I actually thought the same thing as theflib. It might not be a bad idea to clarify this. Looking through the comments, it seems a lot of people have taken this change to mean that the scheduled programming is going to preempt other material on the site during those times.
Interesting idea, by the way. I hope it works out.
@firstofnormalin
I don’t know that I would describe the references to snakes you cite as "favorable." The serpent was still a potent symbol, but notice that in both of your Biblical references it is a man wielding the serpent power, traditionally associated with the goddess, not the god. There’s no denying that early goddess worship in the Middle East was crushed by the rise of the cult of Yahweh, and one of the victims of this rise was the serpent, having been cast as the form of Satan in the Garden of Eden in order to subvert the female-oriented aspect of the symbol.
I don’t know that I would describe the references to snakes you cite as "favorable." The serpent was still a potent symbol, but notice that in both of your Biblical references it is a man wielding the serpent power, traditionally associated with the goddess, not the god. There’s no denying that early goddess worship in the Middle East was crushed by the rise of the cult of Yahweh, and one of the victims of this rise was the serpent, having been cast as the form of Satan in the Garden of Eden in order to subvert the female-oriented aspect of the symbol.
@Jarrod Quebodeaux
Perhaps what’s unclear about the way I described this process in my previous post is that I used the word "matriarchal," which in the strictest sense is inaccurate, since the societies in question were not wholly and completely female dominated. I also probably should have focused on the Middle East, not the Near East. I apologize for the lack of clarity resulting from these two oversights.
Perhaps what’s unclear about the way I described this process in my previous post is that I used the word "matriarchal," which in the strictest sense is inaccurate, since the societies in question were not wholly and completely female dominated. I also probably should have focused on the Middle East, not the Near East. I apologize for the lack of clarity resulting from these two oversights.
The basic timeline for just about all the early cults across Europe and into the Middle East is this:
Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods: Male gods worshipped primarily by hunters (god of the hunt), with goddesses supplementing the belief structures because of female-oriented gathering (hunter-gatherer period). Also prominent during this period are fertility goddesses, usually represented by small sculptures of the female form with engorged breasts and round, pregnant bellies. Many of the gods and goddesses have dual roles and were nearly equal in importance to the daily life of the tribe.
Neolithic Revolution: Tribes discover agricultural techniques and animal domestication. They stop wandering and settle down to grow plants and raise livestock. The mother goddess rises in importance, though fertility totems seem to become less common. Goddesses don’t supplant gods, but they become more central to the belief structures as a result of the observed life cycle of plants, which is equated symbolically to pregnancy and thus the life cycle of human beings. Gods are still important, but goddesses are in the driver’s seat, so to speak.
Bronze Age: Around 6000 years ago (give or take a millennia or two) the tribes of the Middle East harshly reject the mother goddess (who incidentally had a subordinate male consort we’d later come to know as Yahweh) and begin to subvert and delegitimize the symbols associated with the Goddess cults, including, but not limited to, the serpent. The rise and domination of the male god (Yahweh) and the resulting subjugation of women occurs. This process eventually spreads out from this region and affects the Near East and Central European Plains.
The rise of this male-dominated religion out of the desert tribes of the Middle East absolutely did supplant mother-goddess worship. The snake being a symbol of regenerative life cycle and thus mostly associated with goddess worship was undoubtedly collateral damage resulting from the delegitimizing process of priests who wanted to destroy all mother-goddess cults, which they considered a threat to their continuing domination of sacred and secular life.
I suppose I could drive down to my mother-in-law’s house and dig up the books from her basement so I can cite titles, authors, and page numbers, but hey, I’m just not going to do that.
As for the Black Hills region, it was all considered sacred, and Mount Rushmore, or "The Six Grandfather’s" as it was known to the Lakota, was a central location and yes, considered sacred as well. I don’t know where you’re getting that it was not. Are you troubled by the adjectival qualifier "deeply" before "sacred" in my original post?
(edited for clarity)
To echo clbennet001's comment below, I've never quite understood the disappointment fans have surrounding Kirk's death. He went down fighting. He didn't die from an infection, a random cryo-tube malfunction, or while cowering on the shitter.
Kirk sacrificed himself to prevent the inhabitants of an entire solar system from being annihilated by a madman who would have killed millions to ease his own grief. That's a hero's death in my book.
And the walkway wasn't faulty, it was damaged in a firefight.
I agree that the next RISE should not be set in the "normal" world, as you say, but I also don't think it should be set quite as far in the future as you suggest. I think I'd prefer just-post-collapse, when there's still chaos within the human and ape societies (stemming from different reasons, of course).
