season 11 of dw is kind of mincing it’s morals so far i think.
in ‘the woman who fell to earth’, the villain kills about 6 people. he’s trying to kill one randomly selected person. that random person tries to push the Bad Guy Alien off a crane, and the doctor scolds him for trying to kill. nobody should take a life, that’s very clear. the doctor then tricks him into killing himself with his own bombs things. i guess there’s the plausible deniability that he pressed the button himself, but that’s if you ignore that it was the doctor’s one plan to stop him. they asked nicely to get him to leave the planet, and then, there was no backup plan except for that plausible deniability murder. which they had to have been planning for nearly half the episode, since before the data transfer.
in ‘the ghost monument’, episode 2, we get reintroduced to why the doctor never carries a gun. but the scene is about surviving the killer robots. the message here isn’t about Not Taking A Life, it’s just. guns are bad, even as a tool, even in a situation with no life to be taken. t isn’t about the importance of life at all. i get that self defence isn’t a real excuse for murder, but, they’re robots. the show was very clear that these were robots. i kind of just wish the doctor would be honest and say ‘guns don’t work on this show for plot reasons’, because that’s what really happens. or even something like ‘guns aren’t effective here’ because it wasn’t about morality here. no one could argue that ryan is a bad person for trying to protect everyone from killer robots, but that’s kind of what the doctor tried to do.
and later in the episode, the set of Bad Guy Aliens this time are killed in a gas explosion that the doctor planned out. it gave us a clear Life Is Sacred message in front of the mindless drones, and then pulled out on that message for the evil ribbon things, who seemed to be pretty alive. they could talk, and they seemed very intelligent. did their lives matter? did they not count because they were engineered to be evil? and is using a gun really worse than burning something to death? it’s kind of assumed the ribbon things are irredeemable, that they must die, but we aren’t told that in any words at all. which in itself is strange, because already this season we’ve heard so much about the importance of not taking a life, except now it’s okay when the doctor forgets to mention it.
it really feels like so far the message that All Life Is Important has a clock set on it, to run out in the last few minutes of the episode. because the Bad Guy Alien still has to die to wrap up everything neatly. that’s been the only resolution these episodes have had yet.
i’m of course not saying that any previous doctor had a totally consistent sense of morality. and the show has never been consistent with the rule of ’never carrying a gun’, which was only really invented for the 10th doctor. but, i don’t think it’s been so glaring to me before that the doctor was saying one thing and doing another. or even saying and doing things that don’t make sense in the narrative at all. it’s like the show is telling us it’s about Always Finding Another Way, and then killing the bad guys anyway.
Whenever
I see people quoting/referencing/parodying My
Immortal it’s always one of the same four or five lines. You know the ones.
The
iconic opening paragraph, “Hi my name is
Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair… (et
cetera).”
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU
DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!”
“I MAY BE A HOGWARTS
STUDENT… BUT I AM ALSO A SATANIST!”
“Then he put his thingie
into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time.”
“And Loopin was
masticating to it!”
As
great as those are, I’d like to throw a spotlight on what I think are some
of the underappreciated parts of this classic work of fanfiction.
Ebony puts blood on her Count Chocula cereal instead of milk.
Enoby is canonically a weeaboo and speaks to her friends in Fangirl Japanese.
Harry’s scar is now a pentagram instead of a lightning bolt, so either he found
some sort of spell to alter the appearance of the scar or he actually took the time to carve a
pentagram into his forehead.
There is an OC named either Tom Riddle or Tom Rid who works at a “punkgoff” store
in Hogsmeade and has absolutely nothing to do with Voldemort, he just happens
to have the exact same name.
Tara somehow got Fred and George mixed up with Crabbe and Goyle.
The reason Snape doesn’t like Harry in this fic is because Snape is Christian
and Harry is a Satanist.
Marty McFly literally appears out of nowhere to help Enoby travel through “tim”
with his “tim machine.”
