View allAll Photos Tagged Rejection
The flamenco dancer is loosely inspired by MzF's original ...
... in this version she is angled away from the matelot to suggest rejection ...
The eternally creative June Yarham has created an image to accompany the story below: it is here
In this season of renewal, bask in the beauty of your own beliefs. Let your attitude bloom alongside nature's splendor this spring... 🌸💖
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Chapter : Rejection
She shrugged unapologetically...
" Rise above the clamor of both low and high levels, where low levels toss issues demanding attention they never earned. Our worth transcends their noise. Meanwhile, high levels bask in assumed magnetism, dictating how women should conform. We defy such limitations, radiating our own brilliance against them both unapologetically! "
_________ Scarlett Saphira
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A: Who the heck do you think you are?
S: (Raises an eyebrow, a slight smile playing on her lips) Clearly, someone who hasn't been captivated by your attempts. (Simply) A woman wholly unfazed by the desperate efforts or perhaps an admiration seeker? (And, frankly,) you're no exception, regardless of the beautiful throngs who foolishly chase after you or your inflated sense of self-importance.. 💕"
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" Not every woman aspires to safety or a perfect family, some prioritize experiences and fetishes. It's frustrating how many men appear impatient and lack resilience in the face of rejection. This contrast reminds her of her loyal subs - even after being denied 100-300 times, they remain happy and unwavering. They don't easily succumb to feelings of disappointment, crumbling, or fragility. They handle rejections much more gracefully and maturely than men on the other side.
In her profile, the declaration "☑ Keeping vanilla off" isn't merely a statement about avoiding vanilla men, but also about steering clear of vanilla's Thoughts and Values. She's too extraordinary, too fiercely authentic to entertain the lukewarm opinions and pedestrian ideals of the masses. So, if you can't match her intensity, if you can't rise above the ordinary, then don't waste her time with your tepid presence. She's a force to be reckoned with, and she's unapologetically blazing her own trail through a world that's far too dull for her vibrant spirit... 😉💕"
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► Unrigged mesh unisex necklace → Resizer script → Notecard with instructions
► HUD for color changing: → Metals 1: 4 colors → Metals 2: 4 colors → Metals 3: 4 colors → Gems 1: 6 colors → Gems 2: 6 colors → Gems 3: 6 colors
Stuck in a battling case of self retention,
exhausted from this world’s rejection,
from the lack of any source of affection.
All this lead to the arousal of a question:
Am I the cause of my own continuous tension?
I chose not to answer that for my own protection.
Ignoring the necessity of a personality resurrection,
Yet still thriving to quench my thirst for attention,
I lean to my sole friend, my so called distorted reflection.
© T.A
The selection of the caption in the second collaboration is made via Madame_Evil to that I deliver a Thank :)
the idea to add something to this photo came from a follower here on Flickr. It got me thinking and I came up with this.
Momma won't feed me anymore!!!!
I'm going to jump….and then she'll be sorry…you just wait and see!!!!
I'm thinking about it!! I'm going to have to think some more as these wings are likely to keep that from happening!!
Not the best setting with the top of the roof, but I liked the pose that this young Red-shouldered hawk was displaying!! It had actually been raining and he was really trying to dry out and get AWAY from that ol' pesky one-eyed Nikon creature!! A few more hawk shots before I move on!!
DSL_5787ula
Spider-Man is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, he first appeared in the anthology comic book Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) in the Silver Age of Comic Books. He has been featured in comic books, television shows, films, video games, novels, and plays.
Spider-Man's secret identity is Peter Benjamin Parker, a teenage high school student and an orphan raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in New York City after his parents Richard and Mary Parker died in a plane crash.
Lee and Ditko had the character deal with the struggles of adolescence and financial issues and gave him many supporting characters, such as Flash Thompson, J. Jonah Jameson, and Harry Osborn; romantic interests Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, and the Black Cat; and enemies such as the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and Venom.
In his origin story, Spider-Man gets his superhuman spider-powers and abilities after being bitten by a radioactive spider; these include superhuman strength, agility, reflexes, stamina, durability, coordination, and balance, clinging to surfaces and ceilings like a spider, and detecting danger with his precognition ability called "spider-sense".
He also builds wrist-mounted "web-shooter" devices that shoot artificial spider-webs of his own design, which are used both for fighting and for web-swinging across the city.
Peter Parker originally used his powers for his own personal gain, but after his Uncle Ben was killed by a thief that Peter did not stop, he began to use his powers to fight crime by becoming the superhero known as Spider-Man.
When Spider-Man first appeared in the early 1960s, teenagers in superhero comic books were usually relegated to the role of sidekick to the protagonist. The Spider-Man comic series broke ground by featuring Peter Parker, a high school student from Queens, New York, as Spider-Man's secret identity, whose "self-obsessions with rejection, inadequacy, and loneliness" were issues to which young readers could relate.
While Spider-Man had all the makings of a sidekick, unlike previous teen heroes such as Bucky and Robin, Spider-Man had no superhero mentor like Captain America and Batman; he had learned the lesson for himself that "with great power comes great responsibility" — a line included in a text box in the final panel of the first Spider-Man's origin story but later retroactively attributed to the late Uncle Ben Parker.
Marvel has featured Spider-Man in several comic book series, the first and longest-lasting of which is The Amazing Spider-Man.
Over the years, the Peter Parker character developed from a shy, nerdy New York City high school student to a troubled but outgoing college student, to a married high school teacher to, in the late 2000s, a single freelance photographer. In the 2000s, he joins the Avengers.
Doctor Octopus also took on the identity for a story arc spanning 2012–2014, following a body swap plot in which Peter appears to die.
Marvel has also published comic books featuring alternate versions of Spider-Man, including Spider-Man 2099, which features the adventures of Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of the future; Ultimate Spider-Man, which features the adventures of a teenage Peter Parker in the alternate universe; and then Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, which depicts a teenager named Miles Morales who takes up the mantle of Spider-Man after Ultimate Peter Parker's apparent death.
Miles later became a superhero in his own right and was brought into mainstream continuity, where he sometimes works alongside Peter.
Spider-Man is one of the most popular and commercially successful superheroes. He has appeared in countless forms of media, including several animated TV series including the first original animated series Spider-Man with Paul Soles voicing Spider-Man, a live-action television series, syndicated newspaper comic strips, and multiple series of films. Spider-Man was first portrayed in live-action by Danny Seagren in Spidey Super Stories, a recurring skit on The Electric Company from 1974 to 1977.
In live-action films, Spider-Man has been portrayed by actors Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, by Andrew Garfield in two films directed by Marc Webb, and in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Tom Holland. Reeve Carney starred originally as Spider-Man in the 2010 Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Spider-Man was also been voiced by Jake Johnson and Chris Pine in the animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Spider-Man has been well-received as a superhero and comic book character, and he is often ranked as one of the most popular and iconic comic book superheroes of all time and one of the most popular characters in all fiction.
Creation and Development
In 1962, with the success of the Fantastic Four, Marvel Comics editor and head writer Stan Lee was casting for a new superhero idea. He said the idea for Spider-Man arose from a surge in teenage demand for comic books and the desire to create a character with whom teens could identify.
As with Fantastic Four, Lee saw Spider-Man as an opportunity to "get out of his system" what he felt was missing in comic books.
In his autobiography, Lee cites the non-superhuman pulp magazine crime fighter the Spider as a great influence, and in a multitude of print and video interviews, Lee stated he was further inspired by seeing a spider climb up a wall—adding in his autobiography that he has told that story so often he has become unsure of whether or not this is true.
Besides the name, the Spider was wanted by both the law and the criminal underworld (a defining theme of Spider-Man's early years), and had through years of ceaseless struggle developed a "sixth sense" which warns him of danger, the apparent inspiration for Spider-Man's "spider-sense".
Although at the time teenage superheroes were usually given names ending with "boy", Lee says he chose "Spider-Man" because he wanted the character to age as the series progressed, and felt the name "Spider-Boy" would have made the character sound inferior to other superheroes. He also decided to insert a hyphen in the name, as he felt it looked too similar to Superman, another superhero with a red and blue costume that starts with an "S" and ends with "man" (although artist Steve Ditko intended the character to have an orange and purple costume).
At that time Lee had to get only the consent of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman for the character's approval. In a 1986 interview, Lee described in detail his arguments to overcome Goodman's objections.
Goodman eventually agreed to a Spider-Man tryout in what Lee, in numerous interviews, recalled as what would be the final issue of the science-fiction and supernatural anthology series Amazing Adult Fantasy, which was renamed Amazing Fantasy for that single issue, #15 (cover-dated August 1962, on sale June 5, 1962).
In particular, Lee stated that the fact that it had already been decided that Amazing Fantasy would be canceled after issue #15 was the only reason Goodman allowed him to use Spider-Man. While this was indeed the final issue, its editorial page anticipated the comic continuing and that "The Spiderman [sic] ... will appear every month in Amazing."
Regardless, Lee received Goodman's approval for the name Spider-Man and the "ordinary teen" concept and approached artist Jack Kirby.
As comics historian Greg Theakston recounts, Kirby told Lee about an unpublished character on which he had collaborated with Joe Simon in the 1950s, in which an orphaned boy living with an old couple finds a magic ring that granted him superhuman powers.
Lee and Kirby "immediately sat down for a story conference," Theakston writes, and Lee afterward directed Kirby to flesh out the character and draw some pages. Steve Ditko would be the inker. When Kirby showed Lee the first six pages, Lee recalled, "I hated the way he was doing it! Not that he did it badly—it just wasn't the character I wanted; it was too heroic". Lee turned to Ditko, who developed a visual style Lee found satisfactory. Ditko recalled:
One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked ... before I did any breakdowns. For example: A clinging power so he wouldn't have hard shoes or boots, a hidden wrist-shooter versus a web gun and holster, etc. ... I wasn't sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character's face but I did it because it hid an obviously boyish face. It would also add mystery to the character...
Although the interior artwork was by Ditko alone, Lee rejected Ditko's cover art and commissioned Kirby to pencil a cover that Ditko inked. As Lee explained in 2010, "I think I had Jack sketch out a cover for it because I always had a lot of confidence in Jack's covers."
In an early recollection of the character's creation, Ditko described his and Lee's contributions in a mail interview with Gary Martin published in Comic Fan #2 (Summer 1965): "Stan Lee thought the name up. I did costume, web gimmick on wrist & spider signal."
At the time, Ditko shared a Manhattan studio with noted fetish artist Eric Stanton, an art-school classmate who, in a 1988 interview with Theakston, recalled that although his contribution to Spider-Man was "almost nil", he and Ditko had "worked on storyboards together and I added a few ideas. But the whole thing was created by Steve on his own... I think I added the business about the webs coming out of his hands."
Ditko claimed in a rare interview with Jonathan Ross that the costume was initially envisioned with an orange and purple color scheme rather than the more famous red and blue.
Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962) first introduced the character. It was a gateway to commercial success for the superhero and inspired the launch of The Amazing Spider-Man comic book. Cover art by penciller Jack Kirby and inker Steve Ditko
Kirby later said the idea for Spider-Man had originated with Kirby and Joe Simon, who in the 1950s had developed a character called the Silver Spider for the Crestwood Publications comic Black Magic, who was subsequently not used.
