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naladot · 3 years

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Thoughts on the linguistics of A:TLA

Part 1/?

The worldbuilding in Avatar: The Last Airbender is extraordinary. The enduring fandom proves that. However, there is one element of the worldbuilding that’s always irked me a little, and that’s how they depict language. While I understand that certain things are necessary for a half-hour cartoon marketed to kids, and that even films committed to realism are never totally successful in showing the creative and exciting messiness of human languages, I still wish that A:TLA factored in real-world linguistic knowledge a little bit more. But that’s where fandom comes in, right?

These musings are things I’ve thought about for my own fic writing, and I thought I’d share in case anyone else finds them interesting. I will say that I know a little about a lot of things related to linguistics, but no one person’s knowledge is exhaustive, so I welcome input and commentary! I’ll be posting a number of these musings, though I don’t know how many exactly yet.

Why does everyone in A:TLA speak the same language?

The short answer, again, is because it’s a half-hour kids’ cartoon that was distributed by a US television corporation. The long answer is… you’d have to bend your mind into some complex pretzels to believe that everyone in the A:TLA universe actually speaks the same language.

In the real world, multilingual societies are the norm, and monolingual the exception. Many of you reading this post probably come from a place where this is a “duh” statement, but in heavily monolingual areas/communities, it’s often surprising! Regarding multilingual societies: I once asked some friends from Kenya how many languages they know, and waited while they counted out multiple languages and explained the differing degrees of comprehension for each and the situations where they used them. Over a thousand languages were spoken in North and South America before European colonization. Papua New Guinea is famous for over 800 known languages. As for an even smaller region, the government of Taiwan recognizes 16 different indigenous people groups, each with its own languages. And actually, even supposedly “monolingual” societies like the US continue to see regional variation in accents (the US is, of course, not really monolingual, even if some people’s agenda is to pretend that it is).

Diversity is an expected feature of human languages. To say that the world of A:TLA is somehow monolingual is incoherent when we are shown cultural differences on every level except linguistic throughout the show. We occasionally get nods to linguistic change, like Aang’s great “Hotman” scene in season 3, but otherwise all the characters seem to speak and read the same language. I think a realistic version of A:TLA would require significant linguistic diversity, especially since the way societies are depicted across the show would give rise to linguistic differences.

My biggest quibble: Chinese characters as the writing system for everyone

Linguists typically divide spoken language and written language: you can be a complete master of spoken language without ever being able to read and write. From a linguist’s perspective, the spoken form of a language is the “real” language. In this sense, cultures that never develop writing are NOT considered to have more “primitive” or “simple” language than those that do. But people in literate cultures nevertheless tend to express a tight link between a language and its written form, and writing systems bear some vestiges of that link. While writing systems may spread (Chinese characters, Latin script, Arabic script), the adoption of a writing system shows some sort of interaction between cultures. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Throughout the show, Chinese characters (also known as Han characters, or Kanji in the Japanese context, Hanja in the Korean context, etc.) are depicted as the only writing system. Most of the characters are shown to be literate. Katara, for example, is shown reading inscriptions on multiple buildings/monuments (The Cave of Two Lovers, The Serpent’s Pass, etc.) as well as writing a letter for Toph. The show has (deservedly) been praised for taking the time to accurately use Chinese characters, instead of gibberish, like the movie we pretend doesn’t exist. Brkye obviously put time and care into depictions of writing and the show benefited greatly from the hard work of the consultant they worked with, so my issue is not with that at all.

My quibble is that writing systems develop within a context, and there is no reason that all of the societies in A:TLA should be using a logographic writing system (or at least not the SAME one). Elementary schoolers learning to read and write in Chinese must devote a good amount of time to the process. Even where simplified characters were introduced, children still spend a decent chunk of their schooling memorizing characters. (Of course, every language has elements which are challenging for schoolchildren, but I will focus on this writing system for now.) As someone who learned Chinese as an adult, I can also attest that it is possible to read without being able to write—and I have many technological resources for checking definitions and radicals and so on which are not available to the A:TLA characters.

That said, it’s of course much more difficult for an adult to find the time to develop literacy in Chinese than it is for a child. But to the point, do the cultures in A:TLA show the necessary conditions for the main cast to learn to read and write in this writing system? I think it makes the most sense for the standardized version of this writing system to have spread from Ba Sing Se outward. I think this partly because the Earth Kingdom draws the most cultural inspiration from China on several levels, so it makes sense that a similar standardized writing system would develop there. I also think this makes sense because we’re directly shown that Ba Sing Se is a center of government, education (Ba Sing Se University), and literary culture (Sokka’s stint in the poetry club) in a way that isn’t directly shown in other A:TLA locations. For this reason, I will refer to Chinese/Han characters as “Ba Sing Se logographs” for the remainder of this post.

In particular, the depiction of the Southern Water Tribe doesn’t really suggest that Katara and Sokka should develop literacy in this particular writing system, i.e. Ba Sing Se logographs. At the beginning of the show, we are introduced to a culturally and geographically isolated SWT. All the men older than Sokka have left to fight in the war, and the people that remain are (perhaps unrealistically) few in number. There is no indication that anyone in the SWT is corresponding with anyone outside of it, or that the Fire Nation is attacking them on their own land anymore. In addition, Katara and Sokka are shown to take part in duties such as fishing/hunting as their role within their tribe has become increasingly important due to the absence of all the adult men.

So at what point are they finding the time to sit down and practice writing hundreds of Ba Sing Se logographs? Where are they getting reading materials to be introduced to a literary register of communication? Maybe there was a store of old SWT texts written in Ba Sing Se logographs that they use for their studies (likely from before the earliest Fire Nation raids) but by the time Sokka and Katara are learning to read and write, those are outdated. So let’s say that somehow, Gran-Gran was ordering new scrolls of epics and poetry from the occasional trade ship—does she order a dictionary scroll set as well? If you come across a character that no one in your tribe has ever read before, you can’t sound it out because logographic writing systems don’t have a direct correspondence to pronunciation. You might be able to guess the meaning or pronunciation, but if the text doesn’t provide any clues or it’s a word no one else has heard before, guessing isn’t going to do much good. In that case, young Katara and Sokka are forced to either skip the unknown word, make it up, or wait for the next rare ship and hope that the sailors have a habit of reading.

I think it’s realistic that they might be literate in a limited set of Ba Sing Se logographs which are deemed relevant to the reading material the SWT people have on hand and might use in potential trade (the show doesn’t actually suggest that anyone is trading with the SWT, but let’s say that this happens, as they had to be getting news of the war somehow). But then I would suggest that, if you want to imagine the SWT as a literate society, the SWT should also have an independent script, maybe an “alphabetic” type of script (though it wouldn’t have to be—it could even be another logographic system). Perhaps this is shared with the Northern Water Tribe; perhaps it developed independently of whatever is used in the North. What they write would be relevant and useful to them. They can journal, write letters, write inscriptions on their homes and pottery, label their clothes, keep records of conflicts within the tribe, read religious texts, map out genealogies, write down their own epics, graffiti on the walls of the watchtowers Sokka tries to build, and so on.

If they do not have an independently developed SWT script, they are leveraging a writing system (Ba Sing Se logographs) in which new words cannot be comprehended or used. Due to their isolation, their reading material is likely to be old and infrequently updated, thus diverging from whatever is going on in the other nations. And if the SWT invents new words, they have to decide on a correspondence with a character set—which won’t be used by anyone else in the world because they aren’t really interacting with anyone else in the world at this point. So even if the SWT were using Ba Sing Se logographs as their only writing system, their isolation would naturally result in a new and regionally/culturally specific version of that writing system. And this would be the case even before the war, since they are still geographically isolated to some degree. No matter what way we set it up, the SWT in particular should diverge linguistically from other regions in the A:TLA world.

Also, it’s only after Katara and Sokka leave with Aang that they would be exposed to or have reasons to utilize many genres of writing that aren’t relevant to the SWT context. For this reason, I think it is also more poignant that the SWT has its own script, to emphasize those things which are distinctly SWT genres of writing. (Plus, the idea of Sokka and Katara writing notes that no one else can understand has so much potential!)

This whole thought process presupposed that the SWT was speaking more or less the same language as the rest of the world, though I don’t think that would be the case (as shown above). Add in a spoken language difference, and you see even more differences in how those Ba Sing Se logographs are actually used!

More thoughts on A:TLA linguistics to come.

#avatar the last airbender #a:tla #a:tla meta #atla meta #katara #sokka #southern water tribe #linguistics #avatar: the last airbender

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howtodisassembleyourdeviant · 4 years

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Valentine

I know, it’s just a holiday to capitalize on love, but as someone who has never received a Valentine that wasn’t out of obligation, I have dreams, dang it!

Was gonna post it ON Valentine’s Day, but I realized I was off work on Monday (Off work = Offline) so I didn’t account for the missing day when working on my stories for Cute Girls and Hot Androids Week. Anyway, this is a good warm-up for what is to come. I guarantee my next ones won’t be so PG, so be warned!

He had never felt so terrified in his life. He has been in more life and death situations in his short life than most veteran officers. He fell off a roof to his death and helped free thousands of androids from the most powerful company in the world. None of that left him feeling as he did now. He was literally made for those kinds of situations, however, so why would he feel nervous as he does now? This was something so far beyond his comfort zone he was wondering why he was doing it. Then, you walk by, bright smile, eyes sparkling when they meet his, hips swaying in a way that demanded his rapt attention. He is reminded of why. He loves you, and this was all about showing just how much.

Valentine's day.

It was an odd holiday, with many variations. He studied up on it, coming across traditions and tips. He got distracted a couple of times, reading about a few homicides that happened on the same day. In the end, according to his research, there was a good chance you would not appreciate it if he didn't make a big deal of the holiday, and it could deal a blow to yours and his relationship. With the relationship being so young, not even a year yet, he cannot afford that kind of risk. He still thinks back to Christmas and cringes, hearing you shouting at him for scanning one of his gifts before he could open it. He could only imagine how much worse it would have been had he gotten to the others.

Still, that was then, and he had learned his lesson. He has studied up on the holiday and has started to construct a plan. It will be the most romantic night of your life.

..................

He was staring at the roses in the display case. Tradition dictates that a dozen red roses were the most romantic. His eyes locked on them and his body froze. He sees the trellis and the woman standing before it, tending to the blood-colored blooms. He hears her voice, condemning his every action. Disappointment.

"Sir?" A voice chimes from behind him. How long has he been standing here? "Is there something I can help you with?" The small woman smiled up at him. Her appearance reminds him of a garden gnome he had seen while walking Sumo. It only seems fitting that she should work here.

"Y-" he clears his throat, "-Yes. I'm looking to get a bouquet."

"Alright, well, let's start simple. Who's it for?"

"My girlfriend." It still felt like a foreign word from his tongue, but it made him smile nonetheless.

"I see. For Valentines?" She had an insinuating smugness about her face, "Well, roses are a fine choice,-" she saw him eye them, as if they would attack at any moment, "-however, sometimes sticking to traditions can be considered boring. Not all women like that. Instead, try focusing on what she would like."

What you like? Why didn't he think of that? Did you even like roses? Looking over memories, he noticed you commenting more on the different colors and their fragrance rather than the roses physical appearance. You liked them, but no more than any other flowers. You would choose by appearance, rather than by name. He started broadening his sights, looking at the many different blossoms the little shop housed. You like to show him things that spark your interests, so he tries thinking like you. What would you want to show him? He finds what he's looking for on a shelf. Would this be okay?

"She has unique tastes, " the store clerk beamed, taking his choice up to the front.

"I suppose this is as far from tradition as you could possibly get, " he felt anxious about his choice. He knows you'd love it, but what does it have to do with Valentine's day?

"Then make your own tradition. If it's true love, then whatever you do will be perfect in her eyes." He smiled. This garden gnome was clearly wise beyond her years. What is the lifespan of a gnome? He was getting distracted again.

"Thank you, Ms.-" Connor tries not to scan people off shift after Hank chastised him.

"Greta is just fine." Greta the Garden Gnome. Surely this can be no accident. "I hope your lady loves her gift."

"I'm sure she will."

............

Getting the chocolates was much easier. He knew your favorite brand and which ones to avoid. He had thought about making them himself, as tradition dictates that to be the most endearing, but his cooking skills were... Subpar. He was still adjusting to tastes and has learned he has a penchant for becoming distracted. He supposes his 'free thinking' mixed with his original program, to find out as much as possible in as little of time allowed, making it almost impossible to focus on one thing for too long.

The little heart-shaped box only made his bizarre choice at the floral shop stand out. Maybe he shouldn't have taken the advice from a gnome to heart. It was too late now. Instead, he placed it in a small, red bag with pink tissue paper. At least this way it looked like a Valentine's present.

He walked towards your desk with his gifts in hand. When he didn't see you there, he assumed you must be running late. What he did see were several gifts stacked on top of your desk, along with a couple of bouquets and five separate boxes of chocolates. You had many... Admirers. It shouldn't bother him. He knew you were desirable to many. Yet, seeing all the blatant show of such affections, some even giving you their numbers, knowing you were already in a relationship. It rubbed him the wrong way. Still, he set his gift among the many flashier ones before heading to his own desk.

He was shocked to find gifts addressed to him waiting for him, along with a bouquet of roses. Many of them were the same thirium-based chocolates, some of the only products made specifically for androids. He didn't particularly care for the flavor, the chocolate had a cheap, artificial taste compared to the chocolate syrup he tasted at your house.

It was the roses that he was stuck on. He wants to remove them. Seeing them here, where he works, felt too much like they were barring down on him, waiting for him to make a mistake. He takes them and sets them on the ground, under his desk. Out of sight, out of mind. The rest of the gifts were shifted to the side.

You show up a few moments later. He was a little disappointed you did not come up to greet him, but you looked annoyed, so you might have chosen to spare him of your sour mood. You looked over your gifts, and Connor watched as you systematically dumped most of them in the trash, slamming it down before taking your seat and getting to work. That... Was not generally something people did when they received gifts. Only his gifts remained, much to his relief, though you didn't seem to pay them much mind either. A part of him was satisfied that you had ruthlessly destroyed all those people's hearts in one swift action, but he was astonished you would do something so tactless. Perhaps something happened to trigger your bad mood. He stood, hoping to help.

"Good morning, Y/n." Connor smiled down at you, standing next to your desk.

"Morning." You answered automatically, but it was brisk and clipped. You didn't even look up from your computer. Had he done something wrong?

"Are you alright?"

"Fine." He continued to stare expectantly.

"I said, I'm fine!" You snapped.

He knows he should back off when you're like this, that he could only make it worse, but instead, he got down on his knees in front of you, taking your hands in his.

"Please, tell me what's wrong. I want to help." For a moment, he believes he had made the wrong choice, as you looked like you wanted to throttle him. Your gaze was intense, and he could see the red of his LED reflecting from your eyes. It takes a minute, but you lean forward and whisper into his ear.

"Why are you hiding the roses under your desk?" Your words were venomous, making a panic rise in him. You had seen him hide them, and he realizes that could be misinterpreted as concealing the gift so you wouldn't see it.

"I... I become distressed when I see red roses. I didn't want to look at them." He looked away, feeling foolish. What kind of person is afraid of roses? You knew of the zen garden, so you of all people would understand. "They remind me of her." You were quiet for a moment, your anger quickly melting.

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" You buried your face in your hands, "God, I'm so stupid." You muttered to yourself.

"No, you're not."

"I am! I thought, 'since you like clichés so much, you'll probably prefer the traditional gift for Valentine's Day.'" Wait a minute.

"The roses were from you?"

"Yes! Didn't you read the card?" He stood up, going to his desk and reaching under, grabbing the thin, glass vase the roses resided in. Riffling around them, he finds a card with a cartoon picture of a dog holding a heart on it. He flipped it over.

"My heart blooms only for you. Happy Valentine's Day, my Love. -❤Y/n" he could see the impression of your lips pressed into the card, making his thirium pump vibrate within his chest. Hiding your roses while he had only pushed the other gifts to the side seemed so much worse than hiding roses from a secret admirer.

He heard a sniffling sound, seeing that you had turned back to your terminal, but your shoulders were trembling. You were trying so hard not to cry at work. Connor went back to you, pulling you from your seat and practically dragging you to the first available space, which happened to be the old records room. Before you could say anything, his lips crashed into yours, holding you tightly against him. He held your face, turning it slightly to get that perfect angle. Your hand went to the back of his neck, combing through his hair as your other one held his shirt in a death clasp, likely wrinkling the material, but he couldn't care less. He kept you locked to his ravenous lips until you were on the verge of passing out, pulling back as you gasped for air.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know, " he murmured, wiping a stray tear from your cheek.

"I'm sorry, too. I saw you hide them and I made assumptions."

"You had no way of knowing. To be honest, I hadn't thought it was an issue until I was looking at them at the flower shop."

"Do you wanna talk about it?"

"No, another time, maybe. Right now, I want to get through the workday, then take my girlfriend out on a romantic date. She might even gift me with a kiss at the end of the evening." He winked, making you smile.

"You just might get a little more than that, if you like. Valentine's Day has many traditions for couples." At that, you dipped the hem of your jeans slightly, showing a bit of lace that had Connor captivated. His hands itched to reveal more, but you readjusted your pants, snapping out of your hold over him.

"We should probably get to work, " you spoke. He pulled you close for another kiss before grabbing the door, letting you lead the way. Instead of heading to your desk, you went to his, grabbing the roses.

"It's fine, you can leave them-" but you chucked them into the trash in the break room.

"I'm not gonna leave them if they bother you. Besides, I have another gift for you." You went to your desk and grabbed your bag, rifling around, "I was gonna wait until after work, but here." You handed him a package, wrapping paper covered in blue and red hearts with a gold bow over the top. He opened it carefully, and inside was a hand-made knitted hat. It was grey, with a blue heart next to the cute face of a St. Bernard. On top was a pom pom with grey, white, and blue strings. He smiled.

"I hope it fits. I used your other beanie as a reference." He slipped it on, the inside lined with fleece, making the hat much warmer and softer.

"It's perfect. Did you make it yourself?"

"Mostly. Simon helped me. I wanted to make you something, but as you can't eat solids, I thought I'd ask him for his opinion. I've never knitted anything before, but he's a pretty good teacher."

"I love it, thank you." You smiled, looking bashful before remembering the bag on your desk. You picked it up.

"Careful, " Connor warned before you could shove your hand inside. Instead, you picked the tissue out and looked inside.

"Oh my God!" You carefully took out the small teddy bear planter. Growing inside was a Bear Paw succulent, all bundled together with their pink little claws. "It's so adorable! Thank you!"

"I thought you might prefer this."

"I love it! What made you buy a cactus though?" Some might find that insulting for Valentines.

"A garden gnome." You gave him a look.

"A... Garden gnome?"

"Yes."

"Sometimes I wonder what goes on in that brain of yours."

......

I like thinking that Connor is a bit oblivious with anything that doesn’t have to do with detective work. I also seen a few posts where Connor has an aversion to roses, particularly red ones, so I thought I’d play off that idea. Was gonna have them go on their date and all that jazz, but I don’t know when to shut up, so the rest is up to your imagination! Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

#Cute Girls and Hot Androids #connor x reader #rk800 connor reader #Connor fanfiction #rk800 #DBH #detroit become human #valentine #gaming

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nvzblgrrl · 4 years

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Part 1 Heyo man, I'm absolutely ecstatic that you have this whole One Piece Big Fic project in the works. I'm honestly p paranoid about interacting with words, but your works have been something I've continuously enjoyed going back to and rereading over all these years. And while you've grown and your earlier stuff feels cringe, there's a charm that Witt and Witticism and all of your earlier works have that is longlasting. And I, and apparently others, can't help but love.

Part 2 I've probably reread your fics a good thousand times by now. Like seriously I've got a good bunch of the fics you posted on AO3 saved as PDFs for my own personal reading when I feel the urge. Namely Luck of The Draw, Ultimate Symbiote, and a portion of your Chain Adventures. I've been here quietly reading for a long time and I'm gonna make sure to properly give feedback this time. Good luck in your absolutely bonkers endeavor!

Yeah, absolute mood on the ‘cringe’ part. I think the only excuse I can make for the really early stuff is that -

(this is gonna get loooong and reference child abuse + the 2000′s-2010′s meme culture, so pre-emptive apologies)

1. I had a really messed up upbringing. Not as bad as some people’s situations but still on the deeper end of bad by the ‘White American’ standard and still (albeit barely) within the bounds of Funny Sitcom Abuse Antics (at least for mid-2000′s and older stuff) most of the time. Most of it was neglect and social isolation - I pretty much left the property to go to school, church, and to visit relatives because of court-mandated visitation, the last of which probably kept me from going insane, and that was it aside from events where my dad needed an accessory to compliment his public mask - but there were some other shit mixed in that relied on the Trunchbull Rule (it has to sound too weird to be real so nobody believes it/takes it seriously) to happen.