If chaos threatens both species' survival in the second movie, then the third movie could be about the apes taking a firm stand to prevent the annihilation of their growing and dominant culture. At the expense of us pesky humans, naturally. (Although I don't think that would fly. I have a feeling the third movie will be about mankind's redemption and retaking of the planet as the dominant sentient species. Unless of course I'm wrong, which happens.)
For the most part, snakes are only vilified in the Judeo-Christian culture as a physical incarnation of the devil. In many (most?) other cultures it's revered as a symbol of the cyclical nature of time because of the periodic sloughing off of its skin. Also see the Ouroboros. The snake eating it's own tail symbolizes the same basic worldview.
In fact, it's quite probable that when the male-dominated belief systems started sweeping away the matriarchal systems of the Near East, there was a concerted effort on the part of the priests to delegitimize the female-belief systems by corrupting their symbols in order to subjugate the women-folk. (You can see this same basic pattern of behavior when Christians destroyed sacred pagan ritual sites, built churches at those sites instead, and started corrupting local folk belief systems by incorporating them into the Catholic belief structures. Hell, even the US carved faces into a mountain considered deeply sacred by the Native Americans. But I digress.)
Because the snake originated as an Earth-Mother-cult symbol representing the regenerative aspect of nature, and because the male-dominated systems that sprang up tended to reject the cyclical nature of time in favor of a straight line with a beginning and an end (in which nature is not regenerative but rather fallen from grace in the past and which must be redeemed at some point in the future), the snake was seen as a threat to growing male dominance within tribal and religious structures. A few thousand years later and BAM! Satan shows up in the Garden of Eden as a snake and it's all downhill for this much-maligned reptilian brother.
Yeah. Snakes get a bad rap.
I've read a bunch of Larry Niven books, including Ringworld, and I must say, the appeal of his work is all in the ideas. The appeal certainly isn't in the prose, which is wooden, or the characters, which are almost universally one-dimensional, or the stories, which tend to lack satisfying conclusions.
And yet I do still enjoy his books (for the most part).
And if it was "File" he could move to America. They pronounce it differently over here . . .
Great little story. Thanks for sharing!
That could be too. I guess they seemed related because they happened so close together in the story and the four days versus four weeks was called out so prominently. Something weird is going on regardless . . .
It could be that I missed something in the threads below, but one thing I noticed about the time loss (a.k.a. the ghost beer) is that it doesn't seem isolated to Dean.
When Dean goes to see Frank, he's pissed that Frank was given money four weeks ago but then disappeared. Frank was mildly shocked and insisted it was only four days ago, but then dismisses it. I think the time shift is something significant that's happening on a larger scale, but I'm not sure why yet.
You know, Dude, I myself dabbled in pacifism once. Not in 'Nam of course.
I'm talking concepts and you're talking scientific proof. I never said what the Vedics conceived of was scientific in nature. It was an antecedent to scientific thought in relationship to quantum physics, sure, but not science itself. It was primarily metaphysical in nature. As I stated.
But I'm not "making shit up" about the FACT that early Vedic thinkers combined their metaphysical outlook with their conception of physical phenomenon and that they understood that all life is made from tiny building blocks too small to see. If that's what you think then you're the one making shit up.
"I do know that everyone back then thought that water was an element." If that's what you "know," then you don't know as much as you think you do. The earliest people who thought that way absolutely did NOT think of water was an element the way we think of, say, oxygen as an element. That misunderstanding arises from westerners placing their value judgments on systems of thought they don't understand. Water was considered a QUALITY of substance, not an element as a building block. But I (and you without knowing it) digress.
By the way, since Lucretius also conceived of the CONCEPT of atoms and molecules but did not come up with scientific models for them, does that mean he was a crackpot who should be ridiculed for not being able to prove their existence? Is that what we're doing now? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
People like Bohr and Heisenberg and Oppenheimer by their own admission were all deeply influenced by Hindu and Vedic texts. Not as scientific treaties (because that would be absurd), but as starting points for their own speculations about the nature of quantum physics. It's no accident that their first attempts to describe quantum theory AFTER EXPERIMENTATION sounded like mystical mumbo-jumbo straight out of the East.
But from that mumbo-jumbo was planted the seed from which their science flourished. As Oppenheimer implied, his scientific methodology served as an "exemplification, and encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." The old wisdom is not scientific in nature and no one (including me) ever said it was.
You can diminish and ridicule early thinkers with cheap jokes and ham-fisted comparisons all you want. That doesn't mean the inspiration they provided to the first quantum physicists has no value.
But I'm not "making shit up" about the FACT that early Vedic thinkers combined their metaphysical outlook with their conception of physical phenomenon and that they understood that all life is made from tiny building blocks too small to see. If that's what you think then you're the one making shit up.
