This afternoon we learned that Gordon Sondland, Ambassador to the EU and GOP megadonor, will appear for a closed door deposition before House committees on Tuesday, October 8th. According to CBS News it will be the “same format” as Ukraine Envoy Kurt Volker’s testimony yesterday. (I take this to mean that he will appear without a government lawyer.) This seems to me to be a development of great importance.
The White House is putting up a strong bluff. They say they won’t comply with subpoenas. They are even hinting at a challenge to the House’s internal governance, arguing that there actually is no impeachment inquiry because Speaker Pelosi has not held a vote of the whole House to authorize it. It’s the same brash, aggressive and total defiance that has served them so well for the last nine months. The President says he has every right to do what he’s done and his top lieutenants are lining up to agree.
But the people closest to the action, the ones with the most at stake are belying that confidence not with their words but their actions. Secretary Pompeo threatened a dogged fight against any attempt to depose State Department officials or get documents for the House inquiry. Volker, Yovanovitch, Sondland and others could have used that shield Pompeo threw up around them to refuse or at least delay or negotiate over testifying. That was clearly the intention. But they haven’t. Volker resigned his appointment and quickly testified. Now Sondland, much more of a Trump partisan and apparently much more of a driving force in the extortion scheme, is doing the same.
Take it as a given that everyone here will act in their own interests. If the President’s position was strong and he had the ability to protect or threaten these secondary players they’d almost certainly be following his lead. But they’re not. They’re moving quickly, if not to make deals with the Congress then at least to share what they know and hand over documents in their possession. In other words, they’re protecting themselves. We don’t know for certain Sondland is doing this yet. But if he weren’t it would be folly to submit to a deposition without a government lawyer present and without trying to negotiate protective ground rules.
One of the things we learned over the last nine months is that a posture of total defiance can be quite effective. If no one talks or produces any records it’s almost impossible for an investigation to get traction or build momentum. By cooperating they are significantly undermining the administration’s strategy and creating incentives and pressures for others to come forward as well. For a White House where law means little and loyalty means everything that is total betrayal. But that does not appear to be stopping them.
Again, everyone will act in their own interests. The White House is telegraphing a cavalier defiance meant to tell everyone they still hold all the cards. But these underlings’ actions speak louder than words. They know much more than we do and they have much more on the line. So we should listen closely to what their actions are telling us.
Castle-generator is, as you can probably already guess, a generator of castles—gorgeous, two-dimensional pixel art fortresses to die for over and over and over again. It's by _unsettled_; all sorts of parameters are offered to determine the general shape and size of your medieval manse.
2D pixel art parametric castle generator
Hide/show the UI with H, move the camera with the arrow keys.
The final results won’t be published before Friday, and it’s likely that there will be movement in the realm of one or even two Knesset seats for some of the parties. But from the looks of things this morning, it appears that we have spent four months and hundreds of millions of shekels, allowed the normal running of government with all its urgent issues to come to a halt for the better part of the year, and endured the incalculable coarsening of an already-quite-coarse public discourse in order to get… basically the same results.
OK, that’s a bit doom-and-gloom-y. If the current numbers hold, things are slightly worse for the right than they were in April. Likud has a few less seats, the United Arab Party has a few more (and its leader, the dynamic and impressive Ayman Odah, is likely to be the next head of the opposition), both Zionist left parties have lived to fight another day (my party, Meretz, is better off by one seat, though the merger with Ehud Barak’s party means that some good people on the April list are no longer in the Knesset), the far-right and Kahanist blocs have been left out entirely, and the slightly-less-far-right parties, who up until a few years ago were dreaming of running the country, have been voted into irrelevance. But the bottom line remains the same: neither Netanyahu nor Benny Gantz, leader of Blue and White, have a clear path to the 61 MKs they need to form a coalition. Avigdor Lieberman, a corrupt opportunist who has never lived up to the many promises he’s made to the people who vote for him, remains the keystone of any possible coalition, and has made it clear that he will not join Netanyahu’s “natural” coalition, with the religious parties and far-right. But at the same time, Lieberman is unlikely to join a coalition that includes the Arab parties (nor are they likely to be willing to join him, or Blue and White for that matter). There’s a very good chance we’ll be doing this all again in January.
So why am I, nevertheless, cautiously optimistic? Because last night’s results feel like the beginning of the end for Netanyahu’s stranglehold on Israeli politics. The most important thing to remember about both of 2019’s election campaigns is that they were only ever about one thing. The reason we went to elections in April and September (instead of waiting for the regularly scheduled ones in November) is Netanyahu’s looming court cases. This has been even clearer the second time around, as the publication of some of the prosecution’s evidence against Netanyahu has made it obvious that the cases against him are airtight. If he ever makes it into a courtroom, his political career is over (he may or may not go to prison, but Israeli law incorporates the concept of Disgrace, which prevents people convicted of certain crimes from serving in public office for seven years post-conviction; the man is 70, you do the math). He has therefore spent the last several years breaking every conceivable norm, and allying himself with increasingly deranged and disreputable political partners, in his pursuit of a legal loophole to protect him from prosecution. The holy grail until the beginning of 2019 was an immunity law that would make it impossible to indict the prime minister. When it became clear that such a law couldn’t be passed with the current Knesset, Netanyahu went to elections in the belief that he’d end up with a more congenial one. The goal was to get this Knesset, and the immunity law, in place before the hearing that will determine whether Netanyahu can be stripped of his parliamentary immunity and an indictment served against him (currently scheduled for two weeks from now), thus ending the prosecution’s case against him.
Enter Lieberman. He is, by any rational standard, a failed politician, but he’s not stupid, and more importantly, he has grasped a point that many other center-right leaders who thought they could launch themselves into independent political power (and maybe even the prime minister’s office) by acting as Bibi’s kingmakers have missed: it never works. One after the other, these leaders—Naftali Bennet, Moshe Kachlon, Yair Lapid—have ended up being devoured whole by Netanyahu’s machine, their voters cannibalized and their political careers in tatters (Lapid has survived the best; he is no. 2 in Blue and White and there is officially a rotation agreement between him and Gantz, in which they would trade off the prime minister’s job after two years; but it’s noteworthy how silent he was throughout the campaign, and how often the idea of yanking the rotation agreement has been raised in the public conversation).
When Lieberman was offered the same deal, he balked. And he had the perfect pretext to do so. One of Netanyahu’s ploys in seeking to avoid prosecution was to partner ever-more-strongly with religious and far-right parties, and to give them freer reign in imposing religious legislation and religious controls over public services—most prominently, introducing religious content into the syllabus of public schools. This is one of the few things a right-wing prime minister can do that will genuinely enrage the majority of secular (Jewish) Israeli voters. The people who yawned at his obvious corruption, clucked their tongues at his indifference to ten years of rocket fire over the country’s southern cities, and allowed him to fulminate about Iran, have been incensed by the growing interference of religious fanatics in their private lives. Lieberman seized on this—the immediate pretext was an upcoming law regulating the conscription of the Ultra Orthodox, though it’s notable that this law hasn’t been mentioned at all during the campaign leading up to September. Suddenly raising the standard of a secular warrior, he introduced the possibility of a secular coalition comprised of Likud, Blue and White, and himself.
That coalition now seems like the only path towards a stable government. Which doesn’t mean that it is going to happen. Though Likud was already making noises this morning that of course the only way a partnership like this could work would be with Bibi as prime minister, it’s obvious to everyone that Gantz and Lapid won’t agree to this. And either way, Netanyahu will make the immunity law his condition of joining, which Gantz has already ruled out. What this means is that the future of the country probably depends on enough people in Likud—a party that Netanyahu has spent a decade emptying of anyone of substance and stacking with lickspittles whose single-digit brain cells are nevertheless sufficient to recognize that they have no existence without him—deciding that enough is enough and making a separate deal with Gantz and Lieberman. On the other hand, there are already five Likud members whose only action in the Knesset last spring was to vote themselves out of job, so you have to wonder how many people in the current party are willing to let Bibi take them on another round of this losing game.
Of course, other things might happen. Gantz might be able to form a coalition without Likud (there are already voices calling Odah to back down from his categorical rejection of such a proposition). Lieberman might back off and agree to Netanyahu’s original coalition with the religious parties. President Rivlin might do something unexpected. But the important point is that Netanyahu is significantly weakened. He pulled out all the stops during this campaign when it came to vicious incitement, attempted voter suppression, and inflaming his base. He even brazenly violated election law several times yesterday, and it still didn’t do him any good. Anyone watching him must realize that he’s not going to get a better result if he tries to go to another election, and either way, the hearing is next month. Though I won’t swear that this is the end of the road for him, it feels like something has changed.