Simon, in his 1990 autobiography, disputed Kirby's account, asserting that Black Magic was not a factor and that he (Simon) devised the name "Spider-Man" (later changed to "The Silver Spider"), while Kirby outlined the character's story and powers. Simon later elaborated that his and Kirby's character conception became the basis for Simon's Archie Comics superhero, the Fly.
Artist Steve Ditko stated that Lee liked the name Hawkman from DC Comics, and that "Spider-Man" was an outgrowth of that interest.
Simon concurred that Kirby had shown the original Spider-Man version to Lee, who liked the idea and assigned Kirby to draw sample pages of the new character but disliked the results—in Simon's description, "Captain America with cobwebs".
Neither Lee's nor Kirby's explanation explains why key story elements like the magic ring were dropped; Evanier states that the most plausible explanation for the sudden change was that Goodman, or one of his assistants, decided that Spider-Man, as drawn and envisioned by Kirby, was too similar to the Fly.
Author and Ditko scholar Blake Bell writes that it was Ditko who noted the similarities to the Fly. Ditko recalled that "Stan called Jack about the Fly", adding that "days later, Stan told me I would be penciling the story panel breakdowns from Stan's synopsis."
It was at this point that the nature of the strip changed. "Out went the magic ring, adult Spider-Man and whatever legend ideas that Spider-Man story would have contained."
Lee gave Ditko the premise of a teenager bitten by a spider and developing powers, a premise Ditko would expand upon.
Lee, while given credit for the initial idea, has acknowledged Ditko's role, stating, "If Steve wants to be called co-creator, I think he deserves [it]". He has further commented that Ditko's costume design was key to the character's success; since the costume completely covers Spider-Man's body, people of all races could visualize themselves inside the costume and thus more easily identify with the character.
Commercial Success
A few months after Spider-Man's introduction, publisher Goodman reviewed the sales figures for that issue and was shocked to find it was one of the nascent Marvel's highest-selling comics.
A solo ongoing series followed, beginning with The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (cover-dated March 1963). The title eventually became Marvel's top-selling series with the character swiftly becoming a cultural icon; a 1965 Esquire poll of college campuses found that college students ranked Spider-Man and fellow Marvel hero the Hulk alongside Bob Dylan and Che Guevara as their favorite revolutionary icons.
One interviewee selected Spider-Man because he was "beset by woes, money problems, and the question of existence. In short, he is one of us."
Following Ditko's departure after issue #38 (July 1966), John Romita Sr. replaced him as penciller and would draw the series for the next several years. In 1968, Romita would also draw the character's extra-length stories in the comics magazine The Spectacular Spider-Man, a proto-graphic novel designed to appeal to older readers. It only lasted for two issues, but it represented the first Spider-Man spin-off publication, aside from the original series' summer Annuals that began in 1964.
An early 1970s Spider-Man story ultimately led to the revision of the Comics Code. Previously, the Code forbade the depiction of the use of illegal drugs, even negatively.
However, in 1970, the Nixon administration's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked Stan Lee to publish an anti-drug message in one of Marvel's top-selling titles. Lee chose the top-selling The Amazing Spider-Man. Issues #96–98 (May–July 1971) feature a story arc depicting the negative effects of drug use.
In the story, Peter Parker's friend Harry Osborn becomes addicted to pills. When Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn, Harry's father), Spider-Man defeats him by revealing Harry's drug addiction. While the story had a clear anti-drug message, the Comics Code Authority refused to issue its seal of approval.
Marvel nevertheless published the three issues without the Comics Code Authority's approval or seal. The issues sold so well that the industry's self-censorship was undercut and the Code was subsequently revised.
In 1972, a second monthly ongoing series starring Spider-Man began: Marvel Team-Up, in which Spider-Man was paired with other superheroes and supervillains.
From that point on, there have generally been at least two ongoing Spider-Man series at any time. In 1976, his second solo series, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man began running parallel to the main series.
A third series featuring Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, launched in 1985 to replace Marvel Team-Up. The launch of a fourth monthly title in 1990, the "adjectiveless" Spider-Man (with the storyline "Torment"), written and drawn by popular artist Todd McFarlane, debuted with several different covers, all with the same interior content. The various versions combined sold over 3 million copies, an industry record at the time.
Several miniseries, one-shot issues, and loosely related comics have also been published, and Spider-Man makes frequent cameos and guest appearances in other comic book series. In 1996, The Sensational Spider-Man was created to replace Web of Spider-Man.
In 1998 writer-artist John Byrne revamped the origin of Spider-Man in the 13-issue limited series Spider-Man: Chapter One (Dec. 1998 – Oct. 1999), similar to Byrne's adding details and some revisions to Superman's origin in DC Comics' The Man of Steel.
At the same time, the original The Amazing Spider-Man was ended with issue #441 (Nov. 1998), and The Amazing Spider-Man was restarted with vol. 2, #1 (Jan. 1999). In 2003, Marvel reintroduced the original numbering for The Amazing Spider-Man and what would have been vol. 2, #59 became issue #500 (Dec. 2003).
When the primary series The Amazing Spider-Man reached issue #545 (Dec. 2007), Marvel dropped its spin-off ongoing series and instead began publishing The Amazing Spider-Man three times monthly, beginning with #546–548 (all January 2008).
The three times-monthly scheduling of The Amazing Spider-Man lasted until November 2010, when the comic book was increased from 22 pages to 30 pages each issue and published only twice a month, beginning with #648–649 (both November 2010).
The following year, Marvel launched Avenging Spider-Man as the first spin-off ongoing series in addition to the still-twice monthly The Amazing Spider-Man since the previous ones were canceled at the end of 2007.
The Amazing series temporarily ended with issue #700 in December 2012 and was replaced by The Superior Spider-Man, which had Doctor Octopus serve as the new Spider-Man, his mind having taken over Peter Parker's body. Superior was an enormous commercial success for Marvel, and ran for 31 issues before the real Peter Parker returned in a newly relaunched The Amazing Spider-Man #1 in April 2014.
Following the 2015 Secret Wars crossover event, a number of Spider-Man-related titles were either relaunched or created as part of the "All-New, All-Different Marvel" event. Among them, The Amazing Spider-Man was relaunched as well and primarily focuses on Peter Parker continuing to run Parker Industries and becoming a successful businessman who is operating worldwide.
Fictional character biography
Early years.
In Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, Midtown High School student Peter Benjamin Parker is a science-whiz orphan living with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May.
As depicted in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962), he is bitten by a radioactive spider (erroneously classified as an insect in the panel) at a science exhibit and "acquires the agility and proportionate strength of an arachnid".
Along with heightened athletic abilities, Parker gains the ability to adhere to walls and ceilings. Through his knack for science, he develops a gadget that lets him fire adhesive webbing of his own design through small, wrist-mounted barrels.
Initially seeking to capitalize on his new abilities, Parker dons a costume and, as "Spider-Man", becomes a novelty television star. However, "He blithely ignores the chance to stop a fleeing thief, [and] his indifference ironically catches up with him when the same criminal later robs and kills his Uncle Ben." Spider-Man tracks and subdues the killer and learns, in the story's next-to-last caption, "With great power there must also come—great responsibility!"
In The Amazing Spider-Man; issue #1 (March 1963), despite his superpowers, Peter struggles to help his widowed Aunt May pay the rent, is taunted by Flash, and as Spider-Man, he continues fighting crime and saving the city, but his heroic deeds engender the editorial wrath of newspaper publisher of the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, who holds a grudge against Spider-Man, continues making false statements about Spider-Man despite his heroism.
Peter gets hired as a freelance photographer by Mr. Jameson to take pictures of Spider-Man, but Jameson is unaware that Spider-Man is Peter Parker.
Spider-Man fights his enemies including superpowered and non-superpowered supervillains - his arch-enemy and nemesis called the Green Goblin, and then Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Chameleon, Lizard, Vulture, Kraven the Hunter, Electro, and Mysterio, defeating them one by one - but Peter finds juggling his personal life and costumed adventures difficult.
In time, Peter graduates from high school and enrolls at Empire State University (a fictional institution evoking the real-life Columbia University and New York University), where he meets roommate and best friend Harry Osborn and girlfriend Gwen Stacy, and Aunt May introduces him to Mary Jane Watson.
As Peter deals with Harry's drug problems, and Harry's father, Norman Osborn, is revealed to be the Green Goblin, Peter attempts to give up his costumed identity for a while.
Gwen Stacy's father, New York City Police detective Captain George Stacy, is accidentally killed during a battle between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus (issue #90, November 1970).
1970s
In issue #121 (June 1973), the Green Goblin throws Gwen Stacy from a tower of either the Brooklyn Bridge (as depicted in the art) or the George Washington Bridge (as given in the text). She dies during Spider-Man's rescue attempt, and Spider-Man swears revenge against his nemesis; a note on the letters page of issue #125 states: "It saddens us to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey's webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her."
The following issue, Spider-Man vengefully attacks and overpowers the Green Goblin who appears to have killed himself accidentally in the ensuing battle with Spider-Man.
Working through his grief, Peter eventually develops tentative feelings toward Mary Jane, and the two "become confidants rather than lovers".
A romantic relationship eventually develops, with Parker proposing to her in issue #182 (July 1978), and being turned down an issue later.
Parker went on to graduate from college in issue #185, and becomes involved with the shy Debra Whitman and the extroverted, flirtatious costumed thief Felicia Hardy, a.k.a. the Black Cat, whom he meets in issue #194 (July 1979).
1980s
The Amazing Spider-Man #252 (May 1984): The black costume debut that brought controversy to many fans. The suit was later revealed as an alien symbiote and was used in the creation of the villain Venom. Cover art by Ron Frenz and Klaus Janson
From 1984 to 1988, Spider-Man wore a black costume with a white spider design on his chest.
The new costume originated in the Secret Wars miniseries, on an alien planet where Spider-Man participates in a battle between Earth's major superheroes and supervillains.
He continues wearing the costume when he returns, starting in The Amazing Spider-Man #252. The change to a longstanding character's design met with controversy, "with many hardcore comics fans decrying it as tantamount to sacrilege. Spider-Man's traditional red and blue costume was iconic, they argued, on par with those of his D.C. rivals Superman and Batman."
The creators then revealed the costume was an alien symbiote which Spider-Man is able to reject after a difficult struggle, though the symbiote returns several times as Venom for revenge.
Parker proposes to Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man #290 (July 1987), and she accepts two issues later, with the wedding taking place in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987)—promoted with a real-life mock wedding using actors at Shea Stadium, with Stan Lee officiating, on June 5, 1987.
David Michelinie, who scripted based on a plot by editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, said in 2007, "I didn't think they actually should [have gotten] married. ... I had actually planned another version, one that wasn't used." Parker published a book of Spider-Man photographs called Webs and returned to his Empire State University graduate studies in biochemistry in #310 (Dec. 1988).
1990s
In the controversial 1990s storyline the "Clone Saga", a clone of Parker, created in 1970s comics by insane scientist Miles Warren, a.k.a. the Jackal, returns to New York City upon hearing of Aunt May's health worsening.
