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New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don’t know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.
Wait wait WAIT
As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem
BUT who is also invested in antiquities
Is it possible for you to drop the new lore
So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy’s deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.
This was recently partially translated and it’s incredibly fragmentary, but it’s a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer’s home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically “smooth things over”. They are taking an oath.
He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.
Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There’s a lot of “Why don’t you believe me?” “They don’t listen to me!” “Please don’t send-” going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue.
We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary.
The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant’s Guild for a reason, he’s had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he’s the world’s worst judge of character or he’s embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he’s selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He’s your classic failed finance bro.
my god if it turns out nasir was being slandered and is actually an upstanding guy it’ll be the biggest twist in recorded history
Your reaction to chatGPT instantly lets me know how easy it would be to trick you into thinking that you are haunted
“omg it’s literally alive!” Two beers, 45 minutes, deck of tarot cards, and I’m charging you 350$ for an exorcism.
“I read an article that it’s showing simple self-awareness” two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage
“I just spoke to an AI and I’m… rattled to say the least, come with me on this dark journey” twenty minutes. I’ve got to science it up for you, but I can get you to come back every week to “disentangle the psychological imprint” for 125$
We have been seeing some claims that OTW has already hired a Diversity Consultant. We wish that were true! At this point all that’s been done is appoint a volunteer to research diversity consultants
Here is a timeline, as best we can construct, of this issue.
June 2020
OTW first talked about hiring an external contractor in their June 2020 statement on racism, and said they would start researching options “in the coming months”
In July 2021, a year later, they announced that they had created two new “officer” roles, including one to start researching diversity consultants. (OTW uses the terms “officers” & “staff”, but those are currently unpaid volunteer roles)
In April 2022, almost a year after THAT, they appointed one of two Diversity Consultant Research Officers & said they would be starting work. (I guess technically that’s still “coming months” from 2020? lol)
In January 2023, when asked about the timeline for working with a diversity consultant, OTW said they hoped to “conclude the project” in 5 years. Also they had not yet appointed a second officer.
Which brings us to the most recent OTW Board meeting in March 2023, almost another year after the officer had been appointed, when we received the first update on what they had been working on.
OTW was asked about the five year timeline, & this time we were told that they hoped the project would be concluded OR have “made great progress” in five years, again moving the goalposts.
Currently
Looking at this timeline, this could make it eight years before we see anything substantial (3 til now +5 more) in significantly addressing this issue. This is unacceptable. We know they have the funds to hire consultants.
This is why we’re demanding that OTW make good on their commitment and hire someone in the next 3-6 months. It’s not an unreasonable ask given that the officer has already had more than a year to work on this and we are 3 years out since we were told this was a priority.
Having psychosis but not “glaringly obvious” psychosis is weird. I did start to wonder about myself years ago, but went into denial about my symptoms quickly and easily because it’s not like I was having vivid hallucinations. I’ve never held a conversation with someone who’s not there, for example. And this is somewhat my bad for only having a stereotyped understanding of what psychosis can look like.
For me though, my schizospec/psychosis symptoms look like this:
Perceptual distortions: Hearing or seeing things incorrectly. Everyday sounds morph into people talking to me, usually with indistinguishable words/ babble. Images are distorted or skewed. It takes me a moment to recognize an object sometimes, even with clear visibility.
Mild hallucinations: I’ll hear music playing quietly or electronic noises, see shadows or shapes at the corner of my eye or as a flash that immediately vanishes. Sometimes I think I see a bug crawling near me but when I go to look directly at it, there’s nothing there. I’ll smell things that aren’t there, and sometimes even feel touch - though I attribute that mostly to C-PTSD. The most vivid hallucination I can ever remember having was a door slamming.
Ideas of reference: I sometimes interpret things as having some kind of “special” meaning to me. I see “signs” and tend to view things in a superstitious way. I see things as good or bad omens. I think random events are some part of fate. When I’m not doing it I can see how irrational that is, but it happens anyway.