To be clear, the best case scenario going forward still won’t involve a significant movement to the left or progress towards the end of the Palestinian occupation. But nobody knows what Israeli politics look like without Bibi, and in the vacuum he leaves behind, interesting things could happen. As I said, I think this is the beginning of the end, but it also could be the beginning of the beginning.
In 1987, Arleen Sorkin played a bizarre dream jester on the classic soap opera Days of our Lives. Watch above. Several years later, that curious character became the inspiration for Harley Quinn on Batman: The Animated Series. Naturally, Sorkin voiced Ms. Quinn.
In 1987, Sorkin was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, playing the show’s comic relief: the ditzy, leggy, Noo Yawk–accented Calliope Jones. But unlike her flighty character, Sorkin was a skilled and experienced comedy writer. “I could never just come in and run my lines,” she told Vulture. “I was forever suggesting stuff, probably out of boredom!” So when she went to a screening of the faux-medieval The Princess Bride, an idea struck her: Why not do a fairy-tale dream sequence on Days? The producers were into it and aired an episode in which Calliope acts as a court jester, roller-skating into a throne room and doing some hackneyed borscht belt gags for a royal family.
(Writer Paul) Dini and Sorkin were college friends, and one day, she gave him a VHS tape of her favorite Days moments — including her jester bit. The tape sat idle for years. But in mid 1991, Dini was sick as a dog and popped the tape into his VCR. He was a budding television writer at the time, cranking out freelance scripts for the as-yet-unaired Batman: The Animated Series. He’d been struggling to come up with a female character to use as a one-off in an episode about Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker.
“I thought, Maybe there should be a girl there,” he said. “And I thought, Should the girl be like a tough street thug? Or like a hench-person or something? And then suddenly the idea of someone funny kind of struck me.” When he saw Sorkin in clown makeup, the pieces fell into place, and he came up with a silly little sidekick. He gave her the comic-book-y name of Harley Quinn, sketched out an idea for her look, and brought the sketch to the cartoon’s lead artist, Bruce Timm.
Your Full Moon in Pisces horoscopes cover the astrology from September 13 – September 26, from full Moon to new Moon. They are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. They both contain important information. You’ll know which resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, leave the rest. If you find inspiration here we love and appreciate donations. If you want to share this work you must quote it and link it to this post and website. Thank you for your support and for spreading around the work; we really appreciate it and you!
Sun in Virgo trine Pluto Rx in Capricorn, both at 20°
Mars in Virgo opposes Neptune Rx in Pisces, both at 17°
There are times when figuring a situation out is impossible. Times that demand we feel, float, and wade our way through them. Times that leave us untethered and unable to choose a direction.
Known in the Northern Hemisphere as the Harvest Moon, this moment is ripe with messy emotions and events that don’t entirely make sense. Conjunct Neptune, Goddess of the Great Seas, this is one of the most sensitive lunations of late. The full moon opens up the floodgates, upends all boundaries, and makes a mockery of Virgo Season’s desire for clarity and categorization.
Pisces isn’t here to distinguish one thing from another (like Virgo loves to). It’s a sign that does away with all silos of separation. Things fall apart. The laces that tie our lives together come undone. Truth seeps through the seams. Under the light of this full moon, we have the hard task of letting time wash the truth of the matter up onto the shores of our lives. This is not a moment for precision, it is a moment for working with the practices that promote our ability to find solutions; time in nature, reading poetry, staring at the ceiling, taking long baths, long walks, and deep breaths.
If things are a mess at the moment, don’t rush past them. Hold space for your experience without indulging your worst-case scenarios (at least not for too long). Remind yourself repeatedly that there is a solution and it is on its way. Your job is to take the highroad with yourself, bearing witness to what hurts, what gets confused, and what needs sorting through.
It is still Virgo Season after all.
This full moon is sextile Pluto (the Sun is trine it), giving it the ability to lead us towards experiences that will transform our way of working. Whatever comes up in your life over the course of this full moon (right before the full moon up until the next new moon), invest in the belief that it is best. Don’t waste energy worrying about what you can’t fix. Redirect it towards what you can do to stay afloat.
This full moon happens on a day already packed with high-functioning, and just plain high, astrology. At the edge of Virgo, Venus and Mercury meet. This brings a little dose of sweetness to this day, promoting listening, care, and consideration. At the edge of reason, Mars makes an opposition to Neptune (and the full moon). This is a dose of high-octane intoxicant, adding to the mushy make-up of this lunation. Directions get blurry, instructions get lost, and gas-lighting may feel more than likely. You are allowed to be angry when an injustice happens, just make sure that you aren’t being overly precious or preoccupied with what your bruised ego will tell you to do. It’s best to use this energy for creative and spiritual endeavors.
As Mercury and Venus travel together, they leave one’s domain (Mercury rules Virgo) to enter the other’s (Venus rules Libra). Here, Mercury is given a major boost by Venus. The Goddess in all her glory gives The Messenger ample sweet treats and trinkets. This helps us beautify our speech and better connect with one another.
However.
Both are soon to face some incredible opponents. As they do, our relationship dynamics and communication issues will need our attention, energy, and commitment.
September 18
Saturn stations direct at 13° Capricorn
Having been retrograde since the end of April, Saturn has been encouraging us to review the structures we work within. Specifically in the topics related to the part of your chart that contains Capricorn, Saturn’s lessons have most likely been stern but transformative. Nothing is a teacher like real life, and the effects of Saturn are far from virtual. These lessons aren’t complete, but you’ve most likely done a tremendous amount of work anchoring the core of its curriculum. As this Babe of Boundaries pivots, do what you need to honor yours.
September 19
Mars in Virgo trine Pluto in Capricorn, both at 20°
Committing to forward momentum can be the difference between settling for situations not meant for you, or connecting to your future potential by risking what is comfortable but confining. Most fears are just problems waiting to be figured out. Most of the time what stops us from dismantling our doubts is an unconscious agreement to give them a power they haven’t earned. Today’s astrology wants you to connect to your agency, power, and potency. It wants you to dismantle doubt, channel the confidence of a mediocre white man, and give life your all.
This astro might make you a little extra agro, so channel that excess energy into your most challenging projects and pursuits.
September 21
Jupiter in Sagittarius square Neptune Rx in Pisces, both at 17°
The last of 3 squares between these two planets helps us to clear up a couple of our doubts about our growth and pathways towards progress. Over the past year, as Jupiter and Neptune have been in a square to each other, many opportunities may have turned to mush, but many a daydream may have led to your best idea yet. The rub of these two teaches us to manage expectations while allowing time to fantasize ourselves out of what restricts us. After this last pass, Jupiter is free and in the best form it will be for quite some time. October and November bring big blessings in regards to the area of your chart that contains Sagittarius; as Jupiter makes its last moves through here you’ll want to make an effort to make the most of them.
September 22
Mercury in Libra square Saturn at 14° Capricorn
Over the course of the next couple of days, the area of your chart that contains Libra goes through a rough patch. Today’s is all about communication. You may have many a writing deadline or many a tough conversation to be had. ‘No’ abounds. Stick to solutions and you’ll find a way to work through the limits others may be placing in front of you. Some you should heed, some you should have a good long look at to find your way around.
September 23
12:51 AM PT – Sun enters Libra
Happy Equinox! Today’s astrology brings Spring to the Southern Hemisphere and Fall to the Northern. With this change of light we get a new perspective. Libra is the sign of balance and harmony, but its not achievable if we aren’t willing to work through discord and strife. The sun will go through the same challenges that all planets in Libra must. There are a few limits and boundaries that might feel like a weight, until you muster up the strength to lift them.
September 24
Mercury in Libra sextile Jupiter in Sagittarius, both at 17°
Today’s astrology is a moment of levity in an otherwise heavy week. Take advantage of the bright ideas and bold conversations that come your way. In them you’ll find the keys to working through a few current difficulties.
September 25
Venus in Libra square Saturn in Capricorn, both at 13°
Today’s astrology feels like it lacks in loving kindness and over-emphasizes strict rules and guidelines. There may not be a ton of pleasure here, but any responsibilities tended to will most likely lead to some in the long-run. Boundaries in partnerships become a big deal. Knowing which to be firm on and which were erected out of fear makes all the difference.
September 26
Mercury in Libra square Pluto Rx in Capricorn, both at 20°
Deep and cathartic conversations may not lead to peace talks but they will get to the truth. There’s no getting around astrology like this. We can choose to work through it or hide from it, but if we do the latter we just have to deal with it in another form, in another time.