The clone had lived incognito as "Ben Reilly", but now assumes the superhero guise the Scarlet Spider and allies with Parker. To the surprise of both, new tests indicate "Reilly" is the original and "Parker" the clone.
Complicating matters, Watson announces in The Spectacular Spider-Man #220 (Jan. 1995) that she is pregnant with Parker's baby. Later, however, a resurrected Green Goblin (Norman Osborn) has Watson poisoned, causing premature labor and the death of her and Parker's unborn daughter.
The Green Goblin had switched the results of the clone test in an attempt to destroy Parker's life by making him believe himself to be the clone. Reilly is killed while saving Parker, in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75 (Dec. 1996), and his body immediately crumbles into dust, confirming Reilly was the clone.
In issue #97 (Nov. 1998) of the second series titled Peter Parker: Spider-Man, Parker learns his Aunt May was kidnapped by Norman Osborn and her apparent death in The Amazing Spider-Man #400 (April 1995) had been a hoax.
Shortly afterward, in The Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #13 (#454, Jan. 2000), Watson is apparently killed in an airplane explosion. She turns up alive and well in (vol. 2) #28 (#469, April 2001), but she and Peter become separated in the following issue.
2000s
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski began writing The Amazing Spider-Man, illustrated by John Romita Jr., beginning with (vol. 2) #30 (#471, June 2001).
Two issues later, Parker, now employed as a teacher at his old high school, meets the enigmatic Ezekiel, who possesses similar spider powers and suggests that Parker, having gained such abilities, might not have been a fluke—that Parker has a connection to a totemic spider spirit.
In (vol. 2) #37 (#478, Jan. 2002), May discovers her nephew Parker is Spider-Man, leading to a new openness in their relationship. Parker and Watson reconcile in (vol. 2) #50 (#491, April 2003).
He joins the superhero team the New Avengers in New Avengers #1–2. After their respective homes are destroyed by a deranged, superpowered former high-school classmate,
Parker, Watson, and May move into Stark Tower, and Parker begins working as Tony Stark's assistant while again freelancing for The Daily Bugle and continuing his teaching.
In the 12-part 2005 story arc "The Other", Parker undergoes a transformation that evolves his powers. In the comic Civil War #2 (June 2006), part of the company-wide crossover arc of that title, the U.S. government's Superhuman Registration Act leads Spider-Man to reveal his true identity publicly. A growing unease about the Registration Act prompts him to escape with May and Watson and join the anti-registration underground.
In issue #537 (Dec. 2006), May is critically wounded by a sniper hired by Wilson Fisk and enters into a coma. Parker, desperate to save her, exhausts all possibilities and makes a pact with the demon-lord Mephisto, who saves May's life in exchange for Parker and Watson agreeing to have their marriage and all memory of it disappear.
In this changed reality, Spider-Man's identity is secret once again, and in #545 (Jan. 2008), Watson returns and is cold toward him. The controversial storyline "One More Day" rolled back much of the fictional continuity at the behest of editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, who said, "Peter being single is an intrinsic part of the very foundation of the world of Spider-Man".
It caused unusual public friction between Quesada and writer Straczynski, who "told Joe that I was going to take my name off the last two issues of the [story] arc", but was talked out of doing so. At issue with Straczynski's climax to the arc, Quesada said, was ...that we didn't receive the story and methodology to the resolution that we were all expecting. What made that very problematic is that we had four writers and artists well underway on [the sequel arc] "Brand New Day" that were expecting and needed "One More Day" to end in the way that we had all agreed it would. ... The fact that we had to ask for the story to move back to its original intent understandably made Joe upset and caused some major delays and page increases in the series.
Also, the science that Joe was going to apply to the retcon of the marriage would have made over 30 years of Spider-Man books worthless, because they never would have had happened. ...[I]t would have reset way too many things outside of the Spider-Man titles. We just couldn't go there....
In this new continuity, designed to have very limited repercussions throughout the remainder of the Marvel Universe, Parker returns to work at the Daily Bugle, which has been renamed The DB under a new publisher. He soon switches to the alternative press paper The Front Line.
J. Jonah Jameson becomes the Mayor of New York City in issue #591 (June 2008). Jameson's estranged father, J. Jonah Jameson Sr., marries May in issue #600 (Sept. 2009).
During the "Secret Invasion" by shape-shifting extra-terrestrials, the Skrulls, Norman Osborn shoots and kills the Skrull queen Veranke. He leverages this widely publicized success, positioning himself as the new director of the S.H.I.E.L.D.-like paramilitary force H.A.M.M.E.R. to advance his agenda, while using his public image to start his own Dark Avengers. Norman himself leads the Dark Avengers as the Iron Patriot, a suit of armor fashioned by himself after Iron Man's armor with Captain America's colors.
Harry is approached by Norman with the offer of a job within the Dark Avengers. It is later revealed that it is a ruse to coerce Harry into taking the American Son armor, whom Norman had planned to kill, in order to increase public sympathy. When Harry has the option of killing Norman, Spider-Man says to decapitate him, since Norman's healing factor may repair a blow to the head. Spider-Man also cautions Harry that killing Norman will cause Harry to "become the son Norman always wanted". Harry instead backs down, and turns away from his father forever.
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
_____________________________
A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Peter Parker
Publisher: Marvel
First appearance: Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962)
Created by: Stan Lee (Writer)
Steve Ditko (Artist)
Spidey has been a regular on the Bijou Planks since the early days!
Battling his enemies in BP 2018 Day 48!
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/38927028021/
Driving his Spider-Mobile in BP 2018 Day 285!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/43454305420/]
Driving his Webrunner in BP 2018 Day 327!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/44384632375/
Driving his Arachnid Terrain Vehicle in BP 2019 Day 95!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/46818458374/
Captured by the management in BP 2019 Day 161b!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/48040569416/
Caught in traffic as part of 7 Days of Thanksgiving in BP 2019 Day 329!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/49124596596/
Building snowmen with Mary Jane in BP 2019 Day 356!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/49259323713/
Bobbling alongside Starlord in BP 2020 Day 341!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/50692100087/
Having lunch with JJJ in BP 2021 Day 74!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/51041305377/
A secret appearance in BP 2022 Day 293 as part of the 13 Daze of Halloween!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/52441502892/
In specials such as:
Alongside Tarzan annoying Dracula in the 2018 13 Daze of Halloween!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/44758870834/
Celebrating an angry Labor Day in 2018!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/29522109657/
Celebrating Labor Day at Boop's in 2019!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/48667376222/
Photographing the photographers in the 2021 New Years!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/50789392271/
Getting psychiatric help from Lucy!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/48794149141/
And in the Paprihaven story!
Swinging into his debut in Parpihaven 1086!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/33949289490/
Getting into a scrap with Queen Hippolyta in Paprihaven 1097!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/35824686582/
Which of course led to a short and painful encounter in Wonder Woman in Paprihaven 1104!
www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/35363878313/
Hanging out with April in Paprhaven 1232!
You'd think such a dedicated people like the Japanese would celebrate Labor Day with how hard they work in a traditional sense. But just like the rejection of tips, they see their work as more of an obligation to complete, a necessary duty, doing the work is the art of perfecting it, such inspiration.
This was taken at Rakushisha, a hut on the Arashiyama path. It was the home of a haiku poet by the name of Mukai Kyorai, and his work had his property declared as an important piece of heritage, rightfully so. Once in the grounds I saw this straw hat on the wall and saw it as a good subject, I don't know what the add-on dangling from it was for but it almost looks symbolic in a way.
I resent tourists who cannot assimilate to the surrounding area, and I understand why the Japanese are cracking down on tourism as a result. On your own soil what you do may be ok, but this isn't your country, you have to acclimate while not in your country. This means being quiet on subway cars like everyone else, not overrun spots, and especially in Kyoto, leave geishas alone! I've seen many clips of idiots just pestering them (and I don't even get the photographic appeal). I myself often enjoy acting belligerent here in my home country, but I did no such thing while in Japan and wish others would acknowledge these people are a lot more respectable.
There must have been issues in the nest this day as it took three attempts for this skink to finally be accepted. By this time the skink had earned quite a few frequent flyer points :)
(Peter)
What happens when you do not use the sigma clipping pixel rejection method during stacking but "max" signal? You get to see all the satellite trails and hot pixels (the red, green and blue dots) And passing Asteroid 747 Winchester as a bonus in this case! This is a 63 * 180 second stack from 15/16 november 2015, used to make the final HDR image. Esprit 100 f5.5 refractor with Optolong L filter and Canon 6Da. www.flickr.com/photos/kees-scherer/22491642293/
The parallel satellite trails to the right are clustered because they belong to a special class of satellites - the geosynchronous satellites.
If you wonder why the satellites leave trails even though they should appear stationary in the sky, the reason is that the telescope is moving (tracking) to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. And because the satellites are at a distance of 35800 km, the position in the sky in this image is also typical for a location at 39 degrees north lattitude (Portugal).
Knight Observatory Tomar.
In February 1922, after many rejections by established publishers, Sylvia Beach presented James Joyce with his first printed copy in Paris of what was to become the greatest Modernist novel of the 20th century. Ulysses is the story of 24 hours in the life of Leopold Bloom in the city of Dublin on June 16, 1904. Every year the 16th of June is celebrated around the world as Bloomsday.
Taking Homer's Odysseus as a structural device, and using stream of consciousness to convey Bloom's thoughts, James Joyce created a story that at once celebrated the Dublin he had become exiled from, as much as it scandalised its religious conservatism. Not surprisingly the novel has been banned for obscenity and described as a "most dangerous book". All that is part of the history of this book (that even Marilyn Monroe is pictured reading), but essentially it is a book about love. Above all it is a book about the love for life. The final words are the most positive in all of literature: "...and yes I said yes I will Yes."
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/the-seductions-of-u...
Joyce had already made his reputation as a writer with two largely autobiographical works, "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916), and the stories in "Dubliners" (1914). After Ulysses he worked for years on perhaps the most complex novel ever written, "Finnegans Wake" (1939), essentially a cyclic dream about the entirety of Western civilisation where the ending leads us back to the beginning - an idea that was being explored in poetry at the same time by T.S. Eliot in "Little Gidding":
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
The diagram I have created here shows some of the books in my collection (of course about Joyce the making of books has no end) and I have traced a lineage from Homer to Finnegans Wake. Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce is regarded still by many as the greatest literary biography ever written.
But if the exiled James Joyce created most of his revolutionary literary work in Europe, especially Paris, it is quite incredible that the current Irish Tricolour originated in France. It was first designed in 1848 by a group of French women and presented to symbolise the hoped for union of Catholics (green) and Protestants (orange) once the British colonial rule had come to an end. With the Easter uprising in 1916, Irish Nationalists adopted this flag as their standard, and it was a rallying point during the war of independence (1919-1921).
So 1922 is also a significant year for the Irish National Flag, as this is when the Irish Free State came into being. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ireland
2022 is indeed a centenary to remember for Irish literature and politics.
"100 Years of Ulysses I ARTE.tv Documentary"
After a rather quiet morning, I thought about my dream. It's odd to think that my dad might've actually cared about me.
