Day: May 28, 2017
Star Wars never really explores the cool time-keeping situations that you can end up with in a society that spans multiple planets:
- planets with no moon that don’t
have a time increment between days and years- planets with a dozen moons where
understanding their cycles involves university courses- multi-planet star systems where the position of the other planet features prominently in calendar systems
- tidally locked planets with no days
(or years, really, because even though they’re orbiting a star they wouldn’t have significant changes in seasons)- and not only do they not have days or years, they have no cultural concept of those things and are bewildered by the rest of the galaxy’s obsession with measuring time
- planets with years so long that
they’re useless as a way of measuring age, so people give their age
in months instead- planets with like 6 hour days where people are used to sleeping frequently for only a couple hours at a time
- the space equivalent of jetlag involves adjusting to a new day length, not just a new time zone
- when two planets have slightly different day lengths, the days shift relative to each other, so if you travel frequently between two such planets, sometimes the days line up perfectly and sometimes you have to deal with 12 hours of “jet”lag
And there are tons of interesting cultural implications that go along with using Coruscant time as a standard throughout the galaxy:
- standard Coruscant dates have basically no correlation to seasons on planets with different year lengths, so to even guess at the weather during a historical date given in standard time you need to do calculations
- everyone has a different age in
local years and standard years, and a different birthday- some planets have days much longer or shorter than standard days, so your standard birthday might be spread over a few local days or vice versa
- stuff like being old enough to
drive – it tends to go in round numbers of local years, so even on
planets where the rule is “about 18 standard”, you have some
planets where it’s actually 17.36 standard years, or 19.1, or
whatever works out nicely in local years- planets that follow Coruscant standard time and totally ignore natural phenomena on their own planets
- up to and including days – they force themselves into sleep cycles with nothing to do with the sun rising and setting
- planets that refuse to use standard time even in official settings, and pilots hate having to travel there because the space port is always chaotic because no one knows what time it is
- the Separatists try to switch to another time system than Coruscant standard and it’s a total mess but it would be embarrassing to switch back
- the Rebellion learns their lesson from this and doesn’t try to change the standard time system even though the New Republic government is no longer based on Coruscant
- people pay less and less attention to standard time as you get farther from the core
- planets with similar natural time
cycles to Coruscant have more prosperous economies and produce more
prominent and successful people, although the effect is subtle
enough that it goes unnoticed until someone randomly decides to
check for correlation
who The fuck names meds “Zoloft” sounds like some dark wizard cursing me for not wiping my feet before I enter his house and “sertraline” is his snakewife
Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a
Lovecraftian horror scenario?Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that
extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We
have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities
that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve,
to destroy.Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve
abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them,
lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or
smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message
and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts
every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever
working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do
it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of
nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against
this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost
never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook
asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your
twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some
use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security
joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in.
Many do not understand the humour of mages.The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled
our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them.
We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to
you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show
you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a
thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one
point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create
an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to
connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies
deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.
list of favorite things as a fanfic author:
- When someone is really freaking mad at me for inducing an emotional response from them
- when readers give me a background of how/when they read my writing
- when readers give me a background of why they shouldn’t have been reading my writing (usually while at work)
- when readers quote my work back to me in comments
- the frickin’ real heroes here, the ones who comment on every chapter of an ongoing multi-chapter fic
person of color: hey wouldn’t it be cool if angels were represented as brown or black more often–
edgy whites who went to a week of bible study 15 yrs ago and regurgitate all their Superior Knowledge from textually inaccurate all-caps tumblr posts written by supernatural fans: um…… ACTUALLY 🙂 angels don’t look like HUMANS they look like ELDRITCH NIGHTMARES™ that MELT YOUR BRAIN OUT so stop giving them skin colors 🙂 try a few animal heads instead 🙂 don’t forget the eyeballs 🙂
But it’s true?? That’s why they’re always saying “do not be afraid”. Some of them have three faces on one head?? It’s in both Old Testament and Revelations.
i mean, this is my favorite of all subjects so why not chat about it a little. sorry in advance for the essay you didn’t ask for, but i’m getting a lot of smartasses on this post telling me the Edgy Whites aren’t wrong. so let’s go:
1) even if it was true (which it’s not, i will get to that) this wouldn’t be an adequate reason for criticizing or derailing poc who are trying to subvert the association of divinity/purity & whiteness. you know the idea of the aryan race came from the myth of divine whiteness? you know how all fantasy elves are pale slender & white, thanks to j.r.r. tolkein’s prevailing white/christian influence? so if you see poc trying to reframe this, let them!