Chapter 11 ends with Hagrid singing along to “a gothic version of a song by 50
Cent.”
Voldemort inexplicably speaks in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
Voldemort wears high heels.
Draco has a flying black Mercedes-Benz and a black MCR broom.
Snape has a Dork Mark on his penis.
Speaking of penises, Draco is apparently “hung like a stallone.” I guess Tara
is a Rambo fan?
The Hedwig/Voldemort sex scene, wherein Hedwig is a male human instead of a
female owl, for some reason.
Dumbledore flies around on his broomstick while holding a loaf of rye bread. At
least, that’s what I think Tara meant by “Sudenly
a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong
black bread.”
Oh yeah, and Dumbledore is an Avril Lavigne fanboy, because of course he is.
James Potter’s “goff” nickname is Samoro, because Tara erroneously believes
this to be the masculine form of the name Samara.
Draco’s singing voice is described as “a
cross between Gerard, Joel, Chester, Pierre and Marilyn Manson.”
Tara’s brief feud with her editor Raven, as chronicled in the author’s notes, may or may not have had something to do with Raven borrowing Tara’s sweater
and not giving it back. IDK, it’s unclear.
Voldemort smokes a “gothic blak Nightmare b4 Christmas cigar.”
McGonagall has the best insults, like “horny simpletons” and “mediocre dunces” and probably some others I’m forgetting.
Dobby only appears once in the entire fic and literally all he does is watch
Snape and Lupin have sex, and then run away crying.
Sirius is referred to as Harry’s dogfather, and not gonna lie, even if it was a typo I
think that is a genuinely clever pun.
The Hogwarts janitor may or may not be Chuck Norris.
Tara accurately predicted how Harry would defeat Voldemort in Deathly Hallows. No, really. “nd den hairy wil have 2 kommit suicide so
voldimort will die koz he will rilly be a horcrox!!!!!111”
This line: “Snap stated loafing
meanly. He took out a kamera anvilly.”
And this one: “‘Crosio!’ I shited pointing my wound.
Snoop scremed and started running around da room screming.”
“Azerbaijan”
“Hoes of Wax”
“Tom Bombodil”
“Cornelio Fuck”
“Professor Slutborn”
“Preacher McGongol”
“Lumpkin”
“TaEbory”
“The Bark Lord”
“Vadermort”
This is truly the classic of our generation. I want students to explicate this for AP tests.
Superheroes that are like “if we kill them we’re just as bad as they are uwu” ? Micro dick energy
The only exception is Aang, whose whole “I’m not gonna kill him if i can find another way” thing is less false moral equivalency and more “I’m twelve and I have been through way too much bullshit this year to add ‘commit my first murder’ to the list.”
i don’t think i see it addressed often enough that aang not willing to kill is cultural. that’s what he believed in because it’s what the air nomads believed in, that all life is inherently sacred. Not even that life is valuable, but sacred, as in it’s of central importance to air nomad spirituality. we don’t hear of the air nomads having another commandment that’s nearly as important. we hear that they don’t encourage attachment, but aang falls in love without any mention that monks aren’t meant to do that. (love and starting a family have been prohibited. which would mean aang feels okay breaking some rules, except for one he can’t allow himself to break)
aang sees killing the firelord as permanently severing the last link between himself and his culture, that taking a life will mean no longer being an air nomad. it’s tied up in both the deepest level of his identity, and his survivor’s guilt. that’s the only reason he puts it above his responsibility to save the world, and why not even the previous avatars could understand. i think aang really would have died before taking a life, because either way he saw his own death and taking a life as very nearly the same thing, as his whole culture ending forever with him. he can save the world but have to live with the guilt, and without his identity.
and that’s part of why ‘killing the bad guy makes you the bad guy’ falls flat. because aang isn’t just trying to be the Good Guy, he’s trying to be the last survivor of his culture. it’s even said as much by the gang and by every previous avatar that he’s not doing it to be good or morally superior, he’s ultimately being selfish.