As I walk down the stairs, I can't decide if that dream gave me hope or was just an awful nightmare at this point. But I feel like dad still has some input into my life, he has to, so I assume asking him if I can go to the party tonight is a start to knowing more about him. Yet, I don't know what answer to expect other than a no.
I'm fortunate that we live in the suburbs of Detroit. One of the only nicer places, I guess that without my dad being who he is, we could've been much worse. For some reason too, I'm happy he has a job, one that's not too far away from home and still in a nice part of Detroit.
Anyways, if his safety was ever in danger. I trust the head of security, Mr. Orr. He comes off a bit odd but his paranoia gives me a strange sense of relief.
As I make my way towards STAR Labs, I marvel at the building. I'm not an architecture nut in the slightest, but it is an amazing facility for sure.
At the door, the usual scanner greets me. I reach into my pockets for a pass but pull up nothing. I look through the glass and find Mr. Orr, trying to garner his attention, I tap on the glass door repeatedly.
Orr looks my way with a serious glance. I understand the mistake I've made and how seriously Orr takes this but he knows me well enough. Orr walks towards the door and presses a button, the doors swing open as he jokingly mocks me.
Orr - "Other pants, huh?"
Victor - "Hah, something like that!"
Orr looks at me with a death glare.
Orr - "Well next time, I won't be so nice."
Victor - "Understood, sir."
I quickly walk towards the elevator as Orr's glance follows me. Once I step into the elevator, our gazes lock for what seemed like forever. Something's wrong today.
As the elevator ascends, I think about what to say to my dad.
"Hey dad, do you think I could go to this party tonight. I mean, it's nothing huge. It's a good friend, you know Ron, right?"
My dialogue is nothing but shaky in my head. Why am I doing this? I already know the answer will be no. Maybe not.
A 'ding!' snaps me out of my trance. Here comes the big moment. The only thing keeping me from being light headed at this point is my ever growing heartbeat. Why am I so scared of him? He's Silas Stone, my dad, not the Big Bad Wolf!
My heart rate rushes past my steps. Everything just feels wonky, but I haven't been drinking, have I?
The labs are only easily described as Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. But with tech instead of toys and giddy scientists instead of kids. Nevertheless, they can all be the same thing here.
I know exactly where my dad's desk is so I can hopefully avoid any awkward interactions with these guys. As I advance past each station, the notion of everyone working on smaller parts of a bigger machine amazes me. Nobody in science class ever cared this much to collaborate like this.
With a quick turn to the right of the large lab, I see an elevated platform. My dad seems to be working on something else for some reason. My glance shifts downwards as I see a small robot fixing a circuit board under my dad's desk. That's got to be new.
I advance up the steps to my dad's desk and his attention doesn't draw from the work at hand. His desk is cluttered, as always. He seems to be working on some chemical, antidote? Newspapers cover the extension of his desk, they're a week old. One thing catches my glimpse, a red diamond? It's the thing Johnny Thunder went nuts for in the first few issues. I remember my dad reading me these. I always said I'd go on an adventure like Johnny Thunder-- But Detroit isn't quite the Amazon, is it?
With a newfound sense of confidence or the sheer warmth of nostalgia wanting me to ask my father to read me another issue of Johnny Thunder, I try to gain my dad's attention.
Victor - "Hey, dad, how's it going over he-"
Silas - "Victor, I'm busy."
Victor - "Alright, I'll cut the small talk. Ron's throwing a party and he's invited me. I just want to know if I can go."
Silas finally looks up from what he's been working on but he stares at me with a ruthless glance.
Silas - "Ron Evers? You mean the druggie, Ron Evers?"
Victor - "Dad, he's not a druggie."
Silas - "Ah, yes, how could I forget. You are the druggie. Can't seem to pull yourself away from that toxicity, can you?"
Victor - "Don't say that about my friend."
Silas - "Your friend? Hah! Victor, I can't wait for the day when you understand that a waste of air like him isn't a friend. You getting drunk on multiple occasions is one thing, but that 'friend' not even helping your ass up the steps is another. You are worrying your mother, she can't sleep and I can't even believe what torment you put her through with this."
Victor - "Then why don't you ever come home, dad? Maybe the reason mom is so worried is because you are never home!"
Silas - "Your mother and I made an agreement, I already have enough stress at work. I don't need you being my alternate workload. If you insist you're an adult by making these dumb choices, maybe you should own up to your mistakes like an adult."
Victor - "I'm leaving."
Silas - "Good, you need some fresh air to realize that the only bad guy here is Ron. If you weren't my son, I'd give up on you. I'd let you go to that party. But here we are."
I walk away after my dad mocks me. That dream was me being optimistic, my dad will never care about me. If he thinks I'm some thug, I'll show him I'm not. There're other parties anyways.
As I leave STAR Labs, Orr stares at me again. That dude really needs to learn to mind his own business.
I reflect upon what my dad told me while I walk home. Ron isn't a bad guy, just like I'm not. He just likes different things, and he's not dead yet. Not a friend... What a joke.
I am a middle child. I had one older brother and one younger brother. As I grew up I developed a classic case of "middle child syndrome". My older brother was the "golden" child and my younger brother was the "baby". All I got was leftovers and to get anyone's attention I always had to be the "pleaser". It's got a fancy name now called co-dependency.
When things go bad at work or in my personal life these feelings always rise to the surface and affect the way I handle situations. I always try to be the pleaser but sometimes people are abusive or indifferent to my feelings and at some point I just explode. That happened this morning with a client. I have a few things going on right now but he basically said he didn't care. I finally had enough and told him I didn't care either and that he could get out and don't come back. Boy that felt good but I'm still in a bad mood.
Our Daily Challenge - In the Mood
A couple of waterbucks (Kobus ellipsiprymnus), photographed exactly one year ago. The male tried to get lucky with the female, but she rejected him.
In East Africa, two types of waterbucks occur: The common waterbuck and the defassa waterbuck, distinguished only by the white pattern on the rump.
These, which are the defassa type (Kobus ellipsiprymnus defassa), have wide white patches on either side of the rump. (While the common type has a conspicuous white ring encircling a dark rump.)
(Ellipsevannbukk-par, av varianten defassavannbukk, in Norwegian)
My album of photos from Africa here.
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Ella dijo "No" ...Sin imaginar la infinita cadena de repercusiones para las que ese "NO" significaba "SI".
Partió, y al llegar a la esquina una brisa le voló un mechon de pelo sobre su rostro; lo corrio suavemente con su mano y cruzó la calle.
"I choose to love you in silence. Because in silence i find no rejection, and in silence no one owns you but me"-Unknown
No one can blame you
For walking away
Too much rejection
No love injection
Life can't be easy
It's not always well
Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl
'Cause it hurts like hell
But down in the underground
You'll find someone true
Down in the underground
A land serene
A crystal moon
Ah
It's only forever
Not long at all
Lost and lonely
That's underground Undergound--David Bowie
From deep in the archives before some self appointed redistributor of the wealth stole my my camera gear. I would still love to get my hands on that one.
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu is a Roman Catholic church located on the eastern slope of Mount Zion, just outside the Old (walled) City of Jerusalem.
The church takes its name from the Latin word "Gallicantu", meaning cock's-crow. This is in commemoration of Peter's triple rejection of Jesus "... before the cock crows twice." (Mark 14:30)
A Byzantine shrine dedicated to Peter's repentance was erected on this spot in 457 AD, but was destroyed by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in 1010. The chapel was rebuilt by Crusaders in 1102 and given its present name. After the fall of Jerusalem the church again fell into ruin and was not rebuilt until 1931. Today a golden rooster protrudes prominently from the sanctuary roof in honor of its biblical connection. This spot is also believed to be the location of the High Priest Caiaphas' palace.
The entrance to the church is from a parking lot located above the main level of the church. In the courtyard is a statue that depicts the events of the denial and include its main figures; the cock, the woman, and the Roman soldier. The inscription includes the biblical passage; But he denied him, saying "Woman, I know him not"! (Luke 22:57) The entrance itself is flanked by wrought iron doors covered with biblical bas reliefs. To the right are two Byzantine-era mosaics found during excavation, these were most likely part of the floor of the fifth-century shrine. The main sanctuary contains large, multi-colored mosaics portraying figures from the New Testament. Facing the entrance is a bound Jesus being questioned at Caiaphas' palace; on the right Jesus and the disciples are shown dining at the Last Supper; and on the left Peter, considered the first Pope, is pictured in ancient papal dress. Perhaps the most striking feature of the interior is the ceiling, which is dominated by a huge cross-shaped window designed in a variety of colors. The fourteen Stations of the Cross also line the walls and are marked with simple crosses.
Beneath the upper church is a chapel which incorporates stone from ancient grottos inside its walls. Down a hole in the center of the sanctuary one can see caves that may have been part of the Byzantine shrine. These walls are engraved with crosses left by fifth-century Christians. On an even lower level there is a succession of caves from the Second Temple period. Since tradition places the palace of Caiaphas on this site, many believe that Jesus may have been imprisoned in one of these underground crypts after his arrest, however, these underground caves were normal in many Roman-era homes, and often served as cellars, water cisterns, and baths. On the north side of the church is an ancient staircase that leads down towards the Kidron Valley. This may have been a passage from the upper city to the lower city during the first temple period. Many Christians believe that Jesus followed this path down to Gethsemane the night of his arrest.
The church belongs to the Assumptionist Fathers, a French order established in 1887 and named for Mary's Assumption into heaven. The Order has its headquarters in Jerusalem's monumental Hostelry of Our Lady of France, (Notre Dame de France), built in 1889.
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une photo qui fait partie de mon projet "Ephemeral" qui rend homage aux femmes qui ont plus de 50 ans. C'est une rejection de l'idée qui la jeunesse est la definition de la beauté, des photos dans âme, du regard masculin qui voit les corps des femmes come des objets à posséder sans rendre comte qu'il y a à une personne entière devant l'objectif. Les femmes plus agées, elles existent toujours. Elles méritent de 'être entendues et d'être vues.
À un niveau plus profond, ce projet parle de la transformation et la transcendence, de la vie et la mort, et si on regarde de plus près, on apperçoit quelque chose d'éternel.
Mille mercis au modèle qui m'a fait confiance et a posé pour moi cette fois.
______
This photo is a part of my project "Ephemeral," which is a celebration of maturity, of wisdom, of diverse beauty, and of growing older. It is about empowering women about increasing the presence and visibility of older women in the world of photography. We still exist. Our voices and our stories deserve to be heard. Our faces deserve to be seen. "Ephemeral" is rejection of the notion that youth is the definition of beauty, a rejection of soulless photography, a rejection of the male gaze which reduces women to objects, without taking into consideration that there is an entire, living breathing person in front of the camera lens.
But on a deepre level, this project is really about transformation and transcendence. It is about life and death and, perhaps, if we look closely enough, a glimpse of something eternal.
A special thank you to my neighbor who graciously posed for me here.
The art ‘establishment’ seems to lavish its attention on ‘artists’ that deal primarily in ideas, over ones that focus their attention on aesthetics. It does seem common practice to criticise art that doesn’t have an ‘obvious’ meaningful concept, you need only to visit any contemporary gallery to see this elitist philosophy in practice.