Aries & Aries Rising
September’s full Moon lights up your hidden life. What comes to consciousness now, needs to. Healing has its own time. Deeper truths only arise if and when we’re ready. The Harvest Moon primes you for such insights.
The efforts that you’ve made to have a better understanding of what’s pained you have added up. Hopefully this has created some space in you for a little more self-acceptance, a little less fear, and a lot more forgiveness for the mistakes you make as you try, learn, and be human. Let the cleansing nature of this moment leave you with lighter emotional baggage than before.
Open floodgates and prepare flotation devices.
This moment also lifts up the projects that you are working on behind the scenes. As they come to an important stage of their growth, consider how best to serve them. Be mindful of what they lack and be willing to work at correcting it.
As the Harvest Moon fades, so too does Virgo Season. Its close makes a point to inspire you to get your professional life that much more precisely put together. Taking a few key actions is critical at this point as you have a storehouse of power at your disposal. The impact you make at work is long-lasting and should be done with confidence, swagger, and skill.
As Saturn stations direct, it gives you a report card on the structures, boundaries, and responsibilities that you have taken on in your career. Over the past 5 months, this strict seductress has made it abundantly clear that nothing much can be accomplished in your professional sphere without your commitment to the process. This has not been an immediate gratification type of situation but what Saturn has offered you is the opportunity to fully investigate and reflect on what, and who, you answer to. Or should refuse to.
There is a place for all of us on this planet. It was made big enough, wide enough, and grand enough to hold all of our complexity. But more than that, it is dependent upon it. It is the diversity that we bring that makes this place whole. Generative. Gorgeous.
The Harvest Moon pulls focus on how you feel about your wide array of friends, networks, and associations. It comments on the importance of all the many connections you’ve compiled. It asks you to remember the dreams that originally drew you to them, acknowledges the power of your shared ideals, and comments on the reality of all you’ve manifest with them.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in your work with others, you just need to use it towards a collective vision for the dreamiest future possible.
As the full moon fades and Virgo Season comes to a close, the power of your creativity makes itself known. What you create is constantly shaping you; choose your projects with the shape of what you are growing yourself into in mind.
The Equinox brings with it a departure in tone. Libra Season sees you hard at work and challenged in ways that demand the best from you. These little pitfalls and obstacles give you important pieces of your professional puzzle. Don’t fear the conflict and don’t mistake a little struggle for a small scene in a grand tale of triumph.
The soul of your work is where the Harvest Moon wants you to place your attention. The world will tell you to sell out, but right now the only thing that will satisfy you is making an effort to bring your professional dreams into reality.
Without them there is only a shell of a role you play instead of the galaxy of possibility that could be.
The full moon pulls focus on the efforts that you’ve put into your career and offers you some reflections on the ways in which you take up space in the world. Whatever your professional experiences have taught you over the past 5 months, this moment brings the lessons together. This synthesizing can help you feel much appreciation for the intersection of your efforts and the opportunities you’ve been able to run with.
As Virgo Season comes to a close it reminds you how important it is to be determined in your efforts to create a solid and sturdy foundation for yourself. Winning in this area of your life is more about tenderness than triumph. In order to access the softer areas of self, being uncompromising about your power and when to wield it is essential.
Saturn’s station direct reminds you that without places to sort out and transform what is too hard to handle on our own, you end up weighed down unnecessarily. The healing structures you’ve been able to commit to over the past year and a half are revealing themselves for the sound skeletal system they are. When we refuse to do our inner work, partnerships become a funhouse, messing with our ability to experience intimacy. Keep building these places of respite, restoration, and reflection. Your relationships, and all the bounty they want to bring you, depend on it.
There may be no greater tragedy in life than a missed opportunity to appreciate how far you’ve come, how incredible your journey, and how awe-inspiring the process of your life is. The Harvest Moon comments on the dreams that you have realized for yourself – no matter what still feels like a mess. Whatever you do during this Moon, take a moment to reflect on the amount of energy, dedication, and luck it took to get you to this stage of your evolution.
As Saturn stations direct, the dynamics of your committed partnerships become clearer than they’ve been in a while. What you’ve learned about your boundaries and expectations of others will serve you well going forward. Knowing the difference between past dynamics and present ones saves so much time, energy, and hurt feelings. This learning process is far from over for you – it’s lifelong – but the insight you have gained provides you with a much more conscious understanding of the issues that arise repeatedly for you. Don’t take on what others refuse to work on for themselves.
The last week of the month see you working on the foundations of your life. Libra Season sees you turn a couple of tight corners. Finding your way around each one teaches you just how much healing you’ve done – and that each layer you peel back helps you plant your life more firmly in the soil.
The full moon reminds you of the importance of composting. A process wherein nothing is wasted. A process that nature is relentlessly engaged in. A process from which abundance is an outcome.
If we want to grow, we have to make peace with letting go.
No experience, no mistake, no sorrow, and no slight is left unincorporated – all of it, no matter how challenging, is utilized by the organism that is your life.
It’s easy to forget our power when in the middle of molting. This current shedding is temporary, sensitizing, and important for the long-term. Your collaborations might be places for this high-speed growth. They also help you to make dreams a reality, reminding you that the process of doing so is far from perfect but so right for the present moment.
Saturn’s station direct comments on what the last couple of months have taught you professionally. Teaming up with the end of Virgo Season, Saturn’s station direct connects you to your desire to win financially. You’re being asked to strategize with the resources you have at your disposal. It’s not about being perfect, but it is about the moment being exceptionally suited to your specific talents if you choose to stick to your commitments and work through the fears that inevitably arise.
As the Harvest moon blooms, it pulls focus on your commitments to others. What you’ve been able to build together, through dreaming and doing, is celebrated under these skies. What you’ve recently come through within your most important relationships leaves a long-lasting impact on you, and them.
This is a moment of exceptional sensitivity and the power of it is a gateway to radical change if you need it. Be gentle with your tender heart, even when you think it’s being dramatic (it may just be trying to get your attention). Your ability to be vulnerable with yourself is a skill that serves you incredibly well in this moment. It can be a challenging one to master, or even to practice, but doing so brings you insights that can’t be underestimated.
As the full moon fades, the last week and a half of Virgo Season reminds you of the balance between being thoroughly prepared and taking deep leaps of faith. When you commit to the practices that never let you down and you show up for the responsibilities that develop your talents, business has a way of taking care of itself. Worrying is a human reaction to life but redirecting your energy towards doing what you can in the moment leaves much less time for it. Apply the same philosophy if any financial or professional issues arise come the last week of September and as we shift into Libra Season.
A little disharmony is key to living a balanced life. There are solutions in the conflict, new sounds to discover in the discord, and there are ways in which you strengthen your core when teetering off balance. While the Harvest Moon pulls focus on your work routines, relationships and projects, you are asked to do the impossible task of balancing all of that against what you need personally. There are still a million details to tend to behind the scenes but look for opportunities to take micro naps, mini meditations, and make sure to stop by every refueling station you can.
As the Equinox initiates you into Libra Season, you might feel a little more under pressure – and for good reason. You’re being asked to run a much tighter ship, take the shape of things more seriously, and consider all the ways in which it’s time to step up your game. Even the smallest of adjustments can help you make major improvements. Be honest with yourself about what you need to eliminate, either temporarily or long-term, in order to accomplish what you’ve set out to. In order to help you feel more supported in the world, some things at home may be ready for an upgrade. Give yourself what you need, especially when you catch yourself thinking that it’s ridiculous of you to need it.
The Harvest Moon gives you ample opportunity to witness how your creative dreams have recently come into form. It is a reminder to appreciate the immense power of your imagination and to always give it a place of prominence in your work and process. The visions that appear to you in relentless ways want to be brought into the world through you. Oblige them.
This full moon is a reminder that you don’t have to know exactly how your dreams will manifest in order to engage with them. They just have to know that you are willing to go through the process of realizing them and they’ll show you where to go and what to do once you do.
Because your creative process is so tied to the people you wish to serve with it, there is a direct call and response that you can tune into now.
Listen.
This isn’t to say that you need to shape things to other’s likes and dislikes, but the feedback you receive will more than likely inspire you to trust in the power of your creativity. Your community, your audience, and your networks let you know the impact and impression your work has made (and is making) on them. Let any creative triumph you have in this moment become an affirmation that you can use for future projects.
There’s an excellent pocket of time from the end of September to the beginning of December wherein work opportunities can help your bank account become especially abundant. Remember to go for the kind of work that has unusually good returns on the investment of your time and talent, both in material and soulful ways.
