Who should Bruce be with after Tom King’s arc ends?
Top Row (left to right): Selina and Diana
Middle Row (left to right): Talia and Zatanna
Bottom Row (left to right): Julie and Bruce
A. Bruce and Selina should reconcile by the end of the Batman Arc. She understands him and they are soul mates
B. Bruce should look towards his trusted friend Diana. They’ve gone thru hell together and friends can make the best lovers
C. Bruce should reconsider his relationship with Talia (a sane version). While obsessive, she loves Bruce and Damian would have his Mother in his life
D. The dark horse on this list; Zatanna can bring some magic to his life. This would be a fresh pair. She’s dark, beautiful and mysterious; right up Bruce’s alley
E. The trusted and loyal Julie. When Bruce had amnesia she took care of him, and sacrificed their relationship for the city. In a world full of Superheroes, a normal woman may be what Bruce needs to stay balanced
F. Bruce should stay single and play the field
Bruce’s ass belongs to Selina & Clark only. Period.
Talia is a creepy child-abuser and a rapist. I don’t want her even conisdered as a romantic option by writers.
I mean, I’m not a huge expert on the character, but AFAIK that’s a pretty recent retcon.
Regardless, while I was all for Selina and Bruce, at this point it feels like there’s a point of no return that’s been crossed. I don’t really like romance between leaguers, so I’ll discard Diana right off the bat (heh). While as I said before a lot of the nastier stuff with Talia is a pretty recent change form the last decade or so, it’s still a LOT of baggage that I wouldn’t enjoy them working through. I’m not too familiar with Julie, so the only one of these options I like is Zatanna, though I’m not too jazzed about that either.
Honestly, I’d be up to see Bruce be paired with Victoria from Detective Comics.
ok so, susie and fran are adults. they’re probably already at the max size their species reach. ado, a human, is only like, 12, and is already towering over both of them.
I cannot stress how much of an ABSOLUTE unit adeleine is going to be grown up.
I didn’t reply to this right away, because I wanted to give it a thoughtful response.
I’m sorry that you’ve had people tell you that you need to always be the one who forgives and accommodates. That’s actually a huge part of WHY I wrote this the way I did. I wanted to give that as an option, to show that it’s sometimes the best and healthiest choice. Our culture tends to ignore or hide the option where we leave a situation. It’s depicted as weaker than “toughing it out.” It means you’re letting others “get the best of you.” And other sundry garbage. We condition kids (girls in particular) that all sorts of unhealthy relationship dynamics are normal and need to be accepted, and then we wonder why they put up with abusive and toxic relationships. It’s not okay, and it’s not fair.
I had a miserable time in middle school. I ended up scrapping the majority of my friends (and did it again in high school). Both my kids got bullied at their elementary school for years. My son toughed it out, ended up borderline depressed, had to be assessed for PTSD, and needed a year of therapy to be confident and happy again. My daughter has been socialized to mistrust teachers and peers. I chose to pull both of them, and it’s been the right choice.
I’m a fan of forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean forgetting, and it doesn’t mean everyone gets forgiven or gets a second chance. The line you’re asking about, where you get to stop having to forgive, is where you decide it is, where you’re comfortable. When you reach a point where you feel you can’t return to baseline, that you can’t go back to the dynamic you had (and I’m not talking about change alone, because change happens and isn’t all negative), that’s a good place to put your line. And it’s your choice. Like emotions and beliefs, this is yours.
You just put my main issue with some Steven Universe’ episodes into words with that last paragraph. Pushing the envelope, while good for eliciting feels, can make the return to status quo unsatisfying.
What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.
Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line
Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.
Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time
The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.
[…]
The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.
There was also a strike at one point where construction workers refused to continue until they were given sufficient “cosmetics.”
This was thought a highly strange thing until somebody deciphered the recipe for the “cosmetics” the workers were demanding and recreated it.
It was sunscreen. Sunscreen.
Making that the first recorded strike over occupational safety.
xanike made me ascend out of the physical realm and into an astral plane
Honka and Xanike are on opposite sides of the spelling spectrum
the answer to “how do you spell Hanukkah” is “with a different alphabet”
Gather round, my children, and let me tell you how to spell this pesky word.
I’ll start by what everybody agrees on in the spelling: the vowels. Everybody agrees that they go -a-u-a- (I’m using the dashes to denote possibly missing consonants for now).
You may have noticed the 2 different spellings of The Word in Hebrew above:
חֲנֻכָּה: the original word, in which the /u/ portrayed in
נֻ (/nu/) is a short one. BiblicalHebrew distinguished between long vowels, short vowels, and half-sized vowels. Due to Biblical Hebrew syllable-structure shenanigans, the /u/ is short.
