidays off the crushed observe. rover v8 engine for sale In truth, Land Rover has taken the possibility to ensure that remains the case by giving the inside a detail makeover. There are actually two gloveboxes that can swallow six litres' value of clobber, and there's extra space within the more robustly finished centre console now that the park brake is electronic. rover v8 engine for sale The air-con is quieter and has extra retailers, repositioning the passenger and facet airbags has improved their effectiveness, you get active head restraints, the door trims have been redesigned and cabin lighting is upgraded. rover v8 engine for sale Mechanicals - though the Ninety is being phased out completely, the One Ten stays very a lot part of the MoD fleet. That means that if a One Ten is being disposed of, there is probably a purpose for it. Ideally you have to establish that motive before you buy. The criteria for disposing of a vehicle should not publicly accessible, but as I understand it each car has a lifetime repair funds, and as soon as that's used up, even a fairly minor fault will trigger the vehicle to be sent for disposal. rover v8 engine for sale Faults I have seen just lately on direct ex-service vehicles: failed crankshaft oil seal (twice), blown exhaust manifold gasket / leaking entrance shocks, failed A frame ball joint / poor cold starting, dragging clutch. Chassis / bulkhead rot will also be a cause for disposal. So even when the car seems to start, run and drive OKAY, there is a good chance that there can be one thing wrong with it. It might be minor, or main. Driving was easy, very little body roll and it turned into corners very simply. The turbodiesel V6 carried out well contemplating the load it has to tug around, even if it was a bit sluggish on acceleration. Off street it was as you would anticipate - peerless. Having a DSG gearbox in my Golf, I was capable of evaluate it in opposition to the Sport, which was practically as smooth as my VW with no vital signal of adjusting gear. rover v8 engine for sale Please word, there's a dent within the driver's side rear quarter and along the driving force's door however there's completely no paint damage and it is a straightforward repair by a dent specialist however would not trigger any trouble with rust, and many others... if left as it is. Apart from that, this automobile actually is only a beautiful instance of a really cheap to run automobile and I'm sure it gives you many extra years of bother free motoring. rover v8 engine for sale A compact integral multi-hyperlink rear axle debuts for quite a few advantages. These include distinctive on-road agility, class-leading wheel travel and axle articulation - at 340mm, as much as 60mm greater than competitors - and very excessive ranges of composure in on- or off-highway environments. The brand new rear axle also reduces street noise entering the cabin and, as a result of the suspension turrets make only a minimal intrusion into the luggage area, allow row-two seating to slip and recline previous the turrets for maximum leg-room. Similarly, the all-new multi-hyperlink rear axle is vital in delivering 5+2 seating versatility and generous baggage area in a compact footprint. rover v8 engine for sale Back at the flip of the Century, a company known as Grand Western Ideas was marketing a 'cabriolet-style' mushy prime they referred to as the 'Trekker 90'. My truck was converted & fitted with Recaro seats (from a Vauxhall Calibra!), including two particular person forward-going through ones in the rear. rover v8 engine for sale There have been a couple of other conversions produced by the company before they went out of business however mine was unique even among these; in its seating configuration, being fitted with a diesel & being painted an actual Land Rover colour (Atlantis Blue metallic, the colour used on the 50th Anniversary particular edition Defender 90s)!\ In 1997, the last 12 months that Defender ninety's were made obtainable within the US, Land Rover created 300 Particular Version Station Wagons. Referred to as the Restricted Edition (LE) these Land Rover Defender ninety's were painted with a novel one 12 months coloration generally known as Willow Inexperienced with a contrasting white accented roof; they have been additionally fitted with body protection in the form of 5 giant diamond plated sheets and an external security cage with a full roof rack. The 1997 Land Rover Defender 90 LE also came with the next options as customary tools: Air con, rear ladder, rear step, twin tube operating boards with diamond plate trim, entrance A bar and a limited version placard which was affixed to the rear of the automotive that denoted its construct quantity out of 300. Necessary Notes: Reconditioned engines, as per the picture Do Not include manifolds or some other ancillaries, you will want to use the objects from your present engine such because the manifolds, turbo, gas rail, ring gear (flywheel), gearbox etc although we are going to provide you with new manifold gaskets to use when putting in your engine. Reconditioned engines are equipped DRY without oil or water, they may include a brand new oil filter however will want filling with 10w40 oil. Additionally, you will most certainly want some extra anti-freeze to refill the water system. rover v8 engine for sale Range Rover Reconditioned Engines is a trading/fashion of National Engines Range Rover Reconditioned Engines cannot accept any legal responsibility for errors or omissions or for loss or injury arising from accessing this website or using the content material/ data contained inside the website. rover v8 engine for sale Any reliance you place on such information is subsequently strictly at your own danger. Photos are used for illustration purposes only and are copyright to Range Rover Reconditioned Engines or their authentic owners respectively. rover v8 engine for sale For all these aircraft the actual take off and landing distance will range with situations, and with the burden of the loaded aircraft. So absolutely loaded, heavier planes, will require extra distance to take off. That's one of the the explanation why your operator will ask you ways many individuals are travelling, and how a lot baggage they are bringing. This helps to gauge the correct plane for the mission, together with which aircraft can access the airports you want to attain.\n\nWith Project-Landrover you get a whole range of garage providers that are perfectly tailor-made to Land Rover and Range-Rover homeowners in search of a professionally qualified various to the upper priced Land Rover major dealers. We provide full servicing together with cam belts, fault diagnosis, mechanical repairs, electrical faults, air-conditioning, MOTs and extra. rover v8 engine for sale This is a version of the tried and true 474/400 combo we pioneered again within the eighty's. Back then we would offset grind cranks to a three.9 stroke with a 2.200 rod journal. We would then use a 6.535 long GM model rod and those kits labored AWESOME! At this time we simply have the cranks made new out of 4340 heat handled metal and use the same, but slightly longer 6.700 lengthy rod. This mix is good for somebody on the lookout for a little bit more out of their 383. Stroker kits professionally installed into a Muscle Motors prepared block are $4899. rover v8 engine for sale Circumstances: exited freeway made a turn noticed a lightweight at an intersection turning yellow sped up a bit to make it, felt like i hit fuel minimize (ie nearly any toyota turbo engine when overboosting) numerous lights on the sprint car died, pulled over. seemed at the engine, i noticed no rods protruding or any leaking fluids, began her right up and bought a definite rod knock plus check engine mild. bought the automotive towed back house will check in with dealership within the morning. car was properly broken in per subaru handbook suggestion. the one factor i can think of was that i bought the automobile model new from subaru but it had eighty miles on it, so some subaru techs and test drivers prolly drove the out of it. rover v8 engine for sale The TDV6 diesel engine is a 2.7 litre turbocharged V6 producing 140kW of escaping energy and 440Nm of torque. The Sport's acceleration from stationary is disappointing with a prolonged 0-100km sprint of 12 seconds, not superb for pursuit situations. Nevertheless, as soon as the Range Rover is on top of things it has solid mid-Range torque and with a whopping 2450kg kerb weight only the bravest police automobile would dare get in its means. Thrifty economy figures of 10.2 L/100km combined mean long distances between stops are potential. The Sport is far extra snug and succesful at motorway cruising speeds than metropolis driving, making it perfect for getting out of city. rover v8 engine for sale Land Rovers do many things, however one factor all of them do really well is to go anywhere the driver's level. Most of these totally succesful SUVs include locking differentials all around; hill start and descent assist applied sciences, great water-wading capacity and actually excessive floor clearance. rover v8 engine for sale Most vehicles are extraordinarily dependable, providing the type of efficiency expected from a well-constructed off roader. Range Rover has additionally launched new applied sciences with its automobile range. Some of these innovations contains the Predictive Infotainment Display, which predicts which button the driver will press, the Mind Sense feature, which monitors the focus of the motive force by sensors attached to the steering wheel, and a Mid-air Torch, as well as the Wellness Seat that analyses the motive force's respiration and heart price. Click to Post

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rover v8 engine for sale | High quality Reconditioned Or Used Land Rover Engine For Sale

Excessive High quality Reconditioned Or Used Land Rover Engine For Sale

  rover v8 engine for sale | High quality Reconditioned Or Used Land Rover Engine For Sale Land rover Defender 200tdi Engine back Plate with over the previous year we've got rebuilt the entrance axel, and fitted new break discs and calipers (see picture). Most importantly, do you actually need a new engine? Or is it a case of, say, changing the turbo charger on the present one? Then why did the engine fail within the first place? If it is a cooling system downside for instance, and you do not kind that out earlier than becoming a brand new engine, the replacement will probably go the identical method because the old one. rover v8 engine for sale Of more interest to UK patrons is the opposite new motor although, the three.0-diesel underneath the bonnet of my automotive, which delivers 240bhp and an enormous 442lb ft of torque. It chops four entire seconds from the 0-60mph time of the anaemic 187bhp/325lb ft 2.7 V6 it effectively replaces, and is little slower than the TDV8 (which will get a power enhance quickly to reclaim its advantage) rover v8 engine for sale