Hi there! We have articles on Sappho, Khnumhotep & Niankhknum, and Zimri-Lim. The post you’re referring to comes from tumblr user @patrexes , this editor’s roommate Avia. I’ve referred to her for the entirety of this answer. She is not a part of this project, so if you like her content, consider supporting her ko-fi. So, from Avia herself:
the post you’re asking about is probably this one, of which i’m the op and afforded the translations. there’s also another post here but personally i’m a little….well, it’s pretty damn [cis voice] if you know what i mean.
inanna i is one of several extant texts which describe inanna’s own genderfluidity (and do so in the first person; it is inanna’s own self-description), and the descent describes the creation of the kurĝarru and gala-tur. erra is not about inanna but describes the kurĝarru again, alongside the assinu, and is nice to have, as an akkadian text rather than a sumerian one.
inanna c, in addition to the classic “to transform men into women and women into men is yours, inanna” quote also describes the creation or transformation of the pilipili, and has this… really cute quote, “dam dam tuku UR-bi LU níĝ dùg ki áĝ-ĝá dùg dinana za-kam”, translated typically as “to have a favorite wife to love is yours, inanna”.
the kurĝarru, gala-tur, assinu, and pilipili are all various terms for people which the CAD and ePSD obliquely describe as “cultic performers” and “religious functionaries” because they’re too prim and proper to say “sacred prostitutes”, a term i’m using as a fsswer myself both because “fsswer” just doesn’t have the same ring to it and the specification of full service is too important to just call them sex workers, and because “sacred prostitution” is the generally academically accepted term.
now, while the precise differences between the kurĝarru, gala-tur, assinu, and pilipili, also called ur-sal, sag-ur-sag, and some others are sometimes a little bit lost in translation (it’s unclear, for some, if these are separate categories or simply multiple words for the same people), and “transgender” is a modern word which will not necessarily perfectly encompass an understanding of gender that is some 6000 years old, it’s still quite reasonable to describe these people as overwhelmingly what today we would consider transgender and/or gender non-conforming, and there is evidence suggesting a wide range of personal identity, lifestyles, and forms of embodiment; as wide a range as we find in modern trans communities.
what’s especially exciting to me, and hopefully to you as well, is that it’s not only that there’s documentation of trans people in sumer, it’s that we as trans and gnc people—as trans and gnc sex workers, even—aren’t even tolerated, but sacred. in this theology, we are created for inanna, in inanna’s own gnc image, as sacred things. in a world that thinks of us as expendable, dirty, subhuman… that’s so important. i really cannot overstate the serenity which comes of seeing yourself in your theology, and being explicitly told that you are valuable, that you are supposed to be this.
but anyway. if you want to do any further research yourself, there’s a surprising amount of scholarship on transness in sumer, and you’ll find german to be a particularly useful scholarly language. there are also some interesting comparative approaches, particularly with roman and hebrew contact. here’s an articleon each. fair warning if you dig deeper, though, and aren’t super familiar with academia: the language used in scholarly work tends to be… impolite. transphobia and whorephobia abound here particularly, and they won’t shy from slurs.
hope this information proves helpful!
oh hey yall here’s some sumerian bullshit instead of scandinavian bullshit for once! enjoy
people who want pluto reinstated as the ‘””’ninth planet’‘““‘‘ are fake fans. how many of you can name another dwarf planet? how many of you hypocrites fought for ceres, another current dwarf planet that once had it’s planet classification ripped away? it got called a large asteroid until we came up with the dwarf planet classification, you know who else is in an asteroid belt? pluto. it’s not special for a dwarf planet. it’s just the most famous.