So besides like, the PTSD from that (which has a habit of bleeding into all of my works, which you’ve probably noticed by now, lmao), I had like, zero experience on healthy relationships, social skills (well outside of a few variations on ‘messed up friendships’ and what I picked up from books, movies, and TV), and basic life skills outside of stuff like ‘boil water and follow the box directions’).

2. I got into the internet really late compared to my generation and everyone after. This was mostly because we had literally no semi-reliable internet access until I was about 11-13 and that was either the school internet or the dial-up at home (which of course was time-limited with the time shared with my brother and done on the family computer with observation in effect). Most of that was spent on like flash games or webcomics, many of which I have tried to reread only to find them gouging my soul because god what the hell was happening in 2007 - wait. Yeah.

It got better by the time we hit high school because by then we had our own computers (not scanners though, I had to pass art and passwords over to a friend of mine to get them on the internet for a couple years before we got one at home), a better internet connection, and high levels of parental disengagement as we proved to be disappointments despite our previous ‘potential’ (my dad was hoping for me to become a life-long cash cow for him, IDK what was going on with my brother and his mom), which meant I could spend more time on the internet... which at the time, meant DeviantArt and FF.net (tumblr came way, waaay at the end of my time in high school).

Yes, that’s where I started out. That should explain a good 90% of why the early stuff was Like That.

Also don’t look for my DeviantArt because I deleted the whole thing years ago, for cringe reasons - namely, a really, really stupid minor war over something I can’t even remember but it ran a lot like those old ‘Potterheads Get Your Wands’ posts, though the fact that 80% of my output towards the end were extremely banal and/or fucking insane One Piece (and occasionally Soul Eater) Demotivator Posters didn’t help.

Pictured: proof of my crimes against humanity (with some minor repeats - every single one of those demovitators are something I did and that’s not even all of them) despite my attempts to destroy the evidence, because the internet (and pinterest) never forget and often reposts without permission.

[Image description: a series of drawn images of a man. the first panel is of him looking at a computer with the subtitle ‘recognition’, the second is a close-up of him with sweat and a look of surprise on his face along with two exclamation points subtitled ‘realization’, the third and final image is an extreme close up of his intensely stressed expression subtitled ‘fear’.]

[Image description, but funny: me accidentally coming across one of those reposts a couple years ago.]

I personally can’t forget because I know my style at the time (it had a few variations, but all of them have been seared into my soul) and how inane/insane some of them read. My favorite was one that ended up turning into a word vomit about how cool Gol D. Roger was that ran so far that it didn’t fit inside the format anymore and ended up running off of the page repeatedly.

...and yes, I did make one edit that was ‘Dead or Alive? is that a trick question?’ for Brook. That one’s still circulating too.

3. While that covers a certain amount of the problems with the early work, Witt and Witticism stands out as a pinnacle because I was both using a reaction heavy style (I was pretty much doing a live-blog of my One Piece anime rewatch in fanfic form, using Witt as a mouth piece - a similar style was used with Ultimate Symbiote but fortified with a few original stories and actual non-canon stuff happening!) and going through the tail end an extreme manic period brought on by escaping (read: getting kicked out of because they were no longer socially or legally obligated to care for me anymore) my abusive childhood home + having money (from my dead mom’s social security).

Seriously, that year was bonkers. I got to go to Disneyworld, got a new cat, published an insane fic, and blew through so much money on some dumb fucking shit when my dad wasn’t stealing it because I didn’t realize he had access to my then-bank account.

Also I’m pretty sure that you can detect when my sanity/depression started reasserting itself in the last few chapters of Witt because he starts experiencing consequences, though I’m not saying you should reread it to try to locate that moment because I’m having to re-read it repeatedly for reference purposes and I don’t think anyone should have to suffer this unless they’re into that (which admittedly, might be the result of that ‘charm’ you mentioned, because I can’t otherwise account for how that fic got over a quarter of a million hits otherwise).

Not to say that all of my early stuff was bad (some of it was actually shockingly good once I found it again, even though it was flawed) but the most easily accessible stuff is... not great!

And thanks for the well-wishes. I’m gonna need that luck if I want to get through it. I look forward to the feedback!

#asks #the big fat one piece fic project #Anonymous

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theshinobiway · 5 years

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The whole Lee being bald thing was just a mean hoax. It was never verified by any legit sources, just a bogus reddit post. There’s been plenty of those.

PSA: Rock Lee isn’t balding! I repeat, Rock Lee IS NOT BALDING! Here’s the Proof!

I knew that not watching Boruto would catch up with me eventually, so here’s me amending my previous statement: There’s no official confirmation that Rock Lee is actually balding in Boruto.

And BOY did I do a deep dive of the internet for this. Saddle up kids, I’m about to throw on my amateur detective hat and take you for a wild ride through the internet to end this rumor once and for all.

Warning: Long, picture-heavy post where I cross-examine multiple sources.

Part I: The situation!

Here’s a compilation of the screencaps from Boruto episode 58 that sparked a thousand rumors.

Looking at the top-left screencap, we can see a strange rendition of Lee’s hairline. Following this introduction, Boruto and Yurui begin their match. When Yurui unleashes his unnamed Bubblegum-Pop jutsu, Boruto is thrown back. Rock Lee then grabs his hair due to the heavy winds that emanate from the burst. Putting the two together, it looks vaguely like Rock Lee has a strange hairline that accompanies him frantically grabbing his own hair.

Part II: The “Sources”

Okay, I spent probably close to 4-5 hours scouring through different links and articles. Here’s a breakdown of the internet’s say on the matter:

The first major source is from a website called “Comicbook.com” It’s the website that was linked in multiple other copycat articles, blog posts, and forums, and was the first result for any Google search of “Rock Lee balding” (or variations thereof)

Okay, this isn’t so bad. I see that there are sources linked, so I should be able to logically follow the trail back to either an interview or the name of the “book” in question. First, let’s look at where these so-called linked ‘sources’ lead.

In any part of journalism, linking your sources is the most important step to ensure your audience that you cross-referenced with legitimate sourc-

aaaand YOU HAVE FAILED Journalism 101.

Hm. despite the fact that this is a Reddit post and not an actual link to ANY book whatsoever, the link’s dead. Deleted. Frankly, this whole search was an endless loop of dead ends, but I was deadset on getting to the bottom of this.

So thus far, I’ve got one lead that wasn’t solved: there’s a rumored “Book” out there somewhere, and it was referenced at “some point.” My first guess would have been a databook, but I’ve read those. Perhaps the one I read had a translation error?

Scrolling through the comments of this Reddit post, I came across this:

Important context clues here: It’s not stated in a Databook. That means Naruto’s Jin no Sho, the Fourth official databook, is NOT the source of the rumor. Also, I was able to find a scanlation of Rock Lee’s page for the very same book here:

Rock Lee’s balding also certainly wouldn’t mentioned in any of the previous databooks where Rock Lee was, y’know, a teenager. All four official databooks are off the table.

Secondly, the link posted by user “Hydrobolt” leads to a twitter post with the following:

No sources, no reference to a book, nothing. Except for a few screenshots of Boruto Episode 58. I’ll discuss these shots later, but this appeared to be yet ANOTHER dead end. (Also, this twitter thread has ZERO links or sources!)

I can see why the post was deleted by the mods, but this was troubling: Did this whole rumor start from ONE twitter post from a shipper (that had single-digit likes/reblogs?)

I didn’t think so. Even if this random tweet was picked up by a semi-popular media outlet, I still needed to answer the following questions:

What was the “book” that supposedly had Kishimoto’s confirmation? Did it exist, or was it a bluff?

Where could I find a scanlated (and hopefully English, though my husband speaks Japanese) version of the Rock Lee page?

Part III: The Search for the Non-Databook “Book”

Even if it wasn’t in a databook, there are multiple interviews and exo-textual sources that can be used to glean information about the characters. I knew I wasn’t looking for an interview–in part because the key was “book,” and also because Kishi has only given a set amount of serious interviews in the past, and most of those are available in translation. Thus, there might have been a storyboard, book, or some other source that was exclusively released that might hold this information.

The most promising lead was from a site called narutoforums.org

The original post:

Okay, first, there’s no actual link on “here”. That’s a major red flag, especially given that the post is currently only a year old (posted 7.27.18)

And it’s yet another dead end.

…Sigh.

But wait!

User “Platypus” mentions that the source was a ‘movie booklet that’s been out for three years.’ That’s a lead!

A movie booklet, huh? Here we go: Sometimes, highly-anticipated animated movies are released in Japan with exclusive manga chapters or other easter eggs, as well as other goodies.

So, let’s talk about this unnamed “Movie booklet” – Three years prior to 2018 would have marked the release of the Baruto movie in 2015. That means the booklet would have been this one: Zai no Sho

This was the most difficult piece to dig up information on. The booklet in question was only released in Japan and during the original premiere of the movie in 2015. I couldn’t initially find scalations, so I did the next best thing: Looking for a table of contents. Good ‘ol Naruto wiki was here to save the day.

Boom. It even has page numbers!

Now, I had a supposed book source and even the page numbers. All that was left to find a translation. After some deep digging, I found one—right here on Tumblr via user Emotionalrockfish.

This was the moment of truth! I opened the link for Rock Lee’s page and carefully read over the description…

Rock Lee

Tireless effort and ambition! With his hot-blooded passion, he guides a genin!!The leaf village’s pride, an expert of taijutsu. He possesses absolutely no skill for ninjutsu, but refines his taijutsu by exceeding the limits of effort with the gutsiness he inherited from his master, and does nothing but aim high. He and his son, Metal*, absolutely can’t miss their daily training!

*Metal Lee is shortened to just Metal here, so no, he’s not called Lee like his father.

(*Pterodactyl screeching*)

AND THERE IT IS: After a whole trail of vague suggestions and dead links, I‘d finally come to the final source material. And there’s nothing! Nothing there that even remotely mentions Lee’s baldness!

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Conclusion: RUMOR UNSUBSTANTIATED

Part IV: So where did this rumor all start? And what’s with “that” scene?

The Situation Unfolds: The whole situation is from Boruto, Episode 58: The Tournament Begins! The wind in this scene is shown to originate from Yurui’s jutsu.

The bubblegum pop emits a wind blast, throwing Boruto back. The very same blast tussles Lee’s hair.

It’s an obvious gag, but not about Lee: it’s meant to convey the sheer strength that emits from Yurui’s bubbles popping. This is a common trope in anime: Character emits a powerful attack, the audience sees/feels the “force” from the fallout wind.

The audience now knows that there are some stakes to Yurui unleashing his gum-based jutsu, because the force of the blast not only throws Boruto back, but can also reach a good distance away to where the proctor, Rock Lee, was standing.

Further Explanation: It’s also fairly obvious that Boruto (and Ikemoto’s style) deviate from Kishimoto’s, so we should expect some variation in character appearances outside of the expected “age-up” factor.

Here are some original renditions of Lee with his hair (flying) up and his younger self’s hairline:

In Part I, we see that Lee’s hair falls into a widow’s peak. Then, in concept art for the Naruto: The Last, we see a far less defined peak—in fact, the hairline is decidedly square-shaped.

Then, finally, in the Boruto animation, Lee’s hair is almost circular (but also shown from an extremely tilted perspective.)

So we see a distinct transition in the actual SHAPE of Lee’s hairline in conjunction with the evolution of SP/Kishi/Ikemoto’s style. A story written over at least 17 years and spanning over three different series has a change in style? More likely than you think.

Conclusion: It’s a change in the animation style and a throwaway gag aimed at emphasizing the fallout wind from Yurui’s jutsu. Nothing more.

I rest my case, Pumpkin OUT!

#Rock lee #rocklee #naruto #Boruto #boruto next generation #balding #bald #naruto shippuden #yurui #team gai #team guy #pumpkintalks #pumpkin talks #I SOLVED THE CASE

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airquietworks · 4 years

Text

Lost at the Summit (IzuOcha) (Part 3)

Part 1, Part 2

Chapter 3: Story One week later, Ochako found herself alone in a cold bed, groggily awakening on what was supposed to be a lazy Sunday.

Izuku was conspicuously absent, the sheets with barely a trace of warmth from his body's departure. She frowned slightly at that - she liked the rare chance for lazy cuddles in the morning - but didn't think much of it. He must have been preparing breakfast or perhaps dealing with a phone call - which he should not take on a day off, but oft did anyway.

She let herself slide into her bedsheets, struggling to resist the urge to fall back asleep again.

The days were so busy now, conspiring to keep her and her husband apart. A couple of news outlets finally asked her for interviews about retirement, and though she dutifully squeezed them in, they did not get much traction. People were still too preoccupied with Deku's retirement, what that meant for the hero charts, and other news of the day as the world shifted around the fall of the world's greatest.

Ochako had buried herself in her work, intent to live her last days as a hero best she could. She tried her best to ignore people's ignorance of her, focusing on saving lives and helping people. But the days dragged and part of her could not let go of her bitterness. All of a sudden, retirement could not come soon enough.

She decided to start her morning as he usually did - reaching out and grabbing her phone from her bedside table. She idly swiped her fingers across it, checking the news of the day, always with an eye out for anything she should be aware of as a pro.

A glance through her emails yielded something unusual. Her inbox was flooded with messages with similar titles: "thank you," "Thanks, Uravity!" "You rock." It wasn't that uncommon to get an appreciation message from someone she rescued, but the sheer number of them was peculiar.

She opened one.

"Hi! I just wanted to let you know you're my favourite hero, and I absolutely love you. You kick so much butt! I remember seeing you leap into a burning office tower one time and save 20 people. It was so awesome!

I'm so sad you're retiring! =( But I'll keep cheering you on while I still can!"

Ochako grinned at that, her mood lifted by the message of appreciation, even if it was simple. She got them from time to time, but they never failed to make her feel good.

But it was strange. These messages were rarer in her aging years and she could not recall doing anything that would garner this kind of outpouring.

She went through a few more of the emails, all with variations of people sharing their appreciation for her, whether or not she had personally rescued them. Eyebrows furrowing at the strange situation, she checked through her social feeds to see what exactly was going on.

On social media, her mentions were flooded into the thousands, far more than usual. A word caught her attention, causing her eyes to widen.

"#WeLoveUravity" was trending.

It was not a massive trend, but there were still thousands of similar, heartfelt messages - shorter, but no less impactful. Pictures and stories of her throughout the years were being shared. A few noteworthy commentators were even discussing how little coverage she was getting since she made her retirement announcement two weeks ago, and the inherent sexism at play with that.

Ochako fell back into her pillow, trying to make sense of it all. Her heart beat faster, a nervous, excited energy taking hold of her as she watched everything unfold.

The world - at least, a part of it - was finally telling her story.

And Izuku probably had something to do with it. There was no other explanation she could think of.

More than a little perturbed at the idea her husband had somehow manipulated the masses, she got up, not bothering to change, and made a beeline for the kitchen to confront him about it and-

Thank him? Scold him? She was not sure. She loved the words being shared about her, even if it was probably just a passing trend that would fade quickly. But she did not want that to come because Izuku somehow campaigned on her behalf. They supported each other, relied on one another, but only to a point. She wanted her legacy to stand by itself - even if it came up short - instead of sitting on Izuku's broad shoulders.

But as she walked through the kitchen and living area, he was nowhere to be seen. The only traces of him were a few dishes in the sink, a plate of eggs on their dining table and an envelope next to it.

Pouting, she trudged forward towards the message. She opened it up and pulled the paper out, growing frustrated by the surprising morning.

"Dear Uravity,

I wasn't too sure about writing this message. But I saw what was going on and I figured I had to.

You probably don't remember me, and I don't blame you. We met about ten years ago, with a villain raid in the city. I was a new pro hero, fresh out of school. I was overzealous and got myself into a bad situation. I saw my life flash before my eyes as a monstrous villain towered over me. I was sure I was dead, but you knocked her away with one punch and got me to safety.

I'll never forget the care and comfort you showed me, your bright smile somehow making me feel like everything was going to be okay, even in such a calamity. I was about ready to quit right then, but you encouraged me, told me to keep on pushing forward. You were the brightest spot in one of the worst days of my life.

I just wanted to let you know how much that meant to me. I wouldn't be a hero today without you. I've been following you since then, and I'm amazed at what you've been able to accomplish. I was heartbroken when I found out you were retiring, but I understand. You deserve a comfortable life and a happy retirement.

I don't know how to end this, so I guess - thank you. You are my hero.

P.S. I'm not much of an artist, but a lot of people are doing it, so I hope you like the picture.

Sincerely,

Clearway"

The memory was foggy in her mind - she had dealt with a lot of villain-led attacks, and could only vaguely recall this one. But she was touched nonetheless.

She turned over to the next page and gasped at a glorious sketch of her standing atop a roof, still young, posing heroically, looking down on the city below. She was smiling, her short hair billowing slightly in the wind, her confidence radiating in the simple lines.

In her early morning stupor, the image pierced through her heart. It struck her hard to read how much it mattered to someone that she had saved them - a hero, no less. That someone would still remember that, even a decade later.

She took a seat, anchoring herself, trying to find a steady place to keep herself from floating away.

Ochako eagerly consumed the breakfast left for her - perfectly warm, the likely product of Izuku's meticulous planning and knowledge of her sleep cycles - smiling at the simple, sweet gesture.

But as she ate, her mind spun in circles at everything that had greeted her this morning. She ran through the words over and over, a mix of pride, joy, and anxiety swirling around, uncertainty at the centre of it all. Her heart sang with gratitude for the love people were showing her, but her brain refused to stop questioning it.

There were people out there who remembered her, cared about what she had done - she could not deny that. But she always knew that to be true. That ultimately did not mean her legacy carried that much weight in a world filled with heroes who did the same. It did not mean she had helped enough people to make a mark. It did not mean her story would be told beyond the day. It did not mean she could stand on the summit.

But she had to admit their words were making accepting that a lot easier.

The familiar sounds of the front door opening perked her ears up. She got up quickly, moving towards it, eager to tell her partner what was happening and confront him if he had something to do with it.

Izuku wasted little time before marching through the room with a wide grin on his face, wearing a blue hoodie, with an oversized yellow backpack. He nodded towards her despite the confusion she was sure was showing on her face. He walked over to the table, depositing the bag.

"Good morning. Sorry I left early; I had an errand I needed to run," he said sincerely, stepping forward and inclining his head towards her. She put a finger to his lips, stopping his attempt at their usual good-morning kiss.

"Good morning," she managed, though with a sharp edge to her tone. "Do you know what's going on?"

His smile stretched wide again as he disengaged from her finger, gesturing slightly towards the bag. "I do. I went on an early mail run when I saw it. The post office only left a few in our mailbox; there were too many to carry otherwise."

"A few…?" she trailed off as he opened the bag to reveal it was overflowing with envelopes, not unlike the one left for her on the table. She went slack-jawed at the sight, quickly reaching out to get a better glimpse of just how many letters they received. There had to be over 100, all seemingly written out, stacked neatly, but clearly crammed within the bag's tight confines.

So many people had sent her a personalized message. She ran her fingers along the envelopes, confirming that they were really there in front of her.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" he said, awe in his voice as he watched her, gauging her reaction. "So many people wanted to let you know what you meant to them."

Ochako turned her head to face him, feeling her eyes getting a little misty. She narrowed her gaze, gauging him carefully. "But how? I don't get it. Did you do something?"

His eyebrows shot up, and he suddenly looked a little nervous, his green eyes looking away. "I...may have made a post on a popular forum. But I promise I didn't say much, and I kept anonymous!"

He got a little flustered, his hands moving with his explanation.

"I was just so frustrated and upset at how sad you were about everything. I wanted to do something - I wasn't sure what. But I just wanted to vent and maybe show you a thread of people who did appreciate you. I just said there wasn't a lot of coverage about you retiring and how sad that was. I guess it got some traction, and people started posting more and somebody I didn't know said they should do fanart, and before I knew what was happening, it went viral."

He took a breath after his rant, gesturing to the letters. "And I don't know how, but somewhere along the way, someone thought it would be nice to do handwritten messages, too. My post may have started it, but I promise I didn't do anything else beyond that. This was because so many people do appreciate what you've done - because you are one of the best."

He stepped forward to grasp both her hands in his, holding them softly, brushing his thumbs over top. "I know that better than anyone."

Her heart stuck in her throat, Ochako struggled to come up with a response. She could feel a smile stretch across her face as she stared up at him, and she was helpless to stop it. The knowledge that somehow, all these people had sincerely wanted to do something for her...a part of her still could not believe it.

"I just...I just don't get it," she murmured. "I haven't done anything to deserve this."

"You've been leaving an impact on people your entire life. You do deserve this - and more."

On instinct, she hugged Izuku, conveying the appreciation that words could not. He embraced her in turn, the two of them holding one another for a moment, basking in the warmth.

His lips pressed a kiss into her hair. "Want to start going through them?" he suggested.

"I think I'd like that." Maybe then, she could banish the doubts, still clawing at the edges of her thoughts.

