Hitching Post

[queer_scribbling]

It turns out that I didn't have nearly as many saved links as I thought I might for the end of 2023 and 2024.

~osteophage brought up a movie trailer, and I stumbled into a little MMA fighting history: [comment on how old wrestling and boxing are].

Click to read a copy of the comment.

Huh.

According to this:

The vehicle for the story is Oren's quest as a professional mixed martial artist. The sport's origins pre-date the seventh century B.C., and a subculture of this style of fighting—and the wagering that accompanied—was not uncommon in the region during that time.

There's other stuff about the writer/director duo wanting to explore a bit of Jesus' life before he officially started ministering or whatever, but going back to MMA. The actual named sport of MMA isn't that old, but MMA includes elements of wrestling and boxing which are both old enough that something kinda like MMA could have happened in whatever year this story is set.

Although contemporary MMA is only as old as the world's first website and phenomenally proliferated with the growth of the internet, its roots can be traced as far back as Pankration in the ancient Olympic Games. - International MMA Federation

From Mixed Martial Arts: A History from Ancient Fighting Sports to the UFC, chapter one touches on ancient fighting sports (including wrestling and boxing) and, like, these are practically older than dirt. Sumerians in Mesopotamia wrestled. There's artwork from 2000 BCE showing the sequence of an Egyptian wrestling match. "Northern Iran's traditional wrestling style, koshti gil mardi, was a precursor to modern-day MMA" (regarding the Persian empire). "The Greeks practice one of the earliest forms of MMA with pankration"; they separated out boxing, wrestling, and pankration as separate sports, which were added to the Olympics (possibly where the seventh century BCE statement above comes from). "Rome [...] assimilated the fighting sports of Greece and Etruria, to name a few, to produce a hyper-violent rendition of boxing, wrestling, and pankration."

There's a part of me that just was not expecting yet another Jesus' Life Movie to actually have something like this that might have happened. Sure, whatever boxing/wrestling/pankration thing of the time probably didn't look exactly like modern MMA, but without a lot of experience in these sports, I wouldn't be able to pick up on specifics.

~ A golem is not some evil, earth spirit thing that can feed on ghosts: [comment on how That Is Not Correct At All].

Click to read a copy of the comment.

Mercy senses the entrance of the golem, and the golem asks her to help him destroy the vampires. The golem's magic reminds her of Guayota, the volcano spirit, which leads Mercy to conclude that the golem is a manitou—an earth/nature spirit. From this she concludes that what the Rabbi Loew did to bind the golem amounted to enslaving a living being, which is an act of evil.

I may not know much about golems myself, but I don't trust this as an authorial choice here.

Insert that Ben Affleck Smoking meme.

The golem isn't an enslaved nature spirit, Patricia Briggs. Rabbi Loew was a philosopher and Talmudic scholar who was also known as Prague's chief rabbi. This doesn't mean he was the absolute most important rabbi ever (and no one should write anything negative about him), but c'mon, making a legend about him being able to protect his Jewish community from a pogrom via creating a golem into an evil act of enslavement isn't a good look. The golem shouldn't even be doing magic or be some sort of ghost.

So then the golem suggests something else. He wants to attack the seethe himself, and he doesn't have enough power for that, so he asks Mercy to feed him with ghosts, which means the ghosts would be destroyed.

[...] When the golem descends the stairs, he's intent on killing everybody, vampire and human alike. His newfound power, though, comes from the dead, and the dead are subject to Mercy's commands—so with a word, she sunders him to pieces.

Is the golem a ghost of a golem or a separate golem? Part one mentioned a ghost, which means that Mercy should have been able to control it from the beginning.

Going on a rampage. Killing everyone. At this point, Briggs should have just created a separate supernatural entity instead of calling this thing a golem.

~venatrixlunaris shared a post on a specific microlibrary preservation project and some thoughts on doing that outside of that project: [PF post].

~sennkestra shared some mushrooms and fungi: [PF post that's nice to look at].

~sgaren does woodworking, including: [post showing a box for a game being built].

~PC shared a piece of art I thought was nice from ~Lady_Viridis: [post with a starry snake idea going on].

~trivialknot and ~belowdesire brought up 'character is actually dangerous' affecting an oppression allegory: [PF post about Nimona].

I actually commented on that post as well, and you can click this section to read a copy of it.

Netflix currently has Nimona available for free on Youtube, supposedly for a week, so I finally watched it. [Note: This was dated to 21 February 2024.]

The way that the scene [about 49 or 50 minutes in] cuts from Nimona's dragon tail stopping the car up to her face, I'm not entirely sure that Nimona went out of her way to actually save the child. It seemed a bit more like the impact of accidentally stopping the car got her attention, she tried to use her Gloreth Friend child form to reassure this child, and she wasn't expecting the child to still hold out the sword at Gloreth Friend form.

On the one hand, I can see the parallel to Gloreth's rejection at trying to use a human form to try to reassure, but on the other hand, I feel like the use of the Kwispy dragon [mascot from the cereal commercial seen on the train earlier] is trying to soften the actual threat level of a larger-than-humans dragon suddenly appearing in the city. I think ~belowdesire had a point that introducing a plausible reason to fear Nimona brought in some dissonance on how 'we aren't supposed to fear her' lands.

Was the Institute's building so damaged and that many knights incapacitated without harming anyone? What if Ambrosius hadn't saved that random citizen from Nimona's Trauma-Black form stepping on her? Yeah, in the end there was damage from Todd panicking and flying the hover craft thing into a billboard and the Director wanted to use a canon on her own city, but it wasn't like there was a concrete rule that Nimona wasn't actually dangerous when shape-shifting outside of human forms.

While I didn't mind the movie and have no idea what the comic did differently, I kind of thought there might be a little more about shape-shifting in this movie's world. I thought there might be another shape-shifter outside the wall, or another one who's actually not kept out by the wall at all, or there might be some sort of 'can only turn into one relatively non-threatening animal' type of shape-shifter that still gets called a monster.

Comments

[queer_scribbling]

(This broad swath of time included a discussion related to linking to people's posts without their knowledge and/or permission. The original discussion was not about hitching posts, but I just didn't want to deal with certain users transferring the discussion onto a hitching post of mine, so I stopped holding on to links at all. Looking back, I wish I had kept more links during that time, but it is what it is.)

[barbaratp]

Obrigada por compartilhar os links, há algumas coisas interessantes que eu realmente adoraria ler.

[queer_scribbling]

No problem. I have more links saved from 2025 so it's taking a little longer to get the draft ready, and I'm hoping to get back to doing hitching posts more than once a year. I used to do them weekly back when I first started, but I haven't been posting and commenting as often lately as I did back then.

[barbaratp]

Às vezes eu também faço uns posts esporádicos como esse cheio de links de algo que gostei e queria compartilhar. Então entendo como tem hora que faz muito e do nada quase pouco.