Now before I go on with this text, please don’t misinterpret my distain for this practice as total disregard. Unusual, dare I say new ‘ish’ ideas; certainly have the ability to inspire on a conceptual level. I’d even go so far as to say that I’ve been inspired into deeper thought by work that I personally wouldn’t be paid to hang on my wall. But puzzlingly there still does seem to be a tendency to give prominence, (rather than balance) to the beauty of the ‘idea’, over and above the aesthetics. In fact I'd go so far as to say that many of these conceptually weighted ideas have an almost venomous rejection of ‘beauty’.
Maybe the desire for intellectualisation of the critical art world born out of justification insecurity, is partly responsible? (The ‘starving artist’ is a secondary choice for many parents when advising their children into professions such as law, medicine or even accountancy.) let’s face it in our western culture, art is deemed to be icing on the capitalistic economic cake and like the icing on the main body, the conceptualists are desperately trying to dig a serious of defensible trenches underneath the sweetness.
It does however puzzle me who started this elitist modern art philosophy? Is it human nature to work against the mainstream, attempting to stand out, to be (pseudo) fresh? I do have to say that this pretentiousness, (or more accurately, my perception of it) does get my back up. “To be deserving of the prestigious title of art the piece must have an ingenious slightly pretentious concept tagged on” and this mantra is religiously unquestionably followed. (Healthy cynicism or too much exposure to immature poorly thought out art student ideas?) Anyway why should a small minority established media savvy critics dictate mainstream views of what makes good art. Funny, I’m not even sure ‘they’ know themselves where this philosophy its coming from, but supporting the highbrow trend, keeps everybody else thinking they must be right.
In my own artistic philosophy, arts purpose is to first satisfy my own creative aims. I’m lucky to be able to produce art for myself alone, without the commercial pressures I once faced, (working in computer games). Yes this is a very selfish and insular aim, but deeply rewarding, as I can be free to develop in any direction, not worrying too much if the audience is following me.
My second aim from the work I produce is to catalyse some kind of emotional response. Again principally for myself, but this is where it changes slightly. As my insecure ego’s desire to be acknowledged wants others to be moved by the images I produce, as a form of recognition. This is where I want to communicate, but as an emotional response not an intellectual concept. This communication is a subtle thing, not a grand in your face message, but simply to explore the feelings of wonder and beauty emerged in the slender of the natural world. I’m not trying to capture people’s minds but their hearts. (Sorry for sounding all soppy and romantic, but the feelings I try to capture are the ones I love to feel when looking at our beautiful world. The wonderment, the joy, and the deep recharging connections I experience when amerced in raw nature).
Before I get all idealistic, let me be congruent. You may have spotted my own defence mechanism woven in to these words, as I try to justify my own philosophical standing and fight the establishment’s definition of what makes ‘good’ art. Maybe I am deluded and what I do is not ‘art’ at all and I should just accept that and stop worrying? But for me at least, it does deal with subtle communication of feelings towards nature, for the purpose of attempting to explore and develop my own relationship with it. I want my work to championing the deep spiritual beauty that our natural world has and highlight my own desire to preserve and protect it. Granted, not gritty social realism, but I don’t what that, I don’t live in a city, and I hate concrete and graffiti. To stereotypically conceptualise what I do would seem to dilute what fundamental creative purpose, it would feel like tagging on concepts. Rather than exploring the beauty of the nature and the natural would, I would be manipulating it to serve my own ‘desire to be recognised as an artist’ ends... this internal struggle I face is a tough circle to square, as I do see the advantages of both, but I first and foremost want to explore and document my own perception of beauty based on the places I choose to represent. And if a concept that fits my notion of beauty materialises, then great, but it must fit my philosophy
My art is about escapism. I want to remove myself from the destructive selfish economical greed of man. I want to place myself in a safe place, and nature for me has a natural balance, it doesn’t take more than it needs, it provides balance in everything it does, ultimately it offers us as a species valuable lessons, if we are prepared to see them that is. Why can’t more people see past their own selfishness and recognise that we must work with it, as ultimately or environment is what sustains us, without it we cease to exist.
If I were to communicate a message it would be to highlight just how selfishly destructive we as humans are, I would need to show this in some way and introduce this in to my aesthetics. But herein lies the problem, I want to avoided, escape this. I want to champion the purity of the natural world; I want to transmit optimistic emotions, so that I personally can escape our selfish, capitalistic world. I’m sounding naive here, and I accept that I probably am to a degree, but my message is backed up by fact, not jump on the popular bandwagon tree huggers.
Bringing obvious concepts into what I do does seem very appealing, Christ I even went to my local river the other day, inspired by half writing this text and photographed a sewer pipe juxtaposed against the beautiful surroundings. But it felt like I was tagging on a form of humanisation for the sake of it. It felt very wrong! I personally want to seek out and champion the absence of humans and any of their destructive systems. So why would I want to destroy my escapism by introducing conceptual elements.... conceptually congruent with my views but paradoxically opposite to my escapist purposes...
Note: this was taken leaning over a fence, in the pouring rain with two kids in my guardianship trying to kill each other next to the river... as you can imagine I was somewhat stressed and had to work quickly. (o:
Dover (/ˈdoʊvər/; French: Douvres) is a town and major ferry port in the home county of Kent, in South East England. It faces France across the strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury; east of Kent's county town Maidstone; and north-east along the coastline from Dungeness and Hastings. The town is the administrative centre of the Dover District and home of the Dover Calais ferry through the Port of Dover. The surrounding chalk cliffs are known as the White Cliffs of Dover.
Its strategic position has been evident throughout its history: archaeological finds have revealed that the area has always been a focus for peoples entering and leaving Britain. The name of the town derives from the name of the river that flows through it, the River Dour. The town has been inhabited since the Stone Age according to archaeological finds, and Dover is one of only a few places in Britain – London, Edinburgh, and Cornwall being other examples – to have a corresponding name in the French language, Douvres.
There was a military barracks in Dover, which was closed in 2007.[3] Although many of the former ferry services have declined, services related to the Port of Dover provide a great deal of the town’s employment, as does tourism. The prospect of privatising the sale of the Port of Dover to create increased cash flow for the government was given a recent ironic twist due to the rejection of a possible bid from the town of Calais in France after opposition in Dover against any sale forced the government to withdraw the Port from the market. Local residents had clubbed together to propose buying it for the community, more than 12,000 people have bought a £10 share in the People's Port Trust.
Etymology
First recorded in its Latinised form of Portus Dubris, the name derives from the Brythonic word for waters (dwfr in Middle Welsh). The same element is present in the towns French (Douvres) and Modern Welsh (Dofr) forms, as well as the name of the river Dour and is evident in other English towns such as Wendover.
A 2013 study [4] suggested the name may come from an ancient word for 'double bank' referring to the shingle spit(s) that formed across the harbour entrance, for which a word dover is still used in the Isle of Wight. Subsequent name forms included Doverre;[5]
The current name was in use at least by the time of Shakespeare's King Lear (between 1603 and 1606), in which the town and its cliffs play a prominent role. The sight of the white cliffs when approaching Dover may have given the island of Britain its ancient name of Albion.
History
Dover’s history, because of its proximity to France, has always been of great strategic importance to Britain. Archaeological finds have shown that there were Stone Age people in the area; and that by the Bronze Age the maritime influence was already strong. Some Iron Age finds exist also, but the coming of the Romans made Dover part of their communications network. Like Lemanis (Lympne) and Rutupiae (Richborough) Dover was connected by road to Canterbury and Watling Street; and it became Portus Dubris, a fortified port. Forts were built above the port; lighthouses were constructed to guide passing ships; and one of the best-preserved Roman villas in Britain is here.
Dover figured largely in the Domesday Book as an important borough. It also served as a bastion against various attackers: notably the French during the Napoleonic Wars; and against Germany during the Second World War. It was the capital of the Cinque Ports during medieval times.[6]
Geography and climate
Dover is near the extreme south-east corner of Britain between Deal and Folkestone. At South Foreland, the nearest point to the continent, Cap Gris Nez near Calais is 34 kilometres (21 mi) away, across the Strait of Dover - because of this, the town is strongly associated with France[7]
The site of its original settlement lies in the valley of the River Dour, making it an ideal place for a port, sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly winds. This led to the silting up of the river mouth by the action of longshore drift; the town was then forced into making artificial breakwaters to keep the port in being. These breakwaters have been extended and adapted so that the port lies almost entirely on reclaimed land.
The higher land on either side of the valley – the Western Heights and the eastern high point on which Dover Castle stands – has been adapted to perform the function of protection against invaders. The town has gradually extended up the river valley, encompassing several villages in doing so. Little growth is possible along the coast, since the cliffs are on the sea’s edge. The railway, being tunnelled and embanked, skirts the foot of the cliffs.
Dover has an oceanic climate (Koppen classification Cfb) similar to the rest of the United Kingdom with mild temperatures year-round and a light amount of rainfall each month. The warmest recorded temperature was 31 °C (88 °F) and the coldest was −8 °C (18 °F), but the temperature is usually between 3 °C (37 °F) and 21.1 °C (70.0 °F). There is evidence that the sea is coldest in February; the warmest recorded temperature for February was only 13 °C (55 °F), compared with 16 °C (61 °F) in January.
Demography
In 1800, the year before Britain's first national census, Edward Hasted (1732–1812) reported that the town had a population of almost 10,000 people.[10]
At the 2001 census, the town of Dover had 28,156 inhabitants, while the population of the whole urban area of Dover, as calculated by the Office for National Statistics, was 39,078 inhabitants.[11]
With the expansion of Dover, many of the outlying ancient villages have been incorporated into the town. Originally the parishes of Dover St. Mary's and Dover St. James, since 1836 Buckland and Charlton have become part Dover, and Maxton (a hamlet to the west), River, Kearsney, Temple Ewell, and Whitfield, all to the north of the town centre, are within its conurbation.
Economy
Shipping
The Dover Harbour Board[12] is the responsible authority for the running of the Port of Dover. The English Channel, here at its narrowest point in the Straits of Dover, is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Ferries crossing between here and the Continent have to negotiate their way through the constant stream of shipping crossing their path. The Dover Strait Traffic Separation Scheme allots ships separate lanes when passing through the Strait. The Scheme is controlled by the Channel Navigation Information Service based at Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre Dover. MRCC Dover is also charged with co-ordination of civil maritime search and rescue within these waters.[13]
The Port of Dover is also used by cruise ships. The old Dover Marine railway station building houses one passenger terminal, together with a car park. A second, purpose built, terminal is located further out along the pier.[14]
The ferry lines using the port are (number of daily sailings in parentheses):
to Calais: P&O Ferries (25), DFDS Seaways (10).
to Dunkirk: DFDS Seaways (11).
These services have been cut in recent years:
P&O Ferries sailings to Boulogne (5 daily) were withdrawn in 1993 and Zeebrugge (4 daily) in 2002.
SNCF withdrew their three train ferry sailings on the opening of the Channel Tunnel.
Regie voor Maritiem Transport[15][16] moved their Ostend service of three sailings daily to Ramsgate in 1994; this route was operated by TransEuropa Ferries until April 2013.
