Trutharchivist

Finally watched episode 6! And just in time for episode 7, I guess. huh. Anyway, spoilers:

"No, no..." Said Ben, trembling a little. "Just... Need a little time to come to terms with... Dying. Or partly dying." A breathed deeply. "Alright. I'm ready." He got up and went to the infirmary, took a bottle of the lemon juice, lay in a bed, inhaled and drunk it all in one gulp.

@Random Bystander Ben went to the class and listened to the lecture intently. He flinched at the mention of how long it would take to master Necromancy. When the professor mentioned that they'd have to die, he reacted with shocked silence while around him people screamed and demanded explanations. He... Never thought it was going that far. He breathed deeply at the end of the lecture, then got up shakily. He decided he won't go to the infirmary immediately.

Tesh! Been a while since I saw you on the forums. Hi! As a general rule, people who aren't socially awkward can be accepted as advisors for social situations (see in the first page of the thread). So, Rabbit, Calano's blasphemy is actually quite acceptable! Someone wants to try the acceptance to the cult ritual? IIRC, it includes hoods, book scented candles and maybe s'mores.

...Hmm? Reading addiction? No, I do not. hides a pike of books behind a sofa. Why are you asking? Ahem! Twas brillig and the slithy toves/did gyre and gimble in the wabe... (Though I might've misspelled a word or two.) TPBM likes to think in Humpty Dumpty logic. (Only tangentially related to the rest of my message!)

Really weird. Are you on mobile? If so, maybe try to install Discord. I have no idea what the problem is, and hardly have a way to solve it. Edit: my sister says it works. She has a Discord account, though, and has it installed on her phone. So I don't know. Is it just a webpage that says it's invalid, or a Discord page?

Huh. Weird. When I clicked my first invitation I think it offered me to create an account.

https://discord.gg/6tRcqh7nnf Hope it will be fine. This is an eternal link - for now, at least.

The Discord is more active than the thread, which, admittedly, isn't necessarily much. I'm unsure whether the link is still working, might've sent a temporary one. If it doesn't I can send another one.

This thread must be revived! Crimes so far: thread necromancy, double posting. I have, since the last time I posted here, read both Deep Secret and the Merlin Conspiracy - both great books, especially the first. I've also read Dark Lord of Derkholm, Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Fire and Hemlock, Time of the Ghost, the entire Worlds of Chrestomancy series and Hexwood. And a few others. Any other DWJ fan who's still active? Like @Robin Sedai, maybe? (Sorry for randomly tagging you.)

This isn't really the place for this discussion, but... No one ever in HMC went to the future. Wales is in a parallel universe. The going to the past part was a great payoff - to something the movie never mentioned, namely the song on which the curse was based, "tell me where all past years are". Other parts of the movie are quite possibly great all on their own.

To each his own, I guess. Diana Wynne Jones seems to be a generally underrated author, in my opinion. And maybe I should rewatch the movie.

Hmm... I watched a few (will maybe give a fuller list later) and want to mention: studio Ghibli makes good movies, but its adaptations are not too loyal to the source material, IMO. I've read Howl's Moving Castle, and I think I prefer it to the movie; I've read the Borrowers only after watching Arriety and I remember the movie better, though it's not too similar to the book. A great movie, though. Shame on you, Fadran, for not watching it earlier. I didn't watch Tales from Earthsea, but from what I understand, it has mostly a passing resemblance to the source material. Those aren't bad movies; I just kind of regret that I'll never get to see an actual loyal adaptation of any of those books. Though the author of Howl's Moving Castle might disagree with me on how loyal the movie was to the source material. I don't have a huge list, but my favourites are Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and the Secret World of Arriety. (Cue people who didn't know Arriety and Howl's Moving Castle were adaptations.)

Pretty good on some things, not as good on others. I can sometimes give random unimportant details from books, but can't recall the name of a random person I sometimes talk to. Why are there so many LDS people on the Shard? ("Because Brandon belongs to that church" isn't an acceptable answer. Tolkien was Catholic, yet I doubt that the greatest Tolkien nerds are too.)

You do realize that this is also the only Cosmere book that is obtainable for free legaly, right? Unless I somehow mixed things up.

Wait, you have one? That's amazing! I don't, though. And yes, I served in the Israel Defensive Forces. Just finished a month ago, actually. TPBM finds history interesting.

That's the thing: the issue was not that the ideas of enlightenment contradicted Judaism, it was that in order to access those ideas you had to jump over a cultural gap. Emancipation, in and of itself, doesn't have to damage religion... But when religion is what sets you apart from your neighbor, it's going to. Then there were well-intentioned extremists, though the well intentioned part depends on your point of view.

Funny you should say... Yes, I did. Also, can someone around here say that the education system in their country is perfect? Does such a thing even exist? TPBM isn't religious.

