Severus of Antioch, last evangelist of Thomas

Yonatan Moss, a Jew, has found a Christian he can support: Severus Antiochene. Severus, besides being one of Christendom's most successful schismatics, noticed that gender is what we make of it.

First a digression-cum-nitpick. One tidbit Moss brings I didn't know is that Severus accepted John Chrysostom as a Church Father, along with the obvious Cyril. But John and Cyril were rivals. A modern Severus - S. Voicu, Quoting John Chrysostom in the Sixth Century: Severus of Antioch - has that his namesake had cited John for his New Testament tafâsir. We should, then, read Severus' use of John as a late Nestorian like Elias bar Shenaye or Isho'dnah of Basra might nod to occasional readings from some Melkite or Miaphysite. Moss also noted that both John and Cyril were sexists which Severus wasn't. Moss should himself find little to admire in John overall, John being about the worst antisemite in Christian history. Jew to Jew, I suppose: if I were Moss in a Severan context, I'd have sidelined John and stuck with Cyril.

Moss argues that Severus thought of gender as a set of principles: weakness and strength. The strong gender prevailed among both Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, upon the Fall, humanity fell to the weak gender. With the Incarnation, Christians return to the strong gender.

The divorcement of gender - as a grammatic convention - from biologic sex isn't entirely stupid. This held among the Hittites (animate/inanimate, for those wondering). Their Anatolian group, perhaps, yet survived in Isauria and some Carian coastlands. Still. Severus didn't preach in Isaurian.

Severus preached in Greek, and his followers mostly in Syriac. The notion of making Christian Greeks, Latins, Persians and Semites all use the masculine for their brethren but the feminine for everyone else is impractical as long as the Earth and Heavens survive. Our cosmos has survived since Severus' death some fifteen centuries ago.

Severus' main Christian antecedent, whether he admit it or no, is that last logion of the Gospel of ... Thomas: Mary Magdalene may join the strong gender by Christ's will.

The Denisovans of Manchuria

We now have a Denisovan skull. (Welcome to the Bagestan where we bring you HBDChick's tweets yesterday, TODAY.) NB: the Cro-Denisova proper was open for business, as it were, for a long time. By "Denisovan" they mean the seven fragments 2, 3, 4, 8, 19, 20, and 21; the others being Neanders, human, or simply unsequenced - or D. 11.

This paper concerns mitochondria - the mothers. That is why this paper includes Neander hybrid D. 3 but not the dramatic Vindija-mother hybrid D. 11, "Denny": D. 3's mother was Denisovan, where D. 11's mother was not. D. 11's currently-absent father, whom I shall name 11p and whose mtDNA we lack, clustered with the D. 3+4 cousins (pdf). D. 11p was, like D. 3, himself partly Neander. Both Neander influx came further back in their trees.

This newlysequenced skull isn't from Denisova - it is from Manchuria: the Dragon Man "longi", dateable 144kBC. The news here is that the DNA is now sequenced and shown to be Denisovan.

The full paper is on Cell. Specifically the Harbin skull aligns with the common ancestor of D. 2 and the other five. Those 3+4[+11p] cousins must have broken off before 185kBC, although their lineage lasted until the Asian dawn of homo sapiens sapiens; 3+4+11p are presumably the elder, truest Denisovans.

Incidentally without the full genome for Dragon Man, we cannot say if it (can we know "he" or "she"?) had Neander influx as did D. 3 and 11p. But I suspect... it did not. The Neanders came later and Harbin is further east.

When the steppe spoke Arin

This came in yesterday but I had stuff to rant 'bout, so I'll post it now: the Huns were Yeniseyan. We always knew they were Asian, but they were suspected Turkic.

Also shown is that the Huns and the Xiōng-nú were the same, but I think we'd already figured that. Wasn't this assumed in Mulan? Anyway I suppose now the greater Turkic world can go watch that kino with a clear conscience. Manchus too what's left of 'em.

The specific branch of these Hunnic groups is Arin, of which I'd not heard.

This is made possible by the recent discovery of a Hunnic settlement in present Mongolia, suspected to be Lóng Chéng. Before it was Mongol, one supposes.

Plenty of evidence for Turkic, Mongolic, Tocharian, and above all Iranian runs all over the Silk Road... in the Tang, Tibetan, and Islamic centuries. Problem: Xiōng-nú, as the settlement shows, existed before Late Antiquity. During Late Antiquity, the famous Huns were in, uh, Europe. By when, Attila was speaking German: if Etzel had won then "lingua-franca" would have been something like "gothtongue".

Advice for Viennese Schiklgrubers

You are a struggling artist who needs $ and worries about AI. Your customers might be art appreciators but more likely, they are also artists - of the literary sort, looking to illustrate at least the cover of a book. You haven't yet earned your reputation selling to others, and the customers you want - again, literary - aren't going to deviantart. I may have some Don'ts and Dos.

Don't spam under a femme-coded name, first up. Near-literally, get off deez nutz.

Second: if you must ping the author, at least show some hint that you've read the story. Remember: FF.net has analytics, so we know when a story got clicked-on. The one I did isn't even a thousand words. I am also looking for evidence that you're a reader generally: did you review relevant work? Does the review show honest feedback? doesn't matter if "Formative" or positive.

I countersuggest social sites where, on occasion, a writer may hang out. Writers also read, if they are any good. Where do we read? At the bottom of the barrel, we read the boring and degrading places: 4chan, reddit, discord. So yeah: be a "draw fag". People will ask you for commissions.

Because I tell you now: if you have shown up at my door only because you want cash and public attention, I will not ask you for commissions.

Fanfiction.net has too many spammers

I am, like: old... and stuff. I was there in Lollapolooza moshing to the Beastie Boys. As such my leadin to the fanfiction universe was fanfiction.net. So when I started writing, that's where I went. It was a pretty decent place up to 2018ish. You could still get noticed. I didn't want ArchiveOfOurOwn on account it looked like it was being branched-out for housewife smut. I play it G to PG-13.

I am pondering a switch these days. And no, not because I'm horny.

When I posted my latest attempt woo-hoo, I got six emails. But that was weird, because I didn't actually get six hits on the story! On a read through these mails, they were all quick reads. Why? Because five of them were advertisements, all on the same theme. (The sixth had "questions". I responded to that one. I noted all the spam I got in case that's what this one is after. And today a seventh showed up also sniffing for commission.)

I noted that (now) seven out of seven presented as female, or female-coded. Hmmm. What are the - oh wait, I have a statistics degree and am a Dungeon Master. I know those odds! 1 among 2⁷ = 128. Sex sells. Or it might if I weren't old and still gave a toss.

I suspect ff.net's spam problem is why so many authors leave their fix unfinished and quietly avoid the place anymore. I am certain spam is why AO3, for their part, makes applicants wait so long before admitting them as users. (If I'm blocked thence, that'll be because of my social-credit. Because it's a smut site, and sinners don't want to hear from the saints - nor from those of us in Communion with them.)

I report spam to support@fanfiction.net with the [abuse] header, but I never hear back what action be taken. FF might consider commission-begging as part of the experience. FF might even take money to look the other way.

I reported them anyway. I don't much want to give the five (more like seven) spammers free exposure on this blog so, I'll not drop their names here. Some of those idjits were dumb enough to include their gmail and discord.

I'll go further: commission spammers, even if honest artists, are driving people like us off the human art and into the arms of AI. We simply don't want to deal with their ilk anymore. That the spammers are certainly on AI themselves doesn't matter.

Fantasy content

As to what I've been up to of late, 1d4chan failed to slava and - a few years back - was reborn in miraheze as "1d6chan". So: let's talk the Drow Series.

Nobody much liked how the D/Q series ended up. The decline starts within module D3, which ending isn't Eclavdra's manse with that cthulhoid elemental god - it's the Fane of Lolth. Lolth is, yes, a demon queen ruling over the multiverse's nastiest excuse for Eldar. But in the 1970s lore, she dindu nuffins. The villainy was being done by Eclavdra her apostate.

How to fix this? We've had over three decades, and in that time indeed several grognards have come out to fix this.

Dragonsfoot has D4: Encyclopaedia Subterranica, proposing encounters to affix upon the D series map. Joseph Bloch offered an alternate nonLolthian conclusion to that arc: D4: City of Spiders then Q2: Web of Souls; or perhaps "D3.5" and "Q1*". Back to Dragonsfoot, they'd prefer a "Q1.5" to the Demonweb Pits, DF16: Skein of the Death Mother.

Apropos-of-nil I have further wroten a short: "A salvage from the doomed planet". This is set in CS Lewis' Wood Between The Worlds.

The hyperneutrino KM3-230213

Neutrinos are light-mass, fast-moving particles that don't interact with matter until they do, when the collision gives off so much energy that exotica like muons and pions appear. These decay at once, releasing photons which detectors detect.

So: here's KM3-230213, a "neutrino" detected in the Med. This released so much energy it overloaded a lot of the sensors. And it came from a direction whence nobody expects neutrinos, drilled through a lot of rock before hitting the ocean detectors, and no parallel neutrini were seen in the icy detectors of Antarctica.

Perhaps this was no neutrino. Perhaps it was a dark-matter particle. It's been getting harder to consider non-CDM solutions for wide-angle gravity.