Stena Line merged their 20 Calais sailings into the current P&O operation in 1998.
Hoverspeed ceased operations in 2005 and withdrew their 8 daily sailings.
SpeedFerries ceased operations in 2008 and withdrew their 5 daily sailings.
LD Lines ceased the Dover-Dieppe service on 29 June 2009 and Dover-Boulogne 5 September 2010.
SeaFrance ceased operations in 2012 of their Dover-Calais service which was their only service.
Transport
Dover’s main communications artery, the A2 road replicates two former routes, connecting the town with Canterbury. The Roman road was followed for centuries until, in the late 18th century, it became a toll road. Stagecoaches were operating: one description stated that the journey took all day to reach London, from 4am to being "in time for supper".[17]
The other main roads, travelling west and east, are the A20 to Folkestone and thence to London and the A258 through Deal to Sandwich.
The railway reached Dover from two directions: the South Eastern Railway's main line connected with Folkestone in 1844, and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened its line from Canterbury in 1861. Trains run from Dover Priory to London Charing Cross, London Victoria or London St Pancras International stations in London, and Ramsgate or Sandwich in Kent. Trains from Dover Priory are run by Southeastern (train operating company).
A tram system operated in the town from 1897 to 1936.
Dover has two long distance footpaths: the Saxon Shore Way and the North Downs Way. Two National Cycle Network routes begin their journey at the town.
The Port of Dover is a 20 minute walk from Dover Priory railway station.
The Dover to Dunkirk ferry route was originally operated by ferry operator Norfolkline. This company was later acquired by the pan European operator DFDS Seaways in July 2010.[18] The crossing time is approximately two hours.[19] Due to this route not being as well known as Dover to Calais, prices are often cheaper.[20] The location of Dunkirk is also more convenient for those travelling by road transport on to countries in Northern Europe including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and further afield.
Stagecoach in East Kent provide local bus services. Dover is on the Stagecoach Diamond network providing links to Canterbury and Deal. The Western Docks at the port of Dover are served from the Town Centre as well as Canterbury and Deal. Dover is the start of The Wave network to New Romney via Folkestone, Hythe and Dymchurch. There are services to Lydd via Lydd Airport, with one continuing from Lydd on to Hastings via Camber and Rye. There is a link to Sandwich and Ramsgate. Buses run from Dover to Canterbury via Aylesham.
National Express runs coaches from Dover to other towns in Kent including Canterbury, Folkestone, Ashford, Kent, Maidstone, Gillingham at Hempsted Valley shopping centre and Greenhithe at Bluewater Shopping Centre for Dartford to London including Bexleyheath, Eltham, Walworth, Canary Wharf, Elephant & Castle, The City (The City of London) and to Victoria Coach Station
All buses serve Pencester Road except route 68 to Maxton operated by Regent Coaches.[citation needed]
Retail
The town's main shopping streets are the High Street and Biggin Street. The Castleton Retail Park is to the north-west of the town centre.
There are plans to open a 6 screen Cineworld Cinema and leisure element ( Restaurants) at St James but not until 2017. It has been recently announced that Marks and Spencer will relocate to St James Development and that the current M&S general store will close. The new 16,000 sq feet store at St James will be an M&S Simply Food with café only and will not sell clothing or homeware unlike the current store which will shut in 2016. Simmonds Jeweller's will close their Dover branch after 40 years in January 2014.[citation needed] The M&S general store and Simmonds branch in nearby Deal will remain open.[citation needed]
Independent stores continue to grow in Dover,[citation needed] but the main town centre of Dover remains in decline compared to other towns like Deal (Telegraph High Street of the Year 2013), Canterbury, Westwood Cross and Ashford who continue to take trade away from Dover.[citation needed]
RNLI
The Dover lifeboat is a Severn class lifeboat based in the Western Docks.[21] Dover Lifeboat station is based at crosswall quay in Dover Harbour. There is a Severn-class lifeboat, which is the biggest in the fleet. It belongs to the RNLI which covers all of Great Britain. The lifeboat number is 17-09 and has a lot of emergencies in the Channel. The Severn class is designed to lay afloat. Built from fibre reinforced composite (FRC) the boat is lightweight yet very strong and is designed to right itself in the event of a capsize.
Education
There are nine secondary level schools, 16 primary schools and two schools for special education.
Non-selective secondary schools include Astor College, St Edmund's Catholic School and Dover Christ Church Academy. Dover Grammar School for Boys and Dover Grammar School for Girls are the main grammar schools for the town.
Astor College for the Arts federated with St Radigunds Primary School (then renamed White Cliffs Primary College for the Arts) to form the Dover Federation for the Arts (DFA). Subsequently, Barton Junior School and Shatterlocks Nursery and Infant School joined the DFA. Two schools have been rated by OFSTED as Outstanding and two Good with outstanding features. In 2014 the Dover Federation for the Arts was warned by the Department for Education about "unacceptably low standards of performance of pupils ".[22]
The Duke of York's Royal Military School, England's only military boarding school for children of service personnel (co-ed ages 11–18), is also located in Dover, next to the former site of Connaught Barracks.
Dover College, a public school was founded in 1871 by a group of local business men.[23]
Public services
Dover has one hospital, Buckland Hospital[24] built in 2015 and located just along from its previous location ( A former Victorian workhouse) on Coombe Valley Road. The town once had four hospitals, Buckland, Royal Victoria, Isolation and the Eye Hospitals located at various points across the town.
Local media
Television
Dover was the home to television studios and production offices of Southern Television Ltd, the company which operated the ITV franchise for South and South East England from 1958-1981. The studios were located on Russell Street and were home to programmes like 'Scene South East', 'Scene Midweek', 'Southern News', 'Farm Progress' and the nightly epilogue, 'Guideline'. The studios were operated by TVS in 1982 and home to 'Coast to Coast', however they closed a year later when the company moved their operations to the newly complete Television Centre in Maidstone.
Newspapers
Dover has two paid for newspapers, the Dover Express (published by Kent Regional News and Media) and the Dover Mercury (published by the KM Group). Free newspapers for the town include the Dover and Deal Extra, part of the KM Group; and yourdover, part of KOS Media.
Radio
Dover has one local commercial radio station, KMFM Shepway and White Cliffs Country, broadcasting to Dover on 106.8FM. The station was founded in Dover as Neptune Radio in September 1997 but moved to Folkestone in 2003 and was consequently rebranded after a takeover by the KM Group. Dover is also served by the county-wide stations Heart, Gold and BBC Radio Kent.
The Gateway Hospital Broadcasting Service, in Buckland Hospital radio, closed at the end of 2006. It was the oldest hospital radio station in East Kent being founded in 1968.[25]
Dover Community Radio (DCR) currently offer internet programming and podcasts on local events and organisations on their website. The online station of the same name launched on 30 July 2011 offering local programmes, music and news for Dover and district.[26]
Culture
There are three museums: the main Dover Museum,[27] the Dover Transport Museum[28] and the Roman Painted House.
International relations
Twin towns / Sister cities
Dover has three twin towns:
France Calais, France
United States Huber Heights, Ohio, United States
Croatia Split, Croatia
Sports
Dover Leisure Centre on Townwall Street, is operated by Your Leisure, a not for profit charitable trust,[32] which caters for sports and includes a swimming pool.
There are sports clubs, amongst them (Dover Athletic F.C.) who play in the conference Premier league; rugby; swimming; water polo and netball (Dover and District Netball League).[33]
Dover Rowing Club is the oldest coastal rowing club in Britain and has a rich history, at one time becoming the best club on the south coast. More information can be found on the history page of the club's website.[34]
One event which gets media attention is that of swimming the English Channel.[35]
Sea fishing, from the beach, pier or out at sea, is carried out here.[36] The so-called Dover sole (solea solea) is found all over European waters.
Places of interest
Blériot memorial: the outline of Louis Blériot's aircraft, marked with granite setts, at the exact spot where Blériot landed after the first cross-Channel flight, 1909[37]
Dover Castle
White Cliffs of Dover
Dover Western Heights
Dover Museum
Roman Painted House Museum
Dover Transport Museum
Samphire Hoe
Seafront promenade
South Foreland Lighthouse
Pines Garden
St Edmund's Chapel
Connaught Park
Kearsney Abbey
Russel Gardens & Bushy Ruff
St Mary's Church
St James' Church: preserved as a "tidy ruin"
Dover Priory Railway Station
Notable people[edit]
Further information: List of people from Dover
In literature
M.R. James used the Dover landmark, the Lord Warden Hotel, as a location in his short ghost story "Casting the Runes", first published in More Ghost Stories in 1911.
“Have you modeled before?”
“No. Well, I had to do this self portrait assignment for my studies, once. It didn't turn out well.”
Finding a willing stranger at this location was tough. In the busy center of the city people just wanted to grab something for lunch and quickly return to work.
Also, there were people sitting at restaurant tables right next to me, watching me - with growing amusement, it seemed - waiting, searching, asking and getting one rejection after the other. Not the most comfortable situation to be in.
Not giving up was rewarded by the privilege of capturing Yasmine's amazing smile!
For the first time in this project I got to use a tiny reflector that fits into my bag, so I can always carry it around. It made a huge difference to create a more even light on Yasmine's face, with the strong sunlight coming through the glass roof. (I rarely took my big reflector with me for this project and strangers sometimes seemed to feel uncomfortable with it, as it attracts a lot of attention)
Hopefully, Yasmine is at least as happy with her portrait as I am (and hopefully I got the spelling of your name right!).
This picture is # 84 in my 100 strangers project. To find out more about the project and to find photos of other photographers go to www.flickr.com/groups/100strangers/.
To discover my stranger set go here.
Suretta Lisker
INTJ, 63, Professional Extrovert, ASD, ADHD MentorAuthor has 14.9K answers and 28M answer views9y
Originally Answered: Do you agree with the statement that "what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself"? Why and why not?
I was brought up with that adage, but it was not correctly explained to me.
I was told that, "What you see wrong with others, is wrong about yourself." That's not entirely true, and it created a great deal of distress, because I wondered how bad I was since I saw other people as bad.
What the statement really means, is that there is a reason you see or feel things in others. For instance, if you see someone as unsafe, it means you know the difference between safety and danger. <-- that's the reflection.
If you see someone as insincere, it means the reflection is that you can sense insincerity because you are, in fact, sincere.
Had I understood this growing up, I would not have developed the paranoia I have now. I thought that the reason I didn't trust people was because I was untrustworthy, not because I knew the difference between the truth and a lie.
Research indicates a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others
Diana Yates, University of Illinois News Bureau
August 9, 2023
What is selfish behavior? Selfishness is defined as the tendency to act in one's own interests without regard for the impact on others. New research shows that a person’s own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions.
Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual’s own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.
The findings are reported in the journal Cognitive Science.
Previous research into this arena of human behavior suggested that social norms are the primary factor guiding a person’s decision-making in competitive scenarios, said Paul Bogdan, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos.
“The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical. If everyone around me is selfish, then I’m going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly,” Bogdan said. “But we show that your judgments of other people’s behavior really depend on how you behave yourself.”