The two of them moved over to the couch, pressing up against each other, making up for the earlier loss of morning cuddles. Together, they started to read through some of the letters, each one sincere and heartfelt. Izuku took it upon himself to read many of them aloud, giving voice to the sentiments of the people she had saved, helping them ring more powerfully in her ears. They also admired the art together - they had a wide variety of quality, but she appreciated each one, and she resolved to collect them carefully as a keepsake.

A couple of hours passed and they barely put a dent in the messages. They carefully sorted them out, removing the hundreds in the oversized bag, placing them aside for later.

The miraculous letters slowly eroded her defences. The world had left its eyes on her, and she was far more beloved than she would have imagined. Perhaps history would be kind to her, after all.

Still, that irritating, nagging part of her mind knew it might yet be a flash in the pan. Viral trends did not necessarily leave much of a lasting mark. She felt so wonderful about the love of her fans, but how far that ultimately extended was hard to know exactly. Did it really compare to what other heroes were able to do?

Just as they stood up and agreed to take a break, Izuku grabbed her hand again, beaming at her.

"So...I was wondering if you'd be up to take a trip with me."

"Oh? What for?"

He looked strangely giddy, his feet rocking back and forth, a toothy grin plastered across his face.

"Well...I didn't plan for all this. But I did plan for something else. A surprise."

Her spirits buoyed by the lovely morning, she found his giddiness infectious, and she eagerly pumped a fist up to share in his enthusiasm. "Alright, sure! Where are we going?"

Izuku trembled with his excitement. "U.A. High School."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Together, they walked to the place where it all began, Izuku keeping infuriatingly cryptic about his plans. The city streets seemed so much more wondrous now after their morning together, the cloudless day painting it in vibrant light, the busy people she had protected for 35 years going about their lives peacefully; a peace she had protected.

They moved covertly, dressed in baggy, unremarkable clothing, with hoods up to disguise their faces as they made their way to the front gates of the school. It was just as imposing as it was back then, built upon the shoulders of the country's greatest heroes. She had belonged here, but after so many years away, the hallowed grounds had regained their intimidating stature. A part of her wondered about herself in relation to this anyone care that this was the school that had produced her? Would her name be listed amongst its greats?

She tried to clear her head, shaking it thoroughly. It would do her no good to get mired in such thoughts.

"Quite a sight, isn't it?" He looked just as in awe of it as she was, even though he visited far more often than she did for guest appearances. "I really miss living here."

"Those were tough times. But a lot of good memories," she said, reminiscing about those wondrous early days.

"The best," he agreed as they arrived at the front gate, closed with a mighty metallic door. Security was still just as tight as ever.

"So...will you tell me now why exactly you wanted to bring us here?" Ochako pleaded, pouting at her husband, desperate to know what surprise had made him so delighted.

"Well, if they're not late, they should be...ah, there they are!"

He gestured towards the corner opposite to where they had arrived. A middle-aged woman with long, red hair and a kind smile walked toward them, carrying a small girl in her arms. The girl was positively adorable, with short hair like the older woman's, rosy cheeks and a bright smile as she looked around at the school, squirming excitedly.

Ochako looked intently at them and then back at Izuku, posing the question with her eyes. The pair of them looked vaguely familiar, and the girl was certainly cute, but she was pretty sure she had never met either of these people.

"Mommy, mommy, who are they! Are they the surprise?!" the girl squealed, pointing at the two heroes as they approached.

"Yes, that's right," the mother replied, her own excitement ringing clearly in her voice. She turned her head to regard Ochako, looking intently at her. "It's so nice to see you both. Thank you so much for this. I didn't imagine this would ever happen."

"Thank you so much for agreeing to my request," Izuku replied with a grin. "Well, Ochako, do you recognize her?"

Ochako regarded the pair again, putting on a gentle smile, but struggling to put names to the faces. The girl stared back at her with wide eyes, tilting her head slightly, studying her.

"Mommy...is that...?"

"Yes, that's right," the woman said with a laugh, kneeling down to let the girl out of her arms, the child practically vibrating with excitement. "That's Uravity."

It was like a volcanic eruption. The young girl - who could not have been older than five based on her size - squealed with delight, jumping slightly in the air, her hair flying about as she hurried over to the named hero.

Ochako chuckled at the sheer delight before her, kneeling down to meet her apparent fan. It was always fun to interact with the little ones. It did her heart good to see somehow, she could still inspire children.

"Hello there," she greeted the girl, pulling her hood down to show more of her face. The girl glomped her knee, staring up at her with wide, chocolate-coloured eyes, beaming ever-so-sweetly. "It's nice to meet you. What's your name?"

The girl giggled suddenly, squeezing at the fabric of her jeans.

"Yours!" she cried out, laughing as if that was the greatest wonder in the world. "Ochako!"

The hero felt as if her heart might burst from the shock and joy that coursed through it. She felt her eyes go wide, her gaze flashing up towards the girl's mother, who had a smile stretching across her entire face.

The realization came through her mind. She looked back to the girl at her knees, beaming up at her. Her memories flashed backwards, 35 years ago, reaching deep into the rubble, pulling a red-haired girl out, consoling her, hoping she could put a smile back on that face.

Haruka Akemi.

The elder Ochako snapped back to the present, looking down at the girl, who suddenly looked so much like the one in her memories. She gulped, struggling to contain the welling emotion of meeting her namesake. "Well, that's a lovely name for a lovely girl."

The girl blushed, her cheeks getting rosier, but the smile never vanished from her face, little dimples popping up in it.

"Wow!" the girl exclaimed. "I love that we have the same name. You're my favourite hero."

Ochako's heart squeezed at the sheer cuteness, her breath coming out in a little gasp, garnering laughter from the other adults present.

"Thank you very much," she responded, glancing back towards Akemi. "Hey, would it be alright if I held you?"

"Yeah!" The girl cheered, suddenly trying to scramble up into her hero's lap.

Said hero looked up to Akemi for permission, who provided a quick, affirming nod.

Ochako lifted the girl up, grinning as she yelled in delight, her arms reaching up towards the sky. She hardly weighed anything, even without activating her quirk.

"Yaa!" the girl cheered, giggling as Ochako lifted her up and down a few times. Ochako laughed with her, the child's mirth infectious, her heart soaring at the sheer joy of the moment.

But suddenly, she felt a strange tugging at her neckline. Curious, she looked down to see her clothes pulling away from her body slightly toward the girl she was holding.

"Watch your Quirk now, dear," Akemi said. Ochako looked up to see the woman moving ever so slightly towards the pair, without moving her feet, pulled by some unseen force.

"Oh, sorry!" the girl cried out, slightly panicked, the smile running away from her face. She took a deep breath, calming herself down.

Ochako noticed her clothes fall back to normal, the force gone.

"Is that...her Quirk?" Izuku said slowly, putting his hand on his wrinkled chin. She noticed his eyes lighting up, as it often did when an exciting new Quirk appeared before him.

"It is. We're not entirely sure about it since she got it last month, but we suspect,, based on my Quirk, she is increasing her gravitational force to pull things in." Akemi frowned, walking up to stroke at her daughter's hair. The girl had suddenly lost all her excitement, the colour drained from her face.

"Wow, that's quite a power," Izuku chimed in, studying the girl intently.

"It is. But we're a little worried about the risks if it gets too powerful. So we're playing it safe until she's a little bit older."

"I want to be a hero like you…" the young Ochako said suddenly, looking away from everyone. She was suddenly on the verge of tears. "But I don't know if I can with this."

"Ochako…" the girl's mother replied, her eyes widening, apparently startled by the sad comment.

Without thinking, Uravity took action.

"Hey. You know, when I was a little girl, people were worried about what I could do with my Quirk, too," she said, causing her younger counterpart to pull her head up.

"Really?"

"Yeah! People were always saying I needed to be careful or I might really hurt someone." She could remember once sending her father a little too high into the air, leading to him getting a sprained ankle. "So I had to watch out for a little while. But eventually, I got a little older and had enough control to really work with it."

The girl sniffled slightly. "Could I do that?"

"I know you can do it. Just listen to your mom and keep working hard. Reach as high as you can. If you can stay positive and work at it, I'm sure you could be a hero, if that's what you want to do."

The girl's face lit up brighter than the sun, bringing a matching smile onto her namesake. "I do! I will!"

Ochako held up a fist, letting it slowly approach the girl. "Then I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do as the next hero named Ochako!"

The girl slowly mimicked her hero, bringing her tiny fist into her counterpart's one. She held it there for a moment, before bringing it back in, beaming all the while. The torch was passed.

The hero handed the girl back to her mother, spirits buoyed, heart warmed to have helped make such wonder in a child so small.

"I wanted to thank you for everything you did back then," Akemi said, her smile as beautiful as her daughter's. "What you said to me...I never really got to thank you properly, but it was what I needed to hear. I don't know if I could have gotten through everything without it. I never stopped looking up to you after that. I even run a fan site - I was just a little nervous about trying to meet you in person again."

Ochako beamed at the woman, her eyes getting wet as the words left their mark. What she did back then did matter. It was not for nothing. She had made a difference, even if it seemed so small looking back.

"Aww, you didn't have to be afraid. I would have been happy to meet you at any time." She looked towards the small girl who bore her name. "Thank you for this. For her. I'm just...I'm honoured."

"There wasn't anyone more inspiring we could think of to name her after. And neither of us would be here today without you." The girl in question gave a toothy grin and thumbs up at her idol. "And she's loved you ever since she found out about it."

Ochako took a breath, struggling to maintain some composure. Seeing the happy family that her work had helped create made her feel more pride than just about anything, besides her own family.

"Mommy, why is she crying?"

The hero touched her cheek. Oh. She was. She supposed it could not be helped.

"I'm just...very happy," the hero replied, making sure to show it in her smile.

It was difficult to describe the overwhelming, surging emotions within her. Here was solid proof of her mark on the world, something impossible to fathom before this moment. Surrounded by such love, she felt eager to give some of it back out.

"Would it be alright if I gave you two a hug?"

The blush returned to Akemi's face. She buried it in her daughter's hair, but she opened up her free right arm. Her daughter reached out eagerly, tiny arms stretching forward.

Ochako stepped forward and embraced the two of them, hugging them close, though taking care not to crush her namesake. Akemi let out a little gasp, seemingly struck by being embraced by her hero, while the younger Ochako latched around her neck.

The hero felt warmed to the very core of her being, holding a small part of a much greater legacy. She had made a difference, and she was holding it. Right now, these two people were the world to her.

"Thank you," the hero whispered her heart into Akemi's ear.

"Thank you for saving me," was all the woman could manage in reply.

After a couple of autographs and a promise to keep in touch, the couplings waved farewell to one another.

The hero promised herself, right then and there, she would watch the girl grow.

"I can't believe you found her after all these years."

"It took a little doing, but it was worth it." Izuku's answering grin was just as wonderful as it was on the day they first met.

She took the time to hug him from the side, digging her head into his chest. "You're incredible, you know that?"

"I couldn't be without you," he whispered into her hair. "You set a pretty good example."

"Oh, hush." She disentangled herself from him, face aflame, touched beyond words but getting a little embarrassed at the avalanche of compliments the day had brought. "So, shall we head back home?"

"Well...I had one more thing in mind." He walked over to the towering gate, pulling a card out from his pocket and flashing it at a scanner at the side of the door.

Ochako jumped slightly as the doors slowly opened, revealing the campus and school beyond. She stared wide-eyed at the familiar pathway, where she had begun her real journey to becoming a hero.

"How did you…?"

"Retiring comes with some perks. Called in a favour or two," Izuku said, tucking the card back in and adjusting his yellow backpack slightly. "Come on, let's go!"

With a surprising amount of exuberance, Izuku forged ahead, laughing as they returned to the grounds of their youth. Ochako followed him, joining in, eager to see just what more he had in store.

Staring at the school ahead now, it did not seem quite so imposing. The familiar path, lined with the busts of heroes, was significant, but she could walk it just as well as she did when she first came here.

This was a place bathed in legacy, but she was a part of that, just as much as the incredible heroes who had come before her. After meeting her young namesake, she did not doubt that now. Whether or not the world recognized it, she had made a difference, and there was plenty of living proof.

She realized how lost she had gotten. What was important to her was helping people - and heroes - in pain, people who needed you. She had done that thousands of times. That mattered. It was enough.

"I wanted to be here for this," Izuku suddenly called out, snapping her from her thoughts. He surged forward quickly, a few steps ahead of her. "The place where we-EEEEEEEEEE!"

Ochako reacted on instinct, sprinting ahead and tapping her hand onto the backpack of her descending husband. She did not see exactly how he had managed to trip, but even he would suffer from a faceplant into the hard ground.

Her reflexes were still quick enough, though he came pretty close to tasting brick. He stopped awkwardly in the air, body hanging horizontally without its gravity.

A rush of nostalgia hit Ochako with full force. Her mind went back more than 40 years, when she reached out to save the boy who would come to save the country - and her. She had acted on instinct back then too, not wanting to let people get hurt when she could make a difference, even if preventing a fall was trivial.

Silence hung in the air between them, the realization hitting them both at the same time.

She started snickering at him. Uproarious laughter followed quickly.

"I...can...not..believe!" Ochako paused between words, struggling to breathe, keeling over slightly. "That you would fall here again!"

After forty years of heroics, standing at the pinnacle, the world's greatest hero was still felled by his own two feet. Some things never changed.

"I swear...I swear I didn't mean to!" he responded, legs kicking in the air slightly as the laughter wracked through him. She noticed a blush starting to come to his cheeks, a little embarrassment peeking through the mirth. "Gosh, I planned to be more...together this time. I couldn't say a word to you when we..."

His face scrunched up suddenly. Just as she prepared to release him, he turned in mid-air, reaching his hand out to pause her.

"Wait! Uh, can you just hold me here for a bit?" he asked, reaching around himself to take his backpack off his shoulders.

Confused but curious, she nodded, staring intently at her partner as she tried to make out what he was up to.

With a shaky hand, he pulled out a small envelope from the bag, reaching out to hand it to her, still hanging awkwardly in midair.

"One...one last letter," he muttered, tripping over the words as he had with his feet. His nerves were evident, but she could not understand what he had to be nervous about. "From your biggest fan of all."

She had a hard time processing the image before her. Izuku, reaching up, letter in hand, hanging awkwardly, his gravity stolen by her hands. Blushing like a schoolboy, a nervous little grin on his face. She did as he asked, taking the envelope and regarding it carefully, curious as to its contents.

Izuku took a deep breath as she opened it up. "I just wanted to bring you here to remind you. About the very first time you saved me...and I guess the latest time, too."

He held up his yellow backpack, a toothy grin coming upon his face. "I even tried to look the part best I could!"

"Izuku…" she was astonished at just how far he had gone to make her feel better. She felt a surge of affection toward him, even before she read whatever was in this letter.

It was strange, thinking of this place as the first time she had saved someone. It had hardly seemed like anything at the time. Little did she know how that simple gesture would intertwine their destinies forevermore.

He finally flipped himself back upright, well accustomed to moving without gravity. She quickly tapped her fingers together, releasing him. He was suddenly right in front of her, eagerly gauging her reactions.

"Well...whenever you want to," Izuku said, inclining his head ever-so-slightly towards the message she held in her hand.

The envelope contained two pieces of paper, folded carefully together. She opened up the pages, her eyes met with his untidy scrawl. It could be difficult to read - he had developed his handwriting more for speed than legibility - but she had long since grown accustomed to it.

"To the world's greatest hero,

Hello! My name is Izuku Midoriya, and I have been a fan of yours since I was 16 - about 40 years. I might actually be your oldest fan!"

She let out a chuckle at that, Izuku joining in. I was always struck by just how determined you were - and how brightly you smiled. Even when you faced setbacks, you kept maintaining this incredible aura. It must have been hard on you. I wanted to help you, but I also knew it was something a hero had to do; reassure others even in the darkest of moments.

Being back here, Ochako could remember her first Sports Festival, and how brutal that setback had been. It was tough putting on a brave face. She put on a false smile too often back then, but it was a skill that could come in handy.

I've watched you every step of the way, and it was incredible seeing how fast you grew. How strong, how kind, how heroic you were. It drove me to want to be better. I know I would not have been the hero I am today without you.

You may not realize it, but I owe so much to you. At that entrance exam at U.A., there is no chance I would have made it without you. You saved me that day, and you've had a knack for doing that ever since.

She smiled at the memory of their exam together, even if it was fraught. From day one, they had managed to pull each other out of the fire often.

When I've fallen, you've lifted me up. When I doubted whether I could do it, you gave me a name that always meant I could. I've watched you blossom into an absolutely incredible professional. You inspire and help so many people. You are ridiculously kickass.

She snorted at that one.

My favourite moment of yours was your fight against the Renegades. The way you alternated your Quirk so smoothly and took out so many of them at once is - well, you know the rest.

"Nerd," she teased, garnering another chuckle from him.

You are the world to me. Everything we've built together, accomplished together - I'll make sure no one ever forgets it. You helped me tell my story - you helped make sure my story even exists. I will make sure they know yours.

I've left something to remind you of just how far you've come. The world may not recognize it, but I know we stand at the summit together. And I never would have made it here without you.

Thank you for always saving me!

Your number one fan, Izuku Midoriya

"Izuku...I…" her throat clogged up, rendering her speechless. Standing here, she could fully remember the incredible story she had helped create. How could she have doubted she had not left her mark, when the truth stood there before her, his eyes bright, standing at the top of the world, her right by his side?

Her story would be told. Their story. Together, in everything. She could see it now.

"Hang on. You should see the fan art first." Izuku looked sideways, blushing, adjusting himself away ever so slightly. "...Maybe even the first one?"

Startled, Ochako turned the page over, gasping at the sketch of herself. It was a little worn, clearly done with a basic pencil on an aged piece of paper. But it was surprisingly detailed around her face - far more than some of his older sketches. The descriptions highlighted her various costume features and abilities. She noticed a few crossed words like "cute" and "incredible," the page bearing the first signs of his love for her.

"It's the first sketch I ever drew of you. I usually cycle through these pretty fast, updating things. But I wanted to keep that one, even back then. When I first drew it, I realized I went too far and put it away. But I never wanted to get rid of it. Eventually, I realized it might make a nice retirement gift."

She reflected on the old sketch of herself - young, naive, courageous, simple. She drew a hand across the worn page, a gateway to the past, thinking upon how the image of her had changed, how much more she had done since then.

"Thank you, Izuku. It means so much to me." She stared up at him, his green irises shining down at her, the same passionate flame still there within them, even if they were now surrounded by more wrinkled flesh. "And thank you for saving me. Now, and always."

He grabbed onto her shoulders; she could feel the strength still so present in his arms despite how worn they had become. They beamed at one another, as best friends, partners, and everything to one another.

"This is where our journey together began," he stated simply. "Where our story began. And this is where the rest of our lives will, too."

She placed a hand over the top of his, holding it to her, staring fiercely back at him. "We got some adventures left in us after all, right?"

"The best is yet to come."

She acted then, grabbing onto the neck of his sweater and pulling him in for a deep kiss, her heart igniting at the contact, as surely as always.

They pulled away, the passion of the fleeting moment staining both their cheeks, suddenly sheepish about such a brazen public display of affection. Fortunately, nobody was around to witness it.

Ochako carefully put the letter and drawing back in the envelope and tucked it away in a pocket, turning back to the path where she had begun her journey, leading toward the gate out to the rest of the world.

She held out her hand for him, and he took it, intertwining their scarred flesh together.

They walked out towards the sunlight, the rest of their story left to tell.

----------------------------------------------------

AN: Written for the IzuOcha Temple Discord Server Big Bang Event. Prompt: "Thank you for always saving me!" Thank you very much to Mal for editing this and for Xylveon for the incredible artwork provided for the fic. You can also find it at https://twitter.com/Xylveon700/status/1294469669361840129. Please show Xylveon some appreciation! Thank you to the organizers for putting this on, it was truly wonderful to be part of. Please leave a like and/or reblog if you enjoyed it ! ^_^

#IzuOcha #my hero academia #fanfiction #Midoriya Izuku #Ochako Uraraka #shipping #IzuOcha Temple 3rd Anniversary Big Bang #Angst #fluff #romance #this is really dang fluffy

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metaphoreala · 5 years

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THE HEAVENLY LOCALES HIDDEN UPON AN ALTER-EARTH, OR ARE DISGUISED UPON THE PLANET

All religions hold a variation of the belief in an earthly counterpart to paradise. Judging by the psychonautical guidebooks and accounts of journeys to these sanctuaries, the amount of physical determination required makes a K2 climb look like a jog around the block.

But the promise of release from the conditions of physical landscape and even corporeality is more than a term in the contract; its possibility should already exist embryonically within the traveler, who seeks “spiritual riches.”

The chronology of the journey is circular, and the destination found to have been moving and “home” all along: There is no geographical cure, there is no chronological cure.