"I do know that everyone back then thought that water was an element." If that's what you "know," then you don't know as much as you think you do. The earliest people who thought that way absolutely did NOT think of water was an element the way we think of, say, oxygen as an element. That misunderstanding arises from westerners placing their value judgments on systems of thought they don't understand. Water was considered a QUALITY of substance, not an element as a building block. But I (and you without knowing it) digress.
By the way, since Lucretius also conceived of the CONCEPT of atoms and molecules but did not come up with scientific models for them, does that mean he was a crackpot who should be ridiculed for not being able to prove their existence? Is that what we're doing now? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
People like Bohr and Heisenberg and Oppenheimer by their own admission were all deeply influenced by Hindu and Vedic texts. Not as scientific treaties (because that would be absurd), but as starting points for their own speculations about the nature of quantum physics. It's no accident that their first attempts to describe quantum theory AFTER EXPERIMENTATION sounded like mystical mumbo-jumbo straight out of the East.
But from that mumbo-jumbo was planted the seed from which their science flourished. As Oppenheimer implied, his scientific methodology served as an "exemplification, and encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." The old wisdom is not scientific in nature and no one (including me) ever said it was.
You can diminish and ridicule early thinkers with cheap jokes and ham-fisted comparisons all you want. That doesn't mean the inspiration they provided to the first quantum physicists has no value.
Of course I see the difference. That's why I concluded by saying that "I realize that he's talking about scientifically quantifiable data proving such an idea." You may not have read that far, so I'll ignore the patronizing rudeness on display in your comment.
But setting that aside, these same early thinkers also recognized that the universe was made up of elements too small for man to see. They considered these elements to be something very akin to what we would today call atoms.
So yes, to them this concept of "we are in the universe and the universe is in us" was used primarily as a metaphor for spiritual understanding. A metaphor that took into account the metaphysical side but was also applied to the physical side in the recognition of these tiny elements.
And since Tyson brought up Oppenheimer, I'll just conclude with a quote from that physicist.
"The general notions about human understanding . . . which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, and encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom."
--Julius Robert Oppenheimer
But setting that aside, these same early thinkers also recognized that the universe was made up of elements too small for man to see. They considered these elements to be something very akin to what we would today call atoms.
So yes, to them this concept of "we are in the universe and the universe is in us" was used primarily as a metaphor for spiritual understanding. A metaphor that took into account the metaphysical side but was also applied to the physical side in the recognition of these tiny elements.
And since Tyson brought up Oppenheimer, I'll just conclude with a quote from that physicist.
"The general notions about human understanding . . . which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, and encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom."
--Julius Robert Oppenheimer
I absolutely adore Neil Degrasse Tyson. He makes science accessible and his enthusiasm is a wonder.
One very minor thing I'll take issue with: That we only just discovered that we are star stuff in the 20th century. Or, as Neil phrases it: That we are in the universe and the universe is in us.
In fact, this is an ancient concept that was expounded thousands of years ago by Vedic philosophers in the Hindu Kush with the phrase "Tat tvam asi." It can be translated in many ways, but commonly it reads as "Thou art that." It can also be translated as "All this is that," which expands the meaning somewhat to suggest that "All this" (what we see and hear and touch as phenomenon in the observable universe) "is that" (a constituent of the unseen, ultimately unobservable and unquantifiable totality).
We are in it and it is in us. I can't tell you how many times I've read that basic concept in books about the metaphysics of early Hindu and Vedic philosophy.
I realize that he's talking about scientifically quantifiable data proving such an idea, but as a concept, there were people in the world coming to this conclusion five millennia before scientists thought to ask the question.
One very minor thing I'll take issue with: That we only just discovered that we are star stuff in the 20th century. Or, as Neil phrases it: That we are in the universe and the universe is in us.
In fact, this is an ancient concept that was expounded thousands of years ago by Vedic philosophers in the Hindu Kush with the phrase "Tat tvam asi." It can be translated in many ways, but commonly it reads as "Thou art that." It can also be translated as "All this is that," which expands the meaning somewhat to suggest that "All this" (what we see and hear and touch as phenomenon in the observable universe) "is that" (a constituent of the unseen, ultimately unobservable and unquantifiable totality).
We are in it and it is in us. I can't tell you how many times I've read that basic concept in books about the metaphysics of early Hindu and Vedic philosophy.
I realize that he's talking about scientifically quantifiable data proving such an idea, but as a concept, there were people in the world coming to this conclusion five millennia before scientists thought to ask the question.
