Does Evil Queen say 'Mirror, mirror on the wall' in Disney's original Snow White movie?
Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 11:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
There's something visceral about daggers. I suppose that's true of anything that can eviscerate you.
But daggers always seem to be more evil than other weapons, such as the noble sword. You can use this to your advantage by having the villains use nasty daggers. A lot of games will have them be less effective or deal less damage than swords, but you don't have to be beholden to such rules. Just have your evil dagger-wielding villain be as effective or moreso than someone fighting with a more powerful weapon, and watch your players react in fear.
aurilee writes:
A dagger? Odd thing to focus on at the moment with the rest of the environment, but alright. I'd argue those aren't exactly evil runes on it though. Mostly because the resolution isn't good enough for me to tell that they're anything more than a bunch of vertical lines. A more interesting observation is that it's got a couple key teeth behind the blade tip, which is probably what the GM refers to with the "spiked" descriptor. Perhaps "present this dagger at" is code for "use this key to unlock"; that'd be a neat addition to the treasure hunt comments the party are making for themselves.
As for the second part of the text, I think I can imagine quite a bit. So whatever the marvellous surprises end up being, they'll probably be a disappointment. Unless Kylo figures out the Factory location and has it orbitally bombarded just before the group gets there and can enter. Now that would be a great way to keep the contents all a mystery for people to only imagine.
When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to. Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were the 9 Pauline letters to Christian churches that we refer to as "epistles". I was most captivated by these 9 books and I wanted to know what kind of people they were, what their communities were like, what their ethnicities were, and, above all, even way back then, what languages they spoke.
These communities were called:
Romans
Corinthians — Paul wrote two epistles to them
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Thessalonians — Paul also wrote two epistles to them
I knew who the Romans were, and what language they spoke, so no problem there. Moreover, I was aware from a sense of architectural history that a Corinthian capital column was a Greek creation. Several of the others had a Greek ring to them as well. But the one that attracted my attention above all the others was the letter to the Galatians, who were located in a region of Anatolia known as Galatia. Somehow Galatians didn't seem to fit the Mediterranean paradigm that I suspected for the other communities.
Only much later did I learn that the Galatians were a type of Gauls, i.e., Celts, who had migrated from what is now France to what is now Türkiye. What, pray tell, would have driven them there so far from the north to the south, when most population movements during the Holocene Epoch (last ten thousand years) generally were from south to north?
The Gauls and their confrères were outstanding miners. They mined a variety of minerals, including gold, iron, and tin. The latter was important in its own right, but also for alloying with copper to produce bronze, the metallurgy of which the Celts were renowned for. Above all, however, the Celts / Gauls were masters of saltmining, which is reflected in these toponyms: Hallstatt, Hallein, Halle, G(h)alich.
Even today, though, when I think of Celts, a bucolic picture of shepherds with their flocks comes to mind, and it's not difficult to imagine that, just as the Celts went wandering in search of metal sources, so they were ever in quest of better pastures for their sheep.
It is no wonder that, being the skillful shepherds that they were, the Celts would become the premier wool weavers we know them to be. It just so happens that one of the textile types they perfected was diagonal twill. If you add some colored thread into the warp and the weft in a repeated pattern, you get plaid, beloved of the Gaelic Scots still to this day. It is not an accident that the earliest and best preserved plaids in the world are found in the salt mines of the Celtic areas of Europe, as well as in the bogs of northern Europe, whose tannin preserves organic materials, including plaids and other woolen textiles (not to mention human bodies!). The only other place on earth I know of for the early conservation of woolen textiles, including very early plaids from the same period as those in the northern European bogs and Celtic salt mines of north central Europe, is the Tarim Basin, especially Qizilchoqa (near Qumul [Hami]) and Zaghunluq (near Chärchän [Qiemo]). both of which have highly saline soils and exquisite Bronze Age woolen textiles, including plaids. I have tasted the deposits exposed in a tunnel 400 meters down at Hallstatt and from the tableland where Ur-David (Chärchän Man) was discovered. You can use them as table salt to flavor your food.
The Celts / Gauls certainly had a wanderlust, and that would explain what brought them to Anatolia — and other far-flung places.
Selected readings
[Thanks to Elizabeth J. W. Barber, J. P. Mallory, and Douglas Q. Adams]
Brilliant Maps has a page with two terrific images, one “a colourful map of Toronto’s most widespread languages” shown together, and another, “54 Languages in Toronto,” with separate (tiny) maps for each language showing where in the city each is spoken; they “are both the work of Alex McPhee, aka Pronghorn maps,” and there’s a link to his site, where you can buy copies if you so desire. I do love this sort of thing, and there’s a lot more information at the Brilliant Maps link.