If history is written by the winners, it’s your job to triumph by revealing the truth of your roots. The Harvest Moon celebrates your ability to be honest about your past, willing to forgive yourself for what you didn’t know, and ready to keep working on connecting to your core, sourcing power from yourself instead of any position you hold or wish you held in the world.
You were brought here for a reason, born with a purpose, and made with care by the creative force that saw fit to mold you as you are. The full moon wants you to know this with no doubt, no shame, and no hesitation. Healing your relationship with your former life and former selves is hard work. Rest when you need. Go home early. Get into bed when it’s still light out. Make no excuses for your needs. You have a lot to accomplish out in the world, but your home-base is what will hold you through it.
As Virgo Season comes to a close, it does so by granting you incredible drive to make an impact on your professional life – a totally different tone than the full moon created. This push and pull may be confusing and most likely points to the importance of having both aspects of life in as much balance as possible.
Get specific about what you can and can’t do.
The more precision you bring to your professional life, the more impressed others will be, and the more consciously you can direct your energy towards realizing your intentions. Success takes both focus and the ability to understand what to cut out, what to move towards with confidence, and what support your system calls for. You’re going to have to figure out how to hold all the abundance coming your way in the near future. The end of September will also bring interpersonal dynamics to contend with in friend groups and your networks. Be fair when political dynamics need a voice of reason, but be firm when unnecessary drama tries to take over.
The full moon pulls focus on your communications. What you have to say, get across, or put in writing is amplified by this lunation. Make sure that your content has clarity. This full moon will have a tendency to blur the points that you are making, but it can also tend to uncover what has been unclear, muddy, or a little chaotic. If your days feel like they are bursting at the seams, make sure to get some perspective. Remember that what you want in the long-term needs you to fight for it in the short-term.
Trying to avoid conflict is a sure-fire way to create some.
These lessons start to seep into your professional life mere moments after the full moon. Whether it’s you or those that you work with that have a problem being straightforward, the issues are unrelenting come the last half of September and the first part of October. This is a small segment of time, but it’s one that can help shape the trajectory of your career. Make sure to take the high-road in hopes of developing ever more integrity on the job and within yourself.
As your planet, Saturn, stations direct you are reminded that having authority over your life is your birthright, but one that you have to remind yourself of. Fear has a funny way of making us forget this and we have to be willing to deconstruct the myths it spins around our lives. Untangle yourself from stories where you are a passive participant in your own journey.
The Harvest Moon shines its light on your resources and the ways in which you use them to make your dreams come true. Investing in your visions is imperative now. It takes more than money; it takes time, energy, love, and a relentless belief in your ability to figure out the next step to success.
Not taking the risk means never reaping the reward.
The full moon in Pisces brings up deep feelings about your worth, your work, and what you are meant to do with the abundance in your life. There’s no need to over-think your gifts. Your job is to trust them, give the excess you have access to away, and use whatever it is that you have to help others tap into their own wells of plenty. The more you do, the more becomes available for you to work with. Whatever you want in your life wants you to be more of a source for it. It’s a simple recipe for success, but not always easy to perform in practice.
As Saturn stations direct you get clearer on the ways in which you’ve been able to create solid structures for your healing. It’s a process that is never done, nor perfected, but one that you get better at relating to over time. Take note of how the past 5 months have taught you to carve out time for yourself, time for your healing, and time for your projects to take shape. Your creative incubators are holy temples. As you worship at their altar with your commitment and devotion, you’ll gain greater clarity and clearer communication about what your projects need and how to give it to them.
Your ability to tune into the needs of others is at an all-time high during September’s Harvest Moon. Your compassion pours forth. Your kindness is lifted up for all to see.
But this moment also illuminates your need for the same sweetness.
Life is not one-sided; your relationships need not be either. Abundance comes when you know who to share your life with. Satisfaction comes when you strive to share it with integrity. Joy comes when you refuse to compromise being honest for being liked. Virgo season has taught you these lessons by making you reflect on your interpersonal dynamics.
As the light of the full moon shines down on you, celebrate the successes you’ve had and the strides you’ve made to relieve yourself of the shame that would’ve made you shrink in the past. Take up the space that is yours to fill out and shine within.
The world is ready for your work and in order to bring it to us you must refuse to play it small. Fear isn’t always a liar, but when it is, it is the worst kind. These last few months of 2019 want to help you exceed your own expectations. What’s possible when you make a real effort to leave a mark on the world is waiting for you to discover it.
Meditate on the impact that you want to make on your profession, your community, and all those you care for, then bring that vision with you to work each and every day.
Ace, 2019. 448 pages.
Starred Review
Review written 9/13/19, from my own copy, preordered from Amazon.com
I love Juliet Marillier’s novels so much! I was delighted when my preorder came in for this one. (A little less delighted when I discovered I’d preordered it twice.) I was even more delighted when I discovered the main characters were the children of Blackthorn and Grim – the main characters of her most recent trilogy, which began with Dreamer’s Pool. There’s a caption on the front: A Warrior Bards Novel, so I fondly hope it’s the start of another trilogy.
As the book begins, Liobhan (There’s a character list with pronunciation guide at the front – she’s LEE-vahn.) and her brother Brocc are training on Swan Island to be warriors. (If the reader has read the Sevenwaters books, they will know about Swan Island – though I didn’t remember any particular characters who were there.) Only a few of the trainees get selected to stay on the island as elite warriors and spies – and Liobhan wants nothing more, as does Dau, who has become her rival.
But then Liobhan and Brocc get selected for a special mission. In a nearby kingdom an important ritual object has gone missing, the Harp of Kings. It is needed if the royal heir, who has just come of age, is to be crowned at midsummer. However, the regent doesn’t want anyone to know it’s missing, which could cause unrest. Liobhan and Brocc are skilled musicians, so they will go to the kingdom as traveling minstrels with a leader from Swan Island, and seek to recover the harp.
Readers of Juliet Marillier’s other novels will not be at all surprised when druids are consulted and the Folk of the Otherworld get involved. There’s a wise woman who lives on the hillside outside the town who is very like Mistress Blackthorn.
The plot is interesting and otherworldly, but what makes these books so wonderful is the way the author pulls you into this ancient world and you believe that magic can happen.
Here’s a short section from Brocc’s perspective after they’ve gone on their mission:
We play for the household on our first night at court. With time so short, Archu thinks it best that we make our presence known straightaway, and what better opportunity than this? Everyone is gathered, from Prince Rodan and the regent down to serving folk, grooms, and a group of children under less than strict supervision. We choose pieces that are tried and trusty, those most popular with our audiences back home. While we sing and play I try to observe, as we’ve been taught, but it’s hard; my mind loses itself in the music. At a certain point, someone in the crowd asks for dancing, and folk move the tables and benches back to make space. So we give them a couple of reels, and then “Artagnan’s Leap,” which allows Liobhan to show off her talents on the whistle. The children love the jig; they try to clap in time, even though it gets quicker and quicker, and they perform their own version of the dance to the accompaniment of much giggling. Except for one, who sits very still, apart from the others, watching us with such concentration that it’s a little unnerving. When I smile in her direction, she turns her gaze away as if caught out in a misdemeanor.
This book does stand alone and come to a satisfying finish – but I still hope that more books will come soon. I want to read more about these people and this world.
Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.
Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
david.li/paint is a spectacularly gloopy painting app online. You can set paint fluidity, bristle count and brush size, and of course pick any color you like. What I like about it (as opposed to pro apps like Corel Painter or Artrage that offer similar natural media simulations) is that it's just a loaded messy brush that doesn't make it easy or clean itself up for you. The limitations force you to work with it! Author David Li published the source code.
augmented-ui is a stylesheet (a javascript library is in beta testing) that lets you apply cyberpunk styles to your web designs. Just include it in your HTML and tweak your CSS classes and ids, and you're off to the cyber-races.
High Tech, Low Effort
augmented-ui is just CSS.
Futuristic, cyberpunk-inspired UI shaping for any element
Add the "augmented-ui" attribute to equip the augs, and a few CSS settings for each one to make it feel just right
Namespaced to avoid crossing wires.
All custom properties begin with "--aug-"
Selectors only use the "augmented-ui" attribute
Automatic fallbacks and feature detection.
Full support with v1.1.0+ has a global user reach of ~91%!
Great automatic fallback for older browsers (+ ~3.5% global reach). More details below!
Yarn does one thing very well: return a brief video clip of a movie based on the dialog you type in.
I especially like that if you paste in a URL, you get an automatic subtitled GIF that links to the video instead of the full embed. A real USDA grade A GIF image, not a bottom-quality mpeg hacked into its mime type or some other shenanigan that makes it effectively impossible to repost.
