I don't want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don't want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don't want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.
One day Tim’s out in casual clothes just roaming because Alfred said he needed to spend time in the sun (Jason said his sickly Victorian child was showing which is what actually got him outside).
Anyway he’s minding his business, bored out of his mind, when an alert about the riddler goes out. He escaped Arkham and Tim is like “I’ve got nothing better to do,” So he tracks him down. Except he tracks him down as Tim Drake, not Red Robin because he was told to get sunlight as Tim.
Kid basically knocks on the door the Riddler’s hideout like “I’m bored and I’m pretty sure I can out riddle you.” And the Riddler isn’t gonna take that challenge sitting down.
He doesn’t even have a plan set up yet. Just drags Tim in like “guess I’ll use this kid as bait he is influential.” And the entire time he’s setting up his elaborate trap he’s shooting riddles back and forth with Tim. Ten minutes in he’s given up on the trap because Tim is not only keeping up but is also dishing out stellar riddles. Riddler’s not about to risk killing one of the few people in Gotham that are actually entertaining.
By this point the Bat’s “Tim Radar” Has gone off. They haven’t heard from him and he hasn’t checked in for the Riddler Breakout. So they track him and they find him sitting in Riddler’s hideout with a mug of coffee playing the equivalent of four dimensional chess but it’s the game Clue.
It ends with the Riddler being willing to go back to Arkham so long has he has regularly scheduled enrichment time with Tim.
Tim’s content with that. Honestly he had a lot of fun.
Now that Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken his stand, the Zionist worms are coming out and finally saying what they've always been thinking: "You n*****s just hate us for our racial superiority." It has always been the subtext of everything every Zionist has ever said to black people who support the Palestinian cause but they're getting mad enough to be upfront about it
First off, as a critic of Coates Black Panther run, he does tell you exactly what he thinks of a Wakanda throughout it: it’s a bad idea.
Ta-Nehisi does not celebrate Wakanda as he compares T’Challa to a dictator and he how Wakanda is a hotep dream turned nightmare because specifically Wakanda’s isolationist position and indifference to the rest of the continent. To sum it up, Wakanda is a bad but rich neighbor that thrived when everyone else around suffered.
Israel is Wakanda in a way. And Coates, in spite of me not really feeling the run myself, goes out of his way to highlight the fictional idea of the concept at its core. He deconstructs its patriarchal cultural stances as two lesbian warriors of T’Challa’s royal guard rebel and form a sister nation where no man is allowed to enter due to the widespread sexual abuse and repression. T’Challa is forced to actually be diplomatic with his neighbors in spite of how belligerent they are. And he cedes power under the creed that No One Man should have power over all.
I know this has nothing to do with Coates essays, but I just want to point out that this reviewer’s racist remark and criticism of Coates shows exactly how little she engaged with Coates as a writer. Coates, as a black man, does not want a Wakanda. He wants the end of oppression and repression, and knows that the liberation of a black people can’t be at the expense of others suffering.
And that’s what Zionist forget or do not understand at their core.
"I know this has nothing to do with Coates essays, but I just want to point out that this reviewer’s racist remark and criticism of Coates shows exactly how little she engaged with Coates as a writer. Coates, as a black man, does not want a Wakanda. He wants the end of oppression and repression, and knows that the liberation of a black people can’t be at the expense of others suffering.
And that’s what Zionist forget or do not understand at their core."
Ooh, if I can add to this: before cutting any sort of custard-y pie (lemon merengue, key lime, etc), take the wrapper from the butter you used and wipe the knife with it!
An extremely dumb guid to “Which famous 60’s/70's Jazz man is that?”
1, Is it Piano lead or Bass lead? If piano go to question two. If brass question three.
2, Does the Pianist sound like he’s taken all the acid, or is there a guy making love to a clarinet?
Oh yeah: he’s taken all the acid alight. Is… is he okay? Thelonious Monk.
Oh yeah, some guy is going ham on a clarinet. Dave Burkbeck Quartet.
Neither of the above: Duke Ellington.
3, If brass lead: is it Louis Armstrong? If Yes, it’s Louis Armstrong. If no, question four.
4, Does the Trumpet player make you feel sad? Even, dare I say, Blue?
Almost? Chet Barker
Kind of? Miles Davies.
If no, question five.
5, Is the trumpet player trying to blow your face clean off? Like, actively trying to kill the first row of the audience? Dizzy Gillespie.
It’s brass led, but Sax not Trumpet.
Okay, question 6, isolate the stings: is Charles Mingus doing what he’s actually paid to do in the back of the ensemble, or is he dicking around and seeing how far a man can take a double bass before his band-mates kill him?