I recall reading in a book by the catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision? Earth in Upheaval?) descriptions of the edges of gigantic flood plains littered with millions of bones of animals that all seemed to die at the same time. In many cases their bones were crushed and broken in ways that suggested a sudden, violent, common death, such as a massive tsunami. There were other various anomalous finds that early archeologists were (and perhaps continue to be) very confused about.
Velikovsky, being in the camp that put forth the hypothesis that earth changes can happen in catastrophic leaps, hypothesized that sudden pole shifts resulting from close-orbit comets or abrupt changes in geomagnetic polarity may have caused massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic activity that could kill off hundreds, thousands, and even millions of animals in one fell swoop. He points to some of these catastrophes having occurred relatively recently in geologic time, perhaps even as recently six to ten thousand years ago.
Perhaps something like this can help explain the phenomenon described above. A massive tidal wave could have deposited living whales and other mammals into lagoons (or valleys near coastlines turned into temporary lagoons), where they quickly died off once trapped.
I don't know. Many people (I think undeservedly) dismiss Velikovsky's theories as hokum. I've found some of his work to be quite inspired and compelling.
Velikovsky, being in the camp that put forth the hypothesis that earth changes can happen in catastrophic leaps, hypothesized that sudden pole shifts resulting from close-orbit comets or abrupt changes in geomagnetic polarity may have caused massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic activity that could kill off hundreds, thousands, and even millions of animals in one fell swoop. He points to some of these catastrophes having occurred relatively recently in geologic time, perhaps even as recently six to ten thousand years ago.
Perhaps something like this can help explain the phenomenon described above. A massive tidal wave could have deposited living whales and other mammals into lagoons (or valleys near coastlines turned into temporary lagoons), where they quickly died off once trapped.
I don't know. Many people (I think undeservedly) dismiss Velikovsky's theories as hokum. I've found some of his work to be quite inspired and compelling.
Perhaps "first-person gaming mechanics" is not a very clear statement, since you're absolutely right about the game playing the same whether in first or third person.
What I mean is that for me first person is extremely disorienting during gameplay. This mostly has to do with spatial issues. In FPS games you run around in an environment with little else but a floating / bobbing view of the scenery, void of any sense of tactile connection to the ground. In third-person games you can watch the character you're controlling jump over rocks, lean up against walls, and dart under obstructions, which at least provides the illusion of weight and movement in relation to action and space. It's the same reason I don't play flight or driving simulation games.
Anyway, as I said above, it's all a matter of personal preference. There are a lot of really cool looking FPS games out there, but I don't like playing them because of the disconnect between what I see with my eyes and the lack of a sense of occupying space in the visible environment I'm looking at.
Or maybe I just suck at FPS games and I'm rationalizing. I'm willing to accept that possibility. :-)
What I mean is that for me first person is extremely disorienting during gameplay. This mostly has to do with spatial issues. In FPS games you run around in an environment with little else but a floating / bobbing view of the scenery, void of any sense of tactile connection to the ground. In third-person games you can watch the character you're controlling jump over rocks, lean up against walls, and dart under obstructions, which at least provides the illusion of weight and movement in relation to action and space. It's the same reason I don't play flight or driving simulation games.
Anyway, as I said above, it's all a matter of personal preference. There are a lot of really cool looking FPS games out there, but I don't like playing them because of the disconnect between what I see with my eyes and the lack of a sense of occupying space in the visible environment I'm looking at.
Or maybe I just suck at FPS games and I'm rationalizing. I'm willing to accept that possibility. :-)
I know it all comes down to personal preference, and I know lots of people love first-person gameplay, but I really, really wish more first-person games would allow for third-person play in the single-player campaigns. I can't fucking STAND first-person gaming mechanics and there are so many more games I'd play if I had the choice to play in third person.
Kudos to Skyrim for recognizing that not everyone enjoys the first-person fetish in gaming by giving the player a choice.
Kudos to Skyrim for recognizing that not everyone enjoys the first-person fetish in gaming by giving the player a choice.
Well, I do think this is a good point, though I would fall back on the archetype Bruce Willis has created in his roles, especially as John McClane. He's an everyman who, in the course of 4 movies, has killed nearly 50 people. Now, they were all bad guys, yes, but so are the enemies in the Uncharted games. They will kill Nathan Drake if they can and he does everything to beat them to the punch.
Anyway, it might be that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. I don't really have anything invested in the argument other than that I find it unusual that so many reviewers and commenters seem to be dwelling on it.
Fun games, though.
Anyway, it might be that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. I don't really have anything invested in the argument other than that I find it unusual that so many reviewers and commenters seem to be dwelling on it.
Fun games, though.
Yes, it must be a double standard. Nothing else explains the mindless parroting of this non-issue.