Paranoia and delusions: My prime example of this is a reoccurring belief that my therapist doesn’t think I have DID at all and is only playing along for some unknown and malicious reason. When under enough stress, I’ve also been afraid to take medicine in case it’s been tampered with or someone is trying to drug me with the wrong dose.
Overall, my psychotic symptoms get noticeably worse with stress or lack of sleep. I can go for long periods of time with virtually no psychosis at all, but it always reoccurs.
None of those things are normal if they happen with any consistent frequency… Or honestly, in general. Anyone can have mild hallucinations for a variety if reasons (like sleep deprivation) but.
Me thinking I can hear people talking to me in the white noise of my fan isn’t normal. My brain morphing objects into animals that I believe are real and alive for a few moments isn’t normal. Hearing noises and music that aren’t there isn’t normal. Seeing things that aren’t there isn’t normal. Having paranoid or superstitious beliefs about the world around you - believing that everyday events are somehow “special” and “meant to send you messages” isn’t normal - unless sometimes within the context of specific cultural and spiritual beliefs. Believing that others are against you or out to get you when you have no basis or evidence is not normal.
Lilly: Good morning New Babel, you’re listening to Screw Loose, your favorite early-morning exo rig and rig maintenance rig show this side of the white river, I’m Lilly.
The Bear: And I’m the Bear, and you- are on the air. What can we help you with?
Caller: Hello! Hi! So, uh, first time caller. My name is Zuri. I run a barley and flesh farm about an hour south of Isin. I’m in the market for a new rig. My last rig kicked the bucket. But I have an, uh, odd request that I was hoping you two could help give me some guidance on.
The Bear: Welcome to the show doll, we’d be happy to help. But first, I gotta ask, what were you running before and what happened to it?
Lilly: Yeah! We gotta know what we’re dealing with here.
Zuri [beginning to laugh]: So we had an Arcadia Y-400-
[both hosts erupt into laughter]
Lilly: And it broke!?
The Bear: Doll what in the hell did you do to this thing!?
The Zionist movement has worked to make dispossession a timeless theme of the Palestinian experience: Historians and news reporters alike find themselves telling similar stories about the Nakba. We’ve gotten to a point where the rubble accumulates so fast we cannot keep up with it.
When I first began writing this article, an armed Israeli settler had killed 19-year-old Diyar Omari, in the village of Sandalah, in broad daylight on May 6; his murder brought to mind the 1957 Sandalah massacre, when an Israeli explosive device took the lives of 15 schoolgirls and boys in their village, and I thought I would center this essay on the overlapping histories. But the thought of the schoolchildren reminded me of the leftover Israeli bombs that continue to kill or maim schoolchildren in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills, which has been declared an off-limits “firing zone” for the sole purpose of expelling its residents. And I thought I should write of that impending expulsion, and then another one, and another execution, another demolition, another arbitrary arrest, another siege written out of the headlines, another murder reported in passive voice, and another and another…
And then Israeli bombs began dropping on Gaza.
It is tempting to end the essay there—to anticipate, passively, even more wreckage. To declare Palestine a broken condition, a “cycle of violence” in which bombardment is as banal as breakfast. But the reason we keep printing more posters is because people here have not yet accepted subjugation as their status quo, they can still conjure a reality in which they are free. Palestinians are still resisting the shackles of Zionism. They have never stopped.