To test the factors that guide expectations and drive behavior, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving the Ultimatum Game, which captures how an individual responds to offers from another player proposing to split a pot of money with them. The game requires the proposer to suggest how much each person receives of a $10 pot. The receiver must decide whether to agree to that split or reject it. If the offer is rejected, neither participant receives any money. Rejection can be seen as a form of punishment, even though it costs both players, the researchers said.
Some people tend to be generous – or at least fair – when offering another person a portion of a $10 reward. Others try to take as much of the money as they can, offering lopsided splits that benefit themselves at the expense of their competitors.
When on the receiving end of an offer, generous people tend to accept only generous offers, while selfish people are happy with selfish offers – even though the other player’s selfishness hurts them financially, the researchers found. Having the players switch between receiving and proposing offers allowed the team to explore the relationship between a player’s selfish or generous behavior and their evaluation of other players’ offers.
Further experiments showed that generous and selfish individuals tend to trust others who behave as they themselves do, regardless of the economic outcome.
Sanda Dolcos, Florin Dolcos, Paul Bodgan
In a new study, psychology professors Sanda Dolcos, left, and Florin Dolcos and PhD candidate Paul Bogdan, right, tracked how a person’s own behavior guides their expectations of others’ generosity or selfishness. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
“Participants will gain more money with a generous person. But a selfish person will prefer to play with someone who behaves as they do,” Bogdan said. “People really like others who are similar to themselves – to a shocking degree.”
The team also evaluated data from a previous cross-cultural study that found that individuals sometimes punish others for their selfishness or for their generosity in a collaborative game involving resource sharing. They found that, when deciding whether and how much to punish others, participants were guided primarily by their own behavior and less by the pressure to conform. People who behaved generously tended to punish selfishness and people who put their own welfare first were much more likely to punish generosity – even in situations where one approach was more common than the other.
Cultural norms toward self-interest or generosity do influence people, as other studies have found, Florin Dolcos said. “But we are not only observers. This study is showing that we filter information about the world through our own view.”
Those individuals whose behavior switched from generous to selfish over time were more likely to punish generosity and reward selfishness – but only after their own behavior changed, the team found.
This helps explain the phenomenon of social alignment, for better and for worse, Florin Dolcos said.
“You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people, and in order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior,” he said.
Ultimately, the study finds that a person’s own generous or selfish nature drives their behavior in many arenas of life, Sanda Dolcos said.
“This is not just about decision-making,” she said. “It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations.”
The paper “Social expectations are primarily rooted in reciprocity: An investigation of fairness, cooperation and trustworthiness” is available online. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13326
las.illinois.edu/news/2023-08-09/study-finds-people-expec...
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others begins by introducing three characters. There’s Allison, one of the stars of the MTV reality show My Super Sweet 16. (For her birthday parade, she had an entire block of Atlanta shut down, right in front of a hospital: “They can just go around,” she said.) Next is Tucker Max, the celebrity whose books and blog posts about “getting wasted and sportfucking” made him a hero among pickup artists and men’s rights activists. And then there’s Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo, Norway. After that he proceeded to a summer camp, where he shot and killed 69 more. He would later claim that the massacres were a publicity stunt to promote his 1,500-page manifesto deriding women and Muslims, and featuring pictures of him smiling in Knights Templar costumes.
If Breivik seems like an outlier—if the comparison with two relatively harmless figures strikes you as inappropriate—this is intentional. The millennial girl, the bad boyfriend and the murderer: these examples show the range of our obsession with narcissism, a condition we hear more and more about these days. As I write this, half the country is still reeling from the election of a self-absorbed millionaire (or billionaire, if you believe his boasts) whom numerous psychologists have publicly diagnosed as a narcissist, while an online petition calling for the Republican Party to #DiagnoseTrump has been signed by more than thirty-four thousand people.
●
Dombek begins her own discussion on more personal ground, in the depths of what she calls the “narcisphere.” This is her name for the metastasizing cluster of blogs, vlogs, quizzes and support communities where self-described victims gather to vent and to discuss the behaviors of their personal “narcs.” One website, the Web of Narcissism, quotes Dracula and employs gothic castle imagery; its members, who call themselves “keyboard faeries,” trade recommendations for media about sociopaths and vampires, enacting narc victimhood as a kind of underground subculture. There are many gurus and experts to choose from in the narcisphere, but their advice converges on one remedy. If you find yourself in a relationship with a narcissist—and you’ll know because they withhold care and attention, or do not seem to love you with the exclusivity you deserve—then the only solution is to cut your losses and get out. The narcissist can’t love you, and trying to change them is hopeless.
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What’s tempting about this “narciscript,” as Dombek calls it, is that it reduces a complicated situation (e.g. the average relationship) to a heavily weighted binary: Do I continue to extend an imprudent empathy, or do I go cold, the way the other person already has, in the interest of self-preservation? Clearly the latter course is the more “reasonable” one, but the moment I take it—go cold, withdraw, run—is the moment I can no longer safely distinguish my own behavior from the narcissist’s. “The script confirms itself,” Dombek writes, “and the diagnosis and the treatment confound the evidence, until it gets harder and harder” to tell whether the word “narcissism” describes anything at all. This is why, although The Selfishness of Others seems to promise an investigation of whether the “narcissism epidemic” (as it’s been called) is real, the book’s main interest derives from Dombek’s posing of another question, which may shed new light on our urge to #DiagnoseTrump: What’s at stake for us in believing it’s real?
Dombek spent the first part of her life in Philadelphia, where she was homeschooled by her parents, affable-sounding Jesus freaks she has described as “long-haired, corduroy-bell-bottom-wearing, antiauthoritarian biblical literalists.” When she was nine her father became sick with a host of terminal illnesses and the family relocated to a farm in Indiana, where they lived with a lot of animals: according to one (maybe exaggerated) list there were “not only about twenty cats and a dog but a half-dozen roving demented geese and two ornery pebble-shit-spewing goats and a couple dozen hysterical hens and a tyrannical rooster named Sam.” After high school Dombek attended Calvin College, a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She struggled to fit in with her classmates, who had all grown up in suburban neighborhoods.
As a freshman, Dombek became politically active in the fight against abortion—a practice she firmly believed, along with her parents and many of her friends, was not only murder but “a first step toward state-run infanticide and euthanasia.” At church, she and her friends watched films of months-old fetuses writhing in pain as machines snapped them apart piece by piece. Dombek would describe the anguish of those images in “The Two Cultures of Life,” her first article for n+1. The essay, which questions the left-right polarization of the abortion issue, contains many of the hallmarks of Dombek’s later work, including her attempt to bypass either-or distinctions by staging an argument on the page, and her insistence on directing empathy toward those viewed as incapable of returning it: the fetus, the animal, the murderer.
The year after she participated in an anti-abortion march in Washington, Dombek picked up smoking, started wearing flannel shirts and declared herself a Marxist. But her belief in the importance of empathizing across ideological and (sometimes) ontological boundaries seems to have persisted, along with her certainty that, as she writes in “Two Cultures,” “if it looks like violence, it is.” Studying literature at NYU after college, she emphasized persuading secular people to be “more empathetic toward fundamentalists, even those who conduct or support great atrocities.”
Her dissertation, “Shopping for the End of the World,” drew on the ideas of the French philosopher and literary theorist René Girard, who was interested in the ways that violence emerged within social groups. We tend to believe that violence happens when people don’t understand or empathize with one another, but Girard argued, first in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) and later in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), that violence springs just as much from our similarities. We think we desire things and people for their particular qualities but, according to Girard, this is an illusion; all desire is in fact an anticipatory mirroring of the desires of those closest to us. When two people reach for the same thing at once, as they inevitably will, not only are they hurled into conflict over that thing; they are also each confronted with disturbing evidence that their deepest self is little more than a bundle of imitations. Desperate to destroy the bearer of such news, they lash out. And because violence, too, is mimetic, it spreads through the community in a destructive, destabilizing feedback loop.
According to Girard, archaic societies developed a stopgap solution to these epidemics of violence: ritual sacrifice. (All archaic societies, apparently: Girard, who based his theory of sacrifice on readings of ancient myth rather than direct anthropological research, had a tendency to overgeneralize.) The group would select a scapegoat, and the selection itself was a significant decision. Ideally, this being—whether human or some other animal—would be enough like the sacrificers themselves that destroying or exiling it would satisfy the sacrificer’s need to banish what they hated. At the same time, the scapegoat needed to seem, or be made to seem, inhuman enough that everyone could safely assume its suffering didn’t count. This is how Dombek’s interest in empathy led her to the narcissist—the being our society often claims is too inhuman to truly suffer.
●
The first people labeled as narcissists, writes Dombek, were almost exclusively homosexuals and women—and for Freud, who popularized the label, almost all homosexuals and women were narcissists. Beautiful women, whom Freud compared to children and “certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us,” seemed to him particularly resistant to therapeutic practice. To his mind, the abnormal resistance of these women to transference—love, basically—appeared to be a form of regression. Normal, healthy people start their lives in a similar state of selfish inaccessibility, he reasoned, but eventually they develop the capacity for empathy and love. The narcissist, for Freud, was the person who maintained or returned to this self-sufficiency.
Dombek’s criticism of the Freudian interpretation of narcissism draws from another work by Girard. In “Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demystified by Proust,” Girard compared famous passages from Proust about desire with Freud’s vaguely moralistic theorizing about his desirable patients. The similarities he found were remarkable. Both writers ascribed to their subjects an inhuman autonomy, compared them with children and animals (specifically birds: large birds of prey in Freud’s case, seagulls in Proust’s) and marveled at their indifference to those around them. The difference was that Proust didn’t present his descriptions as true. “There is no such thing as a ‘real,’ objective narcissism for Proust,” Girard writes. It’s just less painful, when someone doesn’t feel about us like we feel about them, to believe that they’re incapable of feeling. What looks to us like someone else’s arrogance, according to this line of thinking, is actually our own inverted neediness.
Are these insights about scapegoating and the “narcissistic illusion” (as Girard called it) helpful for understanding today’s “narcissism epidemic”? The claims that narcissism is becoming pathological on the level of the whole culture go back to at least the late Seventies, when Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade” (1976) made the cover of New York and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) became a national best seller. Despite Lasch’s scattershot approach—sections of The Culture of Narcissism are devoted to confessional writing, radical feminism and the use of AstroTurf in sports stadiums—his account of “the new narcissist” remained firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory: specifically, Dombek notes, that of the analyst Otto Kernberg, who modified Freud’s theory by positing that the narcissist’s performance of self-sufficiency was part of a compensatory attempt to fill a vacuum of self-esteem.
Just as Lasch’s book was published, however, scientists began laying the tracks for the more clinical conception of the condition that prevails today. In 1979, two social psychologists developed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a diagnostic tool that reduced Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) (enshrined in the DSM as a mental illness the next year) to a set of eight traits. The NPI is a forced-choice questionnaire, which means it tests NPD by asking subjects to select from a pair of statements—for example, “Sometimes I tell good stories” or “Everybody likes to hear my stories”—which it then correlates with clinical traits. The resulting numerical score tells you next to nothing about the individual test-taker, not even whether that person is a narcissist (as the test’s creators readily admitted). But it makes it much easier to generalize across large sample sizes.
