Depends on the canon. There are versions where Hephaestus was born to Hera alone, similar to how Zeus “gave birth” to Athena. Then when Hephaestus tried to protect Hera from Zeus’s advance, the skygod hurled him off of Olympus
I think it’s pretty striking that the version where Zeus throws Hephaestus not only makes more sense considering Hera’s traditional traits, it is also not the Athenian version. It is part of the Spartan mythology, as Sparta had a much more favorable view on Hera (who had a very good relationship with their patron gods, Ares and Enyo, as Ares was her son and Enyo was her daughter-in-law).
Like Athens had a pretty vested interest in never showing anyone but like, Athena and Zeus in a positive light. I have at least 7 separate rants about how the Athenian depictions of Ares and his wife Enyo are just Athenian propaganda against the Spartans because Ares and Enyo embodied a lot of Spartan ideals about masculinity and femininity (particularly devotion to family, which the Athenians did not believe was a man’s job, and respect for women as equals, as the Athenians believed women to be subhuman) and even more striking, Ares and Enyo had married for love, which most Athenians thought was a completely frivolous practice.
Hera has the same demonization in the Athenian canon, because her traditional trait of being jealous, to the Athenians, was unreasonable, because Zeus was a king. They also believed that her hatred for his actual born out of wedlock children was unreasonable. Considering other Greek city-states made it very clear that Zeus was abusive towards Ares and Hephaestus, more so than his other children, many of whom he doted on. I think a pretty telling thing is that Hera got extremely mad at Zeus when Ares demanded Heracles be punished for literally killing his son and Zeus said the basic equivalent of “You’re my least favorite and Heracles is my favorite so no.” In most versions, i.e. Spartan and non-Athenian states, Zeus’s reasoning is seen as backwards and wrong, Athens sees it as totally fine and reasonable of good Zeus.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that during the time of the Greeks, the Athenians were hated by a large portion of the other Greek city-states because of how rude and capricious they were.
Also side note Nemesis fucking hated Zeus no matter the mythology so I think when the goddess of revenge thinks someone’s a dick it might be a good idea to agree with that.
It’s occurred to me recently that our collective idea of “old” and “middle-aged” names seems to be lagging about a generation behind. The OED defines “middle-aged” as “between 45 and 65″; “old” is over 65. However, what people call “old-lady names” tend to be names that very few living people still have, whereas people with “middle-aged names” are more likely to be 65 or over than to be fiftysomething.
It seems that the relative “oldness” of a name isn’t necessarily something that corresponds with the actual ages of people who bear it. Rather, there are certain names that have become linked with certain ages and ossified there, even as the bearers age and die.
There are a few possible explanations for this. One is exposure to older media, in which names like Ethel and Gertrude accurately reflect the 70something demographic instead of the “90something or dead” one. Another is childhood associations: if you knew a 40-year-old Linda 20 years ago, she’s probably still 40 in your mind. A third is our collective inability to understand the passage of time: “what do you mean 1990 was almost 30 years ago?!” A fourth is the Berenst(a)(e)in conspiracy.
Anyway, to test this hypothesis, I asked Tumblr users at large what names they associated with old women and middle-aged women respectively. Data, analysis, and methodology under the cut.
A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, Alexander Badyaev
also happens to be an award-winning nature photographer.
Inspired by
both passions, perhaps, his curiosity was piqued by the fawn and rabbit
skeletons he would often find perched on the branches of ironwood trees
outside his home in the desert near Tucson, Arizona. “Once I discovered
that these trees are social centers of gray fox activity, I got hooked
on observing these animals and learning their biology,” he says.
As explained in the California Academy of Sciences’ magazine, bioGraphic,
the curious species first evolved more than seven million years ago in
the lush tropical forests that once enveloped the area that is now the
American Southwest. “Since that time,” notes bioGraphic, “this
anatomically distinct fox has accumulated an impressive array of
un-fox-like adaptations for life in the canopy, including primate-like
flexible wrists and cat-like paws with long, curved claws that allow it
to grip tree branches…”
I’m reading this thing about how farmers in Japan considered thunderstorms to be good luck because they’d make more mushrooms grow so some Japanese scientists created this lil electrical machine that they wheeled through the forest administering shocks to the ground to simulate lightning strikes and the areas that they shocked yielded twice as many mushrooms as unshocked plots of land ⚡️🍄
Since getting top surgery, I’ve been thinking a lot more about pain and the ways I experience and define it internally. Pretty soon after I woke up after surgery, I was asked to rate my pain by assigning it a value. I said that pain scales have never been very easy for me to work with, but did offer a number to the best of my ability. I based it off of what impression I wanted them to have, instead of my own internal feeling though, because how I felt was impossible to translate, but how they should treat me was easier to aim for. Since then I’ve tried to figure out a way to make a more personalized scale that will be easier to use in the future. I ran into some problems though, which is what this post is about.