These are journeys to special places the pilgrim may be unsure even physically exist—and their faith therefore must be even stronger than those who think themselves comfortably saved in the big-ticket religions. Mecca and Lourdes and Jerusalem and Mount Kailash and Bodh Gaya are right there, in two dimensions, on a map or book page. One can make the trek to visit them.

These places, in contrast, seem half-products of imagination: glimpsed through mists, glinting on mountaintops or in valley shadows, temporary refuges, or—so it is told—promising more than just salvation or immortality.

They involve in one fashion or another a return to the origin, to the founder, to the creator, to the center of the cosmos.

It is difficult to determine the spiritual pilgrimage’s arrow of signification when it comes to physical geography vs. entheogeography (to meet deity or salvation via a hidden landscape). Rene Guenon and others believe that an otherworldly itinerary always precedes and is the model for that of a transfigured earth; the plane of the lower always symbolizes the higher, and never the opposite.

To undergo a difficult journey to a place of transcendence, transfiguration, or salvation is always held under secular or profane conditions, simply because to travel “across, into, within” remains conditioned by the Cartesian extensional/dimensional realms of human perception. One can travel from one’s own prayer mat given the proper physical and mental training, and with the right secretions of the “celestial dew,” won by years of practice, visions of paradise can douse the mind into ecstatic communion.

For the rest of us, we can hope to find a sacred landscape and its disguised architecture and residents.

MOUNT MERU/AGARTTHA

According to Guenon, the “primordial tradition” of all spiritualities and religions is focused around the concept of the Source or Pole about which all events turn in a cyclical manner.

The most explicit of these is shown in the 7-stage cycle of a kalpa, which is broken down into 14 manvantaras. Each manvantara contains 7 yugas or ages. The manvantara signifies a degeneration and regeneration of energy and its manifestations in truth.

We are currently in the yuga of Kali, in which destruction of the tradition (and thus the destruction of truth) accelerates. The long decline is followed by a purification and renewal.

All these cycles move about the primordial pole, Mount Meru. Meru is believed to have been at the northernmost part of the world and connected the earth to the heavens by means of the Pole star.

Although holy mountains occur in nearly every religion, Guenon and other traditionalists believe Meru is the archetype, and was constituted tens of thousands of years ago as the symbol of this manvantara. Thus, in one sense, all other holy mountains are emanations of Meru, and physical journeys to them are substitutes for the true Meru in a secondary, “profane” sense.

Meru is reflected in our secular concepts of the physical North Pole and the magnetic poles. The self-generating energies, as bases for all cyclical activity, as found in Asian religions, have been corrupted as they moved South and West; they become linear time construed as the primary or only kind of time.

Taken together, these two “types” of time form the basis for the symbol of the cross: the vertical signifying the revivifying Pole (infinite perception/life) and the horizontal signifying linear, finite perception.

“Dual time” is thus symbolized, reflecting simultaneously the four cardinal directions, the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the point (the center) as conceived as a single individual person standing on the face of the planet. We are all therefore at this center, ignorant though we are of it. The swastika adds to the cross a sense of motion as all cosmic and human events flow around the Pole.

To Guenon, (in his book The King of the World), the Pole’s main emanation was the kingdom of Agarttha, a civilization that long ago openly manifested the principles of these cycles. Its king was both legislator and the embodied truth of the cycles and, again, was represented by the cross.

Over the degeneration inherent in successive yugas, Agarttha withdrew into obscurity, leaving reflective centers of its wisdom in chosen persons and hidden social orders that preserved its truths and teachings.

By now, the Kali-yuga, Agarttha is underground in both literal and metaphoric senses. Thus, those seekers who strike out on the road for true knowledge and understanding of the earth, of deity, of immortality, or of humanity’s place in the cosmos in a “place learned in ancient hidden ways” are all seeking Agarttha in a metaphorical sense.

Each act of substitution, whether it be soma instead of Haoma, — instead of amanita, a piece of transubstantiated bread in place of Jesus’s flesh, wine in place of his blood, is a recapitulation of the primordial loss to our current reflective centers (our religions/esoteric schools) and the replacement of our linear time to Agartthan cyclical principles and centeredness.

HYPERBOREA

For Guenon, Hyperborea is the land beneath the geographic North Pole, with the arktoi, the Little Bear and Large Bear, as the symbols and guardians of the world axis.

From these asterism’s motion about the pole star comes the symbolic swastika, with its implied motion of the stars at the four ends of the cross. Mount Meru is always used as an evocation of this lost paradise of the Golden Age beneath a perfectly circling celestial dome. The Golden Age was less associated with a physical place then a principle that held for the world—although Guenon constantly hints at a geographically-situated actual civilization at the pole, which obviously has since sunk or was a landscape now obscured to history due to a pole shift.

The ancient Greeks were split as to Hyperborea’s location, only that it was far north of the Mediterranean civilizations. Herakles’s third labor involved traveling to the Northernmost land to capture what scholars have interpreted as a reindeer—an animal indigenous to Siberia, of course. This “golden horned hind” was sacred to Artemis. Britain, the Urals, and the land beyond the Riphean mountains all were candidates for its physical location. Hecataeus claimed the sun rose and set only once a year in Hyperborea, placing it therefore above the Arctic Circle.

Such terra incognita furnished a template for legends such as those saying Apollo spend part of the year in Hyperborea–which is fitting for a god who was mysteriously venerated both as the sun and of the long chthonic darkness of the polar winter (in his aspect as master of the caves’ “sleep temples”). Both Herodotus and Platomentioned Abaris, the Hyperborean healer who was probably from Scythia (the Ukraine or possibly even farther north in Siberia).

A variant is Ultima Thule, which a mariner merchant name and Pytheas claimed to have visited solo in the fourth century BCE, possibly Norway but was more likely England, Brittany, or even Iceland.

PARDES

The Garden of Eden is traditionally identified as being somewhere in Mesopotamia at the confluence of four great rivers (two of whose identities, the Tigris and Euphrates, are well obviously known) within ancient Sumer and Babylon. In the 3rd century Tosefta or gloss on the Torah’s Mishnah (oral tradition) is told the story of four rabbis who stumble into an otherworldly garden called PARDES. Only one of the rabbis, Akiva, survived this incursion and was able to tell the tale; one went insane, one died, and the fourth became a heretic. Over time, PARDES eventually came to symbolize both a place on earth and a place in, or of, the seven heavens (the latter idea which was probably adapted from Babylonian religion during the captivity).

As one interpretive tradition tells it, the loss of the physical Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE necessitated creating a spiritual Temple accessible through ritual means. Some of these means are preserved in the hekhalot (palace) and merkavah (chariot-throne) rituals conveyed in both Qabbalah and further Mishnah traditions.[1]

Both are said to have originated in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of YAHWEH’s chariot/throne and its four guardians centuries earlier.

Ezekiel’s status as a priest and prophet during the Babylonian captivity allowed him to disseminate the idea that the Temple traditions and the Hebrew faith could be carried on while in exile, without the physical location or implements in Jerusalem. This led to practices of internalizing imagery as a substitute for the lost Temple.

BABYLONIAN INFLUENCE

As a Babylonian exile, Ezekiel was on the banks of the Chebar River when his divine encounter occurred out of the north. In this context, as we’ve seen in the primordial Hindu tradition, north symbolizes the pole or center of the world—Meru. Some believe the vision incorporates Babylonian beliefs, and through those, the Sumerian astrotheology which preceded it—specifically the paths of the gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea and Enki. Enlil’s path is the 12 to 30° celestial north, around the pole star, and the Great Bear was considered the “great wagon” by the Sumerians: MAR.GID.DA. In Greek, this was AMAXA, or the chariot.

After a Sumerian or Babylonian statue of a god was charged and consecrated, its mouth washed and opened,[2]it was transportable. Its essence came from the stars. The essence is me and is the gift of civilization that Inanna stole from Enki.

Charged Babylonian statues were certainly brought to the river Chebar, where Ezekiel’s vision apparently begins, to end the rituals. Further it has been speculated that he was on the banks of the canal connecting Babylon to the holy city of Nippur where the mountain palace of Ekur, the home of Enlil, sat. His vision of the four companion beings conforms to the Sumerian griffins.

Both chariot and throne traditions utilize rhetoric of ascent or descent to the chariot/throne; in fact, the interchangeable double-use of these terms may be a clue as to the meaning, in the sense that the road upward and the road downward are the same, as Heraclitus said—that is, in the ritually altered states of mind of approach, conventional dualities and identity drops away: throne/chariot, ascent/descent, ritual aspirant/angel, ritual aspirant/apotheosis.

The path of Ea was comprised of 15 stars, with Regulus being dominant. AB.ZU. The abyss of Enki was the first star appearing in the constellation of the Libra, at the vernal equinox, the entry to the underworld.

THE RING OF QAF

Muhammad al-Kisa’i mentions the realm of Qaf in his hadiths of the Prophet. It figures in the geography of Ibn Fadl al-Humari’s Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises (1340CE). According to al-Kisa’i’s Prophet Muhammad, Qaf is the primordial mountain, like Meru, of which all our sensible ones are just emanations. It is home of the phoenix and land of the “hidden people”—the Jinn. Muhammad had visited it on his Mi’raj. The Qaf Mountains are made of emerald or peridot and “gave birth” to all mountains on earth, which are connected by underground/submarine passages not unlike arteries. Qaf is said to encircle the earth but is protected from humans by the oceans of the world. Here the narrative echoes that of Olympus and the fairies’ Avalon, as well as the Hindu-Buddhist realm of Shambhala, the abode of the blessed, which is situated similarly in an impassable mountain range that rings 96 towns.

Mythology scholar Thomas Keightly (1789-1872) also recounts Persian explorer Hatim Tai’s account of Qaf, describing lush provinces of magical “technologies.” Hatim’s “Djinnestan” holds two mysterious cities, Jabulqa and Jabulsa. In Al-Kisa’i’s hadith, Muhammad said that the twin cities’ exclusively male inhabitants lived in a continuous green twilight and knew nothing of the human world.[3] The Prophet declared it would take forty months’ journey in total darkness to reach these emerald cities…Perhaps this means a semi-permanent hypnagogic state of consciousness “suspended” for such a period, through ritual sensory deprivation techniques?

HURQALYA

Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth describes the relationship between two major strands of Iranian spirituality: the Zoroastrian Zend-Avestas and the Shi’ite ta’wil of Sufi ecstatic Shahib Suhrawardi (1154-1191CE) and Sunni philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165-1240CE).

A journey to break the membrane into the archetypal world could begin anywhere, with a meditation upon anything—but it is much easier if one starts with one’s being in a world of light.

THE KINGDOM OF PRESBYTER JOHN

Our magnificence dominates the three Indias, and extends to farther India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests. It reaches through the desert toward the place of the rising of the sun, and continues through the valley of deserted Babylon close by the Tower of Babel. 72 provinces obey us, and a few of which are Christian provinces; and each has its own king. And all their kings are our tributaries…In our territories are found elephants, dromedaries, and camels, and almost every kind a beast that is under heaven. Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power.

In one of the heathen provinces flows a river called the Physon, which, emerging from Paradise, winds and wanders through the entire province; and in it are found emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and many other precious stones. During each month we are served at our table by seven Kings, each in his turn, by 62 Dukes, and by 365 counts, aside from those who carry out various tasks on our account. In our hall there dine daily, on the right hand, 12 archbishops, and on our left, 20 bishops, and also the patriarch of St. Thomas, the Protopapas of Samarkand, and the Archprotopapas of Susa, in which city the throne of our glory and are Imperial Palace are situated.

If you can count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, you will be able to judge there by the vastness of our realm and our power.

This is a 19th century reconstruction[4] of the letter sent by “John the Priest-King” (the Presbyter John or Prester Jean) to Emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1165. There had been rumors for decades during the medieval period about a mysterious Magi priest-king in the East who was invincible. His legend preceded this letter, and the Emperor believed that it clinched Jean’s existence. And Jean’s help was needed by the crusaders stuck in Antioch and Edessa.

Later, a bishop named Hugh brought word of the situation in the Holy Land and the priest-king Jean’s victories against the Saracens to Pope Alexander III in 1177. Hugh claimed Jean would already have swept the Muslims from the Holy Lands but for his army’s inability to cross the Tigris (which is odd for an almost supernatural being like Jean and his hosts; it’s almost as if the Tigris water was anathema to him and his army, some sort of forbidden barrier they couldn’t cross by a form of magic).

The Pope and his advisors wanted to believe in Jean. They knew that Nestorian Christians lived in Persia and India and even China and thus believed Jean to be a Nestorian king. (Nestorius was a fourth century cleric who believed Jesus was an ordinary human who grew into his divinity. This got him booted from Rome at the council of Nicaea, along with a lot of other heretics. Nestorius and his followers then moved further eastward under Byzantine then Muslim protection.) Jean’s denominational beliefs made no difference to Rome after the disaster of the Seljuk raids on Edessa and Antioch. They needed all the help they could get. So when Hugh presented this “intelligence” that Jean was not invincible, and had been basically defeated by the Tigris, the Pope gave up beseeching him for help and called for the second crusade.

Still, Alexander III believed Hugh’s tale so much that he sent his personal physician Philip to search for Jean. Philip is never mentioned again in the historical record, but the letter apparently continued to circulate with more and more fantastic embellishments—the prototypical hypertextual story of a superhero.

Jean’s emerald scepter connects him in a tangential possible way with Hermes Trismegistus, whose “eternal philosophy” was written upon an emerald tablet.

SHAMBHALA

There are four main Tibetan texts describing journeys to the paradise of Shambhala. They are mostly based on long-lost earlier texts and have the character of dream trips or visions. The four are:

—Shambhalai Lamyig (Description of the Way to Shambhala) authored in 1775 by the third Panchen Lama of the — sect. This is considered the “standard text” of the journey, because it is based upon an earlier version that is a part of the Tengyur, a long commentary on the Tibetan canon. The account was translated into Tibetan a century earlier by the scholar Taranatha, and is called The Entrance to Kalapa. Kalapa was the capital of Shambhala and seat of its king. The Panchen Lama’s introduction also mentions a guidebook written by a Menlung Lama, who received the instruction via a dream; its route north required two or three years and led north through the Uighur and Tarim Basin area of Mongolia. Due to its dream provenance the Panchen Lama suspected its veracity.

–A 16th century version was composed by prince Rinpung Ngawang Jigdag, and is considered a beautiful literary epistolary creation as well.

–An anonymous author wrote a short guidebook in the 13th century, supposedly from direct experience of the journey. This version, translated by a German Indologist in 1907, has the least fantastical embroidering—except for an element that also occurs in another of the subsequent versions: just before the southern entrance into the holy province, the traveler encounters a city of humans with sexual organs in either upper thigh and reproduce by placing their legs together, the gestation taking place in the upper left thigh.

Based on the 1907 German translation, scholar Edwin Bernbaum has identified common markers in the stories: a northern route, the crossing of the River Sita, and passage through a wall of snowy mountains. Unlike the anonymous version, which shows straightforward geological features, the others are more psychogeological in that they require advanced knowledge of the Kalachakra tantra, prodigious mantra recitations, ritual appeasement of the demons guarding the landscape, and stoic concentration against the many sexual and sensual temptations made by landscape and spirits alike.

The Panchen Lama Lobsang Palden Yeshe was very interested in finding the holy province and collected all the travelers’ tales he could through study and direct interviews, becoming an authority. In 1775 he wrote an itinerary. Basing it on the Tengyur version, which he considered the most accurate, he also preserved in it the place names that had long ago fallen into mystery, to preserve its location from the secular searchers.

Forty years before, the prince Rinpungpa composed his Knowledge-Bearing Messenger in far more symbolic and poetic form. It was meant as a letter to his father, who was believed to have been reincarnated spiritually in Shambhala. He was familiar with the Kalachakra tantric legends of the pure land and quite possibly had vivid dreams or visions that inspired his work. Rinpungpa apparently was a poor ruler and sought his deceased father’s advice in matters of state. To this end he sought to write him in his father’s new abode. After rejecting the clouds, birds, and the light of the sun and moon as messengers, he hit on conjuring a tulpic being to convey the letter, and subsequently tells the thoughtform how to reach the kingdom. The text contains no rituals to ward off or summon demon helpers and is an imagistic itinerary full of lush descriptive passages.

All those spiritually thirsty persons who have sought out these guidebooks encounter in the texts the ascetic-monastic necessities of the dedicated pilgrim juxtaposed with the most fantastic geographies and beings encountered along the way. They are meant to deter all but the most pious and obsessed—and the path can be mortally perilous for the less-than-serious, in every way imaginable. Those with a misapprehension of the “land of treasures,” whether they are profanely willful or ignorant in their opinions, always meet a deserving hellish fate.

Many schools view the guidebooks as descriptions of internal states for which no physical journey is required; this is in keeping with the Kalachakra initiation’s strenuous physical and mental disciplines, the thousandfold opportunities for subversion by impure thoughts and emotions during its exercises, and the dangers when approaching the goal of kundalini awakening and its sudden absolute spiritual transformation.[5]

All versions of the itinerary mention a northern journey. This parallels the Greek Hyperborea, the land beyondthe north where the eternal paradise of the Titans exists. The northern extremity is in continuity also with the pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bon paradise called Olmolungring.

SAINT BRENDAN’S ISLE, HY-BRASIL, AND LOST ISLANDS

From the fall of Rome, Christian monks had fled persecution in Europe and Asia for Ireland. The Green Island was the refuge for scholars (and, some say, the remnants of the Knights Templars, who struck out from there and Scotland for the America continent in the late 14th century).

Medieval Ireland had a tradition of sea voyage tales called immrama that involved hidden magical and holy islands; Tir Na nOg, the Land of the Eternal Young, is probably the most famous version of this idea (although the actual entrances were through sacred burial mounds and caves either on or off islands). Inevitably the stories were Christianized, and by the 8th century someone had written The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot. Many of its incidents were based on earlier immrama and probably Homer’s Odyssey. According to the text, sometime in the 6thcentury “Brendan the Navigator” and a dozen monks set out to find an island that a Saint Barrind had told him about. After a series of adventures involving (perhaps) icebergs, sea monsters, and angry Norse blacksmiths, they find this earthly paradise seven years later. Original locations for this isle (or archipelago) was the Madeira or Azores; by the 19th century it had “traveled” north, and could be seen/landed upon only by the worthy and those not seeking it.

A variation of this is Hy-Brasil, a mythical island off the western Irish coast, cloaked in mist, which was said to appear every seven years. It first appeared on a 1325CE portolan map. It continued to be represented on maps until the 18th century, and expeditions to find it were undertaken in the 15th century. Parallels with Avalon are inevitable.

THE ROSICRUCIANS

The two Rosicrucian manifestoes The Fame of the Brothers RC (1614) and the Confessions of the Brothers RC (1615) occupy a space between fact and fantasy. They became foundation myths for what would eventually become dozens of Rosicrucian Societies around the world. The Fame tells the story of a 14th century spiritual journeyman Christian Rosenkreuz’s travels to the East and his initiations into probably Sufi and Hermetic-Greek-Egyptian orders. A direct lineage of the teachings of German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath and British mage John Dee can be discerned in the Rosicrucian program. The tracts outline the eventual creation of a utopian society of Christian universalism (emphatically non-Catholic, however) dedicated to scientific melioration of humanity’s ills. This program would lead people to believe that Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) was a quasi-Rosicrucian work.

In 1666, Duchess Margaret Cavendish publishes The Blazing World, a novel about a utopian society on another planet accessible from a portal at the North Pole. Along with the Chemical Wedding and New Atlantis, Cavendish’s imaginative work signal the retreat of physical sanctuaries of peace into fictional and secret-societal hermetic ideals. Hence:

MODERNIST SUBSTITUTES

With growing industrialization and mass literacy came the escape into secular fictions that are more or less modeled upon these sacred journeys to hidden places. The near-completion of the global cartographic enterprise by the turn of the 20th century pushed back on the Imagination, which ever reaches beyond the line. Hence journeys to the inner earth, the moon, Mars, or submarine civilizations became popular.

John Cleves Symmes apparently began this “gold rush” to alternate worlds decades earlier with Circular Number 1 (1818), an attempt to convince the world’s governments and scientific societies to mount expeditions to the hollow earth through the poles. Inspired by astronomer Edmund Halley’s hypothesis, Symmes’s model for the inner earth was an inversion of the planetary spheres, a series of concentric rings through which one entered, mysteriously, through a gravitational vortex at the poles where an explorer’s forward motion equaled descent. Symmes’s entreaties came to naught, but someone—either Symmes himself or a Nathaniel Ames—wrote and published the novel Symzoniain 1820.

But even before this, Jack Casanova penned the nearly unread but bizarre 1,800 page Icosameron (1787), a story about sibling-lovers who spend 81 years living with a bizarre race in a mirror-earth within the planet. While technically a pre-Romantic work, it has all the signs of a counter-Enlightenment mentality.

Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) is the most famous adventure story of an arduous journey to an “unknown” place involving a secret itinerary (or clues to a passage to it). Theosophist/Rosicrucian Sir Edward “it was a dark and stormy night” Bulwer-Lytton wrote The Coming Race in 1871, the tale of a man’s accidental discovery of an advanced society of beings living within the earth. The next year Samuel Butler produced Erewhon: Or, Over the Range in 1872, an extended satirical description of an unknown surface country in which an artificial intelligence evolves from their own version of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” the industrial factories. In Etidorhpa (1895), pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd did Bulwer-Lytton one better by creating a matrioshka-story structure in which a strange spiritual being named “I-Am-The-Man” is led into the hollow earth. There he learns alchemy and the spiritual nature of the universe, coming back to tell his story as a near-apparition to a Kentuckian journalist, whose manuscript the author, Lloyd, supposedly found.

Medium Helene Smith’s astral travels to the civilization of Mars were transcribed and interpreted by psychologist Theodore Flournoy in From India to the Planet Mars in 1900. Medium Sara Weiss added her own “scientifickal romance” Journeys to the Planet Mars, Or, Our Mission to Endo to the growing field of sci-fi in 1906. Willis Emerson’s The Smoky God (1908) added yet another fictional English/Scandinavian adventurer, Olaf Janssen, in traveling to the inner planes.

Each of these works describe utopian civilizations in sometimes excruciating detail (architecture, mores, laws, etc.), a tradition going back to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), which you might say was a rough Elizabethan-era blueprint for the scientific technocracy that now exists all around us. But further devolvement of the secular geographical journey into sword-and-sorcery occurred with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar and John Carter of Mars series.

Of course, the most famous “hidden utopia” story is still Lost Horizon by James Hilton, which introduced mass Western audiences to Shangri-La, a beyul in the classic Hindu-Tibetan sense. Immortals, magic medicine, pacifism, all told in yet another double-frame story format.

With the further deenchantment of our physical neighborhood via astronomy, the imaginative mind inevitably turned to other worlds, to other times, to other dimensions—to the other in general, that is, anywhere but here and anywhen but now. This seems to be one of the main themes of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006), which has numerous discussions of travel through the hollow earth, time travel, or to parallel versions of Earth, as well as a search for Shambhala and story arcs that use the Everett-Wheeler multiverse conjecture as a self-reflexive plot device. Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), mentions something called Vheissu (echoing a protagonist’s search for the V-named woman of the title) that is either a savage hidden land that refutes the foundations of all earthly politics, or a Borges-like infection of our world by an imaginary utopia.

WILD SCIENCE STEPS INTO THE BREACH: ONG’S HAT, THE GAME OF SUGGESTION, AND MIND-MAPS

The Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey has always had a reputation for supernatural goings-on. Just ask Paulie Walnuts and Chris Moltisanti.

Legend tripping came online in the early 1990s with the legend of the Moorish Ashram. Located in the Pine Barrens, the hamlet of Ong’s Hat (which doesn’t appear on 95% of New Jersey maps) was supposedly the site where a group of edge-thinkers, chaos magic devotees, and psychonauts developed a technology to travel to another, unspoiled version of earth via a vehicle called the Egg, then later by purely ritual means.

At first just a physical pamphlet, a list of suggested and necessary reading materials for ashram participants called the Incunabula Papers was posted online in connection with this gang of “rogue scientists.” The ideas of Henry Corbin figure in the legend via this catalogue, and one of the scientists named the alter-earth to which they retreated Hurqalya, after Suhrawardi’s transfigured imaginal earth-double. Incunabula mixed real books with invented ones, Borges-style, to weave in the older legends of the Philadelphia experiment of 1943 and its supposed successor, the Montauk project.

The legend all turned out to be the spawn of four primary individuals: Joseph Matheny, physicist Nick Herbert, poet Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), and Peter Moon. A small cadre of message board-lurkers picked up the “alternate reality game” and ran with it as factual, some going far as to visit the Ong’s Hat hamlet in search of either physical evidence or remnants of the portals. Matheny came fully clean after some hardcore fantasists refused to believe the group had made up the legend. The clues were there from the beginning (especially the references to the bogus Philadelphia experiment) but it all just ended up demonstrating the spiritual need people have for the utopian journey, as refracted through geography and high technology.

The extraordinary ABC series LOST capitalized on the concept of a Hy-Brasil-like “invisible” island in south Oceania that revitalized the trope of a hidden land, in which a pair of near-immortal brothers use it as a proving ground for human good and evil. Thanks to the depth of its characterizations and its carefully-unspooling plots-within-plots, LOST tries hard and mostly succeeds at using ancient tropes to recapture the wonder and purpose of the spiritual quest in a geographical context. The story is drawn bigger and bigger.

Bibliography

Bernbaum, Edwin. The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas, Shambhala Publications, 2001.

Corbin, Henri. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Princeton University press, 1981.

-The Imaginal and the Imaginary

-Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth

Guenon, Rene. The King of the World, Sophia Perennis, 2004.

–Symbols of Sacred Science, Sophia Perennis,

Lebling, Robert, Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar, Counterpoint, 2011.

LePage, Victoria. Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-La, Theosophical Publishing House, 1996.

Levenda, Peter. Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.

Matheny, Joseph and Moon, Peter. Ong’s Hat: The Beginning.

Roerich, Nicolas. Shambhala: In Search of the New Era, Inner Traditions, 1990.

–Heart of Asia: A Memoir of the Himalayas, Inner Traditions, 1990.

Silverberg, Robert. The Realm of Prester Jean, Ohio University Press, 1996

——————-

[1] The hitherto hidden Qabbalistic forms of these rituals were “publicly” revealed with the discovery of a vast trove of medieval scriptures in the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, 1753/1864/1896, and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. These could both reasonably called instances of terma (treasure) discovery in the Tibetan tradition—that a cache of wisdom-filled documents are revealed at a certain time for people’s salvation—given the right amount of piety in absorbing and performing the rituals contained within.

[2] The washing of the mouth ceremony involved the introduction of magnetic ore into the water—lodestone ore from Magnesia ad Sipylum in Turkey.

[3] It is not noted in Muhammad’s mysterious account whether these djinn were immortal. Tradition says the “normal djinn” have very long lifespans and die, but the “exclusive” maleness of these first djinn in Qaf makes one wonder if the women perhaps were hidden away from his eyes, or that some means of technological reproduction was involved in their existence.

[4] The best dating to the letter was somewhere around 1165. Scholars Vasiliev and Silverberg and others had never really been able to determine who wrote it but its derogatory tone towards the Byzantine ruler Eugenus and the Greeks in general compelled them to conclude it was a Latin-speaking monk who lived in or was familiar with the Holy Lands and extant folklore or rumors about the East that made their way along the Silk Road—probably stories about the king blank in India conflated with stories about “exotic” Indian and Chinese technology. It’s possible the writer was even familiar with the Thousand Nights and a Night, whose stories feature fantastic lands and technologies like that of Prester Jean.

[5] This ritual is not to be taken lightly and requires months and months of preparation even to take on its preliminaries. It was the gift of the Buddha after parinirvana (bodily dissolution) when he assumed the form the Kalachakra deity, who taught the first Shambhalan king, Sucandra. Sucandra wrote extensive commentaries on it and created the first Kalacakra mandala, which has forever since been a very important public ritual, in a sand-based form, created by monks.

Notes on Entheogeographies of Salvation THE HEAVENLY LOCALES HIDDEN UPON AN ALTER-EARTH, OR ARE DISGUISED UPON THE PLANET All religions hold a variation of the belief in an earthly counterpart to paradise.

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peerless-soshi · 5 years

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Title: Lost & Found Series: Mo Dao Zu Shi Relationship: Wei WuXian & Jiang Cheng (side Wei WuXian/Lan WangJi) Setting: Canon/future Rating: G Genre: Family; hurt/comfort Link: AO3 Word count: 4893 Summary: "I mourned you, Wei WuXian!" His voice broke. "I cried too many times, I'm too tired to do this again. But you left me. Although you promised.”

[Future Fic] Wei WuXian and Jiang Cheng talk about Jiang YanLi's death, fight like children and for the first time in forever feel like brothers. All may not be lost.

A/N: Is writing a concluding story before finishing the novel a good idea? No. Can it be contrary to canon facts? Yes. Is it going to stop me? No. Enjoy. Also it's my first MDZS fic so be understanding and enjoy! I'll love you forever for a comment.

"The Cloud Recesses intends to accept new students? Seriously?" Wei WuXian asked, surprise ringing in his voice.

"Yes," Lan WangJi muttered under his breath, still eyeing the scrolls spread across the table, their edges frayed by fingers of time.

The afternoon sun was peeking into the library pavilion through a huge, round window, painting on the paper some bright flower-shaped stains with asymmetrical petals, which made the scrolls look even more golden and, in Wei WuXian's eyes, even older. Dust flickered in the air, soaring like on butterfly wings. So even here they can't clean everything, Wei WuXian thought with satisfaction. He expected the Lan Clan to polish paper.

"We do not accept new disciples," Lan WangJi added, "They are only sons of the important sects who will stay here for several months, learning and using our book collection. Nothing remarkable."

Wei WuXian put his elbows on the table and shifted towards his partner, smiling brightly. "How unpleasant of you, Lan Zhan! You call the sons of the most important sects unremarkable? Are you whispering behind their backs? Or maybe I should punish you for pride?"

He chuckled and waved his palm in front of Lan WangJi's face, brushing a few long hairs flowing down from between the white forehead ribbon like black ink on a white sheet. It wasn't a surprise that the second master of the Lan Sect didn't move. His eyes waved from one side of the scroll to the other; up, down, right, left, down.

"Any of them."

"How boring," Wei WuXian sighed with exaggerated indignation before lying down on the table. He glanced up. Still no reaction. Now Wei WuXian sighed honestly, but he was used to his husband's behavior and didn't expect more; the mere fact that Lan WangJi uttered five sentences, including the complex one, was quite a change. Who else could hope for such a privileged conversation?

And yet, Wei WuXien couldn't fight with boredom. Lan WangJi has been bending over the old texts for several hours now, studying carefully every sign. He had stopped once, but only to reach for the brush and make notes, then gone back to work. The scrolls were gathered on both sides of the table, arranged in even towers with paper foundations that Wei WuXian wanted to demolish. What was Lan Zhan trying to find if he knew all these texts by heart? Wei WuXian didn't understand. Somehow, he didn't want to go deeper into it.

After a moment, he lay down on the mat and yawned loudly, so that even the younger students, who were studying in the room next door, must have heard him. Lan WangJi finally looked up and sent him a berating gaze, like a rough sea. Wei WuXian has become a good swimmer in the depths of these eyes, so instead of humbling, he answered with a wide smile and waved. To his delight, the corners of Lan WangJi's mouth twitched.

Wei WuXian rose to his knees and moved closer. He glanced over his husband’s shoulder, brushing his lips against Lan WangJi's ear, and whistled.

"Behave yourself, Wei Ying."

"Do you really want to memorize everything?" Wei WuXian asked, deaf to the reprimand.

Lan WangJi nodded. "Using such important texts during lessons would make a bad impression."

"During lessons?"

Texts. Lesson. And Lan Zhan was preparing... Understanding washed through him like waves crashing against a cliff’s edge. Wei WuXian flinched in surprise, his fingers clutching his husband's collar and leaving, horrible, a delicate fold on the perfect white fabric. He felt as if he could dive into the new possibilities. Lan WangJi reluctantly turned his head, smoothing the collar.

"You are going to teach them, Lan Zhan? Really?"

Lan WangJi let out a soft murmur that Wei WuXian had learned to interpret as a variation of yes.

"I remember our punishment."

"Your punishment."

"You will be a great teacher, Lan Zhan," Wei WuXian said, tapping him on the shoulder. "Just talk to your students, you know? If you explain the sacred texts, not just tell them to read for two hours in silence, it's possible that they’ll learn something."

Lan WangJi's mouth narrowed as he pushed Wei WuXian's hand. The feeling of resentment reflected on his impassive face, just like a pebble leaving circles on water. "Do not lecture me. I know what to do."

"Are you sure?" Wei WuXian laughed, too loud as for the Lan Sect library. "Is the rule of silence, or coping three thousand principles of this place, really the best possible teaching method?"

"What would you suggest, Wei Ying?" LanWangJi asked. Belatedly he realized that he just committed one of the most shameful neglects in his life.

Wei WuXian grinned. "I have many ideas," he said and began to count on his fingers, thoughtfulness on his face, "First of all, I would give them more fighting lessons because your clan neglects them. You are a genius, Lan Zhan, but children? They won't learn how to fight fierce spirits by sitting in the classroom! It is irresponsible to let them go unprepared. And practical knowledge about spirits? If you want to teach them the theory then make sure they really need it."

He didn't intend to brag, but his classifications were still used by most cultivation schools. And which of them was better at sorting knowledge and creating tables?

His face must have glowed, lit from the inside, as Lan WangJi grimaced slightly.

"No."

"What? I didn't say anything! That's not fair, Lan Zhan, now you want to add clairvoyance to your endless list of talents." Wei WuXian winked at him.

"It is not difficult to guess your thoughts. And I repeat: no."

Wei WuXian pushed the table aside, so that Lan WangJi's hand hung limply in the air. His eyes widened in shock. What a victory. After that, Wei WuXian put his head on his partner’s lap, smoothing the white robes like a pillow.

"Tell me, Lan Zhan, what am I thinking about?"

"No."

"You are never fun! Say, or later I’ll be boring too and go to sleep early," Wei WuXian threatened and nudged him.

The window bell played when gentle wind slipped into the room and danced with Lan WangJi's forehead ribbon. Ting, ting... Like a cat, Wei WuXian reached out and touched the ribbon. The snow white shone between his fingers, marked by fights and work, reminding him of all he could do now, and everything he had. Then Lan WangJi grabbed his wrist. Wei WuXian expected his husband to feel offended by such frivolous behavior, but Lan WangJi drew the hand closer to his face. His eyes softened.

"No way. Even if children like you."

"So you admit that I'm popular with children!" Wei WuXian exclaimed triumphantly. "I would be more popular than you! Are you jealous?"

Lan WangJi nodded with seriousness disproportionate for this situation. "Yes. But you're proud for the wrong reasons. Do not bring any more trouble to the Lan Clan."

"Me?" Wei WuXian put his palm on the chest, his free hand brushing Lan WangJi's cheek. "If my memory is correct, you brought me, your trouble, to the Cloud Recesses! It's also your fault. You're on the wrong path."

A normal person would probably smile. The second master of the Lan Sect only cleared his throat with impenetrable expression, what sounded more like an elegant combination of a hidden snort and a sudden sneeze. Wei WuXian was getting better and better!

"Besides ..." Lan WangJi continued, "The cultivation world may not be ready to accept you as a teacher of their heirs. Even if you are going to teach only approved techniques, many still do not trust you. That may affect our reputation, and if the clan leaders decide to take their children out of fear... "

"Good observation, HanGuang-Jun." The voice came from the door. "As always infallible – to think that despite your decisions, you still didn't lose the ability of apt judgment. If you let him teach in the Cloud Recesses, your reputation will fall like a stone thrown from the top of this mountain."

They turned their heads at the same moment, though Wei WuXian knew exactly who would wait for them. The voice as sharp as a whip, destroying any obstacle in its path, and sarcasm thrown on HanGuang-Jun. Only few would dare to do that. A drop of bitterness, hidden at the end of the tongue.

Wei WuXian got up from his partner's knees and checked the clothes. He turned to Jiang Cheng, who was standing at the door of the pavilion, his hand decorated with Zidian on his hip. Wei WuXian sat up straight and forced a smile, as real as if painted with Lan WangJi’s brush.

"Jiang Cheng. Good to see you!"

His greeting had the opposite effect because Jiang Cheng grimaced even more and avoided his eyes, talking to Lan WangJi.

"I come to discuss the sect matters," he said.

Lan WangJi’s eyes narrowed. "What matter could bring you to me, Sandu Shengshou? It is not in my power to conduct diplomatic talks."

"It's not about diplomacy," Jiang Cheng corrected him, sitting on the mat. "It's rather a good thing since I wanted to talk with you, HanGuang-Jun. Like a clan leader with a clan leader," he added, and it didn't take much trying to see who those words were aimed at.

Crumpled by the weight of paper smiles and caustic tone, Wei WuXian wanted to leave, but Lan WangJi held his hand.

"The Lan Clan leader is away," he said officially, "If you want to talk with the representative, you have me as well as Wei WuXian, who plays this role on par with me."

Jiang Cheng clenched his teeth. Something was in his eyes, a flash of rage, then a flicker of envy. The ring began to spin on his finger.

"There's no need to annoy the sect leader, Lan Zhan," Wei WuXian said, a long silence announcing the words he wasn't ready to hear. He pulled away before Lan WangJi could grab him, and walked toward the door, his footsteps quicker than intended.

Passing Jiang Cheng, Wei WuXian risked one quick glance. But as expected, Jiang Cheng didn't even look at him.

Some games were eternal.

For example: spreading wings like a swallow and pretending you can leave the ground and worries far behind you... Maybe not literally – Wei WuXian became convinced that even ghosts can't observe everything – but such thoughts flashed through his mind as he was sitting on a stone bridge near the Orchid Hall. He was swaying his legs in the air, resting his chin on his hands and enjoying the warm wind that carried the scent of the evening, the familiar aroma of magnolia trees and river. Everything was covered in silence, like in the clouds.

Only the bell was ringing at his sash.

Similar to silks thrown carelessly on the floor, the water under his feet wrinkled and folded. The koi fishes, orange flecks of sunset, flitted near the surface. How strange, Wei WuXian thought, that in such a quiet place the water was not calm. When he had first come here, in his previous life, everything had seemed to stop in time, as if in a different dimension, on the other side of a mirror. Now, living with Lan WangJi, he has learned the Cloud Recesses’ slow and arranged rhythm. But how could he have seen it back then, with Jiang Cheng trying his best to obey the rule of silence in spite of fiery nature?

Wei WuXian blinked. He raised his head and stared into the distance, but it was too late; the water reflection blurred the face of the second master's spouse, and showed the fifteen-year-old heir of the YunmengJiang Sect, together with his faithful companion, passing the same bridge. Hand in hand. Distant memories flickered on the river, showing lost moments. Drops of their steps as they ran to the class, their innocuous fights the most clear. Wei WuXian remembered the wrinkle between Jiang Cheng’s eyebrows and the way he had given him a tongue-lashing for oversleeping, more out of habit than actual anger. His own laughter, Nie HuaiSang's moaning at the thought of entering the classroom late. Years have passed, but the memory of Jiang Cheng’s facade breaking when he had burst into laughter was still as clear as the fishes swimming in the river.

Then, somewhere to the right, Wei WuXian heard a splash; a pebble fell into the water, ringing like a drowning bell.

He turned his head and smiled. This time it came naturally.

"You always find the perfect moment, Jiang Cheng," he said.

Jiang Cheng stood on the other side of the bridge, his hands crossed on his chest. He looked surprised.

"I have no idea what you're raving about," he stated, passing him, and added, "Goodbye."

Wei WuXuian folded his hands and bowed. That was the right thing, he knew. He would obey all rules – at least those reasonable – and let his new home live in peace. He wouldn't bring any problems. It was just surprising that something as unnatural as bowing to Jiang Cheng quickly became his first reaction.

The purple robes fluttered in the breeze, the bell playing the melody of home. The home. Wei WuXian watched Jiang Cheng's silhouette, a cherry blossom against the whiten hill. It grew smaller and smaller until the gate almost swallowed it.

Wei WuXian stood up. Just a moment ago, he thought that he wouldn't cause problems... right?

"Jiang Cheng!" he exclaimed, running down the stone steps.

Jiang Cheng didn't slow down, though he must have heard him. Nevertheless, Wei WuXian was fast, so he caught up with him. He took a deep breath, trying to calm down and use this moment to decide what to say.

"Jin Ling will come to the Cloud Recesses, right?" he finally said.

Jiang Cheng frowned but still didn't look at him. "Where does this come from?"

"I can't think of another reason why you came to Lan Zhan," Wei WuXian answered and shrugged. "We talked about it today. The sons of the more important clans are going to be sent here for teachings. I think Lan Zhan intends to replace master Lan QiRen and hold the classes. It's a great opportunity for Jin Ling to learn... and make friends," he added cautiously.

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. "Even if you're right, it's not your concern."

"Are you sure it's a good idea?"

"What are you trying to say?" Jiang Cheng grunted, clenching his fist. Zidian gleamed in the setting sun, a drop of violet reflecting the rays of red.

"The situation in the Jin Clan is extremely tense, and Jin Ling is their only heir," Wei WuXian said, eyeing Jiang Cheng, "Is it wise to keep Jin Ling away from the Carp Tower now, when the succession begins?”

Jiang Cheng grinned. He looked as if he didn't want to answer, and did so only because of old habits.

"That's why A-Ling should stay here for a while. You may be right, the situation of the Jin Clan is extremely... difficult. And unstable. It would be unreasonable to let the only rightful heir stay in the heart of conflict. Do you have any objections?"

Wei WuXian shook his head. "There are few safer places than the GusuLan Sect. You can get here only through one, always guarded, gate, and leave with a special token. All known charms have been put on the walls. And we have the strongest cultivators of our age." He didn't need to add that he was one of them. "There is no safer place for Jin Ling."

Yes, he agreed; Jiang Cheng was right. And yet deep in his heart, Wei WuXian couldn't help but wonder if Jiang Cheng was harming his nephew. Of course, he understood – better than anyone else. Jin Ling meant the whole world to his uncle, so Jiang Cheng tried to shield him from this world. But pretending that politic was less cruel than the young master could see would do nothing good. At his age, Wei WuXian and Jiang Cheng had experienced unimaginable things. Maybe that's why Jiang Cheng wanted Jin Ling to be a child for a one day longer.

Jiang Cheng broke into his thoughts. "Even if Jin Ling will be here, it has nothing to do with you. Stay away from him."

"Do you think I would deliberately draw him back from studying? You know how much I loved it. Of course I won't disturb him!"

Jiang Cheng didn't appreciate this brilliant joke. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned to Wei WuXian, who almost expected Jiang Cheng to jump at him.

"I'm serious, Wei WuXian!" he growled, looking him in the eyes, "I don't want you to follow A-Ling. I don't want you to talk to him. I don't want him to be in the same room as you. I want him to be safe."

“Safe?" Wei WuXian repeated, his voice louder than necessary. "What is this supposed to mean?! Do you think I would hurt him? I would give," he hesitated, and almost spat out his last words, "I would give up my life for shijie's child!"

"Maybe that's the problem? Maybe just being around you brings misfortune?!" Jiang Cheng said. Wei WuXian would rather be hit. "Leave A-Ling alone... please."

Someone who hadn't spent half of their life with Jiang Cheng wouldn't know how much it cost him to say this word. That person wouldn't notice that despite the commanding tone, his knees were shaking. But Wei WuXian wasn't that person; he took a step back and nodded.

"Very well," he said slowly, "I understand, Jiang Cheng. If that's what you want, Jin Ling will have nothing to do with the Yiling Patriarch. I will not even speak with him without the need."

The sunset doused Jiang Cheng’s face in the intense glow, making his features even sharper. "No, Wei WuXian. There's no need for it. Never."

He turned his back to Wei WuXian, heading for the gate. Wei WuXian considered following him, but his feet grew into the ground.

"I saved him. Earlier. I've saved his life. Don't pretend that I bathe my hands in blood," he said, more to himself, to the fate awaiting him than to Jiang Cheng.

However, Jiang Cheng hissed through his teeth, "Great. You saved him, huh? A-Ling doesn't own you anything. What would have happened if you’d made a mistake?!" He spun on his heel, his shadow lengthened by the sleeping sun like brush strokes. It almost seemed to overwhelm Wei WuXian. "If you’d made a mistake, you could kill him. Aren't you experienced in this? In both killing and making mistakes?"

There was irony in his voice, although Wei WuXian wasn't sure if Jiang Cheng wanted to laugh or cry. This uncertainty just made his hands hung limply on both sides. He bowed down his head; weak, tired, like something dead that was supposed be alive. Like one of the fierce corpses.

"I'm sorry," he finally confessed, the red sky his witness. The blood of that day had darker shade of red. "I'm sorry," Wei WuXian repeated. "Shijie... it was my fault. And I will never forget about it."

Looking back, Wei WuXian had apologized a lot in his life. There had been different kinds of apologies, often such as those given to Lan WangJi in the library or on the river of the water ghouls: pretending that nothing happened to avoid punishment rather than regretting mistakes. Sometimes he would say them with a smile, sometimes with seriousness. And with pain, suffocating him like a lump in a throat.

Jiang Cheng's eyes widened. He touched the ring and spun it, one way and the other.

"Stop it," he ordered, "I don't want to hear it."

"I know. This may not be the best moment, but you must know that what happened to shijie was an accident and I regret it every day. And I will never redeem for this sin, even if I pull Jin Ling out of the mouth of death a hundred more times."

It wasn't how he had intended to say those words, in the middle of the stone path, in a shaking voice, with talks of some students coming from a distance and furious Jiang Cheng in front of him, but life had no respect for plans. He had to say it now or be buried under the weight of grief. Like Jiang Cheng.

The YunmengJiang Sect leader glanced at his ring, mother's heritage burning memories in his head, then on Wei WuXian. An angry grimace appeared on his face.

"Do not say her name, Wei WuXian," he rasped. "You don't have the right."

He could be serious or carried away by anger and words he didn't mean. This time, Wei WuXian couldn't judge it. He regretted that he didn't have his flute, though he remembered that on the mountain there was no burial area suitable for his abilities. It was just a simple reaction to seeing the rage thundering in Jiang Cheng's eyes, and his whip, unexpectedly unfolded. And yet, Wei WuXian came closer. Once he would probably retreat and let Jiang Cheng face his sadness in loneliness, thinking that he deserved this cruelty. But it was long time ago.

"You are unjust, Jiang Cheng," he said, his words calm, reasonable. "I loved her too."

Then a crack could be heard. Did this place make Wei WuXian's reactions slower? Probably; he was still hunting for evil spirits, but a bunny bite was the only threat behind the walls of Gusu. Maybe that was why he didn't dodge in time when Zidian left a hole in the ground, as well as a deep wound in his hand.

"Shut up!"Jiang Cheng shouted, his scream thunderous among the silence of Gusu. "You loved her? You?! What do you know? Did you go to her funeral, Wei WuXian? Did you hold her baby when her body was wrapped in flames? Did you answer Jin Ling's question when he wanted to know why his parents are not with him? Tell me! Did you lose your sister?!"

"Yes!"

The words were faster than the thoughts.

Jiang Cheng looked as if someone slapped him. He staggered on his feet, about to fall, then rushed at Wei WuXian. His hands clenched on the black collar in an iron grip, taking them both to the ground. Wei WuXian let out a moan as his back hit the path.

"Wei WuXian! You have no shame!"Jiang Cheng hissed, straddling him, red on his face. "You don't have the right to say that. Not after everything you've earned! You insult her memory!"

"How?" Wei WuXian said brazenly, allowing emotion to take control. He grabbed Jiang Cheng by the wrist. "I loved shijie like a sister! She raised me. She was always good to me."

"And how did you repay?!"

"If there was a way to trade my soul for hers, I would do it without hesitation. She deserves a second life much more than me! I loved her like no one else. You know about it!"

But did he really know?

Wei WuXian wanted to believe in it; to believe that both Jiang Cheng and Jiang YanLi were aware he loved them with every word and every thought. Every decision. Every mistake. Every drop – of tears and blood. And he sold his soul to the hell for all kinds of reasons. To take revenge for them. To ensure their safety. To build a future for them. To pay off the debt. But never for himself; Wei WuXian loved them more than himself, and that's why he had never said the most important words – because who was he to say it? A stray at the great court? He was nothing. They were everything. However, it was all before, when no one would wait for thirteen years, convincing him that love was something he deserved by being himself; before he had found home in a place he considered ashes. That had been before Lan WangJi.

Love has built a new life.

"I loved her," he said again, calmer, a shimmer of sadness washing through him. "And I loved you, Jiang Cheng. And uncle. The entire Lotus Pier. I loved you all. I still love."

He always thought so.

He spoke these words for the first time in his life.

Jiang Cheng's grip melted. He looked at him, more a child than a warrior, questions on his lips and confusion in his eyes. Wei WuXian found out that his features weren’t as sharp as he thought.

His lip thinned. "Why, Wei WuXian?"

Wei WuXian was silent, letting the meaning of his words to find Jiang Cheng. The shadow of understanding finally reflected on his face. Before Wei WuXian noticed, Jiang Cheng raised his hand and hit him with all his strength. A wave of rusty taste flooded Wei WuXian's mouth.

This scene evoked many memories.

"I don't understand what you want to achieve, Wei WuXian!" Jiang Cheng shouted, hitting him again. Wei WuXian didn't resist. His head was spinning. "You're coming back after all these years thinking that explains everything? That your help, and petting you by the Lan Clan, can make me forget?"

"No," Wei WuXian replied. He felt blood on his lips. "There is nothing worse than forgetting."

"Don't talk like you understand me!" Jiang Cheng interrupted him, but this time didn't move. "I know that I have to remember. Do you think I have anything except of memories? No, I have nothing. My sister is gone... But you've come back. You've got a reward. I don't want to look at you. You love me? I don't care! I hate you!"

Wei WuXian pretended it didn't hurt more than the punch.

Jiang Cheng did not move. He was still, sitting on Wei WuXian, his hands on the black collar, his head lowered. "I'm sick of you," he said. "Go and die. I got used to. Do you know how many times I've buried you? After Xuanwu. After those rascals from the Wen Clan threw you into the Burial Mounds. After the siege. Again and again."

Thirteen years have passed, but some moments were immortal. Like his soul digging out of the grave and returning to the living, a long-forgotten memory appeared before his eyes. Wei WuXian saw it again: he on the ground, Jiang Cheng on him, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I mourned you, Wei WuXian!" His voice broke. "I cried too many times, I'm too tired to do this again. You left me. Although you promised."

The sun finally disappeared behind the horizon, enveloping them with the red half-light. Wei WuXian closed his eyes. Droplets skittered across his cheeks. It was easier to believe they were raindrops, just like after the Lotus Pier death.

"I am sorry, Jiang Cheng."

And he was sorry.

That was right, Wei WuXian had left Jiang Cheng, again and again. Always to protect him. He would’ve never thought that maybe he'd hurt him the most.

"Uncle? What's going on... "

A panicked voice reached them. Wei WuXian looked back the moment Jin Ling stood frozen, watching the scene unfolding here.

Jiang Cheng got up and brushed off his robes. His eyes were dry, and under the cover of the evening it was almost impossible to see how red they were.

"Let's go," he said in a hoarse voice, not looking at his nephew or Wei WuXian.

Jin Ling stayed for a second, uncertain, wondering if he misunderstood or if what he just saw was not an illusion. In the end, he must have decided that following his uncle was safer because he run quickly after him, breaking one of the Cloud Recesses rules. He gave Wei WuXian a distrustful look.

Drowning in nostalgia, Wei WuXian was laying on the ground for a long time. The sky darkened over him, freeing valiant stars. The moonlight was streaming down his face. He spread his arms wide, catching it. The night sky had the smile of Jiang YanLi, and every wise word she had entrusted him.

"Are you looking at us, shijie?" Wei WuXian asked quietly.

And he prayed, with his eyes on the big moon and with even bigger heart, for the deities to let her see. Maybe he, the condemned one, had been forced to disappear in emptiness, but she has received some divine blessing and knew how much he tried for everything she had left behind. She would be happy. In the end, it was shijie who taught him that hate was simple, and never required any effort, never created anything. Love was the only thing that never died.

Wei WuXian wanted to create. It wouldn't be easy, but if he was good at something, it was aiming for impossible. And he felt that the tears shed today by Jiang Cheng could be a step on this path.

#mo dao zu shi #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #the founder of diabolism #wei wuxian #jiang cheng #lan wangji #my writing #wei wuxian teaching habits series

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psvaneacme-blog · 5 years

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Exactly about DVD Part 4: DVD-Audio and SACD

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New appear formats: DVD-Audio and SACD

When Audio-CD format appeared, most music producers and also music lovers were sure that Audio CD provides best quality sound feasible and so will ever become required. Still some audiophiles instantly declined to take new Audio COMPACT DISC along with reverted back to older vinyl disks. At initial nobody took them critically, still as the time period passed increasingly more00 listeners started out to notice, specially when contrasting CD albums with all the similar records on soft, that will CDs are not competent to transmit full range connected with audio. Eventually it gets to be clear that you have scientific causes behind this, particularly vibrant range and testing charge.

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Dynamic range is a variation between the loudest in addition to softest sounds in sound record. Sound data will be recorded on CD within 16-bit PCM format as well as therefore their dynamical variety does not go beyond ninety six decibels. And the higher range for human hearing is 120Db. The change is usually obvious. While typically the lack of powerful collection might be hard for you to see for the take music, nevertheless for something similar to symphony orchestra noise manuacturers often have a trouble together with too soft as well as way too loud instruments which will are over and above dynamical selection and therefore shed inside record.

Apart from energetic range it also grew to be very clear that Audio Cd albums get insufficient sampling price. Electronic digital record consists associated with small parts called trial samples, each of them is made up of information about sound throughout particular opportunity. The a lot more samples are for every product of time, the increased may be the quality of report. Generally, sample is some sort of digital photography studio of seem oscillation and consequently they tend to be measured by using often the identical unit, hertz (Hz). The most frequency of appear in which humans can find out is just about 20 thousands hertz (20 kHz). To duplicate audio accurately, the noise information must be digitized using sampling level higher as compared to a human can pick up.

During Audio-CD development it absolutely was believed that doubling this kind of rate - up to help forty four. 1 kHz would certainly be enough. But to get some records a part of seem was lost and also converted into noise. Especially usually that happened for time-honored music and jazz, having high-frequency instruments such because violin and flute getting one of the most unlucky ones. The idea is medically proven today that for the the majority of exact sound the trying pace has to end up being not lower than sixty-four kHz. This, of program, is definitely far beyond Sound COMPACT DISK capabilities.

To deal with these troubles the DVD-Audio format was created. It had taken more time to agree to than DVD-Video, as DVD-Forum had to justify in between a couple of alternative technologies: a single by Toshiba and the actual other through Sony-Philips (they also produced Audio CD) alliance. The situation was in order to decide, which file format seemed to be better. Both of these individuals successfully solved the downsides of Audio CD.

Toshiba simply improved existing PCM standard and turned the item into 24-bit one. Typically the dynamic range grew to be able to 144db and sampling charge soared up to hundranittiotv? kHz. These values discuss individual ear capabilities through a very good margin. This kind of format additionally had help for multi-channel sound.

Fiat and Philips took one more route along with invented fresh single-bit music format identified as DSD (Direct Stream Digital). The idea was going to examine data from drive with significantly smaller volumes (one bit at a time frame, in comparison to 16 bits with regard to Music CD and 20-24 parts for DVD-Audio) nevertheless with mad sampling price - minimal payments 8224 MHz. Similar rule is in fact employed in the softtop audio pickup. Due for you to this the particular dynamical array for new structure became to 120db. As well multi-channel support was included alongside with compatibility with Audio tracks CD. The latter had been achieved by adding subsequent coating with sound within Acoustic CD format. In the event that these disk is injected inside generic Audio-CD person, it will probably be played just including any Sound CD, along with all limitations of the style.

At the end, throughout the 90s Toshiba finally came out on top. This is due to numerous reasons. Firstly, DSD soundtrack is hard for making perhaps in studio environment. Next, when this technology initially appeared, there was zero particular equipment that can support this. All present devices could actually work together with PCM sound simply, in addition to DSD required conversions. That eventually reduced some great benefits of DSD to zero. Toshiba, on the other hand, selected DVD as being a medium sized for the new formatting, which made it achievable to generate audio disks with this file format even with home. The situation using Sony-Philips creation was totally different. It had to always be recorded on exclusive hard disk drives, which were similar in features and sizes to standard DIGITAL VIDEO DISC, but totally diverse otherwise. These kinds of disks furthermore required unique equipment regarding printing as well as recording. Most of these were reasons why Toshiba received rights for that DVD-Audio brand-name.

But this didn't stop Sony and also Philips and they made a decision to present their very own format - irrespective of DVD-Forum decision. The new structure was called Super Music Compact Disc. As a new result, there was not one standard and neither SACD nor DVD-Audio managed to help actually get close in order to ordinary Audio-CD sales quantities.

The difference within appear between SACD along with DVD-Audio wasn't spotted also simply by most "advanced" audiophiles.

Why don't examine each of typically the systems in details: DVD-Audio

Given that DVD-Audio standard is actually based on normal DVD MOVIE, such disk might be double-sided or double-layered or even a blend of these two. As opposed to SACD, a sound can easily be recorded on DVD-Audio in different quality in addition to in different formats, stereo system or multi-channel. Sampling level for DVD-Audio can fluctuate from 44. a single kHz up to 192 kHz (however sound can merely possibly be stereo at hundranittiotv? kHz, as it will be simply not enough living space intended for multi-channel sound regarding that quality). Generally, DVD-Audio is able to supply 1000 times more appropriate sound when compared having Audio DISC!

To become able to fit multi-channel uncompressed sound (which typically takes a lot of space) coders have used specific lossless compression technology known as MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing), that in some ways resembles PC archiving packages like Zip or RAR.

To be compatible with generic DVD AND BLU-RAY participants, DVD-Audio disks could have copy of often the soundtrack protected in Dolby Digital as well as DTS upon the other side involving the storage. Such hard drives are called Hybrid DVD-Audio disc instructions HDAD. At times it is possible to come across disks that have solely Dolby Digital or DTS protected soundtracks, however, this kind of devices hardly have something to do with DVD-Audio.

What is more, several sound-recording organizations allow us in 2004 the new format named DualDisc. Essentially it is any twice sided disc, just one area of which is usually single- or even double level DVD as well as the other edge is basic CD. Often the CD style used inside such disk is definitely a bit different form normal CONCEPT ALBUM. Standard thickness of COMPACT DISC or DVD disk is actually 1. 2mm. Audio COMPACT DISK layer occupies all which area, and DVD demands just half of that, or zero. 6mm. As a result it is not probable to make a disk with both equally proper DISC and DISC layers because it would end up being 2mm thick and also is just not fit in any push. Due to this purpose the programmers decided to be able to cheat a little little along with reduced thickness connected with Audio tracks CD layer for you to zero. 9mm. As some sort of result, it is likely to enjoy DualDisc in most players, nonetheless it will be still too thick in addition to doesn't fit in many automobiles CD. In add-on to this it can certainly destruction some Hi-End tools, and it could void the warrantee. One more interesting effect associated with making Acoustic CD part thinner will be the inability to help record almost anything to it by using normal CONCEPT ALBUM recording strategies due to circular incohérence. This means that laserlight can't focus on info pits as well as "see" simply blurred graphic which are unable to provide any kind of actual files. The problem has been resolved my making holes greater, however their sum lowered. As a result, the actual capacity regarding disc provides dropped and as a result of typical 74 short minutes such hard disks contain merely 60, and also there are only 525 MB available instead involving 600.

Most probably DualDisc technology refuses to last very long. There actually is a fresh technology to replace the idea - Onedisc/DVDplus. German planners managed to generate mixture medium with regular fullness - 1. 2mm. A lot more importantly, the capacity connected with COMPACT DISC side doesn't experience; the item still is in a position to contain 650mb associated with data or 74 a few minutes of audio. The designers of this standard, even so, tend not to share their strategies, and exactly did they will were able to overcome obvious difficulties is a mystery. Many producing companies have purchased licence in this technology and Onedisc probably will soon appear about go shopping shelves.

Beside audio tracks records, DVD-Audio disc is usually able to maintain virtually any type of DVD-Video information. It could be video, menu, 35mm slides, and so forth (it is likewise possible to set sound throughout DVD-Audio formatting on DVD-Video disk). The typical also gives new technology to get saving text information, some type of substitute for CD-Text. Disk may contain titles, lyrics, info on performers, etc. Text can be seen on TV or acoustic guitar player screen. Just since DVD-Video, DVD-Audio can supply a selection of various dialects for text details.

DVD-Audio copy protection is definitely also well worth mentioning. Following famous DVD-Video hack companies decided to put back DVD-Audio until better safeguard turns into available. This better safety was CPPM (Content Defense for Pre-recorded Media), such as several different protection actions:

1 ) According to the particular new standard, DVD-Audio info is encrypted. Special established of keys can solely always be kept in legitimate gamer device (that is actually, DVD-Audio player that abide by with CPPM requirements). Inside case if take some time carry out not match the disc (for example when DVD-Audio participant is manufactured with no proper license), it may not be feasible in order to decrypt the data along with DVD-Audio disk simply is not going to play.

Theoretically, it will be possible to content these kinds of keys by cracking typically the device, but practically it is quite useless as if taken take a moment would be uncovered, all afterwards releases regarding DVD-Audio hard disk drives simply will not support all of them. And almost all manufacturers perform month to month version of keys.

second . Items of DVD-Audio may also be sure to the physical moderate. This is achieved by simply taking "digital watermarks" with the hard drive. This invisible information has disk particulars and the specifics of just how many times this drive can be copied. Watermarks are usually recorded with times involving several seconds in addition to if the ball player discovers that will watermarks won't match method it quickly stops record.

Apart from this, when DVD-Audio player is prepared with Firewire (iLink) digital camera out, it's not going to be achievable to use this with regard to illegal copying far too. All of outgoing information is usually coded and because of that just will be probable to connect often the wire to an amplifier or perhaps receiver that supports security. It will not possibly be possible in order to connect player to be able to the PC and thus is just not be possible to duplicate electronic output.