Seems to be playing normally: Charlie Parker
He’s fucking around in F minor, and also that Bari sax is filthy! The Mingus Big band, with Ronnie Cuber on the Sax.
the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!
my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.
nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned
so, as y'all probably know, a lot of appalachian folk music grew its roots in scottish folk (and then was heavily influenced by Black folks once it arrived here, but that's a post for another time).
they existed, as most folk music does, to deliver a narrative--to pass on a story orally, especially in communities where literacy was not widespread. their whole purpose was to get the news out there about current events, and everyone loves a good murder mystery!
as an aside, i saw someone liken the murder ballad to a ye olde true crime podcast and tbh, yeah lol.
the "original" murder ballads started back across the pond as news stories printed on broadsheets and penned in such a way that it was easy to put to melody.
they were meant to be passed on and keep the people informed about the goings-on in town. i imagine that because these songs were left up to their original orators to get them going, this would be why we have sooo many variations of old folk songs.
naturally then, almost always, they were based on real events, either sung from an outside perspective, from the killer's perspective and in some cases, from the victim's. of course, like most things from days of yore, they reek of social dogshit. the particular flavor of dogshit of the OG murder ballad was misogyny.
so, the murder ballad came over when the english and scots-irish settlers did. in fact, a lot of the current murder ballads are still telling stories from centuries ago, and, as is the way of folk, getting rewritten and given new names and melodies and evolving into the modern recordings we hear today.
305 such scottish and english ballads were noted and collected into what is famously known as the Child Ballads collected by a professor named francis james child in the 19th century. they have been reshaped and covered and recorded a million and one times, as is the folk way.
while newer ones continued to largely fit the formula of retelling real events and murder trials (such as one of my favorite ones, little sadie, about a murderer getting chased through the carolinas to have justice handed down), they also evolved into sometimes fictional, (often unfortunately misogynistic) cautionary tales.
perhaps the most famous examples of these are omie wise and pretty polly where the woman's death almost feels justified as if it's her fault (big shocker).
but i digress. in this way, the evolution of the murder ballad came to serve a similar purpose as the spooky legends of appalachia did/do now.
(why do we have those urban legends and oral traditions warning yall out of the woods? to keep babies from gettin lost n dying in them. i know it's a fun tiktok trend rn to tell tale of spooky scary woods like there's really more haints out here than there are anywhere else, but that's a rant for another time too ain't it)
so, the aforementioned little sadie (also known as "bad lee brown" in some cases) was first recorded in the 1920s. i'm also plugging my favorite female-vocaist cover of it there because it's superior when a woman does it, sorry.
it is a pretty straightforward murder ballad in its content--in the original version, the guy kills a woman, a stranger or his girlfriend sometimes depending on who is covering it.
but instead of it being a cautionary 'be careful and don't get pregnant or it's your fault' tale like omie wise and pretty polly, the guy doesn't get away with it, and he's not portrayed as sympathetic like the murderer is in so many ballads.
a few decades after, women started saying fuck you and writing their own murder ballads.
in the 40s, the femme fatale trope was in full swing with women flipping the script and killing their male lovers for slights against them instead.
men began to enter the "find out" phase in these songs and paid up for being abusive partners. women regained their agency and humanity by actually giving themselves an active voice instead of just being essentially 'fridged in the ballads of old.
her majesty dolly parton even covered plenty of old ballads herself but then went on to write the bridge, telling the pregnant-woman-in-the-murder-ballad's side of things for once. love her.
as a listener, i realized that i personally prefer these modern covers of appalachian murder ballads sung by women-led acts like dolly and gillian welch and even the super-recent crooked still especially, because there is a sense of reclamation, subverting its roots by giving it a woman's voice instead.
meaning that, like a lot else from the problematic past, the appalachian murder ballad is something to be enjoyed with critical ears. violence against women is an evergreen issue, of course, and you're going to encounter a lot of that in this branch of historical music.
but with folk songs, and especially the murder ballad, being such a foundational element of appalachian history and culture and fitting squarely into the appalachian gothic, i still find them important and so, so interesting
i do feel it's worth mentioning that there are "tamer" ones. with traditional and modern murder ballads alike, some of them are just for "fun," like a murder mystery novel is enjoyable to read; not all have a message or retell a historical trial.