combining dwarf planets under planets at the moment would make pluto the 10th planet out of a total 13 (and you would know that already if you really loved pluto). except that might not last very long, because there’s about 200 more candidates for future dwarf planets,
“and possibly more than 10,000″ further out than pluto we haven’t seen yet
this article going around, “Yes Pluto is a planet”? if you read past the title, it goes onto how we tend to call even large moons ‘planets’. the same definition (”round objects that are smaller than stars”) ends up with a total of 102 planets in our solar system. if we count ceres (the one dwarf planet closer to the sun than pluto) and only the moons bigger than pluto, then pluto comes out as the 17th planet. but that number counts earth’s moon (that moon called The Moon) as its own planet, of which ‘moon’ is a subcategory. it’s weird. and it throws away the idea that Planets Are Objects That Orbit The Sun. and under that definition even pluto’s moon charon could be it’s own planet, or it could share the one ‘double planet’ label with pluto.
in conclusion, tumblr, please chill about pluto. it’s been 12 years of this. we keep finding more dwarf planets and we keep learning more and more about the solar system, so it’s never going to be exactly the same as when we were kids again. i think we should definitely teach kids about it being the 2nd dwarf planet out of 5-so-far. and it might one day be classed as a planet again, but it’s not going to be as number 9, and you might have to learn a bunch more planets at the same time. but please. please my dear people who share things without reading them. if i see another viral post about pluto really being a planet without any other dwarf planets mentioned i might die
vulcan naming conventions are inconsistent, but the surakian tradition is generally two-syllable names, men’s s____k, women’s t’p___. so, yeah, t’pose is a completely reasonable english transliteration of a traditional vulcan woman’s name
to expand on this a little, the original memos actually say that vulcan mens’ names should be five letters, s???k. this is where you get “shrek is a vulcan name” discourse.
however, that doesn’t really scan. vulcan names aren’t meant to be written with the latin alphabet, after all, and vulcan script looks like this —
— if you can find anything that’s clearly a letter here, never mind delineating five of them, you’re a better man than me.
rather, i’d like to suggest the typical transliteration of a vulcan man’s personal name will most likely fit a {C}CVC.vc format, transliterated S[VC.v]k, assuming a traditionally minded family as well as modernity not fucking with pronunciation too much—remember young diot coke, born 1379? her name written today would probably be denise cook.
assume for a moment that surak is a good example of a traditional name; sarek, then, is uncorrupted in modernity. [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] and [ˌsaɹˈɛk], i guess? ipa will be the death of me one day and i’m absolute shit at vowels. but both of these names are S[VC.v]k, if you’ll accept some very ad hoc use of standard symbols.
there are names that don’t fit this model, though. spock; tuvok; stonn. we’ll throw shrek in here too.
tuvok is the easiest one to consolidate, of course: CCVC.vc, and the name [ˌstʊvˈɑk] drops its /s/ over time to simply [ˌtʊvˈɑk]
spock, stonn, and shrek are single-syllable, five-letter romanizations. immediately a problem becomes apparent, though; spock’s romanized /ck/ is the same as what is elsewhere romanized simply /k/ — the generalization of {C}CVC.vc as “five letters” throws off what would otherwise be romanized as “spok”; similarly, stonn is… presumably not displaying gemination, as romanizations typically drop it (see óðinn -> odin or the names of the dwarves in lotr for examples of consonant reduplication denoting gemination being dropped); as such we should probably see his name romanized as “ston”.
spock and stonn, normalized as spok and ston, are both CCVC. shrek is CCVC as well; remember /sh/ is /ʃ/ in ipa. so you have, in order, [spɑk], [stɑn], and [ʃɹɛk].
i would argue that spock and shrek are names which, over time, experienced vowel reduction; they’re not invalid names, they simply aren’t the original forms of them. diot and denise.
spock, then, would be derived from the name [ˌsʊpˈɑk]. the vowel loses prominence until it’s no longer pronounced at all, or only barely pronounced.