Officials with the Clark County School District and the teachers union have tentatively agreed on the terms of a contract for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, averting a threatened strike on Sept. 10.
Superintendent Jesus Jara and top officials of the Clark County Education Association announced the deal at a 5 p.m. news conference at the district’s offices on Sahara Avenue that also was attended by Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak.
“The effort, collectively … to get this deal done was critical for our 320,000 children,” Jara said.
The agreement includes a 3 percent salary raise; a step increase in the salary table in each year of the contract; a 4 percent increase in CCSD’s health care contribution in both years; as well as a column advancement for every employee who has completed their professional development requirements needed to advance one column on the salary table.
The contract also includes a provision to discuss a new Professional Growth System model in the future.
The professional development raises proved to be the most contentious point as contract talks turned heated last week, leading to threats of a strike. The district had previously offered a one-time payment for professional development raises, which the union declined.
This is very good. Teachers to keep demanding more for themselves, which means more for their students when it means they aren’t working second jobs to make ends meet or taking money out of their meager salaries to buy school supplies for students.
The three candidates are bunched together, each receiving about the same amount of support (Sanders 20%, Warren 20% and Biden 19%) from registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters. They’re followed by California Sen. Kamala Harris (8%), New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (4%), South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (4%), businessman Andrew Yang (3%), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro (2%), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (2%) and author Marianne Williamson (2%). All other candidates received 1% or less in the poll.
Since Monmouth’s June poll, Sanders and Warren have gained slightly (up 6 and 5 percentage points), while Biden has lost significant support (down 13 points).
This suggests that Biden’s “big lead” in the race may be quite soft if not completely illusory.
OTOH that’s what I’d like to believe so take it FWIW.
According to a Monday report by the Los Angeles Times, 2020 candidate Joe Biden had to reassure his supporters about the state of his mind on Friday after he struggled to remember where on the Dartmouth College campus he’d given a stump speech several hours before.
“I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” the former vice president said during a campaign event in New Hampshire. “I’m not sure whether it was the medical school or where the hell I spoke. But it was on the campus.”
That was the same day Biden publicly speculated on what would’ve happened if former President Barack Obama had been assassinated after he was elected.
Other recent Biden blunders include the candidate confusing New Hampshire for Vermont, telling debate viewers to “go to Joe 30330,” and saying that “poor kids” are just as talented as “white kids.”
It’s gotten to the point where Biden’s own advisers are reportedly getting nervous about his growing pile of gaffes on the campaign trail.
Behold the "One HTML Page Challenge" -- to build a one-page site using just the code in a single html file: "Practice your skills with no assistance from libraries, no separation of files, and no assistance of a modern framework."
I dig the constraints here -- all code in one file, no outside code libraries -- because it really honors "view source" culture.
When I was interviewing developers for my latest book Coders, all the ones who grew up during the late 90s and early 00s web talked about how powerful view-source was in teaching themselves to code and make stuff online.
But web development these days has grown byzantine in its complexity; if newbie is trying to learn, view-source is liable to just cough up a slurry of incomprehensible, minified javascript. It closes off the easy onramps that existed back in the earlier days of the web.
So, projects like this one-page challenge are awesome, because the whole goal is to encourage the writing of web-site code that's more legible and tractable. If you view-source any of the entries, some might be a little complex for newbies, but if you spend enough time walking it through, you can figure out what's going on. Sites like Glitch or CodePen are other terrific examples of rebooted view-source culture too. We need as many resources like this we can get!
Come join up and submit a character here! (or just copy paste this: https://discord.gg/c6HDwBh)
This is an Original Character tournament. For those unfamiliar with the format, what that means is you create a character, then face off against another artist in a 1 on 1 match, drawing a comic that features both of your characters. One of you will move on to the next round, decided by a judge (me).
The setting is the Ring of Power in the Kill Six Billion Demons universe. Other than that, you can submit your own original character and see how you do! The first round will start in about two weeks and submissions are completely open up until we get 64 participants. We’ll be running the tournament via discord and voting on rounds will be public (though final decision will go up to me). If you’ve never tried an OCT before, it’s an excellent way to practice your comic making skills, and where I got my start in comics in the first place. It’s open to absolutely anyone, the only requirement being each round you must draw a two page comic featuring both your character and your opponent’s character (you can do it all in pencil if need be) and turn it in on time. Rounds will be two weeks.
I’ve recently been in Germany which, to a greater extent than many other countries (such as my own), is a functioning and prosperous liberal democracy. It wasn’t always thus, as every participant in internet debate know very well. By the end of the Second World War, Germany had suffered the destruction of its cities and infrastructure, the loss of a large amount of its territory, and the death or maiming of a good part of its population and particularly of the young and active ones. Yet, though not without some external assistance, it was able to recover and outstrip its former adversaries within a very few decades.
Thinking about this made me reflect a little on whether people, in the sense of talented individuals, matter all that much. That they do is presupposed by the recruitment policies of firms and other institutions and by immigration policies that aim to recruit the “best and brightest”. Societies are lectured on how important it is not to miss out in the competition for “global talent”. Yet the experience of societies that have experienced great losses through war and other catastrophes suggests that provided the institutions and structures are right, when the “talented” are lost they will be quickly replaced by others who step into their shoes and do a much better job that might have previously been expected of those individuals.
I imagine some empirical and comparative work has been done by someone on all this, but it seems to me that getting the right people is much less important that having the institutions that will get the best out of whatever people happen to be around. I suppose a caveat is necessary: some jobs need people with particular training (doctoring or nursing, for example) and if we shoot all the doctors there won’t yet be people ready to take up the opportunities created by their vacancy. But given time, the talent of particular individuals may not be all that important to how well societies or companies do. Perhaps we don’t need to pay so much, then, to retain or attract the “talented”: there’s always someone else.
Illustrating abstract articles is a pain in the ass, and in the age of social media, a post without an illustration is likely to disappear without attaining any kind of readership, which leaves those of us who cover the field endlessly remixing HAL9000 eyes using walls of code, Matrix text-waterfalls, or variations on hacker-in-a-hoodie.
Eli Sugarman from the Hewlettt Foundation has partnered with design giants Ideo to launch the cybersecurity visuals challenge, designed to create a visual vocabulary for infosec that conveys "the huge stakes for governments, industry and ordinary people alike inherent in topics like encryption, surveillance and cyber conflict."
It's a design competition, with the final output to be released under open licenses to enable "nonprofits, media outlets and anyone else in need of cyber imagery... to draw on a visual language that better reflects the reality of cybersecurity—in all of its salience and complexity—and what it means for individuals, corporations and governments around the world."
25 runners up will win cash of $500, up to five grand prizes of $7K will be awarded to the finalists. Everyone gets "access to resources and community support," and the runners-up and finalists get "mentorship from a cybersecurity expert."
The fifth and final design principle identified in the report is the need to make the invisible visible. The core challenge of depicting cybersecurity visually, of course, is that so much of it is not tangible. How should a visual creator depict a signal speeding along a fiber optic cable? What does a data breach actually look like? And where do people come into the picture? Each of these is a challenge in need of solving, and visual creators will have their work cut out for them.
This last design principle hints at one approach that may bear fruit: developing visual metaphors for complex concepts, as in the famous depiction of Freud’s concept of mind as an iceberg with the conscious mind floating atop the submerged ego, superego and id. The viewer is immediately aware of the relation of each of these parts to the others and the whole, and the relative importance of each in Freud’s overall framework.
On my public Facebook page for this trip, a commenter posted this article, suggesting folks wanting to help should not go to the border. But that depends for what. The article makes some good points: a) the goal of any trip should be to amplify what locals are doing, not get in their way or ask to be hosted; and b) there is much we can do from our own local communities. I’ve also learned that offering to volunteer down here is only helpful if you have experience and skills – like Spanish fluency or legal training.
That said, my interviews with local activists and on-the-ground experience suggest there is one way outsiders can absolutely be of use by going down: we can show up to bear witness. Warm bodies are needed for protests. The more protesters, the more media coverage. My week in El Paso told me that protest has been more limited in this region than in other places because locals are conflicted about the issue, and those engaged are so overstretched doing practical service and relief efforts. Outsiders flying in specifically to join protest events can make a huge impact without getting in the way.
That’s what we’re seeing this weekend. Thirty protesters showed up at the Clint detention facility east of El Paso last night – a prelude of the Moral Monday at the Borderlands event tomorrow in El Paso. This will be a major protest coordinated by faith leaders and local groups including the Border Network for Human Rights. It will kick off tonight with a sermon by Reverend William Barber at the First Christian Church at 901 Arizona Avenue. If you are in contact with folks in the region, you can help by amplifying this event and encouraging them to go. There are non-violence training at 8am on Monday before the protest. It is boiling hot in El Paso so people need to bring lots of water and sunscreen!
