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another instance of me running out of time taking photos before a forzathon live event
i bet this photo is similar to a lot of earlier better ones, I'm just thankful that no one who was doing donuts out of shot left tyre marks to ruin it
~Franklin P. Jones
Let me tell you, my patience was measured today. I deserve a medal or at least a gold star.
large: View On Black
The ham doing her thing a few years ago: www.flickr.com/photos/diyosa/131246453/
Professor X (Charles Francis Xavier) is a character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-writer Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in The X-Men #1 (September 1963). The character is depicted as the founder and occasional leader of the X-Men.
Xavier is a member of a subspecies of humans known as mutants, who are born with superhuman abilities. He is an exceptionally powerful telepath, who can read and control the minds of others. To both shelter and train mutants from around the world, he runs a private school in the X-Mansion in Salem Center, located in Westchester County, New York.Xavier also strives to serve a greater good by promoting peaceful coexistence and equality between humans and mutants in a world where zealous anti-mutant sentiment is widespread.
Throughout much of the character's history in comics, Xavier is a paraplegic using a standard or modified wheelchair. One of the world's most powerful mutant telepaths, Xavier is a scientific genius and a leading authority in genetics. He has devised Cerebro and other equipment to enhance psionic powers and detect and track people with the mutant gene.
Xavier's pacifist and assimilationist ideology and actions have often been contrasted with that of Magneto, a mutant villain with whom Xavier has a complicated relationship.
He also appears in almost all of the X-Men animated series and in many video games, although usually as a non-playable character. Patrick Stewart plays him in the 2000s X-Men film series, as well as providing his voice in some of the X-Men video games (including some not connected to the film series).
According to BusinessWeek, Charles Xavier is listed as one of the top ten most intelligent fictional characters in American comics.
Publication History
Creation and influences
Stan Lee has stated that the physical inspiration of Professor Xavier was from Academy Award-winning actor Yul Brynner.
Writer Scott Lobdell established Xavier's middle name to be "Francis" in Uncanny X-Men #328 (January 1996).
Character
Xavier's goals are to promote the peaceful affirmation of mutant rights, to mediate the co-existence of mutants and humans, to protect mutants from violent humans, and to protect society from antagonistic mutants, including his old friend, Magneto.
To achieve these aims, he founded Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters (later named the Xavier Institute) to teach mutants to explore and control their powers. Its first group of students was the original X-Men (Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, Angel, and Beast).
Xavier's students consider him a visionary and often refer to their mission as "Xavier's dream". He is highly regarded by others in the Marvel Universe, respected by various governments, and trusted by several other superhero teams, including the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.
However, he also has a manipulative streak which has resulted in several significant fallings-out with allies and students.
He often acts as a public advocate for mutant rights and is the authority most of the Marvel superhero community turns to for advice on mutants. Despite this, his status as a mutant himself and originator of the X-Men only became public during the 2001 story "E Is for Extinction".
In a number of comics, Xavier is shown to have a dark side, a part of himself that he struggles to suppress. Perhaps the most notable appearance of this character element is in the Onslaught storyline, in which the crossover event's antagonist is a physical manifestation of that dark side.
Also, Onslaught is created in the most violent act Xavier claims to have done: erasing the mind of Magneto.
In X-Men #106 (August 1977), the new X-Men fight images of the original team, which have been created by what Xavier says is his "evil self ... who would use his powers for personal gain and conquest", which he says he is normally able to keep in check.
In the 1984 four-part series titled The X-Men and the Micronauts, Xavier's dark desires manifest themselves as the Entity and threaten to destroy the Micronauts' universe.
In other instances, Xavier is shown to be secretive and manipulative.
During the Onslaught storyline, the X-Men find Xavier's files, the "Xavier Protocols", which detail how to kill many of the characters, including Xavier himself, should the need ever arise, such as if they went rogue.
Astonishing X-Men vol. 3, #12 (August 2005) reveals that when Xavier realizes that the Danger Room has become sentient, he keeps it trapped and experiments on it for years, an act that Cyclops calls "the oppression of a new life" and equates to humanity's treatment of mutants (however, X-Men Legacy #220 - 224 reveals that Xavier did not intend for the Danger Room to become sentient: it was an accident, and Xavier sought a way to free Danger, but was unable to find a way to accomplish this without deleting her sentience as well).
Fictional character biography
Charles Francis Xavier was born in New York City to the wealthy Dr. Brian Xavier, a well-respected nuclear scientist, and Sharon Xavier.
The family lives in a very grand mansion estate in Westchester County because of the riches his father's nuclear research has brought them.
He later grows up to attend Pembroke College at the University of Oxford, where he earns a Professorship in Genetics and other science fields, and goes on to live first in Oxford and then London for a number of years.
Crucially, as he enters late adolescence, Xavier inherits the mansion-house he was raised in, enabling him not only to continue to live in it, but also to turn it in to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, which he begins together with the first of the X-Men.
Brian, his father, dies in an accident when Xavier is still very young, and Brian's science partner Kurt Marko comforts and then marries the grieving Sharon. When Xavier's telepathic mutant powers emerge, he discovers Marko cares only about his mother's money.
After the wedding, Kurt moves in with the Xaviers, bringing with him his son Cain. Kurt quickly grows neglectful of Sharon, driving her to alcoholism, and abuses both Charles and Cain.
Cain takes out his frustrations and insecurities on his stepbrother. Charles uses his telepathic powers to read Cain's mind and explore the extent of his psychological damage, which only leads to Cain becoming more aggressive toward him and the young Xavier feeling Cain's pain firsthand.
Sharon dies soon after, and a fight erupts between Cain and Charles that causes some of Kurt's lab equipment to explode. Mortally wounded, Kurt drags the two children out before dying, and admits he was partly responsible for Brian's death.
With help from his superhuman powers and natural genius, Xavier becomes an excellent student and athlete, though he gives up the latter, believing his powers give him an unfair advantage.
Due to his powers, by the time he graduates from high school, Charles loses all of his hair. He graduates with honors at the age of 16 from Bard College.
In graduate studies, he receives Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology, and Anthropology with a two-year residence at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.
He also receives an M.D. in Psychiatry while spending several years in London. He is later appointed adjunct professor at Columbia University.
At graduate school, he meets a Scottish girl named Moira Kinross, a fellow genetics student with whom he falls in love. The two agree to get married, but soon, Xavier is drafted into the Korean War.
He carves himself a niche as a soldier in search and rescue missions alongside Shadowcat's father, Carmen Pryde, and witnesses Cain's transformation into Juggernaut when he touches a ruby with an inscription on it in an underground temple.
During the war, he receives a letter from Moira telling him that she is breaking up with him. He later discovers that Moira married her old boyfriend Joseph MacTaggert, who abuses her.
Deeply depressed when Moira broke off their engagement without explanation, Xavier began traveling around the world as an adventurer after leaving the army.
In Cairo, he meets a young girl named Ororo Munroe (later known as Storm), who is a pickpocket, and the Shadow King, a powerful mutant who is posing as Egyptian crime lord Amahl Farouk.
Xavier defeats the Shadow King, barely escaping with his life. This encounter leads to Xavier's decision to devote his life to protecting humanity from evil mutants and safeguarding innocent mutants from human oppression.
Xavier visits his friend Daniel Shomron, who runs a clinic for traumatized Holocaust victims in Haifa, Israel. There, he meets a man going by the name of Magnus (who would later become Magneto), a Holocaust survivor who works as a volunteer in the clinic, and Gabrielle Haller, a woman driven into a catatonic coma by the trauma she experienced.
Xavier uses his mental powers to break her out of her catatonia and the two fall in love. Xavier and Magneto become good friends, although neither immediately reveals to the other that he is a mutant.
The two hold lengthy debates hypothesizing what will happen if humanity is faced with a new super-powered race of humans. While Xavier is optimistic, Magneto's experiences in the Holocaust lead him to believe that humanity will ultimately oppress the new race of humans.
The two friends reveal their powers to each other when they fight Nazi Baron Wolfgang von Strucker and his Hydra agents, who kidnap Gabrielle because she knows the location of their secret cache of gold. Magneto attempts to kill Strucker but Xavier stops him.
Realizing that his and Xavier's views on mutant-human relations are incompatible, Magneto leaves with the gold. Charles stays in Israel for some time, but he and Gabrielle separate on good terms, neither knowing that she is pregnant with his son, who grows up to become the mutant Legion.
In a strange town near the Himalayas, Xavier encounters an alien calling himself Lucifer, the advance scout for an invasion by his race, and foils his plans. In retaliation, Lucifer drops a huge stone block on Xavier, crippling his legs.
After Lucifer leaves, a young woman named Sage hears Xavier's telepathic cries for help and rescues him, bringing him to safety, beginning a long alliance between the two.
In a hospital in India, he is brought to an American nurse, Amelia Voght, who looks after him and, as she sees to his recovery, they fall in love. When he is released from the hospital, the two moved into an apartment in Bombay together.
Amelia is troubled to find Charles studying mutation, as she is a mutant and unsettled by it, though she calms when he reveals himself to be a mutant as well.
They eventually move to the United States, living on Xavier's family estate. But the night Scott Summers moves into Xavier's mansion, Amelia leaves him, believing Charles would have changed his view and that mutants should lie low. Yet he is recruiting them to what she believes is a lost cause. Charles tries to force her to stay with his mental powers, but immediately ashamed by this, lets her go. She later becomes a disciple of Magneto.
Over the years, Charles makes a name for himself as geneticist and psychologist, apparently renowned enough that the Greys were referred to him when no other expert could help their catatonic daughter, Jean.
Xavier trains her in the use of her telekinesis, while inhibiting her telepathic abilities until she matures. Around this time, he also starts working with fellow mutation expert, Karl Lykos, as well as Moira MacTaggert again, who built a mutant research station on Muir Island.
Apparently, Charles had gotten over Moira in his travels to the Greek island of Kirinos. Xavier discusses his candidates for recruitment to his personal strike force, the X-Men, with Moira, including those he passes over, which are Kurt Wagner, Piotr Rasputin, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, and Ororo Munroe. Xavier also trains Tessa to spy on Sebastian Shaw.
Xavier founded Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, which provides a safe haven for mutants and teaches them to master their abilities. In addition, he seeks to foster mutant-human relations by providing his superhero team, the X-Men, as an example of mutants acting in good faith, as he told FBI agent Fred Duncan.
With his inherited fortune, he uses his ancestral mansion at 1407 Graymalkin Lane in Salem Center, Westchester County, New York as a base of operations with technologically advanced facilities, including the Danger Room - later, Fantomex mentions that Xavier is a billionaire with a net worth of $3.5 billion.
Presenting the image of a stern teacher, Xavier makes his students endure a rigorous training regime.
Xavier's first five students are Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Beast, and Marvel Girl who become the original X-Men. After he completes recruiting the original team of X-Men, he sends them into battle with Magneto.
Throughout most of his time with the team, Xavier uses his telepathic powers to keep in constant contact with his students and provides instructions and advice when needed. In addition, he uses a special machine called Cerebro, which enhances his ability to detect mutants and to allow the team to find new students in need of the school.
Among the obstacles Xavier faces is his old friend, Magneto, who has grown into an advocate of mutant superiority since their last encounter and who believes the only solution to mutant persecution is domination over humanity.
When anthropologist Bolivar Trask resurfaces the "mutant problem", Xavier counters him in a televised debate, however, he appears arrogant and Trask sends his mutant-hunting robot Sentinels to terrorize mutants. The X-Men dispatch them, but Trask sees the error in his ways too late as he is killed by his creations.
At one point, Xavier seemingly dies during the X-Men's battle with the sub-human Grotesk, but it is later revealed that Xavier arranged for a reformed former villain named Changeling to impersonate him while he went into hiding to plan a defense against an invasion by the extraterrestrial Z'Nox, imparting a portion of his telepathic abilities to the Changeling to complete the disguise.
When the X-Men are captured by the sentient island Krakoa, Xavier assembles a new team to rescue them, including Cyclops' and Havok's long-lost brother, Vulcan, along with Darwin, Petra, and Sway.