(for instance, i'd even argue ultra-modern, popular americana songs like hell's comin' with me is a contemporary americana murder ballad--being sung by a male vocalist and having evolved from being at the expense of a woman to instead being directed at a harmful and corrupt church. that kind of thing)
in short: it continues to evolve, and i continue to eat that shit up.
anyway, to leave off, lemme share with yall my personal favorite murder ballad which fits squarely into murder mystery/horror novel territory imo.
it's the 10th child ballad and was originally known as "the twa sisters." it's been covered to hell n back and named and renamed.
but! if you listen to any flavor of americana, chances are high you already know it; popular names are "the dreadful wind and rain" and sometimes just "wind and rain."
in it, a jealous older sister pushes her other sister into a river (or stream, or sea, depending on who's covering it) over a dumbass man. the little sister's body floats away and a fiddle maker come upon her and took parts of her body to make a fiddle of his own. the only song the new fiddle plays is the tale about how it came to be, and it is the same song you have been listening to until then.
how's that for genuinely spooky-scary appalachia, y'all?
As a fellow lover of folk in general, and murder ballads specifically, I would love to offer some other recommendations for woman-friendly murder ballads. Most of these are very modern, but they are in the spirit of the ballads I grew up loving.
The River Knows-Molly Tuttle (A woman who knows she's in a murder ballad turns things around)
Caleb Meyer- Gillian Welch (A woman gets assaulted and kills the man who attacked her)
Old Time Angels- Po Ramblin Boys (The women killed in murder ballads get vengeance)
Griesly Bride- McKain Lakey (A man who thought he'd married a sweet young girl has an unexpected wedding night)
And a selection of more classic ones (plus one modern) that are less happy for their female characters, but no less beautiful. I am sticking to female singers here, because OP is right that their versions usually hit better.
Well Below the Valley- Saya Novinger (This one is dark. Incest, child murder, and guilt abound)
Darlin Corey- Meredith Moon (The life and death of a moonshiner named Corey)
The Highwayman- Loreena McKennitt (A woman and her outlaw lover are killed by British soldiers)
The Cruel Brother- Maeve Mackinnon (A woman is murdered by her slighted brother on her wedding day)
Banks of the Ohio- Dolly Parton (A man recounts how he murdered his lover)
my niche interest! hello, I also have a lot to say about ballads!
Hm I'd like to suggest that folks not take these trends as hard rules, indicating omnidirectionality. I tend to think of ballads as open ammunition being tossed back and forth in the gender wars of oral tradition, flipping back and forth between viewpoints as different singers find ways to make them say different things to say with them.
Ballads were hardly a misogynist monolith-they were written by a range of individuals over a wide range of years, and many started out (far as we can tell) carrying women's voices, or have older variants that told more complete and often more empowering versions of their tales that may contain acts of violence against women but that could not originally be condensed to just that feature. Not as a rule by any means, but they're definitely a sizeable number of songs.
Some start out more feminist and lost their teeth over time, and some start out misogynist and gained more feminist frames. It'd be interesting to graph them all out over a timeline and see what trends emerge but also very difficult given the spiderwebbing of variants dating from different periods and going in different directions and the subjectivity of what counts as feminist or the reverse.
Anyhow here are some examples of songs that, far as I can tell, started out fairly feminist long before the 1940s:
Lady Isabel and the Elf Night: dates at least to the 17th c. Very similar to Pretty Polly and Omie Wise (okay also many others) plot wise but when Lady Isobel's courting lover reveals all the other women he's killed before, she kills him instead. Also there's often a parrot.
Fair Annie, an adaptation of Marie de France's late 12th c lai Le Fresne more. Where Annie, the mother of seven of her partner's children, is told to step aside, put out the welcome mat, and feign maidenhood so that he can marry someone new and wealthy. Upon the new bride's arrival she asks who Annie is and why she's crying, then reveals "Oh, we're sisters! Which means you can totally have my dowry and I'm not marrying that pos, you are, don't worry, I'm going the hell home." (emphasis mine but that's basically it)
Broughty Wa's, a Scottish song about outswimming your kidnapper while he sinks like a stone in your wake, known only from Amelia and Jane Harris, sisters who contributed to Child heavily and learned their repertoire from their mother who in turn learned them from "an aged nurse". more
Lady of Loch Royan: most versions of Lord Gregory, as it's known more often today, are the sad tale of a new mother knocking on her lover's door in the rain asking to be let in, only to be turned away by his mother who tells her to jump in the sea, which she does and he wakes up and runs after her, but too late. The two very similar likely oldest versions are an Appalachian variant recorded by Jean Ritchie and the version aggregated by Sir Walter Scott in 1802, unlikely to have been contaminated by knowledge of each other, indicate, "we have here a truly remarkable instance of a unique version of a ballad appearing in two widely separated places 150 years apart" (source), which should serve to underline how often the Appalachian versions might well be the closer-to-original surviving versions of these songs rather than remaining English and Scottish ones, and how difficult they are to date.
Anyhow most of the modern versions of this I hear are highly truncated, just sad Annie crying sweet memories outside of Lord Gregory's door then going off to drown, but the Sir Walter Scott version has her building a ship, meeting with robbers, breaking fairy charms, and being mistaken in her rain-soaked rage for a witch, warlock, or mermaid. I mean she still dies right soggily in despair (or in given how mad she seems in this version, possibly spite), but that's something, surely. more
And not a child ballad but I want to note that the Pretty Polly linked above (there are a bunch of songs by that name, including Lady Isobel, confusingly) is descended from a longer murder ballad called The Cruel Ship's Carpenter/ The Gosport Tragedy, which in it's fuller form most often ends with Polly's ghost appearing and tearing her killer into three pieces.
Ballads <3
*Also might I ask if it's a typo on Twa Sisters going back to the 10th c rather than the 17th I've heard more often, or if I might learn more about that early source? I'm very curious (maybe the related folktale type goes back that far or farther?) Off the top of my head I think Judas is the earliest Child ballad in the 13th c so if there's an earlier one I'd love to know.
i love when a character has something terrible happen to them and as a result they see themself as, essentially if not literally, a ghost. and so that means they only can (and have to) do what ghosts do, ie get revenge and then cease to exist. easy as that. but then halfway through this ghost vengeance they realize hey actually i might still be a human person. with human needs. that’s incredibly inconvenient, considering how much i’ve invested in this whole ghost thing
The point of fiction is actually to put that guy in a situation™️, and he might try to tell you the point is to then get him out of the situation, WRONG, second situation
One of my writing teachers in community college told me that the first step of writing fiction was to run a character up a tree, and the second step was to throw rocks at him. Words to live by
Yeah platonic love exists and yeah loveless aros exist but as a whole I think the right thing to do for everyone, aro or not is to stop viewing love as this mystical, magical force and understand that it's an action. To love is to make an effort. You can admire someone in whatever way but to love them is to make an effort to understand them, to listen to them and to be there for them. It's not magic
This is also where a lot of self-love goes wrong. Loving yourself is not about finding yourself cool or funny or attractive, it's not about hyping yourself up. Loving yourself is about getting up and doing things that are good for you and taking care of yourself and making an effort to kick your self destructive habits
The Batfamily, by proxy of being raised by Bruce (undercover pro, lies every other word) and Alfred (actor in another life and in possession of the world’s blankest poker face), are probably the best at just running with something (a con, a secret identity, an undercover job, etc) and acting it out 100% believably. With zero hesitation.
Someone runs up to Red Hood one night in an alley and says “pretend to be my boyfriend! please, he’s following me!” and suddenly that’s not Jason Todd, Crime Lord. That’s Todd from the upper east side, and what the fuck man? leave her alone, you’re fucking tripping!
The joke that the bats see their contingency plans as a form of love is super fucking funny, don't get me wrong but honestly they probably do see it as that cause they just forget to say the second part out loud.
"after I've taken you down, obviously I'd find whatever made you like this and then find the cure."
They come from gotham where mind altering substances are basically everywhere. One of the most profound ways a gothamite could say 'i care about you' is admitting to having a plan to disarm/capture you in the case you go off the deep end, so that they could then get you a cure.
Unfortunately for the bats, no one else thinks like that cause what the actual fucks guys
[A video starts, Red Robins face incredibly close to the camera as he whispers into the microphone.
Red Robin, in what we can assume is the Batcave, lying down in an army-crawl position: *whispers* okay, so i know were technically not allowed to record in the cave but- were playing cops and robbers and-
*There's a clattering noise in the distance and his head whips towards the sound*
Red Robin, sounding equally gleeful and terrified: shit shit shit, i think someones in here? i gotta go free Signal- FUCK!
*Another noise, this one louder and accompanied by the sound of boots hitting the floor in a run, a flash of red is seen in the corner of the camera*
Red Robin, scrambling to his feet, the camera is shaky, and all you can hear is his feet running and the sounds of yells: ohmygod im gonna die who the fuck made RED HOOD A COP JESUS CHRIST!
Another voice, deeper and followed by cackling: IM GONNA GET YOU! ITS FUCKING OVER REPLACEMENT! COUNT YOUR DAYS YOU SHIT!
Red Robin is full sprinting now, and he turns sharply into a ballroom (??) where Nightwing is seen next to The daytime hero Signal, both of them waving aggressively*
Red Robin, panting: SIGNAL! i'm- shit, I'm on my way!
*The sound of boots gets closer as the camera blurs fully, only audio being heard*
Red Robin, screaming: FUCK NO- NIGHTWING SAVE ME-
*The video cuts off the the frozen image of Red Robin on the floor, a Red metal-plated boot planted on their back- if you look closely you can see Signal and Nightwing in the corner, Nightwing dramatically on his knees as Signal is fake-crying*]
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