If you’re driving across the length of our bruised geography, you will drive past women and men who will choose, time and time again, death over indignity. If you slow down to listen to their orations, you will realize, even if for a brief moment, that you would do the same.
as much as i love vader getting to fuck palpatine over, as much as i think it’s the best thing, and as much as i love AUs where everyone gets together to curbstomp the emperor, i always wanted to see an AU where palpatine dies unexpectedly from the complications of being a bitch just because:
palpatine never intended to die, in my mind, he just aimed to prolong his life through sith bullshit ad infinitum, so i don’t think he ever officially established a successor or even a method of transitioning power. i think everyone collectively assumes vader is his heir, on account of vader being the only person with the horrendous job of actually having to talk to the emperor directly all the time. but there’s not anything binding except for the fact that if darth vader wants the imperial throne, he can crush the litany of people who would like to stop him like bugs, and i think everyone would assume in turn that vader - a guy who is famous for his frothing at the mouth about the empire’s Divine Vision For The Galaxy - would want the throne.
this is, categorically, false, because every single time he’s thought about killing palpatine, he had someone else he wanted to hand the throne. this is an awkward situation in which everyone is waiting for vader to stake his claim on the throne in the immediate aftermath of palpatine’s death, and vader’s like [automated breath] i….. have…… rebels…. to kill……… but i think, as horrific at diplomacy as vader is, he’s at least savvy enough to know that the second he corrects everyone and tries to cede the throne, the infighting as everyone makes a play for the throne would cause a ridiculous amount of unrest. so he can’t just cede the throne, but he’s next to incapable of being functional without serving His Imperial Majesty’s Divine Vision, and he needs to choose a successor as fast as possible and then he can possibly consider finding a ditch to lay down in because his one last attachment to the mortal plane died.
i know it’d be more reasonable for vader to kick punt someone like tarkin at the throne, but consider that vader is, fundamentally, unreasonable. and at this point in time, he’s also famous for being kind of a religious zealot, and he would absolutely choose this particular time of all the times to trust in the force. so he meditates, considers the sane options, but the force keeps lingering on senator leia organa from alderaan - and it’s doing that because she’s secretly his daughter, but he doesn’t know that, and theoretically this is enough ahead of ANH that he doesn’t even have an inclination that she’s a rebel spy. but if the force wills it.
so leia, all of eighteen years old, is named empress by darth vader and he doesn’t have the grace to tell her he’s going to name her empress first, he just kind of goes in front of the imperial senate and does it. i think it would be utterly hilarious if vader handed the empire over to the rebels without knowing it, handed the empire over to his daughter without knowing it, and now leia has to figure out how to safely un-empire an empire while being empress without causing too much chaos.
which is not a job made easier by the wheezing war criminal who keeps kneeling in front of her and asking, “what is thy bidding, my master,” because leia has unknowingly inherited the weirdest position in relation to vader anyone could have, and he’s kind of relying on tradition to cope. i really just want you to imagine an ongoing bit where one of vader’s cybernetic arms gets wrecked while he’s suppressing a coup organized against the new empress, and he leaves it like that for weeks because palpatine always had to clear off significant changes like replacement prosthetics, and he keeps waiting for leia to do it. she finally snaps at him to just go and get it fixed, and vader’s thrown into an array of distress because that is NOT how this works!!! his MASTER clears off his medical procedures, it ALWAYS works like that, and leia’s confusion is bone-deep, because obviously that only makes sense to vader.
wouldn’t vader notice the empire getting un-empired by the new secretly-a-rebel empress, you wonder. i would say that he probably wouldn’t, because as horrific as palpatine was, he was also all of vader’s will to live, up until the moment leia shows him a singular basic courtesy - like not being weirdly involved in the process of vader getting a new arm - and vader decides that he is going to froth at the mouth about Her Imperial Majesty’s Divine Vision, instead, until she sees fit to grant him death.
i just think it would be really funny if leia had to deal with learning that vader, on top of being omnicidal and a war criminal, is also just really ridiculous as a person, and very annoying but in a sad way.
This is awesome and hilarious and all I can think about is Leia’s reaction being, “Um … just to be clear, this isn’t a marriage proposal is it?“ and Vader’s momentary bluescreen before he hurries to reassure her that, no, it’s not.
Vader: *remembers how his marriage went* You are too young to marry anyone.
Bail Organa: Well fuck, now I have to agree with Darth Vader about something!