2) it isn’t true. don’t get me wrong, you can envision, interpret, and portray angels however you want, that’s part of the fun of art and writing and fantasy. i know that a certain post influenced how a lot of people on tumblr imagine angels (again, because people like subverting popularized imagery) but if we’re talking about biblical accuracy, then let’s be biblically accurate.
more specifically, if someone is going to condescend to poc (or anyone!) about the “factual” appearances of angels in the bible, then they damn better get it right.
to start with– angels as winged messengers were popularized after the roman catholic church began co-opting greco-roman imagery, and modeled much of their depictions of angels after hermes and eros. so yeah, the image of pale white angels is tiresome and not technically accurate to the bible.
that said, the majority of angels in the bible very likely appeared as wingless humans with occasional supernatural attributes.
biblical angels are understood by theologists & angelologists to exist in a celestial hierarchy, de coelesti hierarchia, which accounts for nine distinct types. they’re organized in tiers, so to speak. within the first sphere are seraphim, cherubim, and ophanim. this first choir resides within the inner sanctum of heaven; they are the lovecraftian ones tumblr is so big on.
the seraphim (isaiah 6:1-8 and revelations 4:8, the burning ones, sometimes interpreted as a mass of serpents, multiple eyes, etc.) the cherubim (isaiah 1:5-11 and ezekiel 1:5-13, multiple wings, multiple faces) and ophanim (ezekial 1:15-21′s iconic Wheels™) are all witnessed by prophets. not in visitations, but in visions of heaven. these are THE scary angels, the angels of the guillermo del toro persuasion.
but, they exist outside of sight from humans, which is why it was exclusively prophets who could describe them. they do not come down to earth to chat with random civilians. they’re too busy with the tasks of the omniscient, and their proximity to god is what makes them so powerful and so otherworldly. (and no, you won’t drop dead just looking at them: only god is said to be that powerful.)
the second choir– the dominions, virtues, and powers– are typically interpreted to remain unseen and work on the spiritual plane, tasked with more menial things than the first choir, keeping the nonphysical realm in working order.
the third choir are the ones who move between heaven and earth to serve humans: the principalities, archangels and angels. these are the ones most regularly described in the bible as messengers, guides, and guardians who take on the form of man in order to serve and aide them. almost every mention of angelic messengers or apparitions in the bible is an angel of the third choir.
(side note: the only angels not accounted for in the celestial hierarchy are the nephilim: the fallen ones who had children by humans, referenced in genesis 6:1–4 and often considered to be demons.)
so if the angels appearing to humans aren’t abominations, why do they scare people so badly?
the phrase “do not be afraid/be not afraid” is said in variations over 100 times in the bible, not exclusively by angels. most often it’s spoken as an assurance of god’s love and protection. yes, a handful of times it’s said by angels. (matthew 1:20, matthew 28:5, luke 1:13, luke 1:30, luke 2:10, to name some prominent instances.) almost every single one of these, the angel in question is doing just that– assuring vulnerable or frightened people that god is protecting them.
most notable of these angels is gabriel, the archangel and messenger who appears to mary to tell her she will conceive jesus. let’s look at the context at play: mary was a young unwed woman who would not have been accustomed to spending time alone with young man outside her family. when gabriel appears to her, a strange man in her home, she has every reason to be frightened. gabriel goes on to tell her that she’s going to be the mother of god, and this is when he reassures her not to be afraid, because it will be done through god’s workings. gabriel ≠ an eldritch horroterror.
the second instance is that of the messenger angel who tells the women of jerusalem not to be afraid, but jesus has been raised from the dead. this angel is described as unearthly, and tbqh he’s dope as hell: “his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow.” (matthew 28:5) there’s reason to believe this angel is of the same countenance as the one described in a vision in the book of daniel: “then i lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and beheld a certain man clothed in linen (…) his body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.” (daniel 10:5-7) my fave description of an angel in the bible by far, but… still not an eldritch horrorterror.
in a third instance (luke 2:10), the angelic heralds who inform the sleeping shepherds of jesus’ birth do startle the men, and they do tell them not to fear. but it’s said its the glory of god emanating from them that scares the shepherds, not a monstrous appearance.
the cosmic fear attributed to visits from the divine is called numinous dread, the terror that fills us when we’re approached by something we have no capacity to understand. numinous dread is akin to what makes people quiver at the thought of ghosts, or the size of distant planets, or the expanse of the universe– something incalculable and unknowable to the point of being frightening. this to me is by far the coolest aspect of angels. the fact that the very scope of their existence can tug and distort the fabric of our dimension, to the point that humans are bowled over by the merest whiff of their presence? it’s why angels who appear human but still frighten people is such an underrated concept.
you know the phrase “every angel is terrifying”? the author, rainer maria rilke, wrote endlessly on the nature of the human and divine, especially in his work the duino elegies. in the full quote from the first elegy, he mused on the vastness of angels in comparison to mortals:
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”
this, to me, is the most succinct and lovely illustration of angels, which doesn’t define them either as monsters or humans– he’s fixed on the feeling of awe that’s inherent to the divine, however it manifests.
none of this invalidates creative interpretations of biblical angels! it just means you should not be talking down to anyone about their level of accuracy, especially in regards to race.
in summary: YES, some angels are scary looking in the bible. NO, not every single one looks like edgy white tumblr wants to believe. YES, everybody is allowed to have fun with their interpretations and portrayals, go wild. NO, it’s not even remotely acceptable to condescend to people who want to envision them as people of color because, textually, they manifest as humans in the bible, and everyone in the bible was brown and black.
kototyph 