This new team, composed of students of Dr. Moira MacTaggert, was sent to rescue the original X-Men from Krakoa. However, after rescuing Cyclops, McTaggert's former students were seemingly killed. Upon Cyclops' return, Xavier removed Cyclops' memories of the death of Vulcan and his teammates; and began assembling yet another team of X-Men.
Xavier's subsequent rescue team consists of Banshee, Colossus, Sunfire, Nightcrawler, Storm, Wolverine, and Thunderbird. After the mission, the older team of X-Men, except for Cyclops, leave the school, believing they no longer belong there, and Xavier mentors the new X-Men.
Xavier forms a psychic bond across galaxies with Princess Lilandra from the Shi'ar Empire. When they finally meet, it is love at first sight. She implores the professor to stop her mad brother, Shi'ar Emperor D'Ken, and he instantly aids her by deploying his X-Men.
When Jean Grey returns from the Savage Land to tell him that all the X-Men are dead, he shuts down the school and travels with Lilandra to her kingdom, where she is crowned Empress and he is treated like a child or a trophy husband.
Xavier senses the changes taking place in Jean Grey, and returns to Earth to help and resume leadership of the X-Men.
Shortly thereafter he battles his pupil after she becomes Dark Phoenix and destroys a populated planet in the Shi'ar Empire. It hurts Xavier to be on the opposite side of Lilandra, but he has no other choice but to challenge the Shi'ar Imperial Guard to a duel over the fate of the Phoenix.
Xavier would have lost against the greater power of the Dark Phoenix, but thanks to the help Jean Grey gives him (fighting her Phoenix persona), Xavier emerges victorious; she later commits suicide to prevent herself from endangering more innocent lives.
When the X-Men fight members of the extraterrestrial race known as the Brood, Xavier is captured by them, and implanted with a Brood egg, which places Xavier under the Brood's control.
During this time, Xavier assembles a team of younger mutants called the New Mutants, secretly intended to be prime hosts for reproduction of the aliens. The X-Men discover this and return to free Xavier, but they are too late to prevent his body from being destroyed with a Brood Queen in its place; however, his soul remains intact.
The X-Men and Starjammers subdue this monstrous creature containing Xavier's essence, but the only way to restore him is to clone a new body using tissue samples he donated to the Starjammers and transfer his consciousness into the clone body.
This new body possesses functional legs, though the psychosomatic pain Xavier experienced after living so long as a paraplegic takes some time to subside. Subsequently, he even joins the X-Men in the field, but later decides not to continue this practice after realizing that his place is at the school, as the teacher of the New Mutants.
After taking a teaching position at Columbia University in Uncanny X-Men #192, Xavier is severely injured and left for dead as the victim of an attack.
Callisto and her Morlocks, a group of underground-dwelling mutants, get him to safety. One of the Morlocks partially restores Xavier's health, but Callisto warns Xavier that he is not fully healed and that he must spend more time recuperating and restrain himself from exerting his full strength or powers, or his health might fail again. Xavier hides his injuries from the others and resumes his life.
Charles meets with former lover Gabrielle Haller on Muir Isle and discovers that they had a child. The boy, David, has autism and dissociative identity disorder. Furthermore, he has vast psionic powers like his father. After helping him and his team to escape from David's mind, Xavier promises he will always be there for him.
A reformed Magneto is arrested and put on trial. Xavier attends the trial to defend his friend. Andrea and Andreas Strucker, the children of presumed dead Baron von Strucker, crash the courtroom to attack Magneto and Xavier. Xavier is seriously injured.
Dying, he asks a shocked Magneto to look after the X-Men for him. Lilandra, who has a psychic bond with Xavier, feels that he is in great danger and heads to Earth. There, she and Corsair take Xavier with them so Shi'ar advanced technology can heal him.
Xavier leaves Magneto in charge of the school, but some of the X-Men are unwilling to forgive their former enemy. Cyclops loses a duel for the leadership of the X-Men against Storm, then leaves them and joins the other four original X-Men to form a new team called X-Factor.
In the meantime, Charles becomes stranded in space with the Starjammers, but he is reunited with his lover Lilandra and relishes his carefree lifestyle.
He serves as a member of the Starjammers aboard the starship Starjammer, mobile in the Shi'ar Galaxy. He becomes consort to the Princess-Majestrix Lilandra while in exile, and when she later resumes her throne he takes up residence with her in the Imperial palace on the Shi'ar homeworld. Xavier joins Lilandra in her cause to overthrow her sister Deathbird, taking on the powers of Phoenix temporarily wherein he is named Bald Phoenix by Corsair, but sees that he must return to help the X-Men.
Xavier eventually becomes imprisoned by the Skrulls during their attempted invasion of the Shi'ar Empire. Xavier breaks free from imprisonment by Warskrull Prime, and is reunited with the X-Men.
A healthy Xavier returns from the Shi'ar Empire and is reunited with both the current and original X-Men teams, and resumes his leadership responsibilities of the united teams. In a battle with his old foe, the Shadow King, in the "Muir Island Saga", Xavier's spine is shattered, returning him to his former paraplegic state, while his son David is seemingly killed. In the following months, Xavier rebuilds the mansion, which previously was rebuilt with Shi'ar technology, and restructures the X-Men into two teams.
While holding a mutant rights speech, Xavier is nearly assassinated by Stryfe in the guise of Cable, being infected with a fatal techno-organic virus. For reasons of his own, the villain Apocalypse saves him. As a temporary side-effect, he gains full use of his legs and devotes his precious time to the youngest recruit on his team, Jubilee.
With all his students now highly trained adults, Professor Xavier renames his school the Xavier Institute For Higher Learning. Also, he assumes control of a private institution, the Massachusetts Academy, making it a new School for Gifted Youngsters. Another group of young mutants is trained here, Generation X, with Banshee and Emma Frost as headmaster and headmistress, respectively.
Professor X is for a time the unknowing host of the evil psionic entity Onslaught, the result of a previous battle with Magneto. In that battle, Magneto uses his powers to rip out the adamantium bonded to Wolverine's skeleton, and a furious Xavier wipes Magneto's mind, leaving him in a coma.
From the psychic trauma of Xavier using his powers so violently and the mixing of Magneto's and Xavier's repressed anger, Onslaught is born. Onslaught wreaks havoc, destroying much of Manhattan, until many of Marvel's superheroes—including the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk—destroy him.
Xavier is left without his telepathy and, overcome with guilt, leaves the X-Men and is incarcerated for his actions.
He later returns to the X-Men after Operation: Zero Tolerance, in which he is shocked by the cruel act of being turned over to the mutant-hating Bastion, following a clash with the sentient Cerebro and a team of impostor X-Men.
Xavier questions his dream again and Magneto shortly thereafter is confronted by the X-Men. After the battle, the UN concedes Genosha to Magnus, and Wolverine is angered by Xavier stopping him from getting his revenge on Magneto. Charles and Logan are later trapped in a dimension with different laws of physics, wherein they have to coordinate their moves together and, in the process, gain a better understanding of the other's views.
Apocalypse kidnaps the fabled "Twelve" special mutants (Xavier included) whose combined energies would grant him omnipotence. After Apocalypse's defeat with the help of Skrull mutants, Xavier goes with the young Skrulls known as Cadre K to train them and free them from their oppressors, and eventually returns to aid in Legacy Virus research.
Mystique and her Brotherhood start a deadly assault on Muir Isle by releasing an altered form of the Legacy Virus, all in retaliation against the election campaign of Robert Kelly, a seeming mutant-hater. Mystique blows up Moira MacTaggert's laboratory complex, fatally wounding her. Charles goes to the astral plane to meet with her and retrieve information on the cure to the Legacy Virus, but after gathering the information does not want to leave her alone. If not for Jean and Cable talking him down and pulling him back, the professor would have died with his first love, who states she has no regrets.
As Beast cures the Legacy Virus, many infected Genoshan mutants recover overnight, providing Magneto, the current ruler of Genosha, with an army to start the third World War. He demands Earth's governments accept him as their leader, and abducts and crucifies Xavier in Magda Square for all to see. A loyal member of Magneto's Acolytes, Amelia Voght, cannot stand to see her former lover punished in such a manner and sets him free. Jean Grey and rather untrained newcomers, as most of the team are elsewhere, distract Magneto and Wolverine guts him. Xavier is too late to intervene.
Xavier's evil twin Cassandra Nova, whom Xavier attempted to kill while they were both in their mother's womb, orders a group of rogue Sentinels to destroy the independent mutant nation of Genosha.
Magneto, who is Genosha's leader, appears to die along with the vast majority of the nation's inhabitants. Nova then takes over Xavier's body. Posing as Xavier, she reveals his mutation to the world, something he needed to do but did not want to sully his reputation over, before going into space and crippling the Shi'ar Empire. The X-Men restore Xavier, but Lilandra, believing that too much disaster has come from the Shi'ar's involvement with the X-Men, annuls her marriage to Xavier.
Lilandra previously had gone insane and tried to assassinate Charles on a trip to Mumbai. During this period, a mutant named Xorn joins the X-Men. Xorn uses his healing power to restore Xavier's use of his legs.
When the X-Men receive a distress call from a Scottish island, they are surprised to find Juggernaut with nowhere to go, as the island was destroyed by his further-mutated partner in crime, Black Tom Cassidy, who died.
Xavier reaches out to his stepbrother and offers him a place in his mansion, with Cain reluctantly accepting. The Juggernaut redeems himself over the next few weeks and joins the X-Men. Xavier finds out that Cain's father preferred him to his own flesh and blood and that they both thought they deserved the abuse they incurred by Kurt; Cain believed this because his father loved someone else's child more than him, and Charles felt guilty about getting in the way. That it is why neither of them stopped Kurt Marko with their powers.
Now outed as a mutant, Xavier makes speeches to the public about mutant tolerance. He also founds the X-Corporation, or X-Corp (not to be confused with the X-Corps), with offices all over the world. The purpose of the X-Corp is to watch over mutant rights and help mutants in need.
As a result of being out, the school no longer hides the fact that it is a school for mutants and it opens its doors for more mutant (and even human) students to come in.
A student named Quentin Quire and members of his gang start a riot at the Xavier Institute during an open house at the school. As a result, Quire and two other students are killed. Uncertain about his dream's validity, Xavier announces that he will step down as headmaster and be succeeded by Jean Grey.
Afterwards, Xorn reveals himself to be Magneto, having apparently not died in the Sentinel raid on Genosha. Magneto undoes the restoration of Xavier's ability to walk, kidnaps him, and destroys the X-Mansion (killing several of the students). Then Xorn/Magneto assaults New York, where Cyclops, Fantomex and a few students confront him. After the rest of the X-Men arrive, Xorn/Magneto kills Jean Grey with an electromagnetically induced stroke, and Wolverine decapitates him.
With Jean dead, Xavier leaves the school to Cyclops and Emma Frost, to bury Xorn/Magneto in Genosha. In a retcon of Grant Morrison's storyline, there Xavier meets the "real" Magneto, who mysteriously survived Cassandra Nova's assault. The two resolve their differences and attempt to restore their friendship, leading a team of mutants, the Genoshan Excalibur, to rebuild and restore order to the destroyed island nation.
At the mansion, the Danger Room (the X-Men's simulated reality training chamber) gains sentience, christens itself "Danger", assumes a humanoid form, and attacks the X-Men before leaving to kill Xavier. With Magneto's help, Xavier holds off Danger until the X-Men arrive. Danger flees, but not before revealing to Colossus that Xavier has known it to be sentient ever since he upgraded it.
Colossus is especially offended by this because he had been held captive and experimented upon by Danger's ally, Ord of the Breakworld. Ashamed, Xavier tries to explain to them that by the time he realized what was happening, he could see no other course. The disgusted X-Men leave.
House of M
In a prelude to House of M, Magneto's daughter Scarlet Witch has a mental breakdown and causes the death of several Avengers. Magneto brings her to Xavier and asks him to use his mental powers to help her.
Although aided by Doctor Strange and the appearance of Cassandra Nova, Xavier is unsuccessful. Xavier orders a meeting of the X-Men and Avengers to decide Wanda's fate.
Her brother Quicksilver, believing the heroes plan to kill her, speeds off to Genosha and convinces Wanda that she could right the wrongs she inflicted by using her powers to alter reality.