Supple, long-journey suspension is attached to extremely stiff remoted subframes, with massive-diameter gas damper struts on the front and all-new advanced multi-link suspension on the rear for a mixture of agility, refinement and composure. Body roll is effectively contained, and physique management remains distinctive over even the harshest floor. A excessive degree of suspension compliance ensures the tyres' contact patches remain in contact with even very tough street surfaces, rising driver confidence and security. rover v8 engine for sale In the compact 4-wheel drive sector, the Japanese used to have all of it their very own manner. Until Land Rover entered the fray with the Freelander, a automobile which went straight to prime of its class. Now we have now its successor, the Discovery Sport, a automotive which should reassert the model's authority on this market Sadly, I do not want the 4 wheel drive functionality of a Discovery Sport for the varsity run but who cares? It is as at home in suburbia as in the Serengeti and has the benefit over most of its rivals that you would be able to order it with seven seats. Plus this is the only compact household-sized quality 4x4 that's actually rugged sufficient for weekends and holidays off the crushed observe. rover v8 engine for sale In truth, Land Rover has taken the possibility to ensure that remains the case by giving the inside a detail makeover. There are actually two gloveboxes that can swallow six litres' value of clobber, and there's extra space within the more robustly finished centre console now that the park brake is electronic. rover v8 engine for sale The air-con is quieter and has extra retailers, repositioning the passenger and facet airbags has improved their effectiveness, you get active head restraints, the door trims have been redesigned and cabin lighting is upgraded. rover v8 engine for sale Mechanicals - though the Ninety is being phased out completely, the One Ten stays very a lot part of the MoD fleet. That means that if a One Ten is being disposed of, there is probably a purpose for it. Ideally you have to establish that motive before you buy. The criteria for disposing of a vehicle should not publicly accessible, but as I understand it each car has a lifetime repair funds, and as soon as that's used up, even a fairly minor fault will trigger the vehicle to be sent for disposal. rover v8 engine for sale Faults I have seen just lately on direct ex-service vehicles: failed crankshaft oil seal (twice), blown exhaust manifold gasket / leaking entrance shocks, failed A frame ball joint / poor cold starting, dragging clutch. Chassis / bulkhead rot will also be a cause for disposal. So even when the car seems to start, run and drive OKAY, there is a good chance that there can be one thing wrong with it. It might be minor, or main. Driving was easy, very little body roll and it turned into corners very simply. The turbodiesel V6 carried out well contemplating the load it has to tug around, even if it was a bit sluggish on acceleration. Off street it was as you would anticipate - peerless. Having a DSG gearbox in my Golf, I was capable of evaluate it in opposition to the Sport, which was practically as smooth as my VW with no vital signal of adjusting gear. rover v8 engine for sale Please word, there's a dent within the driver's side rear quarter and along the driving force's door however there's completely no paint damage and it is a straightforward repair by a dent specialist however would not trigger any trouble with rust, and many others... if left as it is. Apart from that, this automobile actually is only a beautiful instance of a really cheap to run automobile and I'm sure it gives you many extra years of bother free motoring. rover v8 engine for sale A compact integral multi-hyperlink rear axle debuts for quite a few advantages. These include distinctive on-road agility, class-leading wheel travel and axle articulation - at 340mm, as much as 60mm greater than competitors - and very excessive ranges of composure in on- or off-highway environments. The brand new rear axle also reduces street noise entering the cabin and, as a result of the suspension turrets make only a minimal intrusion into the luggage area, allow row-two seating to slip and recline previous the turrets for maximum leg-room. Similarly, the all-new multi-hyperlink rear axle is vital in delivering 5+2 seating versatility and generous baggage area in a compact footprint. rover v8 engine for sale Back at the flip of the Century, a company known as Grand Western Ideas was marketing a 'cabriolet-style' mushy prime they referred to as the 'Trekker 90'. My truck was converted & fitted with Recaro seats (from a Vauxhall Calibra!), including two particular person forward-going through ones in the rear. rover v8 engine for sale There have been a couple of other conversions produced by the company before they went out of business however mine was unique even among these; in its seating configuration, being fitted with a diesel & being painted an actual Land Rover colour (Atlantis Blue metallic, the colour used on the 50th Anniversary particular edition Defender 90s)!