SACD hard drives can be found in three flavors -- individual layer, double-layer as well as cross.

In case connected with SACD hybrid devices include two layers. Base stratum has Audio COMPACT DISK files and upper semi-transparent coating contains SACD records. In the event such disk is definitely introduced in normal DISC person, there will be not any difficulties with playback - the actual player basically won't detect the upper level.

Single- and double-layered hard disks incorporate only SACD information, in addition known as HD (high definition). Each HD part will take the same room as common DVD stratum - several. 7 GIG. Sound is usually recorded with mono, music or multi-channel formats. Several SACD guitar player can go through only molon or stereo audio disks, and also it will take a new particular device to study multi-channel hard disk drives. In nearly all cases, however, there are generally equally multi-channel and music system editions present. Each sort of soundtrack has it has the own space on the particular storage - stereo info is actually recorded closer for you to the center of disks, multi-channel data comes subsequent and additional data (such while photos or lyrics) will be recorded close to help the edge. Each and every audio zone contains at the very least seventy four minutes of noise. Presently there are, however, purely multi-channel disks with several several hours associated with audio on these.

In bought to minimize size of data, SACD developers had used DST (Direct Stream Transfer) compression setting. This compression is related to MPL and appears like PC stroage utility. The item operates by means of compressing continuing sequences regarding bits along with can achieve considerable lowering in size without just about any loss.

Just as DVD-Audio does, SACD has sophisticated set of replicate defense measures:

1. SACD hard drives are not compatible along with personal computer DVD drives, which usually makes against the law copying on home impossible.

2 . not Storage contents are hard to get at right up until special lead-in SACD-Mark is usually read. This style is positioned in a hidden location of the disc in addition to contains information essential regarding typically the playback. Only accredited products can read as well as decrypt it.

3. Disc items are also safeguarded by PSP-PDM (Pit Sign Processing-Physical Compact disk Mark) watermarks. By transforming pits (tracks) width it is easy to write further info on the hard drive (for example, key coming from encrypted soundtrack). These watermarks can be reproduced just on exclusive licensed devices. Without them often the play-back will stop after simply few seconds. Besides, that is possible to produce a visible picture on work surface of the disk : for instance , company logo, hence the original drive can easily be recognized even together with undressed eye. To stay away from compatibility difficulties, the secondly layer in SACD is definitely protected as much seeing that almost any normal Audio CONCEPT ALBUM is actually.

For audio result generally analog out will be used, although encrypted electronic digital out by means of Firewire (iLink) is also likely, merely as in DVD-Audio. Coaxial and also optics outputs usually are not reinforced at just about all.

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trinuviel · 6 years

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When the Land is Cursed - Catastrophe and Magical Pollution in “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Part 2: Asshai-by-the-Shadow

(Asshai by the Shadow. Art by René Aigner)

In my previous post about the Doom of Valyria, I framed the blighted lands of the Valyrian peninsula and the surrounding Lands of the Long Summer in terms of magical pollution. I argued that it is possible that magic was partially the cause of the Doom in some form - possibly related to spells that the Valyrians used to make mining active volcanoes a feasible project. The Valyrians had a tendency to meddle magically with the natural order of things and in that sense, the Doom is framed textually as the punishment for such hubris.

What I found particularly interesting is the fact that the Doom not only shattered the Valyrian peninsula and turned it into a smattering of islands in a new sea - but that it also left the land blighted far beyond the the peninsula itself. I’m specifically thinking about the city of Mantarys where children often are born severely deformed, in a way that is eerily reminiscient of the effects radiation damage in the wake of nuclear disasters in our world.

However, the ruins of Old Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer are not the only places in the world of ASoIaF that suffers from magical pollution.

There is at least one other place that is magically polluted in a similar manner but perhaps to an even larger degree.

I am speaking of that mysterious place at the end of the known world: Asshai-by-the-Shadow. It lies in the far eastern reaches of Essos where the Jade Sea meets the Saffron Straits. It is just north of an unexplored landmass called Ulthos. It is about as far from Westeros as you can come.

THE CITY OF ASSHAI

Asshai is a mysterious place - its origins are lost in the mists of time and even the Asshai’i don’t know who built this city. It is a forbidding place:

Few places in the known world are as remote as Asshai, and fewer are as forbidding. Travelers tell us that the city is built entirely of black stone: halls, hovels, temples, palaces, streets, walls, bazaars, all. Some say as well that the stone of Asshai has a greasy, unpleasant feel to it, that it seems to drink the light, dimming tapers and torches and hearth fires alike. The nights are very black in Asshai, all agree, and even the brightest days of summer are somehow grey and gloomy. Asshai is a large city, sprawling out for leagues on both banks of the black river Ash. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Asshai-by-the-Shadow)

This description of the gloomy cityscape of Asshai also brings to mind the trope of Foreboding Architecture.

Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, had likely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai. (On Vaes Dothrak, AGoT, Daenerys IV)

This trope is mainly associated with video- and computer games but I do think that it is relevant in this context. Another trope that seems to come into play is Evil Is Not Well-Lit, which corresponds perfectly with the rather sinister reputation that Asshai has when it comes to magic:

The dark city by the Shadow is a city steeped in sorcery. Warlocks, wizards, alchemists, moonsingers, red priests, black alchemists, necromancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, bloodmages, torturers, inquisitors, poisoners, godswives, night-walkers, shapechangers, worshippers of the Black Goat and the Pale Child and the Lion of Night, all find welcome in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, where nothing is forbidden. Here they are free to practice their spells without restraint or censure, conduct their obscene rites, and fornicate with demons if that is their desire. Most sinister of all the sorcerers of Asshai are the shadowbinders, whose lacquered masks hide their faces from the eyes of gods and men. They alone dare to go upriver past the walls of Asshai, into the heart of darkness. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Asshai-by-the-Shadow)

Several of the most powerful, mysterious and somewhat sinister magic practitioners that we meet in the novels have all spent time in Asshai: Mirri Maz Duur, Melisandre of Asshai and Quaite of the Shadow. Even a maester of the Citadel, Marwyn the Mage, travelled to Asshai to study magic.

(Asshai. Art by Marco Iozzi)

One curious aspect is that Asshai is a HUGE city. It has enormous land walls and it covers enough ground to contain Volantis, Qarth, King’s Land and Oldtown. However, despite its size it has rather few inhabitants. Its population roughly corresponds to a good-sized market town, which probably means that it has a couple of thousand inhabitants. This, of course, raises the question of what happened to the original population. Thus, Asshai is a variation upon the trope of the Ghost City:

A Ghost City is the larger version of a Ghost Town, and is used in visual media as shorthand for 'something terrible has happened'. A city typically contains millions of people, and the viewer knows that only the hugest of disasters could completely clear it of its inhabitants. [...] Usually there is one person, or possibly a few people, left to contrast the vast emptiness. (TVTropes)

However, Asshai is a thriving trade port despite its forbidding aspect as it is known for gold, gems and esoteric knowledge. Strange treasures can be found in the black bazars of Asshai - and ships travels from all parts of the world to partake in its riches.

THE SHADOW LANDS

Asshai is situated at the tip of a mysterious area called the Shadow Lands. It is a landscape of mountains and rivers, of which the most prominent is the river Ash that runs through a deep and narrow valley called the Vale of Shadows.

Though the landscape is harsh, the Shadow Lands are not entirely unpopulated. Certain areas are inhabited by the so-called Shadow Men. Not much is known about these natives of the Shadow, other than that they cover their bodies in tattoos and wear red laquered wooden masks. They are also known for piracy and reaving.

(Shadow Men. art by HBO)

Many stories exist about the Shadowlands but a common denominator is that these lands are home to twisted and monstrous creatures - demons, dragons and worse.

Some legends claim that the dragons originated in the Shadow:

She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. (AGoT, Daenerys III)

There might just be some truth to this legend as the three petrified dragon eggs that Daenerys Targaryen receives as a wedding present came from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai. Furthermore, during Bran’s first vision when he lies unconcious after his fall from the Broken Tower he sees this:

He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond, to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise. (AGoT, Bran III)

That is an interesting little tidbit of information and I wonder if it will play a part in the story to come novels. Some fans believe that GRRM initially planned to have Dany visit Asshai but that he ultimately dropped that plot (x). I’m not so sure about that because the story has set Dany up with a narrative arc as a failed saviour from the very beginning.

However, from a Doylist perspective, Dany’s proposed solution to the problem of the raped women becomes part of a pattern in her narrative arc where she attempts to save people from something (rape, slavery), only to end up with solutions that are very similar to the conditions she wanted to save people from. She wanted to save the Lhazareen women from wartime rape by putting them in a situation where they would be subject to marital rape. She wants to save people from slavery but end up using unpaid labour as well as profiting from people selling themselves into slavery. (x)

It is true that the shadowbinder Quaithe wants Dany to visit Asshai:

"To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow." Asshai, Dany thought. She would have me go to Asshai. "Will the Asshai'i give me an army?" she demanded. "Will there be gold for me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find in Qarth?" "Truth," said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the crowd. (ACoK, Daenerys III)

By not going to Asshai, Daenerys may have been set up by the narrative to fail as a saviour for the third and most important time - because she doesn’t learn whatever truth that Quaithe wants her to learn. The Rule of Three dominates Dany’s narrative and after ultimately failing to save the Lhazareen women from rape and after failing to definitely end slavery in Meereen, I fear Daenerys is set up a third and final time as the saviour of mankind.

GRRM has said that if Asshai appears in the novels it will be through flashbacks. If that is the case, then we may learn the truth that Quaithe alludes to and I think it is very possible that this truth relates to dragons. It is worth noting that there’s dragonglass in Asshai, just like there is on Dragonstone. It is, apparently, one of their important export goods.

STYGAI - THE CORPSE CITY

Asshai is not the only city in the Shadow Lands. In the Vale of Shadows lies the ruined city of Stygai, also called the City of the Night because it only sees sunlight for a brief period of time each day.

On its way from the Mountains of the Morn to the sea, the Ash runs howling through a narrow cleft in the mountains, between towering cliffs so steep and close that the river is perpetually in shadow, save for a few moments at midday when the sun is at its zenith. In the caves that pockmark the cliffs, demons and dragons and worse make their lairs. The farther from the city one goes, the more hideous and twisted these creatures become...until at last one stands before the doors of the Stygai, the corpse city at the Shadow's heart, where even the shadowbinders fear to tread. Or so the stories say. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Asshai-by-the-Shadow)

Stygai is yet another example of the trope of the Ghost City but unlike Asshai, Stygai is completely abandoned - and a place of fear, even among the shadowbinders.

The name itself is interesting. Some fans believe that Stygai is an intertextual nod to the story “Shadows in the Moonlight” by Robert E. Howard (x). That is certainly possible but it is also worth remembering that in the English language “stygian” is used as a synonym for “extremely dark, gloomy or forbidding”, which certainly fits the description of a ruined city in the heart of the Shadow Lands. In the literal sense, “stygian” means something like “of or relating to the river Styx”. In classical Greek mythology, Styx was one of the rivers that constituted the border between the Earth and the Underworld (Hades), the realm of the Dead - and that definition is certainly also pertinent to the city of Stygai, which borders the black waters of the river Ash.

THE LAND IS STERILE

One curious feature of Asshai and its environs is, in my opinion, extremely important: the land is completely sterile! Outside the city nothing but the inedible ghost grass grows:

Down in the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man on horseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with the spirits of the damned. (Jorah Mormon to Daenerys Targaryen, AGoT, Daenerys III)

In fact, the Asshai’i are entirely dependant imported food and fresh water as the waters of the river Ash are blighted and unhealthy.

The waters of the Ash glisten black beneath the noonday sun and glimmer with a pale green phosphorescence by night, and such fish as swim in the river are blind and twisted, so deformed and hideous to look upon that only fools and shadowbinders will eat of their flesh. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Asshai-by-the-Shadow)

Incidentally, this little detail about the fish living in the Ash sounds eerily reminiscent of wildlife affected by nuclear fallout or extreme chemical pollution. The very climate is unhealthy:

There are no horses in Asshai, no elephants, no mules, no donkeys, no zorses, no camels, no dogs. Such beasts, when brought there by ship, soon die. The malign influence of the Ash and its polluted waters have been implicated, as it is well understood from Harmon's On Miasmas that animals are more sensitive to the foulness exuded by such waters, even without drinking them. Septon Barth's writings speculate more wildly, referring to the higher mysteries with little evidence. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Asshai-by-the-Shadow)

The mention of Septon Barth here is an interesting and possibly important bit of information. I have previously written about Septon Barth and his writings on magic and unnatural creature. There are Doylist reasons for believing that his writings may contain clues to the magical mysteries of A Song of Ice and Fire. Furthermore, Samwell Tarly has in his possession the possibly only surviving copy of Barth’s Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History.

He [Maester Aemon] asked Sam to read for him from a book by Septon Barth, whose writings had been burned during the reign of Baelor the Blessed. (AFfC, Samwell IV)

This book is a Chekov’s Gun waiting to go off at some point in the story.

There’s another important detail about Asshai where the water is undrinkable, where livestock die and where no edible plants grow:

There are no children in Asshai!!!

Asshai is so polluted that its inhabitants can’t even reproduce! They have to import food and water - and they cannot have children. Thus, there are plenty of signs that Asshai is a severely polluted place - but is the pollution of a magical nature?

She was stronger at the Wall, stronger even than in Asshai. Her every word and gesture was more potent, and she could do things that she had never done before. (ADwD, Melisandre I)

In this quote we should pay special attention to this sentence: “stronger even than in Asshai”. The implication being that Melisandre’s magic is stronger in Asshai than in other places (except for the Wall). There’s a reason that so many practitioners of magic travel to Asshai - there is of course the existence of ancient texts but it also appears as though the place itself enhances spellwork. The combination of the Ghost City trope and all the signs of pollution indicate that some kind of magical cataclysm once took place in the Shadow Lands and I suspect that Stygai was Ground Zero for this catastrophe, which turned Asshai-by-the-Shadow into the most polluted place in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire.

ASSHAI AND THE GREAT EMPIRE OF THE DAWN

As previously stated, the origins of Asshai are lost in the mists of time. So who, exactly, built this incredibly large city? On r/eddit the user u/sangeli has posted an elaborate and well-argued theory that Asshai was built by the Great Empire of the Dawn (GEotD).

In ancient days, the god-emperors of Yi Ti were as powerful as any ruler on earth, with wealth that exceeded even that of Valyria at its height and armies of almost unimaginable size. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Yi-Ti)

u/sangeli argues that the GEotD is the only real candidate as the founder of Asshai in terms of the time period, the geographical location and its power. The GEotD was ruled by the gemstone emperors (Pearl, Jade, Tourmaline, Onyx, Topaz, Opal, Amethyst and Bloodstone). u/sangeli argues that the GEotD had dragons, which isn’t impossible since there are hints in the novels that there are, or once were, dragons in the Shadow.

According to legend the GEotD didn’t survive the Long Night and u/sangeli argues that Valyria could be the product of an Asshai’i diaspora - and a fragment of Septon Barth’s lost book Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History seems to suggest something of this kind:

In Asshai, the tales are many and confused, but certain texts—all impossibly ancient—claim that dragons first came from the Shadow, a place where all of our learning fails us. These Asshai'i histories say that a people so ancient they had no name first tamed dragons in the Shadow and brought them to Valyria, teaching the Valyrians their arts before departing from the annals. (TWoIaF, Ancient History: The Rise of Valyria)

I’ve previously mentioned that it is always worth paying attention to what Barth says when it comes to the history of the world, magic and dragons. Furthermore, this particular quote comes from the companion book The World of Ice and Fire where it is emphasized by the lay-out by being separated from the main text by a sidebar. There are Doylist reasons for taking the text in this sidebar seriously as GRRM himself has written the text in the sidebars of the book whereas his co-authors are responsible for the main text (x). Furthermore, u/sangeli argues that there is at least one clue in the novels that support this theory - the fever dream that Dany has when she miscarries during Mirri Maz Durr’s sorcerous ritual:

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. "Faster," they cried, "faster, faster." She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. "Faster!" the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew. (AGoT, Daenerys IX)

The ghost kings of Daenerys’ dream all have the silver-gold hair of the Valyrians but their eyes are described as gemstones, more specifically the gemstones that the emperors of the GEotD were named after. I have to say that this is a pretty compelling clue and though I don’t agree with everything in their comprehensive theory, I do find their argument that Asshai was the centre of the GEotD and that Valyria may have been founded by an Asshai’i diaspora after the Long night compelling.

THE LONG NIGHT

If it is indeed correct that Asshai was the centre of the Great Empire of the Dawn, then the stories of this legendary civilzation may hold the clue to the kind of cataclysm that left Asshai, Stygai and their environs permanently polluted to the degree that the very land is sterile. According to myth, the end of the GEotD came when the Bloodstone Emperor usurped his older sister the Amethyst Empress:

When the daughter of the Opal Emperor succeeded him as the Amethyst Empress, her envious younger brother cast her down and slew her, proclaiming himself the Bloodstone Emperor and beginning a reign of terror. He practiced dark arts, torture, and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger-woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true gods to worship a black stone that had fallen from the sky. (Many scholars count the Bloodstone Emperor as the first High Priest of the sinister Church of Starry Wisdom, which persists to this day in many port cities throughout the known world). In the annals of the Further East, it was the Blood Betrayal, as his usurpation is named, that ushered in the age of darkness called the Long Night. Despairing of the evil that had been unleashed on earth, the Maiden-Made-of-Light turned her back upon the world, and the Lion of Night came forth in all his wroth to punish the wickedness of men. (TWoIaF, The Bones and Beyond: Yi-Ti)

I don’t think that it was the act of usurpation itself that caused the Long Night. It is much more likely that it was the Bloodstone Emperor’s practice of magic (such as the dark arts of necromancy) that ushered in the Long Night. I think that only a magical catastrophe of extreme proportions can explain why Asshai and the Shadow Lands are so severely polluted that nothing is fertile in this particular region. Exactly what caused the Long Night remains a mystery - so far - but it is possible that Stygai was the Ground Zero of this catastrophe since this city is completely abandoned and even shadowbinders fear to enter it.

ON THE DANGERS OF MAGIC

GRRM has hinted that the Others work as a kind of analogy of climate change in his story:

I mean, we have things going on in our world right now like climate change, that’s, you know, ultimately a threat to the entire world. But people are using it as a political football instead of, you know … You’d think everybody would get together. This is something that can wipe out possibly the human race. So I wanted to do an analogue not specifically to the modern-day thing but as a general thing with the structure of the book. (GRRM)

Thus, I don’t find it impossible to think that an improper use of magic can function as an analogue to pollution within the narrative. After all, the text itself warns against the use of magic on more than one occasion:

“Take a lesson, Bran. The man who trusts in spells is dueling with a glass sword. As the children did. Here, let me show you something.” He stood abruptly, crossed the room, and returned with a green jar in his good hand. “Have a look at these,” he said as he pulled the stopper and shook out a handful of shiny black arrowheads. (Maester Luwin to Bran, AGoT Bran VII)

“We free folk know things you kneelers have forgotten. Sometimes the short road is not the safest, Jon Snow. The Horned Lord once said that sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.” (Dalla to Jon Snow - ASoS, Jon X)

There’s no safe way to use magic and it is dangerous to meddle with nature through the means of sorcery.

(Sadly, I haven’t been able to source all the art work)

#asoaif #a song of ice and fire #game of thrones #meta #asshai #asshai-by-the-shadow #the shadow lands #stygai #dragons #the great empire of the dawn #the bloodstone emperor #the long night #valyria #magical pollution

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jewelbrain64 · 2 years

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Prepring to Buy Your Next Sunglasses

Differing people use sunglasses on several occasions, for various purposes. For several people, sunglasses are the final ornament, while for many others, it is a way of making their personal statement. Yet, there are certain factors that need considering when buy Watches, for instance for use on the poolside or the place of work. One key element needing consideration while selecting sunglasses is your vision only. You may be using reading glasses. In that situation, you could prefer buying sunglasses from the regular optician offering prescriptive lenses that work well as good as your reading glasses, except that they are tinted in order to save your eyes from glares. Very often, opticians extend special deals allowing their potential customers to get a couple of prescriptive sunglasses free when purchasing their normal glasses.