Quicksilver somehow forces a tearful Wanda to reveal to him her heart's desires of Magneto, the assembled New Avengers, and the X-Men, and then uses her powers to make them all real.
Thanks to Magneto, though, this re-imagined world is a place where a much more numerous mutant-kind are the dominant species, humans a disenfranchised and oppressed 'silent majority', and Magneto himself rules supreme. In this reality, the only proof that Charles Xavier ever existed is a secret monument in Magneto's palace garden, with the engraved message "He died so Genosha could live".
After mutant Layla Miller restores the memories of some of the X-Men and Avengers, they head to Genosha where they discover that Magneto has erected a memorial garden for Xavier commemorating his death. Emma is horrified until Cloak fades into the grave and discovers there is no body inside.
After a battle, Scarlet Witch again uses her powers to restore reality and, as a slight against her father, causes a large majority mutants to lose their powers, leaving the mutant race on the brink of extinction and causing the lost powers to become an energy mass, the Collective. With reality restored, Xavier is still missing and the X-Men are unable to detect him with Cerebro.
Deadly Genesis
Xavier returns when Cyclops' and Havok's long-lost brother, Vulcan, is revived by the Collective energy released as a result of the "House of M" incident. Vulcan then attacks the X-Men.
Xavier, now depowered but able to walk in the wake of "House of M", reveals that he had gathered and trained another team of X-Men (this one composed of students of Dr. Moira MacTaggert) sometime between the original team and the new X-Men team introduced in Giant Size X-Men #1.
This team included Vulcan as a member. Like the "Giant Size" X-Men team, McTaggert's former students were sent to rescue the original X-Men from Krakoa, the living island. However, after rescuing Cyclops, McTaggert's former students were seemingly killed. Upon Cyclops' return, Xavier removed Cyclops' memories of the death of Vulcan and his teammates and began assembling the "Giant Size" X-Men. Vulcan skirmishes with the X-Men and eventually flees into space.
In spite of Cyclops' feelings, Xavier forms a new team including Havok and Darwin, the lone other survivors of Moira's students. Xavier seeks to confront Vulcan before he can enact his vengeance against the Shi'ar empire, which killed Vulcan's mother.
While en route to the Shi'ar homeworld, Xavier is abducted and is later thrown into the M'Kraan Crystal by Vulcan. Darwin follows Xavier into the crystal and pulls Xavier out. This somehow restores Xavier's lost telepathy. With help from his longtime lover, Lilandra, Xavier escapes back to Earth with several of his X-Men.
Upon Xavier's return to Earth, as seen in the World War Hulk storyline, he begins to search for lost mutants such as Magneto. Charles' search for more mutants is interrupted by the Hulk, who was sent into extraterrestrial exile by the Illuminati, a group of powerful superbeings to which Xavier belongs.
Xavier had no part in (and did not know of) the Hulk exile decision, but Xavier admits to Hulk that he would have concurred to a temporary exile so Bruce Banner could be cured of transforming into the Hulk.
However, he also tells the Hulk he would not have agreed to permanent exile. Xavier attempts to surrender to the Hulk, but after viewing the X-Mansion's large graveyard dedicated to post-M-Day mutant deaths, The Hulk concludes the mutants have suffered enough and leaves the Mansion grounds on his own accord. While the X-Men tend to the wounded, Cyclops finally forgives Professor X.
Messiah Complex
While using Cerebra and talking to Beast during the Messiah Complex storyline, Charles detects a new mutant so powerful it fries Cerebra's system. He asks Cyclops to send out a team to find out about the mutant.
Once the team has come back empty handed, he argues with Scott for not telling him about the team he deployed to find former Acolytes. Scott tells him outright that he does not need him to run the X-Men anymore.
This upsets Charles and annoys him later on when he overhears Cyclops briefing X-Factor on the situation. He also approaches the New X-Men in an attempt to help them figure out a non-violent way to help against the Purifiers, but is quickly rebuked by Surge, who questions where he was when they were getting attacked the first time, and that they did not need to learn from him.
Charles questions Cyclops' decision to send X-Force to hunt down his own son, Cable, in front of the students. Cyclops then tells Xavier that he is a distraction that will keep getting in the way and that he must leave the mansion.
Xavier is contacted by Cable, who lost the mutant newborn to the traitorous actions of Bishop, who in turn lost the child to the Marauders, and tells him that he is the only one who can help Cable save the future.
In the final fight, Xavier is accidentally shot in the head by Bishop. Immediately afterward Xavier's body disappears and Cyclops declares that there are no more X-Men.
Professor Xavier survives Bishop's gunshot but falls into a coma. Xavier is kidnapped by Exodus, Tempo, and Karima Shapandar. Exodus tries to heal Xavier, Xavier mentally fights Exodus.
Exodus finally approaches Magneto, who is apparently still depowered, for help. Magneto and Karima Shapandar are able to stir Xavier's memories and coax him out of his coma, though Xavier remains slightly confused and partly amnesiac. Later, Exodus confronts Magneto about Joanna Cargill's injury (Magneto was forced to shoot a laser through her eyeball to prevent her attempted an assassination of Xavier).
Exodus nearly kills Magneto, and Xavier drags Exodus onto the Astral Plane, putting Xavier's own newly restored mind at stake. Xavier defeats Exodus after a harrowing psionic battle, and Exodus reveals the reason he abducted Xavier and to restore his mind: Exodus wants Xavier to lead the Acolytes and find the mutant messiah child (now under the guardianship of Cable) to indoctrinate the child into their cause.
Xavier refuses. Emma Frost's telepathy picks up on the psychic fight, and Emma informs Cyclops that Xavier is alive. Xavier parts company with Magneto and Karima to try to regain his lost memories by visiting people from his past.
The first person Charles visits is Carter Ryking, who had gone insane after losing his powers. Charles reads Carter's memories and discovers that when the two were children they were used as test subjects by Nathan Milbury of the Black Womb Project, with the approval of Charles' father, Doctor Brian Xavier.
Xavier makes the connection Milbury and X-Men villain, Mister Sinister, who has apparently long been manipulating Charles' life in addition to other X-Men. Afterwards, he discovers he has been targeted by assassins.
Charles eventually discovers Mister Sinister had set up Charles, Sebastian Shaw, Juggernaut, and Ryking (Hazard) as potential new hosts for Sinister's mind.
Bleeding slowly to death, he apparently gives in to Sinister becoming the new Mister Sinister. But in reality, Xavier is still battling Sinister for control of his body.
As Sebastian Shaw and Gambit destroy Sinister's Cronus Machine, the device that he used to transfer his consciousness into new hosts, Xavier drives Sinister out of his body permanently.
Xavier thanks Shaw and Gambit for their help and declares he must go and see Cyclops immediately. Professor X returns to the X-Mansion to find it destroyed after recent events.
Afterwards, Xavier leaves the ruins of the X-Mansion to secretly meet up Cyclops by psychically coercing his former student for the visit. Xavier explains to Cyclops about the recent events with Mr. Sinister and tries to explain to Cyclops how Sinister has been manipulating Scott's and Jean's lives since when they were children.
Xavier attempts to have Scott give him permission to scan Scott's mind for traces of Sinister's influences, but instead, Scott turns the tables on Xavier by revealing that he has secretly invited Emma Frost into their entire meeting and also into Xavier's mind.
While in his mind, Emma forces Xavier to relive each of his morally ambiguous decisions under altruistic pretenses. As the issue continues, Charles realizes his human arrogance and that while some of his decisions were morally wrong, he must move forward with his life and deal with the consequences.
Emma ends her incursion into Xavier's mind by reminding him of Moira MacTaggert's last words. As he reflects on Moira's words, Xavier gives Cyclops his blessing to lead the X-Men and leaves to find his own path.
Following his encounter with Wolverine (in the "Original Sin" Arc) Professor Xavier seeks out his step-brother, the unstoppable Juggernaut in an attempt to reform him. After a conversation about the meaning of the word "Juggernaut" and a review of Juggernaut and Xavier's shared history Xavier offers Cain an empty box as a gift.
Confused by Xavier's gift Cain attempts to kill the Professor bringing an entire sports bar down over their heads in the process. Later Cain battles the X-Men in his full Juggernaut armor and conquers the planet.
Just as everything appears to be under the Juggernaut's control Xavier reappears and informs him that everything that has just taken place except for Juggernaut destroying the bar took place in Cain's mind.
A baffled Cain demands to know how Xavier managed to overcome his psychically shielded helmet to which the Professor replies that he decided to visit Cain in his sleep.
Professor Xavier then informs him that he now understands Cain as a person and that he will not attempt to get in his way or reform him again. But Xavier also warns Cain that if he gets in the way of the Professor's path to redemption Xavier will stop him permanently. Following his encounter with Cain it has been revealed that Xavier is now searching for Rogue.
After his bruising encounter with Cyclops and Emma Frost, Professor X is forced to revisit the biggest challenge and the biggest failure of his career, Wolverine, when the feral mutant asks for Charles' help in freeing his son from the clutches of the Hellfire Club.
As the two search for Daken, Wolverine reveals that when he first joined the X-Men he attempted to assassinate Xavier due to some unknown programming. In response, the Professor broke Logan's mind and rebuilt it so that any and all programming he received was forgotten. Logan also revealed that the real reason Xavier asked him to join the X-Men was that Charles "needed a weapon".
Eventually Professor Xavier and Wolverine locate Sebastian Shaw's mansion and attack his minions, just as they are about to enter a bomb explodes from within catching them both off guard. From the wreckage emerges an angry Sebastian who immobilizes Wolverine.
Meanwhile, Miss Sinister knocks Daken unconscious and has him taken to the med lab in the mansion's basement. As Shaw prepares to deliver a killing blow to Xavier, Wolverine recovers and stops him telling Xavier to rescue his son. Professor Xavier locates the med lab and after a quick psychic battle with Miss Sinister enters Daken's fractured mind. While in Daken's mind Xavier discovers Romulus's psychic tampering and comments that Daken's mind is even more broken than Wolverine's was.
Before Xavier can heal Daken a psychic bomb explodes causing Xavier to become comatose and Daken to wake up. Miss Sinister arrives and attempts to manipulate Daken who reveals that the psychic bomb in his head restored his memories and stabs Miss Sinister in the chest.
Meanwhile, Wolverine defeats Shaw and enters the mansion to find Daken standing over an unconscious Xavier preparing to kill him. Wolverine tells Daken that he will not let him hurt Xavier and the two fight.
Overcome with guilt over what happened to Daken and Itsu, Wolverine allows himself to be beaten. Just as Daken appears to have won Xavier pulls both of them onto the astral plane revealing that the psychic bomb had little effect on him because his psyche was already shattered.
Xavier then explains to Wolverine and Daken that Romulus is solely responsible for Itsu's death and that he lied to Daken about everything because he wanted Wolverine to become his weapon. As the three converse, Daken returns to the physical plane and prevents Shaw from killing Xavier.
With the truth revealed Wolverine and Daken decide to kill Romulus. As the two depart Wolverine tells Xavier that he forgives him for all of the dark moments in their history. Wolverine acknowledges that Professor Xavier allowed him to become a hero. Wolverine then tells the Professor that he hopes he will one day be able to forgive him for choosing to kill Romulus.
Professor Xavier recruits Gambit to go with him to Australia to find and help Rogue who is currently staying at the X-Men's old base in the Outback; unaware Danger is using Rogue as a conduit for her revenge against him.
In a prelude to the "Secret Invasion" storyline, Professor X was at the meeting of the Illuminati when it came to the discussion about the Skrulls planning an invasion by taking out Earth's heroes and posing as them. He claims he was unable to distinguish that Black Bolt had been replaced by a Skrull, and his powers were tested quickly by the Black Bolt Skrull.
Professor X leaves after learning even he can no longer trust the others, yet appears to have severely restricted the number of people he informs of the forthcoming alien invasion, as the X-Men were not prepared for the Skrulls, at least at first.
Xavier was not seen again during the events of Secret Invasion, though his X-Men in San Francisco are successful at repelling the invaders there through the use of the modified Legacy Virus.
Dark Reign
During the Dark Reign storyline, Professor X convinces Exodus to disband the Acolytes. A H.A.M.M.E.R. helicopter arrives and from inside appears Norman Osborn, who wants to talk to him.
During the Dark Avengers' arrival in San Francisco to enforce martial law and squelch the anti-mutant riots occurring in the city, Xavier appears (back in his wheelchair) in the company of Norman Osborn and publicly denounces Cyclops' actions and urges him to turn himself in.
However, this Xavier was revealed to be Mystique who Osborn found to impersonate Xavier in public. The real Xavier is shown in prison on Alcatraz and slowly being stripped of his telepathic powers while in psionic contact with Beast, who was arrested earlier for his part in the anti-mutant riots.
It was also revealed by Emma Frost that she and Professor X are both Omega Class Telepaths when she manages to detect the real Professor X.
Professor X helps Emma Frost enter Sentry's mind. However, as Emma frees him of the Void's influence, a minute sliver of the entity itself remains in her mind. Xavier quickly tells her to remain in her diamond armor state to prevent the Void from gaining access to her psi-powers. Professor X is later seen with Emma Frost where Beast is recuperating.
After what happened at Utopia, Xavier has come to live on the risen Asteroid M, rechristened Utopia, along with the rest of the X-Men, X-Club, and mutant refugees and is also allowed to join the Utopia lead council (Cyclops, Storm, Namor, Iceman, Beast, Wolverine and Emma Frost).
While he no longer continues to openly question every move that Cyclops makes, he is still concerned about some of his leadership decisions. Xavier had wanted to return to the mainland to clear his name, but in the aftermath of Osborn declaring Utopia as a mutant detention area, Cyclops refused to let him leave, stating that it would be a tactical advantage to have him as an ace in the hole in case the need arose.
To that end, he has kept Xavier out of the field and instead relied on Emma Frost, Psylocke and the Stepford Cuckoos respectively for their own psionic talents.
While attending the funeral of Yuriko Takiguchi, Magneto arrives at Utopia, apparently under peaceful motives. Xavier does not believe it, and attacks Magneto telepathically, causing Cyclops to force him to stand down. He later apologizes to Magneto for acting out of his old passions from their complicated relationship, which Magneto accepts.
Next, Professor Xavier is seen on Utopia delivering a eulogy at Nightcrawler's funeral. Like the other X-Men, he is deeply saddened by Kurt's death and anxious about the arrival of Cable and Hope.
Xavier is seen using his powers to help his son Legion control his many personalities and battle the Nimrods.
Afterwards, Professor X is seen surveying the aftermath of the battle from a helicopter. As Hope descends to the ground and cradles Cable's lifeless arm, Xavier reflects on everything that has transpired and states that, while he feels that Hope has indeed come to save mutant kind and revive his dream, she is still only a young woman and will have a long and difficult journey before she can truly achieve her potential.
AvX
During the "Avengers vs. X-Men" storyline, the Phoenix Force is split into five pieces and bonded with Cyclops, Emma Frost, Namor, Colossus and Magik (who become known as the Phoenix Five).
Eventually, Cyclops and Frost come to possess the full Phoenix Force, and Professor X is instrumental in confronting them both, and dies in the ensuing battle with Cyclops.
The Phoenix Force is subsequently forced to abandon Cyclops as a host by the efforts of both Hope Summers and the Scarlet Witch.
Xavier's body is later stolen by the Red Skull's S-Men while the group also captures Rogue and Scarlet Witch. Xavier's brain is removed and fused to the brain of the Red Skull. After Rogue and Scarlet Witch snapped out of the fight they were in, they find the lobotomized body of Professor X.
Red Skull uses the new powers conferred upon him by Professor X's brain to provoke anti-mutant riots. His plans are foiled by the Avengers and the X-Men, and the Skull escapes.
Professor X's spirit is later seen in the Heaven dimension along with Nightcrawler's spirit at the time when Azazel invades Heaven.
During the AXIS storyline, a fragment of Professor X's psyche (which had escaped the scrubbing of his memories) still existed in Red Skull's mind preventing him from unleashing the full potential of Professor X's powers.
During a fight with the Stark Sentinels, Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch attempt to cast a spell to invert the axis of Red Skull's brain and bring out the fragment of Professor X to defeat Onslaught.
Doctor Strange was targeted and captured by the Sentinels before they could cast the spell. When Magneto arrived with his supervillain allies, Doctor Doom and Scarlet Witch attempted to cast the inversion spell again and Red Onslaught was knocked unconscious and reverted to his Red Skull form.
Although they did not know whether Professor X was now in control, the Avengers decided to be cautious and take Red Skull to Stark Tower.
It was later revealed that the spell had actually caused all the heroes and villains present to undergo a "moral inversion" rather than simply bringing out Professor X in the Skull, with the result that the Skull and other villains became heroic while the Avengers and X-Men present became villainous. Eventually, the inversion was undone.
After the Skull mounts a telepathic assault that nearly allows him to take control of the Avengers, he is defeated when Deadpool places Magneto's old helmet on Rogue, allowing her to knock out the Skull and take him to Beast.
Beast is subsequently able to perform brain surgery on the Skull, extracting the part of Xavier's brain that was grafted onto the villain's own brain without causing any apparent damage to the Skull. Rogers attempts to claim the fragment for himself, but Rogue flies up and incinerates the fragment with the aid of the Human Torch, the two expressing hope that Xavier will rest in peace.
Return
The astral form of Professor Xavier has since been revealed to be imprisoned in the Astral Plane after Shadow King somehow acquired it upon Professor X's death.
After what appeared to be years in the Astral Plane, Professor X is able to trick Shadow King into playing him in a 'game' that lures Rogue, Mystique and Fantomex onto the Astral Plane, while turning others into carriers for the Shadow King's 'contagious' psychic essence. With the Shadow King certain of his victory, he fails to realize that Xavier's apparent 'surrender' to his game was really just him biding his time until the Shadow King's influence was distracted long enough for him to drop his already-subtly-weakened guard long enough for Xavier to break his bonds, luring in the three aforementioned X-Men as their identities were already fundamentally malleable.
With the Shadow King defeated, Xavier is apparently returned to the real world in the body of Fantomex, Fantomex reasoning that nobody really knows who he is as an individual beyond his status as one of the X-Men whereas this act of sacrifice will ensure that he is remembered for a great deed.
Proteus has spent years trapped in a psionic hellscape of the Astral Plane, where The Shadow King reigned supreme, only to escape.
Part of the reason that he could was the escape of Charles Xavier (who now chooses to go by X, since he is now in a younger body after escaping), and now X leads the X-Men directly into an ambush, as Proteus has warped an entire village with his powers, leading to a mind-to-mind battle that leaves X on the receiving end of a psychic beatdown.
Proteus has started his garden and his seeds are planted all over the world. Psylocke is in command and has a plan which mainly consists of Archangel using metal and Mystique morphing into his mother.
Once they drain him, Rogue and Bishop convert his energy and release him back to the universe. Whilst this all went down Psylocke and X combined forces to burn out the seeds across the planet. As they are working on it they discover they are not enough to accomplish the task. X mentions the network of psychics the Shadow King was using and that Betsy who is in control should tap into it.
She agrees and does so yet unbeknownst to her X was possessed by the Shadow King who violently erupts from X's head.
Following X's apparent death after the Shadow King exploded from his skull, the psychic villain tears the X-Men apart until X literally pulls himself back together (a feat he later refuses to explain), and he and Psylocke team up to harness the power of all of Earth's psychics to destroy the Shadow King.
As Psylocke says she feels no psychic trace of him anywhere, X implants comforting post-hypnotic psychic suggestions in his allies and then erases their memories (including allowing Warren Worthington to switch between his identities at will). Only Psylocke's memory is left intact, with X telling her she will be the one to "keep him honest" while he embarks on a new mission.
Dawn of X
X has since made his presence known to his former students and reveals his new plan for all mutantkind. Now clad in a Cerebro-like helmet, Xavier has apparently abandoned his dream for peaceful coexistence, and had turned Krakoa into a sovereign nation state for mutants as well as use it to apparently heal the X-Men from their ordeals during the showdown against the forces of O.N.E.
He then leads the X-Men into planting in seeds in strategic locations around the world and Mars, which, overnight, grow into massive plantlike "Habitats". As it turns out, these "Habitats" – and the plants that grew them – are extensions of Krakoa.
Through the advancement of mutant technology combined with Krakoa's unique abilities as a living mutant island, Professor X and the X-Men have embassies around the world. Also through this combination of technology and mutant power, Xavier have developed three drugs that could change human life – a pill that extends human life by five years, an adaptable universal antibiotic, and a pill that cures "diseases of the mind, in humans".” In exchange for recognizing the sovereignty of Krakoa, Professor X will give these drugs to mankind, with mutants living in peace on the island.
Xavier and Magneto later meet with Raven Darkholm inside his sanctum. The two mutant leaders both greatly pleased with the success of her mission as she presents what they'ed petitioned her to steal. A mysterious USB tab containing sensitive information stolen from Damage Control, Mystique would inquire for her payment as she had met their demands.
However, Xavier mentions that he still had more demands that needed to be met as they were building their protected future of Homo Sapiens Superior, seeming to psychokinetically beckon the contents of her theft into his hands while Mystique questions how much more needed to be done for his ultimate pet project.
Xavier and Magneto reveal the contents of the USB drive to Cyclops, which are shown to be information on Orchis, an organization dedicated to responding to a large-scale mutant threat and the plans of a Mother Mold.
They believe that the creation of the Mother Mold will herald a new generation of Sentinels and along with it, Nimrod. They task Cyclops with assembling a team to destroy the Mother Mold station. Although the team (composed of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Husk, Mystique, Archangel, and Monet) is successfully, they are all killed in the process. X mourns them, vowing "No more."
Xavier is revealed to have upgraded Cerebro with the help of Forge, which is now able to copy and store the minds of mutants in a database.
After the Five (Hope Summers, Goldballs, Elixir, Proteus, and Tempus) are able to grow the bodies of deceased mutants, Xavier is able to copy the minds back in these empty shells. Thus, he is able to restore Cyclops's team, thanking them for what they did.
At the U.N., Xavier, Beast, and Emma celebrate with other ambassadors for the recognition of Krakoa as a sovereign nation. Xavier telepathically converses with Emma, revealing that he knows that she manipulated the Russian ambassador to abstain from the vote, before thanking her for her service.
Two days after the U.N. vote, Xavier, Magneto, and Wolverine are in Krakoa waiting besides several portals. While Wolverine expresses his misgivings about the upcoming event, Xavier and Magneto assure him all will be alright. Soon after, several villainous mutants, including Mister Sinister, Sebastian Shaw, Exodus, Selene and Apocalypse arrive through the portals.
Apocalypse in particular expresses satisfaction at arriving and Krakoa responds in the same way. Magneto and Xavier reveal that they have invited all mutants, even those who have fought against them in the past, to Krakoa, to form a society. The assembled villainous mutants agree to their terms, and Xavier shakes Apocalypse's hand, welcoming him and the others to their home."
While peace reigns on Krakoa, a mysterious team of assassins HALO drops into the island and assassinates Xavier, destroying his Cerebro helmet in the process.
The Quiet Council hides Xavier's death from the rest of the world, and through the activation of a Cerebro backup, and the efforts of The Five, Xavier is reborn once more.
Soon after, he partakes in a global conference alongside Magneto and Apocalypse, professing that he still loves humanity, whilst subtly warning them in regards to his previous assassination - and his knowledge of an ongoing assassination attempt at the forum itself, foiled by Cyclops and Gorgon.
Powers and Abilities
Professor X is a mutant who possesses vast telepathic powers, and is among the strongest and most powerful telepaths in the Marvel Universe. He is able to perceive the thoughts of others or project his own thoughts within a radius of approximately 250 miles (400 km).
Xavier's telepathy once covered the entire world; although following this, Magneto altered the Earth's electromagnetic field to restrict Xavier's telepathic range.
While not on Earth, Xavier's natural telepathic abilities have reached across space to make universal mental contact with multiple alien races.
With extreme effort, he can also greatly extend the range of his telepathy. He can learn foreign languages by reading the language centers of the brain of someone adept, and alternately "teach" languages to others in the same manner. Xavier once trained a new group of mutants mentally, subjectively making them experience months of training together, while only hours passed in the real world.
Xavier's vast psionic powers enable him to manipulate the minds of others, warp perceptions to make himself seem invisible, project mental illusions, cause loss of particular memories or total amnesia, and induce pain or temporary mental and/or physical paralysis in others.
Within close range, he can manipulate almost any number of minds for such simple feats. However, he can only take full possession of one other mind at a time, and must strictly be within that person's physical presence. He is one of the few telepaths skilled enough to communicate with animals and even share their perceptions.
He can also telepathically take away or control people's natural bodily functions and senses, such as sight, hearing, smell, taste, or even mutant powers.
A side effect of his telepathy is that he has an eidetic memory and his brain can assimilate and process impossibly huge amounts of raw data in an astonishingly short amount of time.
He has displayed telepathic prowess sufficient to confront Ego the Living Planet (while aided by Cadre K) as well as narrowly defeat Exodus.
However, he cannot permanently "reprogram" human minds to believe what he might want them to believe even if he wanted to do so, explaining that the mind is an organism that would always recall the steps necessary for it to reach the present and thus 'rewrite' itself to its original setting if he tried to change it.
However, his initial reprogramming of Wolverine lasted several years, despite Wolverine overcoming the reprogramming much faster than an ordinary human because of his healing factor.
He is able to project from his mind 'bolts' composed of psychic energy, enabling him to stun the mind of another person into unconsciousness, inflict mental trauma, or even cause death. These 'bolts' inflict damage only upon other minds, having a negligible effect on non-mental beings, if any.
The manner in which Xavier's powers function indicates that his telepathy is physical in some way, as it can be enhanced by physical means (for example, Cerebro), but can also be disrupted by physical means (for example, Magneto's alteration of the Earth's magnetic field).
Xavier can perceive the distinct mental presence/brain waves of other superhuman mutants within a small radius of himself. To detect mutants to a wider area beyond this radius, he must amplify his powers through Cerebro and subsequently Cerebra, computer devices of his own design which are sensitive to the psychic/physical energies produced by the mind.
Professor X can project his astral form into a psychic dimension known as the astral plane. There, he can use his powers to create objects, control his surroundings, and even control and destroy the astral forms of others. He cannot project this form over long distances.
Uncanny X-Men writer Ed Brubaker has claimed that, after being de-powered by the Scarlet Witch, and then re-powered by the M'Kraan Crystal, Charles' telepathy is more powerful than was previously known. However, the extent of this enhancement is unknown.
Years prior to initial publishing, Charles Xavier had an undefined level of telekinesis. This aspect of his powers were potent enough to cause catastrophic system disruption in computerized appliances.
Such an attribute has faded, however. His evil counterpart Cassandra Nova Xavier would possess this ability, indicating he still possessed the potential for them.
This potential was proven true after his death and resurgence within the younger, stronger body of Charlie Cluster 7. The Professor, using the moniker X, fashioned a Cerebro like a helmet which acts as a focusing device for his psionic powers and used it to galvanize latent aspects of his X-Gene to stimulate some dormant properties, seemingly using telekinesis to will a flash drive on Mystique's person into his hand.
Charles Xavier is a genius with multiple doctorates. He is a world-renowned geneticist, a leading expert in mutation, possesses considerable knowledge of various life sciences, and is the inventor of Cerebro.
He possesses Ph.D.s in Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology, and Anthropology, and an M.D. in Psychiatry. He is highly talented in devising equipment for utilizing and enhancing psionic powers. He is also a great tactician and strategist, effectively evaluating situations and devising swift responses.
During his travels in Asia, Xavier learned martial arts, acquiring "refined combat skills" according to Magneto. When these skills are coordinated in tandem with his telepathic abilities, Xavier is a dangerous unarmed combatant, capable of sensing the intentions of others and countering them with superhuman efficiency. He also has extensive knowledge of pressure points.
Charles Xavier was also given possession of the Mind Gem. It allows the user to boost mental power and access the thoughts and dreams of other beings. Backed by the Power Gem, it is possible to access all minds in existence simultaneously. Like all other former Illuminati members, Xavier has sworn to never use the gem and to keep its location hidden.
The Xavier Protocols
Totally NOT a blatant rip-off of the Batman Protocols from DC... /end sarcasm
The Xavier Protocols are a set of doomsday plans created by Professor X. The protocols detail the best way to kill many powerful mutant characters, including the X-Men and Xavier himself, should they become too large of a danger.
The Xavier Protocols are first mentioned during the Onslaught crossover and first seen in Excalibur #100 in Moira MacTaggert's lab. Charles Xavier compiled a list of the Earth's most powerful mutants and plans on how to defeat them if they become a threat to the world. They are first used after Onslaught grows too powerful.
Only parts of the actual protocols are ever shown. In the Operation: Zero Tolerance crossover Bastion obtains an encrypted copy of the protocols, intending to use them against the X-Men.
However, Cable infiltrates the X-Mansion and secures all encrypted files before Bastion has a chance to decrypt them.
Due to the tampering of Bastion and his Sentinels, the X-Mansion computer system Cerebro gains autonomy and seeks to destroy the X-Men by employing its knowledge of the Xavier Protocols. In a virtual environment created by Professor X, Cerebro executes the Xavier Protocols against the X-Men.
Each protocol is activated by the presence of a different combination of X-Men and were written by Xavier himself: Code 0-0-0 (Charles Xavier) was activated by Moira MacTaggert, Cyclops, and Jean Grey.
This file is both an entry on Charles Xavier, as well as an introduction to the Xavier Protocols. It contained a holographic image of Charles Xavier, reading the following message: "Moira, Scott, Jean; if you three are seeing these images, then I have become a mortal threat to my X-Men. In this instance, I must be stopped by any means necessary. Some years ago, I made a study of various forms of possible defense against my own psychic abilities. The image next to me is that of an anti-psionic armor. The wearer should be protected from my talent. When I finish speaking, a blueprint for this armor will be downloaded."
Code 0-2-1 (Wolverine) was activated by Archangel, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Code 1-3-9 (Cable) was activated by Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Cannonball. Other X-Men who have faced their Xavier Protocols are Colossus, Rogue, Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Gambit.
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
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A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Charles Francis Xavier
Publisher: Marvel
First appearance: The X-Men #1 (September 1963)
Created by: Stan Lee (writer)
Jack Kirby (artist)
Professor X last seen back in BP 2019 Day 234!
Aye, 'tis an oft-captured scene, ah knew. However, this is the first time I've photographed it before sunrise! Notice the dense patches of low-lying fog in the distance-----this is another one of those instances where the photo can't do justice to what the eyes see.
Not enough catnip garnish, for instance, and not one cheezburger on this week's menu! The horror!
Keeping the girls off the counters is impossible. I pretty much wash them (the counters, not the feline overlords) down with straight vodka before prepping food. The worst Ben ever did was beg from a distance...and he was given occasional scraps. The girls never did learn from their noble collie brother, and they get no scraps.
L’administration allemande construit cet imposant édifice à partir de 1899, à proximité de la prison et du tribunal régional.
Son architecture influencée par le style gothique tardif et celui de la Renaissance, affiche une grande diversité et une grande abondance décorative : gargouilles, garde-corps ajourés, nombreux éléments sculptés aux thématiques variées, baies de différentes formes et tailles, grilles en fer forgé ...
L’intérieur n'en est pas moins intéressant, avec ses vitraux, ses lustres en fer forgé suspendus à des becs d'oiseaux et ses sculptures évoquant la justice et ce qu'elle doit être : « une main de fer dans un gant de velours ». (Architecte Édouard Schimpf)
© Ben Heine || Facebook || Twitter || www.benheine.com
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A scenery I recently captured from Santorini island, in Greece.
The above photo has been shot with the Samsung NX10
Santorini also known as Thera is a volcanic island located in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km (120 mi) southeast from Greece's mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago which bears the same name. It forms the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately 73 km2 (28 sq mi) and a 2001 census population of 13,670. It is composed of the Municipality of Thira (pop. 12,440) and the Community of Oía (pop. 1,230). These have a total land area of 90.623 km2 (34.990 sq mi), which also includes the uninhabited islands of Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni, Aspronisi, and Christiana (all part of the Municipality of Thira).
Santorini is essentially what remains of an enormous volcanic explosion, destroying the earliest settlements on what was formerly a single island, and leading to the creation of the current geological caldera.
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For more information about my art: info@benheine.com
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Just a Dream
A poem by Peter S. Quinn
Just a dream in the far-off glow
Drifting in time's infinity
Gleaming mist in horizon slow
Everything comes there to be
Weaving the ocean on and on
Dreams of its being in trance
Till those hours forever are gone
On to the color verve blanch
Daydreams of the evening sky
Playfully giving and waking
Reaching to dusk Greek lullaby
And to memories forever making
Breathing and torching leaving day
As it goes on to the night
In every shade and feelings play
That for a moment has flight
Like love boat on oceans past
Traveling on to the evermore
Times on the hillsides are lost
Thru its wandering on to shore
Billows that play in the deep
Giving and taking of their feel
Some instances is ours to keep
Before they again become unreal
This is a repost of an image I initially posted in February of 2014. I edited this instance by simply rotating it 90º to make it work as the new banner. Let's see how it looks!
Here's an image from my 2014 archives!
This stretch lace minidress does let me show off my legs quite well! I hope you like the view!
I'm sometimes a little modest with what I wear but I do like to tease you too! This stretch lace minidress gives both you and me the best of both!
This black stretch lace minidress is from a new vendor I've discovered, sinsofskin.com! They have the type of minidresses that I like, their prices aren't too high and their selections is pretty varied too!
I've matched my new minidress up with my nude Bodywrappers Under Wraps Microfiber Camisole leotard from nydancewear.com, super shiny Platino Luxe 40 denier pantyhose from shapings.oom over Hanes Alive Barely There pantyhose from onehanesplace.com and finished off with my black open toe T-strap platform pumps from venus.com
To see more pix of me in other tight, sexy and revealing outfits click this link:www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157623668202157/
To see more pix of me wearing other sheer & see through clothing click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157622319095237/
To see more pix of me showing off my legs click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157623668202157/
To see more pix of me in my Little Black Dresses click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157615355440906/
To see more pix of me wearing super shiny Platino pantyhose click this link: www.flickr.com/photos/kaceycdpix/sets/72157633156315924
DSC_1321-1-1
Tomorrowland continues to be one of my favorite locations in Walt Disney World to photograph. There's just so much going on and all the different colors lend to photos that pop. I love the cool steel look that goes along with that as well. Having said that I certainly feel there are elements of Tomorrowland that could be refreshed. For instance I would really love to see the Speedway eliminated and use that huge land plot for some kind of new exciting E-Ticket ride. The Laugh Floor is another attraction that while I'm sure many people enjoy is one I skip every single trip. Obviously a replacement here would be welcome. Also viewing some of the other Tomorrowland entrances around the world I am really drawn to the look of Japan's Tomorrowland. It is futuristic but in a timeless way that I feel the Walt Disney World version does not have. I'd love to see a stylistic refresh of that sort brought to Walt Disney World here in the states.
Shot Details
This was once again a 5 shot bracket taken with my Nikon D810 and Nikon 14-24 2.8. I had a good base exposure and used multiple under exposures to blend in the various highlights in the scene. Tomorrowland can be tricky with all the brightly lit signs and neon to get just right. It is very easy to blow something out and not be able to recover it convincingly. One thing that can help is metering off one of the brightest lit signs and starting your exposure bracketing from that point. Doing this will guarantee you'll have your brightest points properly exposed for. This is good because recovering shadows is always much much easier than recovering highlights, especially so on Nikon. Once the detail is blown there is no getting it back.
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In some instances, a world spiraling out of control can be a beautiful thing. I made this capture of a magnificent spiral stairway at a local winery by lying on my back and shooting up 3 stories into the dome of the silo. A very wide-angle lens was required to get all of the subject into the composition, as the space was very high and considerably constricted width-
wise. This abstract rendering was what I came up with. It will have to do until next time, when I may pull another lie-down treatment out of the bag.
The Ion Mystic Forms - Geometric Symbolism Part II - The Symbolic Duality Of The Circle by Daniel Arrhakis (2022)
The circle represents limitless things, among them eternity, unity, God, sanctity, infinity, and wholeness.
Unity – In some cultures, when people want to come together and support one another, they form a circle.
Monotheism (God) – Several cultures view the circle as a symbol of the existence of the one and only God they subscribe to. For instance, Christians refer to God as the alpha and omega, which means the beginning and the end. In this case, God is seen as a complete circle. In Islam, Monotheism is represented by a circle with God at the center.
Infinity – The circle is a representation of infinity because it has no end. It symbolizes universal energy and the continuity of the soul. The ancient Egyptians chose the ring worn on the finger as a way to symbolize the eternal union between a couple, a practice we still carry on to this day.
Sanctity – This symbolic meaning is seen in Judeo-Christianity, where deities and people considered holy are presented with haloes around the heads.
Heavens – This meaning comes from Chinese symbology, which uses the circle as a representation of heaven.
Containment – With the aspect of protection also comes containment. A circle is a representation of keeping contained what is inside. A good example of this is a ring; whether it is a wedding ring, religious or cultic, the ring stands for a pledge of fidelity.
With the powerful symbolism associated with the circle, it’s no wonder there exist numerous symbols and artifacts resembling circles and shapes. Some of these symbols include: The Enso, The Ouroboros, The Flower Of Life, The Mandela, The Yin And Yang, etc.
In the Mystical World of Ion The Circle and or the Sphere have a symbolic duality: Creation and Destruction.
The circle is often symbolized in the Mystic World of Ion by the shell of a nautilus and represents infinity, eternity, the notion of God as a universal spirit, the beginning and end of timeless cycles that renew themselves in infinite realities, the circle of generations, the light that illuminates the darkness, the universal knowledge of all things unattainable and immeasurable.
The prevailing scientific theory on the origins of the universe posits that everything began with a Big Bang.
In the moment after, a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons were swimming around in a dark, invisible primordial soup.
In the beginning there was no light. ”The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds,” according to NASA. But over thousands of years, as the temperature cooled, the free electrons joined nuclei and created neutral atoms. This process eventually allowed light to shine through about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
In other words, in the beginning, everything was dark for a long, long time. Then there was light, this sounds pretty similar to what’s written in the Bible !
All of existence started with an explosion from one point that is continually multiplying, according to Jewish mysticism.
we can see a strong relationship between the contemporary Big Bang theory and the Kabbalistic notion that the universe burst forth from a single point, which in mystical terms is the limitless light of the divine, or Infinite, known as the “Ein Sof" (“no end”).
So the divine, or god, is just another word for infinity.
The notion of darkness containing light described in mysticism also illuminates black holes, places in space where gravity’s pull is so strong that even light can’t escape. As NASA explains, the gravity in a black hole has such a forceful pull because matter is compressed into a tiny space.
Scientists believe that when the universe began, small black holes also formed. We can’t see black holes with the naked eye, but we know they exist because of the effect they exert on the stars orbiting near them. Black holes bend light toward them.
In Kabbalah, a hole is called “rah,” meaning “evil” in Hebrew. Holes are portals from the domain of good to that of evil that suck up matter, energy, and knowledge from the universe.
In some cosmological models that black holes could be wormholes—portals to parallel universes, which is similar to the kabbalistic concept of holes as an entryway to “the other side.”
The Mystical World of Ion has cosmological or universal pantheistic vision, God or the Universal Spirit is present in all things, whether animate or inanimate.
In this view God is not the absolute creator but a universal spirituality that can be found throughout the cosmos, in every physical and chemical manifestation, in every element of nature and is everywhere, for he is the whole, universal and infinite. So he is creation itself.
In Ion's Mystical World Conception the notion of the Devil does not exist, he is a creation of man to try to justify his own misfortunes.
However, there is the notion of Primordial Chaos, the Infinite Void as well as Absolute Darkness often materialized in ignorance as a powerful force against organization, knowledge and light.
If God has an infinite and universal dimension, then so does absolute darkness, having been by this order of ideas earlier, older and omnipotent to a certain point - at least until the Light appears!
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As Formas Místicas de Ion - Simbolismo Geométrico Parte II - A Dualidade Simbólica do Círculo por Daniel Arrhakis (2022)
O círculo representa coisas ilimitadas, entre elas eternidade, unidade, Deus, santidade, infinidade e totalidade.
Unidade – Em algumas culturas, quando as pessoas querem se unir e se apoiar umas às outras, elas formam um círculo.
Monoteísmo (Deus) – Várias culturas veem o círculo como um símbolo da existência do único Deus que elas subscrevem. Por exemplo, os cristãos se referem a Deus como o alfa e o ômega, que significa o começo e o fim. Neste caso, Deus é visto como um círculo completo. No Islão, o monoteísmo é representado por um círculo com Deus no centro.
Infinito – O círculo é uma representação do infinito porque não tem fim. Simboliza a energia universal e a continuidade da alma. Os antigos egípcios escolheram o anel usado no dedo como forma de simbolizar a união eterna entre um casal, prática que continuamos até hoje.
Santidade – Este significado simbólico é visto no judaísmo-cristianismo, onde divindades e pessoas consideradas sagradas são apresentadas com auréolas em redor da cabeça.
Céus – Esse significado vem da simbologia chinesa, que usa o círculo como representação do céu.
Contenção – Com o aspeto de proteção também vem a contenção. Um círculo é uma representação de manter contido o que está dentro. Um bom exemplo disso é um anel; seja um anel de casamento, religioso ou cultual, o anel representa uma promessa de fidelidade mas também de proteção e segurança.
Com o poderoso simbolismo associado ao círculo, não é de admirar que existam inúmeros símbolos e artefactos semelhantes a círculos e formas. Alguns desses símbolos incluem: O Enso( Ensō (円相) é uma palavra japonesa que significa “círculo” e é um conceito fortemente associado com o Zen Budismo), O Ouroboros (um símbolo místico que representa o conceito da eternidade, através da figura de uma serpente ou dragão que morde a própria cauda), A Flor da Vida, A Mandala, O Yin E Yang, etc.
No Mundo Místico de Íon O Círculo e ou a Esfera têm uma dualidade simbólica: Criação e Destruição.
O círculo é muitas vezes também simbolizado no Mundo Místico de Ion pela concha de um náutilo e representa o infinito, a eternidade, a noção de Deus como um espírito universal, o início e o fim de ciclos intemporais que se renovam em realidades infinitas, o círculo das gerações , a luz que ilumina as trevas, o conhecimento universal de todas as coisas inatingíveis e imensuráveis.
A teoria científica predominante sobre as origens do universo postula que tudo começou com um Big Bang.
No momento seguinte, uma vasta gama de partículas fundamentais, como neutrões, eletrões e protões, nadavam em uma sopa primordial escura e invisível.
No início não havia luz. “Os eletrões livres teriam causado a dispersão da luz (fotões) da mesma forma que a luz solar se espalha nas gotículas de água nas nuvens”, segundo a NASA. Mas ao longo de milhares de anos, à medida que a temperatura esfriou, os eletrões livres juntaram-se aos núcleos e criaram átomos neutros. Esse processo acabou permitindo que a luz brilhasse cerca de 380.000 anos após o Big Bang.
Em outras palavras, no começo, tudo era escuridão por muito, muito tempo. Então houve luz, isso soa-nos bem parecido com o que está escrito na Bíblia!
Toda a existência começou com uma explosão de um ponto que se foi multiplicando continuamente, de acordo com o misticismo judaico.
Podemos ver uma forte relação entre a teoria contemporânea do Big Bang e a noção cabalística de que o universo irrompeu de um único ponto, que em termos místicos é a luz ilimitada do divino, ou Infinito, conhecido como “Ein Sof” (“ sem fim”).
Assim, o divino, ou Deus, é apenas outra palavra para infinito.
A noção de escuridão contendo luz descrita no misticismo, também ilumina buracos negros, lugares no espaço onde a força da gravidade é tão forte que nem a luz pode escapar. Como a NASA explica, a gravidade num buraco negro tem uma força muito forte porque a matéria é comprimida num espaço minúsculo.
Os cientistas acreditam que quando o universo começou, pequenos buracos negros também se formaram. Não podemos ver buracos negros a olho nu, mas sabemos que eles existem por causa do efeito que exercem nas estrelas que orbitam perto deles. Buracos negros desviam a luz em direção a eles.
Na Cabala, um buraco é chamado de “rah”, que significa “mal” em hebraico. Buracos são portais do domínio do bem ao do mal que sugam matéria, energia e conhecimento do universo.
Em alguns modelos cosmológicos, os buracos negros podem ser buracos de minhoca (wormholes) – portais para universos paralelos, o que é semelhante ao conceito cabalístico de buracos como uma porta de entrada para “o outro lado”.
O Mundo Místico de Ion tem uma visão cosmológica ou panteísta universal, Deus ou o Espírito Universal está presente em todas as coisas, sejam animadas ou inanimadas.
Nessa visão, Deus não é o criador absoluto, mas uma espiritualidade universal que pode ser encontrada em todo o cosmos, em cada manifestação física e química, em cada elemento da natureza e está em toda parte, pois ele é o todo, universal e infinito. Então ele é a própria criação.
Na Conceção do Mundo Místico de Íon a noção do Diabo não existe, ele é uma criação do homem para tentar justificar seus próprios infortúnios.
No entanto, existe a noção de Caos Primordial, o Vazio Infinito, bem como a Escuridão Absoluta, muitas vezes materializada na ignorância como uma força poderosa contra a organização, o conhecimento e a luz.
Se Deus tem uma dimensão infinita e universal, então a escuridão absoluta também tem, o que pela ordem das ideias explicadas anteriormente, é assim mais antiga e omnipotente até certo ponto - pelo menos até que a Luz apareceu!
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Background landscape made with AI Art Generator Using NightCafe Studio's Online and light textures made with Amberlight 2.
Elements from stock images and images of mine.
"Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
I just thought the quote was appropriate for that "stubborn" shadow. :)
I am trying to make my way through your streams my friends. I eventually will get the hang of moving around well enough again, some time soon. I hope. Have a great day!
Copyright © GeDelaCruzPhotography. All Rights Reserved.
I see this lady walk past my front door every day, with the same smile on her face.
For the past 83 years, and despite of a hard life in the fields, her happiness is written in her wrinkles. I have rarely met someone as happy and at peace with oneself.
A true inspiration...
This year, the weather in our globe is very un-predictable. One instance it is spring.
On another day is winter back again. With the weather changing dramatically, it is very easy for people to get sick & feel low on the emotional cycle.
I have been observing the plants' flower's boomming & their cycle of becoming fruit's. I found out that plant's are very much affected by the hot & cold ; especially it change between a single day of more than 20-40 degree F.
The Bees' are dying as well for the reason of too much disturbances from the cell phones frequencies according to some bio-scientists. I would like to comment that the dramatically change of the day & night temperature would have cause the death of the bees.
Thus, it would be more difficult for plants' to harvest fruits.
With these in mind. We have to think seriously about the effect of Global warming & to take action & rectified the situation now; before it is too late.
So Go Green...
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This image was taken with wind speed 15mph.
Camera is setted on tripod.
Sun light from the back of the subject.
A white paper tower is held on the left hand to bounce more light.
Post processing:
Sharpen
Clarify
Straighten
Saturation
Glow
Fill Lights
Color Correction
Save.
700 years ago, The Akmaddian Empire sprawled central Historica. With its formidable cavalry's lightning tactics, it was able to conquer a massive area ranging from the cool steppe of southern Avalonia to the arid scrublands of northern Kaliphlin. Among the many races that fell under its domain was a large population of centaurs. Military cooperation between centaurs on non-centaurs (referred "two-legs" by the former) was historically limited. There rare instances of archers sitting on the backs of centaurs to operate as "tail-gunners", but these were rare.
The Akmaddians implemented a new role for their centaur soldiers: drawing chariots. A centaur didn't need to be controlled by whoever was in the chariot, allowing those inside to focus on the battle. Passengers could include archers or pike men. Usually fighting in duos, these teams were trained for years to master their craft, something which would pay off as they blazed a path across the continent.
The Akmaddian God-Emperor would eventually fall in battle, and the empire would fracture as his children battled for the throne. Though the empire only lasted 20 years, its effect on central Historican culture can still be felt today
Pirated, poorly applied instances of my designs brought to you care of SCAmazon 1 of x (with x being a large number I'm afraid)
Some of these would be laughable if there weren't so many of them - and if they didn't mean so much work by me to issue take down notices - costing time & energy that could be better spent doing other things.
Flickr Spoonflower Discussion Group on the issues here: Copyright Issues on Amazon
And here's yet another designer grappling with the same issue of Spoonflower theft on Amazon: karapeters.design/copyright/
The irony is that Spoonflower - my publisher - hosts its designs on AWS - yet has no business-to-business relationship that could protect its investment. I guess that's the free market for you! Meanwhile Jeff Bezos buys a $114m house! Nice one Jeff!
[Poorly pirated stolen care of SCAmazon_1ofx]
In all these instances, the Hebrew word for “mercy” is hesed, which has the connotation of undeserved kindness or grace. In Exodus 34, the word for “merciful” is rachom, derived from rechem (“ womb”), and implies caring for another in the way that a woman cares for the child in her womb. The pervasive sense that Scripture gives of God’s maternal compassion makes the fifth Beatitude a summons to imitate it.
-Evolving humanity and biblical wisdom : reading scripture through the lens of Teilhard de Chardin, Marie Noonan Sabin.
For Instance: For the devil in you...wicked pink - When you are too angelic...textured off-whites - Hunting instinct up? Helanca stretch leotards - When you go all little-girl...stockings in very young blue.
Chemstrand Nylon
yet another instance where it's hard to compete with the pros, but I'm happy I got to take a shot at it
I went into today anticipating 1/4000s shutter speeds and ended up with sub 1/100s for most of my shots because of the heavy cloud cover.
Fortunately by combining multiple images I was able to blur out the clouds and get a clearer view of the sun.
We were both in our cars. Parked outside a local supermarket. She must have sensed my lens, peering at her and the light of her mobile phone. She turned her head, just for an instance...
The Coopers Rock lookout near Morgantown WV. Most times when standing on the lookout one would tend to look the other direction across the valley that overlooks the Cheat River, but in this instance turning around with my back to the valley gave us beautiful morning light cresting over the mountain.
Perhaps I am “pushing the limit” when taking the liberty of using a famous artist’s illustration and using her artwork to create my own, personal interpretation of said artwork – albeit strictly for non-commercial purpose.
In the subject instance, I downloaded a work by Carrie Ballantyne (signed as C L Ballantyne) as shown on the left. Her superb illustration titled; “The Cowboy Way”. Using Ms. Ballantyne’s artwork, I then digitally colored the illustration and in a final step, utilized Topaz Simplify to complete my artistic interpretation as seen on the right.
On a personal note, let me say I am totally enthralled by Carrie L. Ballantyne's extraordinary artwork. She is indeed a highly talented and accomplished artist.
The source of the artist’s original artwork can be found HERE
A Short Bio of the artist, Carrie L. Ballantyne
For the past 30 years, Carrie Ballantyne has been drawing and painting the people of today’s ranching and cowboy culture with depth and texture and an emphasis on authenticity. She is best known for her powerful yet sensitive portraits that chronicle men and women of the contemporary West with a timeless quality.
“The individuals themselves inspire much of my art,” Ballantyne says. “I enjoy painting representational and intimate portraits of real people – most often family members, personal friends and neighbors.”
Profiled in numerous periodicals over the years, Ballantyne is the recipient of various awards and honors from distinguished Western art shows and museums. The Prix de West continues to be a favorite venue. “Showing my art alongside many of my heroes at the National Cowboy Museum is an exhilarating and humbling experience,” she says, “an inspiration I look forward to each year.”
I am hoping there will not be any legal (or otherwise) repercussions over what I have done here. My intensions were, of course, purely for entertainment purposes. Should there any problems what-so-ever, I will promptly remove this post from flickr photo-share.
Hope you'all enjoy .................
I'd appreciate it if you didn't "Follow" or "Fave" a photo without leaving a Comment thanks.
The birds were clearly enjoying the New Brighton Beach pier (Previous photo), though in this instance, the young Kelp Gull - known in NZ as a Black-Backed Gull - decided it was time to stretch the wings...!
Unfortunately, the little Point And Shoot camera failed to pick up the wing feather details, but the shot still illustrates just how big the bird's wingspan is...!
If I haven't commented on your photo/s today, be assured: I will tomorrow...!
Thanks so much for the very kind and encouraging comments beneath this photo...! Your support is always greatly appreciated...!
My inspiration song for this pictur:
SCHAMANISCHES Tribal Drum Journey
Message for you:
Even when the wolf sometimes disappears deep into the forest, he always finds his way back home. May the power animal Wolf guide and lead you because in the last instance we will always follow the call of our soul.
Together we go our Soul Path the Queen of Swords and the Wolf as companions you will meet again and again and strengthen each other's backs because that is the deal and the goal.
Botschaft für dich:
Auch wenn der Wolf manchmal tief im Wald verschwindet findet er immer wieder den Weg nach Hause zurück. Möge das Krafttier Wolf dich leiten und führen, denn in letzter Instanz werden wir immer dem Ruf unserer Seele folgen.
Gemeinsam gehen wir unseren Seelenweg, die Königin der Schwerter und der Wolf als Gefährten werden sie sich immer wieder begegnen und sich gegenseitig den Rücken stärken denn das ist der Deal und das Ziel.
How we see echother:
Ich und Du - Anna Depenbusch & Mark Forster
Egzod & Maestro Chives - Royalty
Sam Tinnesz - Leading The Pack
Valley Of Wolves - Take It All
Soul Mates enter your life some stay for just one page others for a whole chapter and then there are those who are there for the whole story.♥
Since we have met each other I have always seen us as very polarizing and as strong personalities, two alphas who respect each other even if we sometimes snarl at each other.
Like the Bremerstadt musicians we couldn't be more different but we are connected from cradle to grave by a strong bond.
We are there for each other come what may and YES come what may.
We are never alone on the path we each take. I was allowed to grow on and with you and that is incredibly valuable to me. ♥
We know each other for what feels like an eternity now and I am incredibly grateful that you are a part of my life. You make my life more colorful and even more worth living.♥
Thank you for being exactly the way you are because in my eyes you shine in all your facets and it is pure joy to be able to experience this. Friends like us are very rare and I appreciate this gift very much.♥ Together we accompany each other on our way and Yes I am proud to have a friend like you at my side!
I am glad that you wash my head from time to time ^^ and still let me be who I am. ♥
You strengthen me and give me the courage to handle everything because you simply believe in me, thank you for that. ♥♥♥♥♥
Thank you for all the emotional and wonderful moments I was able to experience with you, whether good or bad, both are part of it. ♥
I have found my best friend in you because you are friend and girlfriend in one what could I wish for more ^^
Love you my BBF Friends for Ever SL & RL ♥
Seelen Gefährten treten in dein Leben einige bleiben für nur eine Seite andere für ein ganzes Kapitel und dann gibt es noch die die während der ganzen Geschichte dabei sind.♥
Seit wir uns getroffen haben, habe ich uns immer als sehr polarisierende und starke Persönlichkeiten gesehen zwei Alphas die sich gegenseitig respektieren, auch wenn wir uns manchmal anknurren.
Wie die Bremerstadtmusikannten könnten wir unterschielicher nicht sein und dennoch verbindet uns ein starkes Band denn von der Wiege bis zur Bare sind wir alle miteinander verbunden.
Wir sind für einander da komme was wolle und JA wolle was da komme.
Überwegs auf dem jeweiligen Weg den jeder einschlägt sind wir nie alleine. Ich durfte an und mit dir wachsen und das ist mir wahnsinnig viel wert.♥
Wir kennen uns nun schon eine gefühlte Ewichkeit und ich bin unglaublich dankbar das du ein Teil meines Lebens bist. Du machst mein Leben bunter und noch lebenswerter.♥
Danke das du genau so bist wie du bist den den in meinen Augen strahlst du in all deinen Facetten und es ist die Pure Freude das miterleben zu dürfen. Freunde wie wir es sind sind sehr selten und ich weiss dieses Geschenk sehr zu schätzen.♥ Gemeinsam begleiten wir uns auf unserem Weg und Yes ich bin stoltz einen Freund wie dich an meiner Siete zu haben!
Ich bin froh das du mir ab und an den Kopf wäschst ^^ und mich dennoch so sein lässt wie ich bin. ♥
Du stärkst mich und gibst mir den Mut alles in Agriff zu nehmen weil du einfach an mich Glaubst danke dafür. ♥♥♥♥♥
Danke für all die Emotionalen und wundervollen Momente die ich mit dir erleben durfte ob nun gut oder schlecht beides gehört dazu. ♥
Ich habe in dir meinen besten Freund gefunden denn du bist Freund und Freundin in einem was will man mehr ^^
Love you mein Bester Friends for Ever SL & RL ♥
There are several instances when long hood forward locomotives are the better choice, and this is one of them. Not because the 4619, a first gen GP9, was set up to run LHF, not for dramatic effect, either, but because the other short hood end is really ugly. This old veteran was originally a Grand Trunk Western GP9 and wore the old olive and gold. It also served time on the Central Vermont, then came back home. I don't know who or when the lobotomy was done, but it wasn't the best work the loco doctors had ever done. It came out with a nice streak of unpainted rust around the top of the chopped nose and was never painted over or repaired. So be happy you don't have to look at that end. The crew aboard the 4619, the Griffith local, may not have been happy, but then they're inside the beast and not outside having to look at it...
27/52 By some unspoken rule, the "special needs" boarding cats - for instance geriatric or diabetic cats - have become my responsibility (under the doctors' supervision) on the shifts I work. Many cats don't eat for a day or two when they first come to board because they are too nervous. I feel bad they are so nervous but I know they'll be OK. However, diabetic cats MUST eat. As you may be able to tell from this picture, Magic spent his first 24 hours under his towel - NOT eating. I tried every variety of prescription diabetic food we have - wet and dry, pate and "savory selects" in gravy and nothing. I tried tasty junk food and nothing again. I tried slipping his food under his towel with him and still nothing. We were getting to the point where we were going to have to test his blood glucose level to determine if, or how much, insulin to give him. I was just about to walk out the door at the end of my shift and have him be someone else's responsibility when I saw him peek outside his towel and eat some of his Purina DM Savory Selects wet food for about 45 seconds and something huge inside me lightened up. I was so thrilled to see him eating that I, of course, didn't want to open his cage door to get a better picture of him. Any cat who eats while boarding is a happy, little thing.
By the way, if you ever have to board your cat and the vet asks for your permission to give an appetite stimulant if needed - please say yes. For those who feel reluctant to give their cats medication, know that the appetite stimulants used are very safe and the risk of the medication is so much less than the risk to your cat of not eating - especially if it is overweight or diabetic. Often one dose is enough to get a cat to eat and that first meal is all it takes to jump-start their appetite and no further doses are needed.
Another shot from my Cornwall holiday in St Ives last July, a place that's a veritable cornucopia of captures, and this is one of my prime spots for people photography, the pier, a stage for all sorts of everyday dramas. In this instance I was watching these three people (mother, son-in-law and daughter) walking their dogs, it was an okay shot with a nice touch of symmetry but it just didn't have that special 'moment' that makes a street/pier shot work, then the mum and son-in-law paused and turned around to look back at something...*click*...I like that the daughter chose to walk her shades rather than the dogs. :-)
4 instances of raw images from Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences enhanced, tweaked and converted into a human colony on Mars. My nod to favourite SF authors Lem and Dick. HAPPY SLIDERS SUNDAY! :) Here is a before and after image: www.flickr.com/photos/lunaryuna/14181342603/
It's difficult photographing works under glass. But in this instance I decided to go full reflective mode and incorporate myself into the photograph. I saw the pattern of light and dark in the original photograph created an interesting abstract effect with my reflection on the glass. It also plays with the idea of a photograph within a photograph.