possibly this is due to a slight complication of the guidelines; not simply {C}CVC.vc, but {C}C’VC.vc. that is, not [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] but [ˌs’ʊɹˈʌk]; not [ˌsaɹˈɛk] but [ˌs’aɹˈɛk]. [ˌst’ʊvˈɑk] becomes [ˌt’ʊvˈɑk]*, and spock maybe originally was [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk].
see, /p/ really loves turning into /p’/; it probably happens in your speech all the time. so [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk] maybe gets functionally pronounced as [ˌs’ʊp’ˈɑk], and that’s a lot of ejectives in one syllable, so down the line it becomes simply [sp’ɑk].
shrek experiences a similar, but not identical, vowel reduction, with the likely protoform [ˌʃ’ʊɹˈɛk] becoming [ʃ’ɹɛk].
stonn is a bit of an odd case, obviously, as it doesn’t end in /k/ at all. i might argue that it’s diminuitive; like naming your kid joe or joey instead of joseph, you might name your kid [st’ɑn] instead of [ˌst’ɑnˈɛk]. this may be especially common if it’s typical vulcan pronunciation is actually [st’ɑŋ] and indicative of a dialect shifting word-final /k/ to /ŋ/; in a dialect where [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛk] is being pronounced [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛŋ] anyway, fuck your _# /ŋ/, who needs it? thus, stonn still feels complete as a name despite technically being a diminuitive.
*note that ipa /t’/ and the element /t’/ in traditional vulcan women’s names are not the same thing; /t’/ designates what in ipa is written /tʔ/ or /t’ʔ/. t’pose is [tʔpoʊz] or [t’ʔpoʊz] and, structurally, i suppose, C.CCVC, where women’s names are likely constructed C.CC{C}V{_C}; that is, T’P[{C}V{_C}], allowing t’pau ([t’ʔpaʊ]), t’pring ([t’ʔpɹɪŋ]), t’pose ([t’ʔpoʊz]).
i was writing this whole thing about. listening to all the d&d segments of harmontown. and how it’s such a mess. how often the joke is just, jeff davis mentioning aids. and the audience cheering at that? ‘i fuck the giant fish so the fish gets aids and then it’ll die’ like god can u imagine having paid to be in the audience of that its such a low fucking bar? this was after, really early on, there’s this interlude about how like. Dan Harmon can’t tell jokes. so jeff gives him some jokes. one the punchilne is just aids again. the other is child rape. presumably the remainder of the show that isn’t d&d is like that, i guess. and like. uh. listening to it i’m so aware of how much i’m having to make myself forgive the show just to get to the next episode. but i got up to them dropping the t slur and i just can’t anymore. i don’t think i can even hatelisten past this point. liking spencer’s style of DMing, and, you know, erin mcgathy being a ray of sunshine, it’s, sadly not enough to motivate me to get deeper into this trainwreck. especially knowing that they always run with these jokes, but that’s arguably harmon’s on stage presence, and it seems like if you stopped and said, hey that’s not funny, let’s not joke about that, it could fucking kill him. like that, consent joke moment in harmonquest. can u imagine stepping on that ego it’s like a baby chick
i think. the biggest difference between harmonquest and harmontown is that, harmonquest had a network. it presumably had someone tapping everyone on the shoulder and saying, hey keep it clean, keep it at least tolerable. keep it something that a Real Life Human Being can sit down for a half hour to watch without wincing. and the jokes are pretty limited to, uhh, the running gag that dan’s character is coming to terms with being gay. i guess. so it was still a mess from the beginning and i’m, a fucking idiot for finding media i think i like. but now seeso’s fucking dead and buried, if it ever gets a third season i’m sure it’s going to end up being the same fucking, edgy lolrandom humour that harmontown ends up as. that rick and morty is. i think my main problem is thinking dan harmon that wrote community is like, still alive and kicking somewhere, and i’m looking for that painfully aware optimistic metahumour in some painfully unaware, bitter shell of a writer
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