If you are interested in attending a future protest, or simply coordinating a group of friends who go at a time convenient ot you, a good person to be in touch with is Heidi Li Feldman, who has formed a nation-wide community, #CitizenPresence, formed around precisely this ethic. A Georgetown law professor, Heidi fundraises, coordinates, and cultivates local connections on the ground and a community of resisters around the nation through Slack.com. To join, DM her on Twitter.
Heidi’s goal (which seems consistent with what locals have told me would be helpful) is to keep a steady stream of Americans at these sites even in small numbers to bear witness – freeing up locals to do the important work of practical refugee support.
Word of the atrocious conditions at the US Customs and Border facility in Clint, Texas broke on June 21, 2019. Thousands, maybe millions, of Americans wanted to act: to bear witness, to rally, to protest. I believe the best response is steady stream of American citizens heading to Clint, TX to produce a constant, visible presence at a known epicenter of the overall moral disaster resulting from U.S. government policies and actions related to immigration.
Connecting with this group or donating money to support travelers who go down to bear witness is one additional way you can get involved, even if you can’t travel yourself. And research by Christian Davenport and Priyamvada Trivedi shows that when people attend protest, especially if they have to travel far and thus have “skin in the game,” they’re more likely to stay active and do more. Support these initiatives if you can, and help build this movement to resist these camps.
For updates from this weekend’s protest activities, follow me or Heidi on Twitter.
Here we go. 50,000+ words in my demented attempt to figure out how Jake English might stop sucking. The Pumpkin Path at last takes root. If you read it, pls lemme know what you think–I’m real excited to share it :)
Pls doff your hats furiously to @sam-keeper for enabling this damn thing to get posted at all cause I was never ever gonna finish formatting it by hand LMAO. I wanna see some real fires started, tia
Adventuron is an online text-adventure creation system. Like Pico-8, it uses the conventions and limitations of the 8-bit era to simplify code and suggest a distinctive aesthetic. Like Twine, it makes it easier to get creative with interactive fiction and to publish your work.
Creator Chris Ainsley describes its objectives and offers a basic tutorial:
Adventuron is a browser-based Text Adventure authoring system and game engine. Adventuron requires no installation and it executes via the web without any fuss. ...
Adventuron is unashamedly anachronistic. Old-school text adventures used to feature a number of locations, paths between locations, objects in the gameworld, puzzles to be solved using textual inputs, and usually using items in your possession.
A cliche example of a puzzle is, when faced with a locked door, you must have a key in your possession to unlock the door, and until the door is unlocked, you can’t enter a room, that has a another object to be used elsewhere. There can be dozens of overlapping puzzles.
Adventuron introduces light programming concepts such as variables, conditional statements and instructions. Adventuron should be quite useful as a first programming language once a few tutorials are created.
The Nixon reelection campaign was in the news last week because of this article this article by Never Trump Republican Charlie Sykes. He offers a warning to Democrats that in 1971 Democrats thought they had Nixon on the ropes only to see George McGovern lose to him in a devastating electoral landslide in 1972. As it happens, the history is off. Nixon was doing reasonably well in 1971 and was actually pretty popular in 1972. But the story of the Nixon presidency has notable parallels and contrasts to today that are worth revisiting.
In 1971 Pat Buchanan, then a young aide and speechwriter for Nixon, wrote a memo for Nixon and his top advisors in which he argued that Nixon should “cut the Democratic Party and the country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
The story of the next couple decades of American politics and certainly of the early 1970s is that Buchanan was right. Nixon’s strategy was about polarizing the country, heightening the contradictions and inflaming divisions – around the war, around race, crime and the drug culture. Nixon’s half was bigger. Watergate upended that, but only briefly. Democrats had a massive wave in 1974 and the stain of Watergate allowed Jimmy Carter to eke out a narrow victory against the never-elected Jerry Ford. But post-Nixon Republicans came back with modest but key pick ups in the 1978 midterm and Ronald Reagan was elected along with a GOP Senate in 1980, in an election which defined American politics until the first years of this century.
The logic of the Trump presidency is also to continually divide the country, to maximize polarization. The difference is that Trump’s half is clearly the smaller half. This isn’t wishful thinking. It was true even in his improbable 2016 victory and even more so in the 2018 midterm. Looked at from a different, more demographic perspective, if you look at George McGovern’s losing coalition in 1972 – educated white voters and white professionals, young voters and minority voters – it’s fairly similar to the Obama coalition of 2008/12 and Democrats in 2018. It’s just that those groups are much larger in 2018 than they were in 1972. The key is that in our current political moment – especially in the Senate, but also in the electoral college and the House – the smaller half can monopolize political power.
People speculate about Trump somehow playing 12 dimensional chess, sending up a new flare to distract attention from this or that bad story, rushing ahead with self-destructive gambits which somehow must actually amount to counterintuitive genius moves. I doubt any of this is really true. The whole logic of Trumpism is to light the Trumpian base on fire and keep it boiling while doing everything possible to demoralize, exhaust and gaslight the opposition, psych everyone out, whip up spoiler third party candidacies and more.
The reality, though, is that the anti-Trump part is bigger and significantly so. The real question of the 2020 election is whether – either by their own internal haggling or because of Trump’s demoralization and search for third party spoilers – that anti-Trump part sticks together and maintains its focus. We’ve already seen how Trump can claim victory with a minority of support. There are good reasons to think the margin of popular vote defeat he can weather while winning the electoral college is even greater than it was in 2016 (because of activation of new voters in already blue states). But in this sense, the outcome is really in Democrats’ hands. They have the bigger part of a divided America, enough to overcome the locked in advantages of a Republican candidate, if they hold together.
Narnia Recap: Digory prevented Polly from leaving so he could ring a bell. Now there's a very tall woman dragging them around the castle which is rapidly falling apart around them.
I'm sorry it's been such a long time since the last Narnia; life has been difficult over here and I'm so grateful for your continued patience with me. You are all the best. As you may recall, we last left off with the castle crumbling around the children while Jadis unhurriedly hauls them out whilst playing tour guide.
They came at last into a hall larger and loftier than any they had yet seen. From its size and from the great doors at the far end, Digory thought that now at last they must be coming to the main entrance. In this he was quite right. The doors were dead black, either ebony or some black metal which is not found in our world. They were fastened with great bars, most of them too high to reach and all too heavy to lift. He wondered how they would get out.
This feels faintly strange to me but it's hard to explain why. Up until now, the castle has continuously been described as derelict and decaying. We've also seen mention of the sky, and I had thought that meant there were areas where the children were actually out in open air--either because the castle had open courtyards or because some of the roof (or roofs, if the castle is made up of multiple structures) had caved in. If they're escaping the derelict castle as it collapses into rubble, why do they need to use the barred front doors? Shouldn't there be a breach in the walls somewhere, or an open courtyard where they can be safe?
There's a sense here that either Lewis had a clear idea of the castle which he failed to communicate onto the page, or he didn't have a clear idea of the castle at all and instead this new barrier has been erected in order to serve a literary purpose rather than to fit the setting thus far. The latter would appear to be the case, because we're about to see Jadis do her bad no-good magic.
The Queen let go of his hand and raised her arm. She drew herself up to her full height and stood rigid. Then she said something which they couldn’t understand (but it sounded horrid) and made an action as if she were throwing something toward the doors. And those high and heavy doors trembled for a second as if they were made of silk and then crumbled away till there was nothing left of them but a heap of dust on the threshold. “Whew!” whistled Digory. “Has your master magician, your uncle, power like mine?” asked the Queen, firmly seizing Digory’s hand again. “But I shall know later. In the meantime, remember what you have seen. This is what happens to things, and to people, who stand in my way.”
I'm not on Jadis' side here; "I turn to dust all who stand in my way" seems like a generally bad philosophy. Let the record show my brave refusal to endorse wholesale slaughter of all opposition.
But... I can't help thinking that Lewis would be 100% on board with this philosophy if it were coming from, for instance, Aslan or the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea. I'm imagining all the times we've seen enemies laid low with magic or brute force, like the time Aslan swallowed up the witch, or the time the woods themselves bestirred to rout the Telmarines, or the time Caspian and his men beat an elderly gate-keeper for not letting them inside with sufficient speed or humility, or the time a magician turned people into unnatural abominations, or the time Aslan transformed a Calormene prince into a donkey.