An equally important factor is always to know the level of protection provided by the sunglasses. For this reason you come across glasses claiming to provide utmost UV (ultraviolet) protection, an important safety consideration. Ultraviolet rays could cause serious harm to your eyes. Often, cheaper glasses are simply lacking on this aspect. It's safer to buy your sunglasses from your reputed optician. The following feature will be the design of the sunglasses. You will find frames in hundreds of thousands of different designs. You should look for a design that meets your face well. It's worth trying various designs before finalizing on a single. For instance, people with a short face will discover that short glasses look better on their own face. Larger glasses usually look good on bigger faces. Within the overall kind of sunglasses, the frame's color is a large contributory factor. Look for a color which may complement a bad tone of your skin and color of hair. Frames can dramatically alter the look and model of your face. Ensure that you select the most appropriate one. It might be a good idea to ask one of your friends to accompany you while making picking a sunglasses. Needless to say, another important consideration is the budget. There is a large variation inside the prices of sunglasses. So, you ought to decide if you are going to wear those glasses for very long time to justify the price. You also can get designer sunglasses at very fancy prices. Certain manufacturers concentrate on producing sunglasses alone. Buying from one such manufacturer ensures that you are buying quality product at inexpensive price points. You should be aware how the high expense of any product doesn't ensure its top quality. You may be highly impressed by the design of an item, but it is probably not the best quality. Compromising about the quality of the product having direct impact on your eyes is certainly not a good idea. You could consider shopping online for sunglasses to get a quality product in a reasonable price. Probably the most helpful feature of shopping on the web is the fact that you will benefit from the reviews posted by others.

#Buy Sunglasses

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barbex · 6 years

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For mass effect fic purposes, I transcribed what Vigil had to say on Ilos. What a chatterbox he was. Anyway, in case anybody else needs this, here it is. I took it from a video so there are no dialogue tree variations.

You are not Prothean. But you are not machine, either. This eventuality was one of many that was anticipated. This is why we sent our warning through the beacons.

I do not sense the taint of indoctrination upon any of you. Unlike the other that passed recently. Perhaps there is still hope.

(Why aren't you speaking the Prothean language?)

I have been monitoring your communications since you arrived at this facility. I have translated my output into a format you will comprehend.

My name is Vigil. You are safe here, for the moment. But that is likely to change. Soon, nowhere will be safe.

(Are you some kind of artificial intelligence program?)

I am an advanced non-organic analysis system with personality imprints from Ksad Ishan, chief overseer of the Ilos research facility.

(Why did you bring me here?)

You must break a cycle that has continues for millions of years. But to stop it, you must understand or you will make the same mistakes we did.

The Citadel is the heart of your civilization and the seat of government. As it was with us, and as it has been with every civilization that came before us.

But the Citadel is a trap. The station is actually an enormous mass relay. One that links to dark space, the empty void beyond the galaxy's horizon.

When the Citadel relay is activated, the Reapers will pour through. And all you know will be destroyed.

(How come nobody ever noticed the Citadel was an inactive mass relay?)

The Reapers are careful to keep the greatest secrets of the Citadel hidden. That is why they created a species of seemingly benign organic caretakers.

The keepers mantain the station's most basic functions. They enable any species that discovers the Citadel to use it without fully understanding the technology.

Reliance on the keepers ensures no other species will ever discover the Citadel's true nature. Not until the relay is activated and the Reapers invade.

(How do the Reapers survive out in dark space)

We have only theories. The researchers here came to believe the Reapers enter prolonged states of inactivity to conserve energy.

This allows them to survive the thousands and thousands of years it takes for organic civilization to rebuild itself. But in this state, they are vulnerable.

By retreating beyond the edges of the galaxy, they ensure no one will accidentally discover them. They keep existence hidden until the Citadel relay is activated.

(The Reapers can wipe out the Citadel and the entire Citadel fleet in a single surprise attack!)

That was our fate. Our leaders were dead before we even realized we were under attack. The Reapers seized control of the Citadel and through it, the mass relays.

Communications and transportation across our empire were crippled. Each star system was isolated, cut off from others. Easy prey for the Reaper fleets.

Over the next decades, the Reapers systematically obliterated our people. World by world, system by system, they methodically wiped us out.

(The war was lost. If you had surrendered, they might have let you live.)

No offer of surrender was ever given. Our enemy had a single goal: the extinction of all advanced organic life.

Through the Citadel, the Reapers had access to all our records, maps, census data, information is power, and they knew everything about us.

Their fleets advanced across every settled region of the galaxy. Some worlds were utterly destroyed. Others were conquered, their populations enslaved.

Theses indoctrinated servants became sleeper agents under Reaper control. Taken is as refugees by other Protheans, they betrayed them to the machines.

Within a few centuries, the Reapers had killed or enslaved every Prothean in the galaxy. They were relentless, brutal and absolutely thorough.

(What do the Reapers get out of this? Why do they keep repeating the pattern of genocide over and over?)

The Reapers are alien, unknowable. Perhaps they need slaves or resources. More likely, they are driven by motives and goals organic beings cannot hope to comprehend.

In the end what does it matter? Your survival depends on stopping them, not in understanding them.

(I don't understand. Where did the Reapers go after they conquered your people?)

Our worlds were stripped bare, harvested by the indoctrinated slaves. Everything of value--all resources, all technology--was taken.

Certain that all advanced organic life had been extinguished, the Reaper retreated back through the Citadel relay into dark space, sealing it behind them.

All evidence of the Reaper invasion had been wiped away. Only their indoctrinated slaves were left behind, abandoned.

Mindless husks no longer capable of independent thought, the indoctrinated soon starved or died of exposure. The genocie of the Protheans was complete.

(You said you brought me here for a reason. Tell me what I need to do.)

The Conduit is the key. Before the Reapers attacked, we Protheans were on the cusp of unlosking the mysteries behind mass relay technology.

Ilos was a top secret facility. Here, researches worked to create a small-scale version of mass relay. One that linked directly to the Citadel: the hub of the relay network.

The Conduit is not a weapon. It's a back door onto the Citadel.

(How did you manage to stay hidden?)

All official records of our project were destroyed in the initial attack on the Citadel. While the Protheas empire came crashing down, Ilos was spared.

We severd all communication with the outside and our facility went dark. The personnel retreated underground into these archives.

To conserve resources, everyone was put into cyrogenic stasis. I was programmed to monitor the facility and wake the staff when the danger had passed.

But the genocide of an entire species is a long, slow process. Years passed. Decades, centuries. The Reaper persisted. And my energy reserves were dwindling.

(You should have fought!)

We were a few hundred against a galactic invasion fleet. Our only hope was to remain undetected.

I began to disable life support of non-essential personnel. First support staff, then security. One by one their pods were shut daown to conserve energy.

Eventually, only the stasis pods of the top scientists remained active. Even these were in danger of failing when the Reapers finally retreated back through the Citadel relay.

(There were hundreds of stasis pods out there! You just shut them down? You killed them?)

(You were programmed to protect them! Not kill them!)

This outcome was not completly unforeseen. My actions were a result of contigency programming entered on my creation.

(I bet they didn't tell the "non-essentials" staff about this contingency.)

I saved key personnel. When the Reapers retreated, the top research were still alive. My actions are the only reason any hope remains.

When the researchers woke, they realized the Prothean species was doomed. There were only a dozen individuals left far too few to sustain a viable population.

Yet they vowed to find some way to stop the Reaper from returning. A way to break the cycle forever. And they knew the keepers were the key.

(I still don't understand what's going on here. Why is Saren trying tofind the Conduit?)

The Condui gives him access to the Citadel and the keepers.

The keepers are controlled by the Citadel. Before each invasion, a signal is sent through the station compelling the keepers to activate the Citadel relay.

After decades of feverish study, the scientists discovered a way to alter this signal. Using the Conduit, they gained access to the Citadel and made modifications.

This time, when Sovereign sent the signal to the Citadel, the keepers ignored it. The Reapers are trapped in dark space.

(Saren must have some plan to undo everything you did.)

The one you call Saren will use Conduit to bypass the Citadel's defenses. Once inside, he will transfer control of the station to Sovereign.

Sovereign will override the Citadel's systems and manually open the relay. And the cycle of extinction will begin again.

(Is there any way we can stop them?)

There's a data file in my console. Take a copy when you go. When you reach the Citadel's master comtrol unit, upload it to the station.

It will corrupt the Citadel's security protocols and give you temporary control over the station. It might give you a chance against Sovereign.

(Where's the Citadel's master control unit? I've never heard of anything like that.)

Through the Conduit. Follow Saren. He will lead you to your destination.

(If the Reapers are trapped in dark space, how did Sovereign get here?)

It is logical to assume the Reapers would leave one of their own behind after each extinction, a sentinel to pave the way for their inevitable return.

Like those in dark space. Sovereign probably spent most of the last 50,000 years in a state of hibernation. Periodically, it would wake to analyze the situation.

Keeping its existence hidden, it would evaluate the state of galactic civilization. And, when the time was right, it would signal the Citadel and usher in the next Reaper invasion.

But this time, the signal failed. The keepers did not respond. Sovereign's allies were trapped in the void. Alone, it was sorced to try and discover what had gone wrong.

(Sovereign's the largest ship in the galaxy. Why all this secrecy? Why not just attck the Citadel?)

Soverign is not invincible. Revealing its true nature would have united the forces of every orgnaic species against it. Even a Reaper couldn't survive such odds.

But the Reapers are patient. They will not rush into the unknown. Sovereign could have been planning this for centuries, moving dleiberatly, gathering allies.

Slowly, it has assembled the peices of the puzzle, working through agents to keep itself hidden. Saren is the most visible pawn of the Reapers, but I doubt he was the first.

Now, Sovereign has grown bold. Whether from confidence or desperation, I cannot say. But it is determined to reopen the portal to dark space.

(What about the beacon on Eden Prime? And the one on Virmire? What were they for?)

At our apex, the beacons spanned the breadth of our empire. We used them as a single galaxy-wide network, to transmit data and communications rapidly from world to world.

Virtually all the beacons were destroyed during the invasion. But once the Reapers were gone, the survivors here on Ilos decided to risk sending out a message.

We knew it was unlikely there were survivors. But if there were, we wanted them to know about Ilos. We wanted to give them ope, So a message was sent across the network.

(You could have exposed yourself to the Reapers.)

In truth, we didn't expect any of the beacons would still funtion, but we had to try. If there were survivors, we had to reach them.

The message was meant for our own people. It was coded so only organic beings could interpret it. We still didn't understand the power of Reaper indoctrination.

We never realized it could lead an agent of the machines -- like Saren -- to this world. But it has also led you here. So perhaps we did not fail after all.

(So when the REapers created the Citadel, they created the keepers as well?)

A more likely scenario is that the keepers were one of the early harvested civilizations. Perhaps the very first.

Perhaps they responded well to indoctrination or the Reapers simply bred them to be obedient. In any case, they were left behind to operate and maintain the Citadel.

But the keepers are no longer directly controlled by Sovereign ot its ilk. They evolved so that they only respond to the signals emitted by the Citadel itself.

When the Protheans altered the Citadel's signals, they broke Sovereign's hold over the keepers. Now they are completely harmless.

(Sovereign must have realized organic races were difficult to control.)

A likely hypothesis. The keepers evolved in an unanticipated direction. Non-organic servants like the geth would be more predictable.

(What happened to the survivors from the Conduit Project?)

They used the Conduit to gain access to the Citadel, but the Conduit is only a prototype. The portal only links in one direction, so they were trapped on the station.

I do not know what became of them then. It is unlikely they found any food or water on the station. I fear they suffered a slow, grim death.

I only they succeeded in their mission to seal the relay. Your presence here proves their sacrifice was not in vain.

(Saren's got enough of a head start. Grab the data file and let's go!)

The one you call Saren has not reached the Conduit. Not yet. There is still hope if you hurry.

#mass effect #Ilos #Vigil #mass effect transcripts #mass effect fanfiction #ME1 #Mass Effect 1

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drwakanda · 6 years

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Black Panther Fighting Styles Update

I have posted about Black Panther and African fighting styles previously but since the new movie is out and we have some new visuals to draw from I figured I would do a little update. Here is a description of the fighting styles of Wakanda and what real world African martial arts they would likely be related to. This comes from a mix of what cultures are in the same area as Wakanda in the film and what I suspect the choreographers used as inspiration.

Now for the sake of suspension of disbelief it is important to note that the choreographers as far as I know are not well trained in African or African based martial arts. So what they had to do is aproximate the forms using what they already knew and samples. Fortunately all martial arts work on the same principles of human physicality so a throw in Judo looks very similar to a throw in Giddigbo. Martial arts styles are distinguished by subtle differences in body shape, rhythms and situational heritage. If one understands the body mechanics of combat and the culture the art is coming from, one can extrapolate fairly accurately. This film have delved deeper in to African traditions than any other film to date. So at minimum the choreographers have good material to work with.

There are four major fight choreographers on Black Panther, Clayton J Barber, Jonathan Eusebio, Jon Valera and Chris Brewster. Brewster seems to have a background primarily in Taekwondo, bjj, and tricking. Clayton J Barber stated in an interview for the official ovie guide book that they took inspiration from a range of fighting styles and tried to keep the fighting styles in tune with African movements, themes, and rhythms. he also stated this was difficult process but that he feels they found a good balance.

One thing I noticed about this statement is that it is rather vague. The only African based fighting style he mentions in the interview is Capoeira and he the other styles he mentions by name are Silat and Kali but in a sense that elements of those Asian arts were just used for "seasoning" Barber and Brewster both have some very standard karate. Taekwondo, and tricking backgrounds. Probably some Brazilian Jujitsu in there as well. (I am guessing BJJ cause that is is super popular.) Maybe some kung fu forms of some sort. Hard to find a detailed list of the arts they do. Jon Valera and Jonathan Eusebio are both major Kali and Silat practitioners. Eusebio is also versed in Savate Muay Thai and Jun Fan. He is an Dan Inosanto student which typically means. if it is historically East Asian and can kill you, he has probably studied it rather extensively.

Capoeira is relevant to the creation of fight choreography because of its unique history. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial folk art created by African slaves brought to Brazil. Most of these slaves were from Angola and The Congo region. experts on the art believe capoeira was adapted from Angolan arts like Engolo, Kandeka, Bassula, and Kamangula. Congolese arts that are believed to be like Kipura, Libanda, Gwindulumutu, and Musondi. There is a limited amount of info on most of these arts (along with most of the African martial arts I am discussing here) but all these are share common themes, emphasis on evasive movement and inverted body positions(handstands and the like) extensive use of kicks sweeps and slaps; dynamic grappling and headbutting; and the incorporation of music that uses the same instruments and rhythms.

I don't think it is as accurate to say that Capoeira is descended from these other arts as it is to say Capoeira is a branch on the same tree of of arts with shared concepts. Capoeira is uniquely Brazilian and also has elements of West African and Native culture blended in as well. Capoeira was and is a system built to preserve and proliferate African culture against the pressures of colonial oppression and degradation. Different Capoeira schools different emphasis on the African culture at core of the art but it is always there. If you were trying to make a Black Panther movie with only one martial art Capoeira would be the best one to create a movie accurate to African identity.

The writers, composers and costume designers drew on many African cultures for the design of the film. Some even spent some time in Africa for research so it is likely that some of the choreographers did similar research. Even if they didn't we do live in an age where you can google African martial arts and a decent list of videos and a few articles will come up. Winston Dukes even references Laamb in an interview about the movie so at minimum we can make a relatively safe assumption the choreographers referenced some some Youtube videos when designing the fight choreography itself I suspect they used there own training in Asian arts and the training of the actors and other stunt performers as a base and trying to mimic African arts and extrapolate out what they would look like in the world of Wakanda. Many of the actors and stunt people did train or already had training in some African arts which provided even more material to work from.

Wakanda is situated in between South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda , and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some of the people listed by the creators of the film as being influences for the costumes and culture of Wakanda are Maasai Himba Dogon Basotho Tuareg, Turkana Xhosa, Zulu, Surma, Serer and Dinka peoples. Given that some of these cultures are thousands of kilometers from Wakandas' location Their influence probably came through trade. Through out the history of Africa Warriors have traveled between tribes and nations exchanging combat techniques. This tradition has likely been a part of Wakandan culture as well. Even after going into hiding they still maintained Wardogs in other countries and still had a public face that has some interaction with other peoples. We will look at Wakanda’s martial arts as though they evolved next to real African martial arts, developing rather simultaneously and influencing each other. Some arts from neighboring countries will have closer relation while others share some influence from long distance trade.

Besides trade, the five tribes that settled in Wakanda could have migrated from quite far across the African continent which could have migrated from the far ends of the continent which would also contribute to there martial arts having a diverse ancestry. It is also important to note that while the different tribes and social classes of Wakanda would have different combat forms reflective of there roles and unique environments, these arts also would have shared between tribes and shaped each other. In this way along with the history and technology, Wakanda stands as a Mecca of diverse Pan-African identity.

To start we have The fighting style of the Black Panther and his family the Golden Tribe. Based on the matching color schemes, I suspect the Panther clan came from the merchant tribe originally. Chadwick Boseman spend a lot of time training for the role a mix of escrima, jujutsu but mostly Capoeira. He stunt doubles also primarily used capoeira for the fight and stunt scenes as well. Based on this an the geographrical location of Wakanda. Black Panther’s style is probably most closely related to Kipura, Libanda, Engolo and the like. Libanda in particular is a prominent feature of the Bukumbusu (Mukumbusu being the singular), a culture of professional fighters in Kinshasa. Libanda features a lot of grappling. In The Film T'Challa uses a lot of transitions found in Capoeira low game like negativa, role, and queda de rins to go into different locks and and holds. This give the sense Black Panther’s style has a more expanded ground game than is seen in most Capoeira practices. The next closely related martial art is probably Kayti, Maasai stick fighting. There are a few variations of the style but typically involve a defensive and offensive stick and a lot of downward strikes. Xhosa, stick fighting, Zulu stick fighting and Musangwe also seem to ad some strong influence as well seemingly incorporated into the Kayti forms in the martial traditions of the Golden tribe. T'Challa's preferred combat during challenges is a spear and shield similar to Zulu combat.

Next Nakia of the River Tribe. I think like the Golden Tribe, they use a set of forms related to a mix of Congolese, Kenyan and south African arts. While The Golden tribe uses more Congolese related forms similar to Kipura and Libanda, the River tribe Kenyan South African forms. Based On Nakia’s grappling the River tribe seems to use fighting forms related to Turkana Grappling like Saki and Zulu Isinaphakade Samathongo. Both this arts have extensive trapping locking and throwing techniques that work well with compact blades like the Turkana wrist knife or Ararait. The keepers of the sacred herb probably branched off of the river tribe being people of the denser vegetation areas. Plus Nakia new of a secret entrance to the garden.

The Dora Milaje were described as being mostly based on the Maasai in design, but their spear techniques look very similar to Egyptian Tahtib and the the Surma stick fighting art of Donga. The matching red patterns of the Mining tribe (and the Maasai influence in their look) gives me the sense that the Dora Milaje were originally a branch of the mining tribe but now any women can apply for the job. (I imagine you could apply. I wonder who you would use for references...) The footwork and the way the Dora work in groups reminds me of the demonstrations I have seen of Tahtib. Tahtib historically has been a stick fighting art meant to train someone for the use of a short spear or axe so it lends itself well to the Dora spear. Donga appears to be a related influence with some of the strike patterns.3 Add in some Kayti from their Maasai influence and you have a pretty diverse and deadly combat system.

The border tribe are described as being based on the Basotho for clothing design. The sickle swords they use look similar the to the Azande makraka and the Axumite shotel. Their Territory seems to be more arid open plains and their use of shields in a phalanx fashion seems similar to more Ancient Egyptian and Nubian infantry. The Shotel is especially useful for pulling mounted enemies of horses, hooking around shields or pulling legs out from under an opponent. The Border Tribe seems very well versed in fighting against shields and cavalry as well as fighting with shields and mounts. Even before the mounted rhinos (which was awesome) we see many of them riding horses and they probably have horsemanship skills like those of various Berber tribes of Northwest Africa. (Many Berber communities are still Matriarchal too which makes Okoye wearing the metaphorical pants in the family even more fitting. Their fighting style seems like a mix of Nuba sword and shield fighting and Ethiopian sword technique.

As I stated before, Winston Dukes talks about the the look Jibari being based on Sengalese wrestlers. During the first challenge M’Baku uses a lot of headbutts. It is likely the Jibari use a style related to Eritrean Reisy or Testa that combines grappling with strategic headbutting. Jibari combat probably also incorporates some Libanda and some elements of Laamb.

Finally there is Eric Killmonger/N’Jadaka. His style is an interesting mix. He has some training in the Golden tribe arts so some of his farm looks like kipura and Katyi. But the biggest influence in is form seems to be Boxing or potentially even some 52 Blocks while he was training on the east coast in Annapolis. Along with boxing his training military probably included Jujutsu, Eskrima and Taekwondo. (Those tend to be pretty common across the country in the military) He has very sharp, snappy, Taekwondo kicks. Eric also has experience in other African fighting styles But it is tough to know what ones without knowing more about where he has operated. Though his scar imply a lot of time spend With the Surma.

I am really hoping the DVD extras has the choreographers talking about the African martial arts that inspired the film. There is a rich history and culture Of African martial traditions I am looking forward to seeing more of in future films.

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#marvel's black panther #african martial arts #comic books #black history matters #capoeira

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