In The Narcissism Epidemic (2009), for instance, social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell reported that because millennials scored 30 percent higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than ever before, they were likely the most self-involved generation in history. But according to Dombek, the study the book was based on actually only revealed that a “slight majority of students in 2006 answered, on average, one or two more questions in the narcissistic direction than did those in 1986.” Another caveat is that the people surveyed in Twenge and Campbell’s study were not just American college students, but specifically freshman psychology students, participating for course credit—an extremely common form of institutional bias which leads Dombek to wonder how much of popularly reported psychology research “would actually be more accurately framed as an understanding of what young psychology students think about themselves.”
The problem is not just that studies using this paradigm mask an absence of real knowledge, although this is a problem. More importantly, by presenting narcissism as a diagnosis with a firm empirical basis, journalists quoting social psychologists often make it seem like a condition someone—or a whole group of someones—just has. For researchers, this sort of shorthand isn’t unusual—it’s more or less how most sciences operate. But such research isn’t usually being cited to support sweeping claims about entire generations, nor to explain the behavior of our bad boyfriends, murderers and politicians.
The fact that, with narcissism in particular, such labeling has become so common, speaks in favor of Dombek’s suggestion that the narcissist occupies a special place in our social imagination. For Twenge and Campbell, millennials play the role of arch-villains in a story about our culture’s refusal to grow up. More recently, many of us have focused our attention on a villain who looks very different from a millennial, though we call him the same name we call them. Which makes one wonder what, in this case, is the underlying sameness that we’re hoping to purge.
●
It’s likely no coincidence that one of the terms commentators often used to describe the political divides of the 2016 presidential campaign—“echo chamber”—brings us back to the Narcissus myth. In the classic version told by Ovid, Echo is a girl who, cursed by Hera, can only speak by repeating what others say. In the forest she falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus, but when she tries to embrace him he reacts fearfully, with angry words that she can only whisper back to him; then he abandons her in favor of his own reflection in a dark pool. In our modern rendition, the term “chamber” is supposed to suggest a technological component to the problem, but the basic story is the same. In it, the other side of whatever divide—political, ideological, demographic—is imagined as being trapped in the echo chamber of “fake news” and bias-confirming feeds, while “we” play the role of Echo. We want to communicate, but the only way our voices can carry across the divide is if we repeat exactly what the other side already believes.
Although the echo chamber presents itself as a tragic picture, Dombek can help us recognize its flattering features. We, the ones who bemoan being stuck in our chamber, desire earnestly to reach out to the other side. They, the narcissistic ones, refuse to leave their chamber and meet us halfway. Scapegoating has always been an effective political tactic, and it is one Trump used ably, if offensively, during his campaign. But if Dombek and Girard are right that narcissism functions today largely as a scapegoating technique—a way of justifying coldness, maybe even violence, toward the one we label the narcissist—then it is Trump himself who emerges as the ultimate scapegoat, precisely because of his refusal to even pretend to care what his adversaries think.
Other presidents, after they win, at least make a show of reaching out; our narcissist-in-chief just keeps insulting us. Apparently he’s seeing other people, or maybe he really does just look into his reflection on TV all day. In any case, a better pretext for our own unapologetic anger and hatred could hardly be imagined. Which is a relief, in a way: all that empathizing can be exhausting.
The problem is only that, as Girard believed, scapegoating could never truly end violence or hatred, because, in misidentifying its source, it leads us to think we’re outside the dynamics responsible for it. “The moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy—when you find him inhuman,” Dombek writes, “is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.” We say, this is how things are, fair or not. Either they burn, or we do.
For the last couple of years I've been looking with admiration in on the incredible 100 Strangers group page. The idea is to take pictures of one hundred strangers; introducing yourself, explaining the project, sharing a chat and some moments together. A mix of fears have held me back from getting involved myself; the uncomfortable thought of breaking the ice, the fear of rejection and most of all the fear that people would say "yes" and I'd fall short of giving them a portrait they'd be pleased with.
This last year, however, I've really enjoyed taking pictures of my daughter; JSH. I've got a good number of JSH portraits I'm happy with technically, and a keen desire to get better so I can keep pace as she grows. The first point diluted the fear of being seen as inept. Meanwhile, in striving for the second, the 100 Strangers project seemed to offer a way of learning hard lessons to get better at portraiture.
So, this is Michael, who was kind enough to share ten minutes with me whilst he waited for the 336 bus from Rickmansworth back to Watford. He'd been over to pick up some shopping for his elderly father.
I'd made the decision to go into London and start my 100 today, then procrastinated through the early morning. Having eventually parked up across the road from the station, I saw Michael at his bus stop as I crossed to catch my train. He was meditating on the afternoon with a characterful pose and pipe. I'd taken three steps past him, when I remembered gtpete63's advice in his interview on the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page; "...keep reminding yourself that your greatest regret will be not asking “that” interesting stranger you just saw walk by."
So, I stopped. I got my camera out on the other side of the shelter, I looked about the cluttered area for the best chance of some smooth background and fired off a few frames to get an exposure around about right. I fully expected a "no", yet knew if I didn't follow gtpete's advice would be haunting me the whole way into town. So, with a half-planned sentence of introduction I backtracked and said "hello".
We had a fantastic chat. I'd feared I'd be interupting Michael's quiet thoughts, but he was very interested in what I was up to. We chatted about that, and the area; he's a hugely knowledgable local, whilst I'm a releatively recent arrival to Rickmansworth. I learnt lots - for instance that a nearby pub that recently burned down, had previously burned on some four other occasions. When the bus arrived, it was too soon.
In terms of photography lessons learned, I'd likely highlight a couple. Firstly, when I met Michael he was wearing a black woollen hat, which he removed when we took our pictures together. I was too caught up in things to adjust accordingly, and so the sky is likely a little too bright. I wish I'd adjusted my suggested background in response to his removing the hat, but I'll hopefully remember next time. Secondly, never having taken a portrait of someone with glasses, I didn't realise how hard it is to focus correctly. I fear Michael's spectacles stole the focus from his eyes. Another learning for next time.
This is a slightly cropped version. Even though the B&W version was fantastic, I've kept it in colour; I find colour portraits harder to shoot and hope the challenge will increase the learning potential of the project.
Michael - thank you for sharing a portion of your afternoon with me, for your good humour and for offering me a start to this fabulous project.
I very much hope everyone is well and enjoying a fantastic 2013 so far.
Unfortunately only 3 of my friends came and although I was disappointed I guess the rejection is just part of this process I will have to get used to...
God blesses those who work of peace, for they will be called the children of God. but this also may come with persecution for standing by your faith. although there is a great reward that awaits for you in heaven for this, many can't bear the trouble and social rejection.
"Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me,
though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me
shall never die. Do you believe this?” ~ John 11 v. 25-26
This may not be significant to many or even worthless, but one day
when we give accounts to God, you may remember this you saw
in flickr. :) and you run away as this gets so boring .
God is knocking at everyone's hearts to acknowledge
Him once again in their lives. As the days are getting
darker and darker and no turning back .
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Prophetic events foretold of Jesus' birth, ministry and death on the cross have
been fulfilled. But big lies to distort everything and about salvation only through Christ
is still on proliferating in many doctrines , that includes the rejection of Jesus death.
If Jesus didn't die, then there would be no resurrection and Christianity is down the drains.
It's a faith with no use. Jesus' death was the blood sacrifice for everyone who accepts
God's offer of salvation. This has been spoken by the prophets of the Bible.
If you aren't even sure of your salvation today , how scary that is !!!!
You can't gamble your eternity and what the ifs . You can't listen to the
blind and proud at heart who reject Christ and trust in their own stinky
knowledge ... like that of Science , their PhD's only to reject God the
creator. God is love but He judges too, one day He will judge each one
with their own doings. If you haven't got the righteous attorney ,
and that is Jesus Christ who defends you with own blood sacrifice on
the cross you'll loose out big time.
Revelations of hell coming out these days of people given visions ,
even drifted into the realm of hell, and what a horrible place the saw ,
a place of unspeakable horror and torment .
If you're not saved in Christ , that's a destination for all to reject
God's only offer of salvation.
Oh there's Mary or what they call " Mama Mary" . My cousins are devout
Mary worshipers. Sad, sad , sad and very sad, because Mary can't saved.
She is not a mediator and will pray for you to Jesus', perfect doctrine of the devil
to deceive and damned as billions did through the ages.
My extended family wont believe either when told about worship of the Virgin Mary.
It's an abomination to God , a replacement of the glory only for God.
I felt sad for them , if only God can open their eyes.
However, God gave everyone a free will to choose.
We aren't made robots.
I felt so sad my aunt suddenly died in 2011, she was devout to Mary.
In her coffin, she was dressed like the Mary stuff and with a big picture of
the Virgin Mary glaring in her coffin . It's a horror because not one who
does this will ever return to God . God hates IDOLATRY ,
200 verses from the Bible said so.I hope on her last seconds of her life
she was able to repent and cry out to Jesus alone . But had she called
out Mary to her defence, it's sooo sad , as it's a pure false doctrine ,
I can't imagine the darkness she could be in and bound
and forever a lost soul . She's a good person but our goodness, even
how we think we are and have done so good in this life, without
Jesus Christ, we will loose everything.
Our righteousness are but filthy rags in the sight of God.
Jesus is our only way out
and
He is coming soon !!!
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Thank you everyone of your past views comments on my photo stream
I do appreciate them . If I haven't visited your photos it's not deliberate, ok.
I probably have missed out . I've got problems with my laptop, it has
gone very slow.Takes ages downloading pages and sometimes I just give up.
I know I have visited some of your streams that got me minutes to
download or suddenly froze and I just quit of the idea of commenting.
Though I have the joy to use on odd times my eldest daughter's laptop
if not in use and get the speed .
I'll be on holiday soon and I wont be posting anymore photos
for around two weeks, I'll be off flickr . Though if given any chance
I may pop in . Anyway , have a lovely flickr posting friends.
I'll surely catch up with your works when I come back.
It will be slowly but surely.
Take care and God bless :)
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Signs of the times
Tribulation-Now Radio, 14th July 2013 - Alien Human Hybrids Living
Tribulation-Now Radio, 19th June 2013 - Inside the Gates of Heaven with Oden
Sometimes when I hear revelations of heaven , I felt I can't wait to go home.
It's our home for those who believe and get out of this evil infested rock . This
has to be renewed soon when Jesus comes and no more corruptions, cheating, no
more crazy political correctness, and rejection of God. Everything will be put right
with the reign of Jesus Christ in real persona as King of Kings in the millennial Kingdom.
If your don't know what is this millennial Kingdom , it's because you
aren't reading your Bible. I recommend read the entire book of Revelations,
your pastors avoided talking about as many are pleasers of men not of God,
avoiding pure and full Biblical doctrine including the prophecies.
on the sunlit streets of palma de mallorca, a woman in white raises her hand in a gesture of dismissal, her face set in a mask of determination behind dark sunglasses. the stark contrast between the bright light and deep shadows captures the intensity of the moment, emphasizing the strong emotions at play. her body language speaks volumes, a candid snapshot of modern urban life where personal boundaries are asserted amidst the daily hustle.