Hello, and welcome to my blog! I’m Trutharchivist, your rambler for today. And I want to talk about a specific point in the history of Judaism: the Age of Enlightenment onward, to this very day. I include about two or three centuries in the last period in the history of Judaism, because I think that some topics which rose at this era are still points of argument to this very day. At first, I thought to write on it all in one essay; then I realized that it’s going to be too much to talk about, so I decided to divide it to multiple essays, about Enlightenment, Haskalah and Reform, about the more inner religious world - Chassidus, Musar and Yeshivos, and about Zionism, Anti-Zionism and Secularity. This is the one about the direct effects of the Enlightenment on Judaism, starting from the Haskalah, with the next one probably being on how it led to Reform Judaism and different reactions to it. I can probably assume you all know what the Age of Enlightenment was about; but for my own sake, and for the sake of those who don’t know, I’ll try to explain. It was an era, around the 17th-18th century, It was for a couple of centuries that modern printing existed and knowledge was relatively cheaper, free for everyone. This allowed more people to learn, and as something of a side effect, it caused equal rights to be given to many minorities, including Jews. The thing is, up until then the Jews were generally secluded. They lived in neighborhoods of their own - ghettos, if you will; this is merely the Italian term for it, the negative associations came relatively late. They mostly spoke their own language - Yiddish or Hebrew - and worked in semi-autonomous communities, though they did have some contacts with the general population. The Enlightenment, and the Emancipation that came with it, changed that. Or, well, the possibility of emancipation. We’ll get to that. Anyway, some Jews, probably those with contacts in the government or the general non-Jewish population, joined the flow of knowledge and learned general science and philosophy. In time, those Jews became the Haskalah Movement - a movement bent on causing Jews to learn more about things outside the Torah. One such person, a prominent member of the Haskalah movement, was Moses Mandelssohn. Madelssohn was a German Jew, and a great philosopher at his time; he conversed with many gentile philosophers, won awards - surpassing Immanuel Kant for a prize, one time. He got special permission from the king to live in Berlin - and yes, most Jews didn't have this right this easily, sadly. He was also a G-d fearing Jew, well appreciated by at least some of the rabbis of his era. The thing is, though, in all that fame and renown and contacts with gentile philosophers... Well, he was somewhere in between, sometimes a complete outsider to the people he discussed with; a great example for this is the Lavater incident. Johann Kaspar Lavater was a Swiss Christian theologian who met Mandelssohn and discussed with him about his opinion on Jesus. Then, one day, he sent him a book of evidence on the truth of Christianity and asked him to either disprove the claims of the book or to convert to Christianity. Mandelssohn found himself trapped; if he'd prove Christianity wrong, it wouldn't do well with the people surrounding him, who were mostly Christians; if he'd refuse to dispute the book's claims, it will seem like Judaism has no answer; in short, Lavater has pushed him to the corner. His reply to that was a public letter, in which he says (among other things) that he thinks that one can appreciate the wisdom of another without trying to convert him. But a point has been made: it is hard for a Jew to both stay true to his religion and converse with Christian scholars. One more point I'd like to make, in relation to Mandelssohn, is what in the end became his legacy: a translation of the Torah (the Pentateuch) to the German language. He started on this project for various reasons: one, that Christian translations were bound to be Christian in nature, and unfitting for Jews as a result; two, that most Jews at the time studied a Yiddish translation of the Torah, which he saw as an unfitting language for its complexity; and three, to help Jews get closer to the general German culture by helping them learn German. Moses Mandelssohn was a great Jewish scholar and philosopher; he had a few things to say both about the Jewish Halacha and about philosophy, but he's remembered the most due to his translation. Remembered - and sometimes despised for it. You see, it worked; it did get Jews to learn German and be better integrated to the general culture. But it also had a negative impact on the religion. More on that later. The Haskalah movement, because of the aforementioned gap between Judaism and general society, adopted the motto "be a Jew at your home, and a person outside". All that was bound to cause a problem. Most of what I wrote so far is about Germany. This is because it was a huge center of enlightenment. Similar things happened in France, and to a lesser extent in easter Europe, in countries like Poland, Ukraine and Russia; in the Muslim countries - like North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Yemen - the effects were less immediate, due to the Enlightenment being a European movement. It reached them via colonialism and education centres funded by European Jews, instead, and that actually made the Jews the enlightened people of this area, thus avoiding the gap the European Maskilim fell into. The Yemen Jews who accepted the Haskalah ideas mostly just estranged themselves from Jewish mysticism; the Jewish community in Babbel - Iraq of today - first accepted a school funded by French Jews, only to find out about the negative impact it had religiously and stop sending their children there. The North African Jews received French citizenship far easier than the Muslims around them, and many of them went to live at France at some point, though I don't know how they reacted to the ideas of the Haskalah. That will be it for today, I'm afraid. I planned on talking about much more, but I delayed quite a lot in delivering in my promise. So this is the first chapter in the series, I don't know how many more I will post.

All right. I know, just two days to the next episode, but...

Well... If you delete the not very, then yes. Or, well, depending. But I do that. TPBM wishes songs from their favourite books were set to music.

Someone, at some point, must've been ready. I think. Or hope.