"This is what happens to things, and to people, who stand in my way" seems like a pretty good summation of how the Good Guys in this series act. And we haven't even gotten to The Last Battle yet! So it's hard to see this as a rejection of "might makes right" as a philosophy and instead seems to be setting Jadis up for her role as an authority which isn't so much evil (to be contrasted with the actions of those who are good) but rather illegitimate. It's okay, in other words, for opponents to be blasted into dust if the person doing the blasting has the authority to do so.
Aslan, yes. Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea, sure. Peter or Caspian or Rilian, usually. Jadis? No. Much more light than they had yet seen in that country was pouring in through the now empty doorway, and when the Queen led them out through it they were not surprised to find themselves in the open air. The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them. Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of gray dust.
This is a pretty paragraph, even if it feels like the good bits were lifted out of H.G. Wells' Time Machine and dusted off. I do have some questions about the city having pyramids, which aren't exactly some kind of mandatory stop on the "civilization tech tree" like we're playing Civ 5 all of the sudden. But I have even more questions about the temples, and who they were built to honor. Does an Aslan/Jesus analogue exist in this 'verse?
If yes, why wouldn't Jadis recognize him by whatever name he was known on Charn, when she runs into him later on Narnia? It seems like that would only strengthen Lewis' claim of Aslan being THE Jesus for all worlds and not just for Narnia. Even if Jadis wasn't a follower of his on Charn, she should recognize him as her mortal enemy whose name gives her Bad Shivers (TM). That's the established world-building, after all, for how all this works.
I wonder if Lewis didn't think about how Jesus/Aslan appeared to the Charnians, or if he was afraid of confusing his audience.
“Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again,” said the Queen. “Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?” “No,” said Digory. He was going to explain that Uncle Andrew didn’t rule any cities, but the Queen went on: “It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.”
I hate that we don't have a sense of how old this world and its population is. The red sun suggests a timeline on the scale of billions, but this civilization feels like it's maybe a few thousand years old at the most and moreover only recently (in the relative scheme of these things) removed from whatever evolutionary stage brought about the local equivalent of homo sapiens.
Again: there's not one civilization technology tree that every planet has to follow, and I'm not demanding robots and flying cars, but when you've got wooden wheels ("creaking of wheels...chariots") for transportation and your population is composed of manual laborers ("slaves") who are themselves motivated by overseers flicking animal hide at them ("cracking of the whips"), then this feels pretty dang "early human development" for a world that's supposed to be far more ancient than earth.
Of course, I suppose Jadis could have wiped out all life on Charn billions of years ago when the sun was young and yellow and only now has anyone come to wake her, but I don't think we're meant to get that impression. Thematically, Charn is supposed to be our older sibling whose mistakes we must learn from, not a younger sibling cut off in its infancy before it even had a chance to learn right from wrong.
She paused and added, “All in one moment one woman blotted it out forever.” “Who?” said Digory in a faint voice; but he had already guessed the answer. “I” said the Queen. “I, Jadis, the last Queen, but the Queen of the World.” The two children stood silent, shivering in the cold wind. “It was my sister’s fault,” said the Queen. “She drove me to it. May the curse of all the Powers rest upon her forever! At any moment I was ready to make peace—yes and to spare her life too, if only she would yield me the throne. But she would not. Her pride has destroyed the whole world. Even after the war had begun, there was a solemn promise that neither side would use Magic. But when she broke her promise, what could I do? Fool! As if she did not know that I had more Magic than she! She even knew that I had the secret of the Deplorable Word. Did she think—she was always a weakling—that I would not use it?”
Again, I don't really know what to do with all this because, I mean. *waves at paragraph* This is a villain monologue. But it's a villain monologue that wouldn't be out of place in the throat of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. The next book in this series, after all, is about the total destruction of Narnia (and the Friends of Narnia) in order to bring everyone up to Heaven. Much like the problems with Left Behind and the Rapture, it's unclear to me how the Deplorable Word is worse than god ending the world and killing everyone so they can be in heaven now.
It's not that Jadis is good, in other words. She's not, and I make no claims to the contrary. But I'm struggling to see how she's any different from, or worse than, Aslan and his father. And I think that's why I'm struggling to analyze this chapter, and part of the reason why this deconstruction post has been so long in coming: this is all clearly very important in the sense of establishing character and backstory but because it's so very similar to the way Lewis' good guys operate, it's difficult to suss out what, exactly, Lewis expected us to take away in the sense of "why Jadis is bad".
Are we meant to think she's bad because "might makes right" is objectively bad, and we're just not supposed to notice that everyone else in Narnia operates that way to wild narrative applause? Or are we supposed to take away that Jadis is bad for some other reason, in which case...what? Because she's a woman? Because she's kinda sour and bitchy about the whole planet-killing thing, rather than shedding a single manly tear as she talks about how it was painful-yet-necessary? In other words, I know what crimes I feel Jadis has committed, but I'm not at all clear on whether Lewis is on the same page with me. It's hard to imagine he is or could be, unless he just had so profoundly a blind spot for "Turbo Jesus" that he didn't realize how similar his god is to his devil.
To summarize the summary: the problem with this chapter is that Jadis doesn't do anything fundamentally different from what Aslan and the Emperor do over this series. And it's one more reason why I will only deconstruct this series in published order (rather than "chronological"), because it is crucial to point out the juxtaposition of the upcoming book. The Last Battle will see Aslan and the Emperor hauling out their own version of the Deplorable Word in order to end Narnia when a rival rises to challenge them, and that seems relevant to any discussion of Jadis using the Deplorable Word in order to end Charn when a rival rises to challenge her.
Lewis' position seems to be that the Deplorable Word is fine as long as the "right" person is using it, and that's...a difficult position to defend. And he doesn't really defend that position so much as assert it as objectively and self-evidently true and then yell look over there a distraction at the reader.
“What was it?” said Digory. “That was the secret of secrets,” said the Queen Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought to overcome her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water—” “Beast!” muttered Polly.
I just. Again. This is what Lewis believes his own god will do in the end times. It is what happens in Narnia in the next book. Hell, "poured out the blood of my armies / people like water" is a pretty good summary of a lot of this entire series. Lewis is not anti-war when god is doing it! So Jadis' war-mongering is bad because... she's a woman? she's not a christian? she's not god? she's not doing it for a sufficiently good "cause"? Why, exactly, is Jadis wrong for going to war over her claim to the throne, but Caspian wasn't wrong to go to war over his claim to the throne? Why, precisely, is Jadis wrong for spilling blood over an ideological struggle in Charn, but Aslan isn't wrong to spill blood over an ideological struggle in Narnia? We need more than just asides from the peanut gallery!
This is supposed to be a book which sets forth THE theological roots of Narnia. This is Satan's origin story, this is his fall from grace, this is how he went from Lucifer the angel of light to Satan the deceiving serpent. Lewis wanted to sit down and set out the theological basis for why Satan is wrong and Jesus is right, and that requires a lot more than casual misogyny about Jadis' appearance coupled with sneers from Polly about Jadis' lack of remorse whilst relating her history.
“The last great battle,” said the Queen,
Oh my god, he even uses the same phrase for the fall of Charn as he does for the title of the book about the fall of Narnia. I hadn't noticed that, but he does. Lest anyone think I'm stretching by comparing Jadis:Charn :: Aslan:Narnia, here is textual evidence.
“The last great battle,” said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was halfway up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, ‘Victory.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘Victory, but not yours.’ Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”
I think this is supposed to read as cold and unfeeling, but honestly I'm left with the impression that Jadis showed surprising forbearance to wait until the last possible moment to play her trump card? Aslan isn't nearly so patient when he ends Narnia in the next book; you get the impression that he's been itching for a while to get the apocalypse started. (By the way, if ya'll haven't watched Good Omens on Amazon Prime, it is so good and so very gay and I love it so much. I didn't expect to like it but I loved it.)
“But the people?” gasped Digory. “What people, boy?” asked the Queen. “All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.” “Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?” “It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.
It is frustrating to find myself in the position of defending this, because I find it indefensible. Just to be clear! Wiping out every living thing on earth because you lost a war is not a defensible position. It is bad. But, again, this is what Aslan and the Emperor will do to Narnia in just a few short pages. It is what Lewis wants God to do on Earth: kill everyone and take them home to heaven so we can all get on with the afterlife.