First I’m going to separate two terms that have the same word just to make it easier to use both in this post. Normally both are called pain, but I’m going to call them red-pain and white-pain.Red-pain is the pain of a cut or a bruise or a burn or anything along those lines including more painful iterations of similar things. White-pain includes red-pain, but also includes other kinds of pain that are less obvious to some. Pain from sensory processing disorder is included here. Anything defined by the person experiencing it as pain is what I’m using white-pain to mean. I don’t know if these terms are defined well enough, but hopefully my use of them will make it clearer what they mean to me. I suspect different people define red-pain differently to some degree.
Even with red-pain, I can’t really assign it to a scale. I’m hypersensitive to red-pain, and there are things that I would call red-pain that don’t feel painful to me, but are instead a hint at it that I suspect many other people don’t notice if they even experience it. At some level, red-pain for me mixes with “unpleasant sense of touch” so most points of strong contact my body has with any solid surface fall in this range. Right now, my elbow on my chair’s armrest, my foot’s two points of contact with the floor and my desk frame, and my bottom on my chair’s seat are all examples of this sensory-space where for me, red-pain blurs with something else I don’t feel justified in calling pain even though it is white-pain.
A few days after surgery, I still had surgical drains in which needed to be emptied and measured every so often. One particular time they were being drained, my mom tried to pull some of the fluid through the tube into the bulb. There was absolutely no red-pain from this. Even still it was awful and I cried held my hands over the place that felt so bad from what felt like an internal vacuum under my skin while I told my mom to stop repeatedly. At the time I felt like I was lying, in letting my mom think that it was painful, because it wasn’t red-pain, and I’ve never been good at recognising when I can call something white-pain.
I was realizing that after something similar occured when the drain tubes were removed, that maybe a pain scale that asks me to look into my brain and directly see my pain isn’t at all what I need. I connected it to alexithymia, and the way I’m pretty good at figuring out what I feel when I have a strong enough emotion to leave an impact on me outside of my brain. Maybe there are indirect clues that are better to inform me of how to quantify my pain.
I haven’t built a detailed scale for myself yet, but I think I would have much more luck putting a number to a pain, if my response to the pain is what I’m going by instead of some abstract continuous line of values.
I plan to include things such as “uncomfortable enough to try frequently to alleviate the feeling, but distractions can keep mind mostly off of it.” and “makes me take up a defensive/curled posture” and “crying” as various things that would be behaviors of my own that help define pain. I also want to include more mental things, like how hard it is to think about anything else, or how often my mind is brought back to it.
It isn’t perfect because other factors will inevitably influence some of these a bit, but that doesn’t matter much, because if i’m crying for example, even if it’s for relatively lesser pain, I’m still crying for a reason, so there’s probably still something significant to address. Maybe that reason is some sort of overload that I’m bad at recognising too, and that white pain combined with another white pain is enough to add up to a higher number.
My only question with this all is if it’s fair to classify different things similarly. My experience of when the air has a bad smell that I walk around quickly to find some someplace that doesn’t smell bad in spite of social expectations for stillness has not even a hint of red-pain. Even still my behavior for it is in essence very similar to the way I’ve been shifting in my seat to minimize my experience of my weight pressing the skin between my chair and my bones in a way that is similar to but not entirely red-pain.
Has anyone else worked out anything like this? I don’t know at all how anyone would classify my experiences, because I can’t know any one else’s experiences to compare, nor them to mine.
But basically, I’m suggesting that pain from hypersensitivities is something I never learned how to process as pain, because it isn’t red-pain. (and growing up undiagnosed, I’m sure I was told that things like that don’t hurt plenty.) So to work around that, I can understand it the same way I understand my emotions in spite of alexithymia.
I hope you don’t mind me reblogging this to say how I relate. I think the somatic head pain I get is red pain, and the uncomfortable side effects of the migraine are white pain.
I hate being asked how bad they are on a pain scale because the worst ones are like a 4 from red pain but I literally can’t move at all because I’m so disoriented from head motion.
The light sensitivity is the hardest to explain. It doesn’t make the red pain much worse at all, but any light is just horrifyingly BAD and I would do anything to avoid it.
I could manage it by lying very still in the dark, and then I think I’m probably overreacting and I would test to see if moving and light would make the pain return. It can’t only hurt when I sit up. I must be staying in bed longer than I need to skip school or something. Maybe it’s hysteria.
I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of my gi symptoms. I can feel bloated and nauseated and overfull without actual somatic pain, but those sensations are painful in their own way and still worth paying attention to.
I think that’s why “malaise” is an actual sign of diseases like heart attacks. It’s a white pain that is so infrequent we lack any more specific descriptors.
If you need a white pain to describe for other people, I think vomiting is one. You feel like crying afterwards, your mouth tastes bad, you feel defeated, and you’re exhausted.
But it usually doesn’t physically hurt. But it is very unpleasant to the level of pain and indicates distress or illness like pain does.
(The extreme discomfort I get from this could just be me being hypersensitive though)
Wanna know the thing I’ve learned about this year that’s changed how I look at the world more than anything?