חנוכה: the modern way of writing the word. The נו (/nu/) would have denoted a long vowel in Biblical Hebrew … but Modern Hebrew does not distinguish vowels by length.
The first /a/ (in
חֲ) used to denote a half-length vowel. Since vowel-length doesn’t mean anything anymore in Hebrew, both /a/ are equal.
Therefore, in Modern Hebrew,
חנוכה =
חֲנֻכָּה.
That covers the vowels. Next, the bits where everybody who knows even a bit of transliteration would agree on:
There’s only 1 /n/. That means it’s -anu-a-.
There are 2 /k/ after the /u/. That’s because the Hebrew is
כָּ. You see the little dot in the middle? That used to mean that the sound used to be geminated. We don’t really observe gemination in Modern Hebrew anymore, except that in some letters (v, f, ch) the little dot (dagesh) denotes something very important.
In case you don’t want to double the K, because the language that you’re using, AKA English, that doubling means absolutely nothing, you can skip it.
This leaves us with -anuk(k)a- as a definite spelling so far.
This is where things get murky. Because you see … this is when the transliteration rules start falling apart by way of a long tradition of transliteration as well phonology rules across several languages in the duration of about 2000 years.
The beginning
ח: is it h, kh, or ch? Frankly, it could be any of these.
KH: This is the transliteration of a sound in Hebrew that no European language has or has had. Standard Modern Hebrew doesn’t have it anymore, but it’s still considered an acceptable, very common variance of the consonant ח. In linguistics, it’s written as [
ħ
], and in Semitic studies, it’s written as
ḥ (an h with a little dot below it). You can listen to it [here on Wikipedia]. This is the classical, old-fashioned, origins-faithful spelling … which looks very very wrong: Khanukka-. Weird, right? Still correct.
If you listened to the recording, you might think it sounds between an /h/ and an /x/ (as in ‘ch’ in the Scottish Gaelic word for lake ‘loch’), depending on which sound you preferred.
H is how the Greeks transliterated the letter ח in the Bible (such as in the second h in the word ‘Bethlehem’)
CH is how Standard Modern Hebrew pronounces via the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Yiddish.
So if you spell it with a KH, you’re an out-of-date traditionalist; if you spell it with an H, you’re faithful to the name of the holiday in your own language, and if you spell it with a CH you’re faithful to the Standard Modern Hebrew pronunciation (and probably have family who speaks either Hebrew or Yiddish).
Possible, correct options so far:
Khanuk(k)a-
Hanuk(k)a-
Chanuk(k)a-
Which leads us to the very last dash! Is there an H at the end? Should there be an H at the end?
This is where it gets the most complicated, because it requires some background in Hebrew noun-noun constructs.
The word ‘
חנוכה
‘ is an actual word in Hebrew that means ‘inauguration, dedication, consecration‘ according to morfix.co.il (the Hebrew-English-Hebrew web translator). Since Hebrew is a gendered language, The Word is a feminine noun. A lot of feminine nouns in Hebrew end with what can be directly transliterated as ‘-ah’, or, in Hebrew, a word-final ‘
ה
‘ (the name of this letter is either He or Hey, depending on how much official Hebrew education the person had).
This Hey is silent. It hanging around does not mean there’s an /h/ sound in the word. All it does is tell the user of the language that they should pay attention to this word, because in noun-noun constructs, the Hey becomes a Tav (or Taf). This was ‘inauguration of [noun]’ is חנוכת-בית (khanukkat-bayit in pefect translit; ‘bayit’ is ‘house’ or ‘home’).
So, it’s really up to you whether to add that last H or not.
What you should be careful of, probably, is mix-and-matching. Khanuka is just outright weird, because you’re mixing a bunch of translit styles – going from extreme translit mode (KH) to mild mode (one K, no H). Chanuka also looks strange, because the CH is also somewhat strict-ish translit.
This all means that these are all the correct spellings in English, from a Hebrew standpoint, from most-strict transliteration to the most permissive:
Khanukkah
Chanukkah
Hanukkah
Chanukka (h is silent, double-k still serves a phonetic purpose that I didn’t bother going much into)
Hanukah
Hanukka
Hanuka (as much as it makes me twitch)
You’re welcome, and may you all confuzzle everybody you come across!
Well, thinking about it, that’s probably because of learning through osmosis thanks to the fact that for most of people’s young lives (At least in the US) they heard it used as a snarl word against Democrats, and then later used as a term of disgust for centrists with the important part being that both uses of the term were largely against the same sorts of people, IE post-Clinton-type weenie Democrats.
So, even if it is out of step with the actual academic definition, its public definition is relatively consistent (IE, the Weenie Centrist Democrat Norm)and if y’all want to clarify, well, the burden’s on y’all’s back…
Monsters and Stuff 