"What else they for but to do [the king's / god's] will" is almost canonically Lewis' position towards commoners! It's why he's so unfussed about, for example, a ruler turning all his subjects into unnatural abominations. It's why he doesn't mind writing a god who mauls a young girl for breaking a rule she didn't know existed. It's why he doesn't even blink over letting his human Telmarine invaders kill off 90% of the native Narnian population. It's why he sees no ethical dilemma about Caspian ruling with an iron fist, up to and including barring people from trying to search for the lost prince. It's why he can't even imagine an objection to using swords and whips on small children for the crime of being priggish bullies. It's why he doesn't see a problem in turning a score of bored children into pigs. All these "common people" exist to be used by God and/or his kingly representative, and once they stop being useful they are fit for ridicule, harm, or death.
So it's... I disagree with Jadis' position. But the hypocrisy here--where we're supposed to ignore that she's no different from Lewis' kings and gods except by virtue of being a woman and not kowtowing to the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea--is hard to swallow. Hard enough that I'm choking.
“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”
Not to repeat myself, but. *waves at the entire canon of this series*
I do think that Lewis would disagree with one thing here and that's the point about "we must be freed from all rules". Lewis absolutely wants his rulers bound by rules. But I would point out that those binding "rules" are different from the rules the common people live by and (in the case of Aslan and the Emperor) self-imposed to be whatever they want them to be. On a practical level, I don't parse much difference between "I don't live by rules" versus "I live by my own set of rules that I make up for myself and which are not available for you to review, peruse, or argue."
Digory suddenly remembered that Uncle Andrew had used exactly the same words. But they sounded much grander when Queen Jadis said them; perhaps because Uncle Andrew was not seven feet tall and dazzlingly beautiful
Ah, yes, we all know about "female privilege" and how it lends so much weight to the words we say.
“And what did you do then?” said Digory. “I had already cast strong spells on the hall where the images of my ancestors sit. And the force of those spells was that I should sleep among them, like an image myself, and need neither food nor fire, though it were a thousand years, till one came and struck the bell and awoke me.” “Was it the Deplorable Word that made the sun like that?” asked Digory. “Like what?” said Jadis. “So big, so red, and so cold.” “It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?” “Yes, it’s smaller and yellower. And it gives a good deal more heat.” The Queen gave a long drawn “A—a—ah!” And Digory saw on her face that same hungry and greedy look which he had lately seen on Uncle Andrew’s. “So,” she said, “yours is a younger world.”
Ah, okay, that answers my question about how old Charn was when the Deplorable Word was spoken. So, yes, it was already an ancient world in comparison to our own Earth, but for reasons which I suppose we're not meant to dwell upon they were essentially stuck on Old Testament Egyptian level of technological and social advancement.
She paused for a moment to look once more at the deserted city—and if she was sorry for all the evil she had done there, she certainly didn’t show it—and then said: “Now, let us be going. It is cold here at the end of all the ages.” “Going where?” asked both the children. “Where?” repeated Jadis in surprise. “To your world, of course.” Polly and Digory looked at each other, aghast. Polly had disliked the Queen from the first; and even Digory, now that he had heard the story, felt that he had seen quite as much of her as he wanted. Certainly, she was not at all the sort of person one would like to take home. And if they did like, they didn’t know how they could. What they wanted was to get away themselves: but Polly couldn’t get at her ring and of course Digory couldn’t go without her. Digory got very red in the face and stammered.
I'm trying to remember if this revelation puzzled me as a child; it certainly doesn't now. There's no living thing on the planet--no flora or fauna--so it's not a surprise that Jadis would want to leave. Even if she's as introverted as I am, a girl needs food. This feels like one of those points where Lewis tries to make the reader feel smart by making the characters particularly thick--"of course she wants to go back with you, you ninnies," being presumably the intended reader reaction.
There's a dissonance, though, to their reaction. I can understand not wanting to take Jadis back to earth after the revelation that she can end all life on a planet with a single word! But the language here is so anodyne. They had "seen quite as much of her as he wanted" and "she was not the sort of person one would like to take home". There's no sense of Digory or Polly being afraid of her, the way one would be afraid of, say, Hannibal Lecter. (Who, it must be pointed out, has killed far fewer people than Jadis has.)
Instead this feels like more of Lewis' sneers over propriety. Jadis isn't a proper woman, she's got no class, she's foreign and not a good English lady. She isn't the sort of person one would take home in the way one wouldn't take home a feminist or a foreigner; family and neighbors would judge you. Lewis doesn't take Jadis seriously as a threat to life or limb, but rather as a threat to imperial homogeneity and local property values--and, thus, neither do Polly and Digory.
“Oh—oh—our world. I d-didn’t know you wanted to go there.” “What else were you sent here for if not to fetch me?” asked Jadis. “I’m sure you wouldn’t like our world at all,” said Digory. “It’s not her sort of place, is it, Polly? It’s very dull; not worth seeing, really.” “It will soon be worth seeing when I rule it,” answered the Queen. “Oh, but you can’t,” said Digory. “It’s not like that. They wouldn’t let you, you know.” The Queen gave a contemptuous smile. “Many great kings,” she said, “thought they could stand against the House of Charn. But they all fell, and their very names are forgotten. Foolish boy! Do you think that I, with my beauty and my Magic, will not have your whole world at my feet before a year has passed? Prepare your incantations and take me there at once.” “This is perfectly frightful,” said Digory to Polly.
I don't really know how many times I can point out that this is the Left Behind fantasy: that Jesus will come with a sword and make the whole world fall before his feet. The problem here, again, isn't that Lewis thinks global conquest is inherently bad! He just thinks global conquest by this particular person would be bad.
“Perhaps you fear for this Uncle of yours,” said Jadis. “But if he honors me duly, he shall keep his life and his throne. I am not coming to fight against him. He must be a very great Magician, if he has found how to send you here. Is he King of your whole world or only of part?” “He isn’t King of anywhere,” said Digory. “You are lying,” said the Queen. “Does not Magic always go with the royal blood? Who ever heard of common people being Magicians? I can see the truth whether you speak it or not. Your Uncle is the great King and the great Enchanter of your world. And by his art he has seen the shadow of my face, in some magic mirror or some enchanted pool; and for the love of my beauty he has made a potent spell which shook your world to its foundations and sent you across the vast gulf between world and world to ask my favor and to bring me to him. Answer me: is that not how it was?”
I mean, again, "who ever heard of common people being Magicians" is practically the tagline to this series? Everyone with magic in this series has so far come by it from their bloodline; they're either a magical race or a star or a god or something similar. Those few we've seen who may not have come by magic "naturally" by their bloodline were almost universally bad people who, by implication, were bad because they didn't know their place and chose to grasp for more than they'd been given. It is extremely difficult to parse a lot of what Jadis says when she is canonically correct.
The whole thing with her assuming that Uncle Andrew is in love with her and sent these children to plead his case is, of course, meant to make her seem vain and foolish--but I don't really think it works when she's really just being genre savvy for this series. I mean, we've seen magic mirrors and enchanted pools in spades. I've lost count of the number of magic mirrors and enchanted pools, actually. I don't really think you get to turn around and laugh at someone for being aware they exist.
“Well, not exactly,” said Digory. “Not exactly,” shouted Polly. “Why, it’s absolute bosh from beginning to end.” “Minions!” cried the Queen, turning in rage upon Polly and seizing her hair, at the very top of her head where it hurts most. But in so doing she let go of both the children’s hands. “Now,” shouted Digory; and “Quick!” shouted Polly. They plunged their left hands into their pockets. They did not even need to put the rings on. The moment they touched them, the whole of that dreary world vanished from their eyes. They were rushing upward and a warm green light was growing nearer overhead.
That's the end of the chapter. I'm sure everything will turn out fine.
I couldn't find a place to work it into the post, but as part of the research for this chapter I came across this C.S. Lewis quote on Milton and Paradise Lost and I am quite frankly dead from irony.
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.
For an anime all about connections, Sarazanmai, with its musical numbers, kappa mythology, and formal experimentation sure can be obscure. But its unique symbols are an inventive communication tool, one rooted in the unique power of cartooning.
For an anime all about connections, Sarazanmai, with its musical numbers, kappa mythology, and formal experimentation sure can be obscure. But its unique symbols are an inventive communication tool, one rooted in the unique power of cartooning.
I did some deep dive reading on semiotics in comics for this one but I think I managed to parse what are honestly some pretty obscure and complicated arguments down to something comprehensible
mainly: don’t be afraid of developing your own visual language if you do cartooning!
Signal processing engineer Stéphane Pigeon created this captivating Gregorian chant generator. It enables you to simply "conduct," mix, and process the sacred a cappella songs heard in the monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church since the 9th century.
Narnia Recap: Digory prevented Polly from leaving so he could ring a bell. Now there's a very tall woman dragging them around the castle which is rapidly falling apart around them. 