\ In 1997, the last 12 months that Defender ninety's were made obtainable within the US, Land Rover created 300 Particular Version Station Wagons. Referred to as the Restricted Edition (LE) these Land Rover Defender ninety's were painted with a novel one 12 months coloration generally known as Willow Inexperienced with a contrasting white accented roof; they have been additionally fitted with body protection in the form of 5 giant diamond plated sheets and an external security cage with a full roof rack. The 1997 Land Rover Defender 90 LE also came with the next options as customary tools: Air con, rear ladder, rear step, twin tube operating boards with diamond plate trim, entrance A bar and a limited version placard which was affixed to the rear of the automotive that denoted its construct quantity out of 300. Necessary Notes: Reconditioned engines, as per the picture Do Not include manifolds or some other ancillaries, you will want to use the objects from your present engine such because the manifolds, turbo, gas rail, ring gear (flywheel), gearbox etc although we are going to provide you with new manifold gaskets to use when putting in your engine. Reconditioned engines are equipped DRY without oil or water, they may include a brand new oil filter however will want filling with 10w40 oil. Additionally, you will most certainly want some extra anti-freeze to refill the water system. rover v8 engine for sale Range Rover Reconditioned Engines is a trading/fashion of National Engines Range Rover Reconditioned Engines cannot accept any legal responsibility for errors or omissions or for loss or injury arising from accessing this website or using the content material/ data contained inside the website. rover v8 engine for sale Any reliance you place on such information is subsequently strictly at your own danger. Photos are used for illustration purposes only and are copyright to Range Rover Reconditioned Engines or their authentic owners respectively. rover v8 engine for sale For all these aircraft the actual take off and landing distance will range with situations, and with the burden of the loaded aircraft. So absolutely loaded, heavier planes, will require extra distance to take off. That's one of the the explanation why your operator will ask you ways many individuals are travelling, and how a lot baggage they are bringing. This helps to gauge the correct plane for the mission, together with which aircraft can access the airports you want to attain.\n\nWith Project-Landrover you get a whole range of garage providers that are perfectly tailor-made to Land Rover and Range-Rover homeowners in search of a professionally qualified various to the upper priced Land Rover major dealers. We provide full servicing together with cam belts, fault diagnosis, mechanical repairs, electrical faults, air-conditioning, MOTs and extra. rover v8 engine for sale This is a version of the tried and true 474/400 combo we pioneered again within the eighty's. Back then we would offset grind cranks to a three.9 stroke with a 2.200 rod journal. We would then use a 6.535 long GM model rod and those kits labored AWESOME! At this time we simply have the cranks made new out of 4340 heat handled metal and use the same, but slightly longer 6.700 lengthy rod. This mix is good for somebody on the lookout for a little bit more out of their 383. Stroker kits professionally installed into a Muscle Motors prepared block are $4899. rover v8 engine for sale Circumstances: exited freeway made a turn noticed a lightweight at an intersection turning yellow sped up a bit to make it, felt like i hit fuel minimize (ie nearly any toyota turbo engine when overboosting) numerous lights on the sprint car died, pulled over. seemed at the engine, i noticed no rods protruding or any leaking fluids, began her right up and bought a definite rod knock plus check engine mild. bought the automotive towed back house will check in with dealership within the morning. car was properly broken in per subaru handbook suggestion. the one factor i can think of was that i bought the automobile model new from subaru but it had eighty miles on it, so some subaru techs and test drivers prolly drove the out of it. rover v8 engine for sale The TDV6 diesel engine is a 2.7 litre turbocharged V6 producing 140kW of escaping energy and 440Nm of torque. The Sport's acceleration from stationary is disappointing with a prolonged 0-100km sprint of 12 seconds, not superb for pursuit situations. Nevertheless, as soon as the Range Rover is on top of things it has solid mid-Range torque and with a whopping 2450kg kerb weight only the bravest police automobile would dare get in its means. Thrifty economy figures of 10.2 L/100km combined mean long distances between stops are potential. The Sport is far extra snug and succesful at motorway cruising speeds than metropolis driving, making it perfect for getting out of city. rover v8 engine for sale Land Rovers do many things, however one factor all of them do really well is to go anywhere the driver's level. Most of these totally succesful SUVs include locking differentials all around; hill start and descent assist applied sciences, great water-wading capacity and actually excessive floor clearance. rover v8 engine for sale Most vehicles are extraordinarily dependable, providing the type of efficiency expected from a well-constructed off roader. Range Rover has additionally launched new applied sciences with its automobile range. Some of these innovations contains the Predictive Infotainment Display, which predicts which button the driver will press, the Mind Sense feature, which monitors the focus of the motive force by sensors attached to the steering wheel, and a Mid-air Torch, as well as the Wellness Seat that analyses the motive force's respiration and heart price. Click to Post