So People Of Unsounded Discord Started Discussing Who Qualifies As A Magical Girl In The Comic And They

Those who approach the New Testament solely through English translations face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice. In most English translations, the word ‘justice’ occurs relatively infrequently. It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice; the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch — and for all I know, most languages. The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as 'justice’ is 'dikaiosune;’ the adjective standardly translated as 'just’ is 'dikaios.’ This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants. To the person who comes to English translations of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'just,’ the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'right.’ The noun, for example, is usually translated as 'righteousness,’ not as 'justice.’ In English, we have the word 'just’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Latin iustitia, and the word 'right’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Old English recht. Almost all our translators have decided to translate the great bulk of dik-stem words in the New Testament with grammatical variants on the latter — just the opposite of the decision made by most translators of classical Greek. I will give just two examples of the point. The fourth of the beatitudes of Jesus, as recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’ The word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ And the eighth beatitude, in the same translation, reads 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The Greek word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ Apparently, the translators were not struck by the oddity of someone being persecuted because he is righteous. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted; people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble. It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of 'righteousness’ are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of 'justice.’ 'Righteousness’ names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. … The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. 'Justice,’ by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way. … When one takes in hand a list of all the occurrences of dik-stem words in the Greek New Testament, and then opens up almost any English translation of the New Testament and reads in one sitting all the translations of these words, a certain pattern emerges: unless the notion of legal judgment is so prominent in the context as virtually to force a translation in terms of justice, the translators will prefer to speak of righteousness. Why are they so reluctant to have the New Testament writers speak of primary justice? Why do they prefer that the gospel of Jesus Christ be the good news of the righteousness of God rather than the good news of the justice of God? Why do they prefer that Jesus call his followers to righteousness rather than to justice?

Nicholas Wolsterstorff (via chamerionwrites)

Ghost Trick

Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.

Hey... I hear you're asking for are suggestions... how about 4A for Stephen's mom?

Palette - Forest and Fire

doing diplomacy with the senator was a mistake

How do you feel about the fact that Book 1 of Unsounded written in prose would be like one or maybe two books/volumes and take much less time? I often think about stuff like that as a comic artist :o

It’s true, but it would be a different beast. Stories are so dependent on the medium. Think about how they change between books and film, between film and tv, between comics and novels! Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the film are related, but they’re third cousins at best. Are the ATLA comics really a seamless transition from the show? Does FFVII the OG game really feel like it came before Advent Children? I am sorry I only have Boomer examples

Unsounded in prose would lose all the sight gags; the moments of surprise or awe when you load a new page to see a new creature or location or sudden story turn. Reactions that are told with a heart-wrenching facial expression would instead have to be limned in words.

And words are great, words are super powerful, but words do their own thing and have their own strengths. You can paint scenes far more powerfully with words than you can with comic art, because with them, you’re painting on the infinite canvas of the reader’s imagination. But at the same time, you’re losing specificity and some potential impact. Well-done art affects us deeply. We’re drawn to it. We want to see faces.

Anyway, this has actually really been on my mind the last few nights because I’ve been listening to The Neverending Story, which I’d never read before, but I’ve always really enjoyed the movie. And though the plots are basically the same, they are SO different to me! I dislike Bastian so much in the book, and like Atreyu so much more. It was totally opposite for me in the movie. And it’s all to do with the actors.

So I don’t know, Anon, it doesn’t bug me that yes, the plot of the Unsounded could be told faster in prose, in books. Because a work is more than its plot. Webcomics in particular are this crazy modern format that let us communicate like this in-between every page. We have memes and in-jokes and can speculate on mysteries and dream and hope about upcoming pages. It’s cool!

Novels can do this too, of course, and serial fiction has been a thing for centuries. Webcomics are a pretty neat evolution of that.

Anyway, I forgot my point.

cytherea tarot i did as a commission for @powerbottomblake <3

I don't know about obsession, but if i may ask...

Do you like Moby Dick because it may be based in a true story or because it's written so well??

It's certainly inspired by the true story of the Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale. Back in the old days it was considered kind of unseemly to write pure fiction. Novels needed to be a travelogue or a biography or a historical account or a religious morality tale - at least on the surface. Pure fiction was too much like a lie, and could get you a dark reputation.

So yes, most of Melville's books were "based" on real events, either others' accounts or stories from his own colourful youth and later travels. But once you read them, you see the narrative is just an excuse for explorations of social or philosophical themes and ideas. Though his first two books were more straightforward travelogues, he couldn't afterwards write anything straightforward to save his life. His readers at the time felt betrayed by this - they'd liked his funny, scary adventures in the South Seas! - but they didn't understand the rest and stopped buying his books. Melville eventually gave up his writing career, got a day job, and died in obscurity.

I mention all this because Herman Melville the man is a big reason why I like Herman Melville's writing. His life was fascinating, sad, and we know a lot about it. It's brilliant stuff to study. His writing, too, is fascinating and sad. I'll just stick to Moby-Dick here but I love all his work.

Moby-Dick was the first novel I ever read that felt like the author was speaking directly to me. I was in high school when I first came across it - I was going through a pirate phase and it was on my list - and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It's not just a novel; it's an anachronistic multimedia experiment. It mixes prose and script and poetry and quotes and dictionary entries with elegant language and salty sailor speak. It's eloquent and disgusting, elevated and deeply down in the dirt and foam. It is an explosion of contrast, a constant seesaw back and forth between the narrative reality of a captain obsessively hunting a whale, and a common sailor named Ishmael reflecting on what that hunt means, what whales mean, what the colour white means, what the sky means, what the universe means. In his ruminations, nothing is dismissed. He wasn't dusty Hawthorne obsessing over the Bible; instead he was a sailor with a wide but naive breadth of knowledge of "Eastern religions," Asian history, "South Seas cannibals," so you never know what he's going to bring up. His was the kind of eclectic thinking that you didn't often see expressed with such eloquence in the 1850s.

So yeah, I like it a lot because it's written really well :)

But also, it's very raw, and you feel the sloppy earnestness of Melville on every page. He's trying so hard to communicate with you and - knowing that so many of his contemporaries didn't understand him - it makes you feel kind of special and connected with him when you do understand what he's saying, and you agree. It's a novel that benefits in a very unique way from NOT murdering the author; from understanding who the author was, what he went through, how exuberant he was for so long and then how much the exigencies of publishing and finances beat him down.

We people who love Moby-Dick tend to really love Moby-Dick. I'm certain Melville himself is a big reason for this. We connect with his struggles. We celebrate the immortality of all artists by raising up his work and reaching back through the centuries to take his tarry hand.