The original photograph by is by John Kauffmann from 1920 and entitled The National Bank. Comparing this to his 1914 overtly Pictorialist photograph I showed you in the previous collage, it marks a shift to a Modernist approach in photography that was being popularised in America by Paul Strand (1890-1976).
Hi Flickr!
I know it's been a while since last time. A lot has happened in my life. I've for instance taken a year off school. August has been an amazing month for me. I've kayaked on the waves in Lofoten where I saw the most beautiful scenery Nature has to offer..
I then went to Svendborg/Denmark as a travel leader for something called "Emax", a entrepreneurship conference that brings young entrepreneurs together from Scandinavia. As well as known and successful entrepreneurs that hold lectures to always inspire us.
After 4 days in Svendborg I went to Copenhagen and met a magnificent and heart lifting facebook friend called Cecilie. She'd been to India several times and it had changed her life completely. Some months ago I sent her a facebook mail and told her about my life and misery. She then told me to go and visit her and I did.
We did Yoga in the morning and had smoothies for breakfast. She had breath taking apartment with tall windows and a great positive atmosphere. We walked and talked. About Life so to speak. About how everything happens for a reason. About happiness, and how everything that happends to you - is eventually for you to get on the right path in your life. The one that makes you happy.
But what is happiness?
Is it a new car? A new television? Food? Desserts? Cakes? Having a boyfriend? Watching a movie? Shopping? Getting plastic surgery or a new camera and lens? Having a bed to sleep in? Having pets? Nice phones and computer? Being tall and skinny? Smoking?
I figured that for me personally all of these things are just temporarily - temporarily happiness to make me forget about the most important thing. - Happiness Within.
Happiness, true Happiness I’ve come to find after a lot of hard work and a million tears and bad episodes is not to find outside the body. But rather Inside. You can have all the money and external joy and that will still not make you happy. This is a well-known fact. Even though it's sometimes hard to realize.
So after being with Cecilie the visit India seemed so much closer. And I also realized how much I wanted to BELIEVE in something more than molecules and Darwin’s theory.
About how everything that happens for you is for a reason. About how I shouldn't identify myself 100% with my body. Because in the end; My "body" has it all; A bed with a million blankets, All the food I can dream of, Clothes (I recently gave away my own bodyweight in clothing to charity!!!!!! CRAZY), Shoes, Friends, School, A job, Income, A family, +++ and I STILL don't feel happy with myself. I'm on the quite opposite field. Wondering what the heck I'm doing here. And why I have to wake up to these days which are all the same. I WAS anyway.
There's so much "Magic" in the world. There's so much we cannot touch or see but is still there. Like our thoughts and feelings for instance. And there's so many tiny creatures that have a life that we cannot see. That scientists are yet to discover. Or maybe never will discover. However they live with us as fellow members on this earth.
There is so much astonishing in this world. Like how a seed can have all the "ingredients" and wisdom to become a solid tree fifty meters of the ground.
Humans should show more respect to our fellow members of this earth.
We destroy the woods and we kill the animals so we can eat their meat.
Surely if the slaughter houses where made of glass we would stop killing millions of animals every year. Surely we would use our energy to feed the humans that are starving on the other side of the planet.
I'm not saying that everyone should become a vegetarian. My theory is that I should eat what I can kill. Therefore I've stopped eating pigs, cows, sheep’s, birds, simply because I know in my heart that if I had a choice of eating a melon or killing that innocent lamb standing next to me I would with NO doubt choose that melon.
It's so easy to STOP thinking when it comes to food. You have everything cut in small pieces and files in the stores. It's hard to think about what you eat. It's too easy to think about it. In the end every human being has to find their own way. But if you're up for some changes please see this video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#
I’m not even saying that “Happiness” isn’t to find on the outside for somebody. I’m not saying that my way will work for everybody. I’m not saying that no body has done this before me. I’m not saying that everybody should go to India. However, what I’m saying is #BE HAPPY – regardless of the costs. Fight for happiness like you would fight for your life. Never be satisfied with crying and being depressed year after year. And if happiness has come to you, I smile from ear to ear and hope you simply enjoy it to the fullest every single day!
Anyway, here comes the most important point in this text, and as I’ve written so much I’ll caps look it! I’VE QUIT SCHOOL AND AM BUYING MYSELF A TICKET TO AUSTRALIA, INDIA, NEPAL TO GO ON THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. TO SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS AND HEALTHINESS. I’M GOING ALONE. I’M SCARED. BUT STILL I’M SO HAPPY. I’M LEAVING NORWAY WITHIN TWO MONTHS.
There. I’ve said it.
And I’ll be poor.
And I’ll be alone.
My mind and Me.
And I’ll practice all that I’ve written in this text.
And I’ll throw away all my university books.
And I’ll have no job.
But to find myself. To try to understand life and appreciate it.
Go back to the beginning.
Following the road with bad balance and cerebral palsy.
It won't be easy!
Wish me luck!
The Saddest Poem
by Pablo Neruda
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
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Sony A7RII Fine Art Zion National Park Autumn Winter Subway Hike! Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Landscape Photography!
An important thing to remember is that even though pixel sizes keep getting smaller and smaller, the technology is advancing, so the smaller pixels are more efficient at collecting light. For instance, the Sony A7rII is back-illuminated which allows more photons to hit the sensor. Semiconductor technology is always advancing, so the brilliant engineers are always improving the signal/noise ratio. Far higher pixel counts, as well as better dynamic ranger, are thus not only possible, but the future!
Yes I have a Ph.D. in physics! I worked on phototranistors and photodiodes as well as an artificial retina for the blind. :)
You can read more about my own physics theory (dx4/dt=ic) here: herosodysseyphysics.wordpress.com/
And follow me on instagram! @45surf
Facebook!
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Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Photography!
I love shooting fine art landscapes and fine art nature photography! :) I live for it!
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Feel free to ask me any questions! Always love sharing tech talk and insights! :)
And all the best on Your Epic Hero's Odyssey!
The new Lightroom rocks!
Beautiful magnificent clouds!
View your artistic mission into photography as an epic odyssey of heroic poetry! Take it from Homer in Homer's Odyssey: "Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them. " --Samuel Butler Translation of Homer's Odyssey
All the best on your Epic Hero's Odyssey from Johnny Ranger McCoy!
Sony A7RII Fine Art Zion National Park Autumn Winter Subway Hike! Dr. Elliot McGucken Fine Art Landscape Photography! Sony A7R2 & Sony 16-35mm Vario-Tessar T FE F4 ZA OSS E-Mount Lens!
fine art landscape photography,fine art photography, fine art photographer, elliot mcgucken photography, landscapes, fine art landscape, landscape, landscape photography
Intimated Instance is from 0 to 1.5 ft.
Public Distance is 12 ft or more.
P.S. Change begins at the end of comfort zone!
Sky100 天際100
This is a REAL instance of ice even without vaccines and it's not the Trump ICE lockup and covid super-spreader site for migrants and kids in Denver. A while back, I grabbed more Clover Basin ditch shots down at Willow Farm when I hauled my D700 back down even though the sky was blank blue. I therefore had no choice but to point the camera downward for captures and keep the sky from the shots. Just like today and tomorrow and tomorrow! I decided that I needed some better originals to edit! I liked this view as well as the other. I got few real duds in my "action" takes of the ditch but I do have several NORMAL shots of the ditch now (they call it Willow Brook) but I call it a ditch. It's not much of one either. Let's face it, most of the St. Vrain stream and ditch flows have been ripped by the towns and cities to water blue grass instead of agriculture.
I can't figure why anyone would cut a ditch this darn squirrely. Drunk diggers, probably, though Longmont was a temperate colony at the time. Not so now When I first saw it, It was nearly impossible to follow the reasoning for this ditch but it does seem that the floods scoured this ditch somewhat. I think I noticed the colors of the reflections and contrasts and decided to take advantage. They seemed to oversaturate in this case but that's about everything posted on Flickr. The water course was a bit torn up but there must have been no serious flooding here.
We hit the end of autumn then and the chills came through but we hit the 60s after Christmas - so no coat. I won't go down to shoot ice today - it hit the 67 degrees in early December and await the 80s later in the week. No Coats in the 60s, no Clarks either. I've still got a lot of captures in the temp directory in today's stretch of no skies. I found Willow Farm on Google maps when searching for a barn I glimpsed and made some trips down there and added some more weird captures to temp stash. This is a shot of Willow Creek, another ditch, IMHO. I went back down with my D700 to see if I could capture some shot of the barn. I may go out soon if we can retrieve some skies and clouds at all.
Here is a normal, if not fairly slow hand held exposure. I already posted other shots that were "action" shots and they were the better shots. I grabbed a couple of slices in Lightroom and dropped them into Photoshop to see what might appear.
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.
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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.
Instance.
After many failed attempts, tonight I managed to create an image I've had in my head for an age.
It needs a bit of tidying up but I've got plenty of time to do that.
I wanted to create a kind of black hole sucking a stream of matter into its core.
Cheers to Chris T for the final piece of the jigsaw.
Three lenses, two tripod positions, pin pricked card, blue lp brushes filter attachment el wire, breath and my mobile phone.
Single long exposure black hole exploration.
I had a bunch of Tree Swallow shots from a trip earlier this summer that i've been meaning to go through for awhile. I had to edit this shot much more than I usually edit my shots, and these sorts of instances really make me want to shoot raw and use lightroom rather than iPhoto.....well, maybe one day.
It's interesting how sometimes I can go through old photos and feel the same way I did when I was taking them. Like, for instance, this photo that I took 3 years ago. That feeling still has a place in my heart, ever glowing--dimmer now--but there all the same.
It's just.... interesting.
Walsall Corporation trolleybus 345 working the joint 29 service to Walsall, with a Wolverhampton Corporation Sunbeam behind. 345 was an interloper, having been new to Ipswich Corporation in 1950, and sold to Walsall in 1962, prior to the closure of the system in 1963.
The joint trolleybus service operated between Wolverhampton & Walsall had commenced in 1931, although Wolverhampton had been operating trolleybuses as far as Willenhall since 1930. It was one of the few instances of joint trolleybus working. The other notable places this occurred was between:
Manchester & Ashton
Grimsby & Cleethorpes
Rotherham & Mexborough
The picture is taken in October 1964, just 12 months before the service was converted to motorbus. At the time Wolverhampton Corporation were at an advanced stage of trolleybus abandonment, but Walsall Corporation wanted to continue trolleybus operation with Walsall trolleys on the through service.
However, the construction of the M6 motorway sealed the fate of the route. The Ministry of Transport did not want trolleybuses to cross over the motorway junction, then under construction at Bentley. I understand this to have been based on largely unfounded fears of the overhead wires falling onto the motorway in the case of a severe accident. An incident in 1965 where a Walsall trolleybus fell onto its side following an accident killing a pedestrian, did not help the situation. It was another nail in the coffin for trolleybus operation in the Black Country.
In this instance, RML stands for Leyland-engined RM. One of the prototypes for the classic London bus visited the Isle of Wight Beer & Buses Weekend this year. Seen in between trips to Ryde sitting at Newport Quay alongside a former London chum, DMS550.
Not a friendly handshake in this instance though… lol.
(This picture is in this week's [Sat September 20th 2014] Amateur Photographer Magazine on page 21 :)…. Yay, I'm in a national magazine!!! They picked it up from the BWPA and have published several pictures they liked from the awards. Thanks to Rob Williams for informing me.)
Not really good IQ on this because of bad light, I just thought the pose was interesting! I hadn't intended to take this sort of shot today (which is why 700mm) but the starlings were so distracting I couldn't help myself!
I was in the hide for an hour and a half, took over 800 photos, it was a lot of fun, there's lots going on there at the moment and there are still good photos to be had even in bad light.
IAA Frankfurt 2019
The number of available relatively affordable four-seater convertibles has reduced considerably in recent years. Volkswagen has for instance discontinued the Beetle, Eos and Golf convertibles, but has now launched their successor: the T-Roc Cabriolet, which will compete with the Mini Cabrio. The Mini Cabrio rival follows in Land Rover's and Nissan's footsteps, manufacturers which had already tried to combine the success formula of the SUV with a convertible.