Pinsetters.
You know, the machines at bowling alleys that set the pins back up after you’ve knocked them down.
The thing about pinsetters is that they’re oddly difficult to get ahold of. In fact, most models of pinsetter haven’t been manufactured at all since the 1970s; the majority of bowling alleys get theirs secondhand, and competition for the increasingly rare supply of spare parts can be fierce.
You probably knew that there were once over a dozen different varieties of bowling that were popular throughout North America; what you might not know is that most of those varieties have gone extinct not because nobody is interested in playing them, but because the particular kind of pinsetter they require can no longer be obtained in sufficient quantities to keep bowling alleys in business. Indeed, the most common reason for a bowling alley to go under isn’t lack of customers, but having pinsetters that can’t be repaired when they break down because the parts and the institutional knowledge required to do so no longer exist!
Like, people will cross the planet to get their hands on replacement pinsetter parts. It’s like a goddamn post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt out there to keep these ancient contraptions in working order.
For bowling.
I’m sure it’s a metaphor for something or other, but hell if I can figure out what.
Do you instead mean that maintenance parts for older pinsetters aren’t
manufactured anymore? Because it looks like there’s still an extant
pinsetter manufacturing industry (Brunswick still makes them, for
example) and modern varieties can handle pinsetting for all pin games.
I said most models aren’t manufactured anymore, not all. And it’s absolutely not true that modern versions can handle pinsetting for any game; most duckpin and candlepin variants are badly short on compatible pinsetters, for example, and even pinsetters that can do Canadian five-pin are often hard to find. About the only context where it’s not a major issue is if you assume “bowling” is synonymous with “American ten-pin bowling”.
There isn’t really an analogue for “witchcraft” in the western sense in Hinduism. Many of the Sanskrit words that could be translated as “witchcraft” just refer to the practice of yoga (the spiritual/religious kind, not the fitness kind) or could be translated as “illusion,” “psychic powers” or simply “creation.” One of these “witchcraft” words evolved into a generic term for “magic,” so that could be close (in the sense that it’s used in the Hindi translations of Harry Potter novels), but that’s also in modern Hindi and so rather detached from Hinduism specifically (because Hindi is spoken by much more than just Hindus and not all Hindus speak Hindi). The closest thing to western “witchcraft” might actually certain types of “folk Hinduism” which could be viewed as a kind of sympathetic magic in a religious context, but I would be careful of claiming that those practices are somehow the Hindu equivalent of witchcraft, because then you’re dealing with marginalized groups inside marginalized groups, which is fraught.
Since the character is American-born, it could change things, depending on the nature of witchcraft in your universe. Check out this old answer here about the Patil twins in Harry Potter for an example of what I mean: Hinduism and Magic: offensive?
Just take that with the caveat that, just because I couldn’t recall any Hindu groups getting twisted up over it then, doesn’t mean that no one would. There seem to be Hindu groups that will get hot and bothered over anything these days, but I (and others) believe that they’re missing the point of what it means to be an inherently pluralistic religion.
I’ve noticed a lot of Indian women tend to keep their hair long, is there a cultural significance to it? They’re American born so I’m not sure how that changes things.
We open that portion of your question to Indian followers.
–Mod Nikhil
Hair length is associated with femininity and one’s position as a woman in traditional Hindu society. Some Hindu women are forced to shave their heads upon the deaths of their husbands to indicate their retreat from the social sphere. Selling one’s hair (a common practice today; many wigs worn by Jewish women to synagogues and hair sold as hair extensions come from India) is often seen as the act of desperation that a woman would only engage in to save her family from poverty. I keep my hair long both because I did traditional Indian dance as a child and out of respect for my rather traditional family.
Just as an addendum, I should emphasize that there are types of yoga that are distinctly bad and would be more analogous to what westerners think of when they think of “bad” witchcraft like curses. Protections against these are often still used today even though younger generations have probably forgotten them, given how common they are. Bindis are an example, as is the practice of adding a smudge of dirt onto the face of a baby to dissuade evil forces from claiming that child before they have had a chance to grow up. “Bad” yoga pop up in Hindu mythology and folklore repeatedly involving corrupt sadhus, rakshasas, asuras etc. Given that, as mentioned above, Hinduism is a pluralistic religion, many of these stories could easily be interpreted as a dominant form of Hinduism at the time attempting to bismirch the reputation of a local religion.
When you’re thinking of your characters, you also need to consider the dimensions of religion and caste. I notice you mention looking into Hinduism specifically, but please remember that Indian ≠ Hindu, I can only speak for Hindu traditions, but don’t forget that Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Jewish people, Zoroastrians and Buddhists are all also present in India and members of all of those religions have migrated to the US at one point or the other. Each of these religions have their own stances on witchcraft which have to be taken into consideration. Finally, within Hinduism, there are differences between castes as to the types of rites and yoga that would be acceptable, so please be mindful of that as well.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.