[This is a guest post by Barbara Phillips Long]
There is an interesting sidelight in commentary about an article in the New York Review of Books, which posits that the U.S. is two nations under one government, where the two entities exchange political power. The link to the NYRB (paywalled) article is here.
The concept of two nations doesn’t really track with the concept of political power remaining in “the people’s hands,” since the basically mystical concept of “the” people is usually thought, as a matter of political legitimation at least, to be more or less synonymous with the idea of “the” — as in one — nation.
This I think is somewhat obscured by the usages of the English language in regard to the underlying concept. Here’s the official government translation of the Constitution’s preamble into Spanish:
Nosotros, el pueblo de los Estados Unidos, con el fin de formar una Unión más perfecta, establecer la justicia, garantizar la tranquilidad nacional, atender a la defensa común, fomentar el bienestar general y asegurar los beneficios de la libertad para nosotros mismos y para nuestraposteridad, por la presente promulgamos y establecemos esta Constitución para los Estados Unidos de América.
“El pueblo” — literally “the town” — conjures up a more concrete and less metaphysically vague concept than “We the People.” Someone more learned in such matters can no doubt explain how the Greek word “polis” ended up being translated so much more literally in some languages than others, but I think this historical accident, if that’s what it is, could have considerable psychological/practical significance.
(source)
I thought Paul Campos made a good point about how "We, the people" does not convey the same rhetorical flourish in every language. Language Log readers are likely all aware of the pitfalls — and illuminations — of translation, but I confess I am curious about how many and different ways the Preamble and the concept of "polis" are expressed.
Selected readings
Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay discuss an American woman in her 50s who is going viral for her plastic surgery journey. Michelle Wood is a mom who traveled to Guadalajara to undergo several procedures, including a facelift and a chin implant. She documented her journey before and after the procedure, creating intrigue, curiosity, and surprisingly positive responses online. TikTok reacted similarly when Kylie Jenner revealed the details of her boob job and broke the internet within the same week. So what do Wood and Jenner’s transparency say about the way women are talking about their bodies, and their surgeries, in 2025?
This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim, and Kate Lindsay.
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@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now
As I anticipate my chicken curry and lemon bars, I’ll mention some of the gifts that have come my way. There was a group of movies, for some reason all Asian: two by Tsai Ming-Liang (Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L’amour), Mother by Bong Joon-ho (I loved his Parasite and Memories of Murder), and the new 2-Blu-ray Criterion edition of Seven Samurai (replacing my ancient DVD), one of my favorite movies (I last watched it in conjunction with a reread of The Last Samurai and am due for another viewing). Oh, and I almost forgot Gimme Shelter, one of the greatest and most troubling of rock movies. My lovely and generous wife gave me this Mingus box set (7 CDs!). And I got a book of great Hattic interest: Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (her name has the tone marks on the cover, the first time I remember seeing that). The NY Times review by Shahnaz Habib (archived) gives an idea of what I mean about its interest:
Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist, is traveling around Taiwan with O Chizuru, a brilliant translator with deep knowledge of the island’s layers of culture. Having received an official invitation to conduct a lecture series, Chizuko plans to spend a year on the island writing travel articles for Japanese publications. […]
Who better to answer these questions than a translator, adept in the language and culture of the colony and the colonizer? Translation, after all, can be both a capitulation and an act of resistance to the soft power of an empire. Having mastered the master’s toolbox, the translator understands precisely how cultural domination works.
Perhaps this is why Yang fashions “Taiwan Travelogue” as a nesting doll of translations. Richly detailed conversations about food, for example, serve as code for the growing erotic tension between Chizuko and Chizuru, which remains unspoken.
Beyond this, the book itself is presented as a fictional translation of a Japanese novel written by Chizuko years after she returns to Nagasaki. According to this framing device, the novel was published in Japan in 1954, and translated into Mandarin twice, first by Chizuru, and then decades later by Yang. There are multiple afterwords and many footnotes from both fictional and real translators. It all amounts to a virtuosic performance of literary polyphony.
In her disorientingly convincing afterword, Yang, writing as the book’s fictional translator, recounts how she discovered Chizuko’s novel by following a breadcrumb trail of archival material. (To complicate matters further, Yang Shuang-zi is actually a pseudonym, but, for your sanity and mine, I refer to her as the author in this review.)
A few pages later, the novel’s English-language translator, Lin King, writes in her own (real) afterword that she consulted the Japanese translation of “Taiwan Travelogue” for help with certain terms, noting the irony of turning to “the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel.”
I imagine I’ll be posting about it in due course.
Update. A couple of later-arriving novels: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar.