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y-rhywbeth2 · 1 month

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@leomonae Hmm. Were [judges] always chosen from the ranks of the patriars, even 200 years back?

That's actually a good point that I failed to factor in and just had to go research - the only aspect of it I'd considered prior was the fact that the new money minority amongst the Peers wouldn't count in this equation (whether Astarion would be from a Patriar family, and thus require human ancestry to make sense in the lore) because he died long before they were established. (I was also incorrect about lawyers: barristers are a rare (and insanely expensive to hire) minority within the city, though from what else I've seen on the topic of lawyers in the realms that is a very new evolution. As Astarion says himself though; he was a judge, he made rulings.)

By default the role of judge is performed by the Dukes, when a crime is too serious and under dispute (or a Patriar, or somebody in similar power (*cough*high ranking temple clergy*cough*) wants it taken to court) and can't be settled by officers of the Fist or the Watch. Within the Gate's legal system it's rare for a case to require a magister to rule on it, so there's not much call for judges in the first place. Rule of thumb: you just go straight to jail… or the gallows! Hm, I'm suddenly reminded of Angelo sentencing the party back in BG1: "I am commander of the Flaming Fist. I will be your judge, jury and executioner, pardon the cliché."

In the 15th century the Dukes may delegate to a member of the Parliament of Peers, but that itself raises some questions because the Peers exist because the Patriars saw an opportunity to grab power and took it*, and this power was not delegated… so it's quite possible that when Astarion was alive you had to be a Grand Duke to serve as a judge. Grand Duke Ancunín! The Gate is doomed. (I somehow don't think Astarion was ever a duke, I think that would've come up at some point.)

*"Hand all the power over the nobility". Even before the Peers the Patriars were using their money and influence - Dukes were voted for, and democracy held sway, but the nobility are still happy to try and game the system, though they weren't as successful before they could overrule the Council of Four. Nowadays they're doing it with the Peers, who will have a handful of non-Patriar members that got in by having money and (trades) Guild and Patriar connections. Dalyria, I have always mistrusted you even before finding out you were experimenting on 12 year olds, and I am staring very suspiciously at you right now. What were your connections, doctor? (The part of the systems that aren't rigged by the Patriars are usually rigged by the Flaming Fist.)

However there's nothing concrete about legal systems in the Gate in the late 13th century that I can find, only information for the 15th. So if you don't like the idea of Astarion being a Patriar here's your grounding (Which tbh, I don't necessarily like it. I see him as new money for some reason.) He would need connections and money for one of the city rulers to known him to declare him a proxy judge, if they did that back then (which, again, suggests Patriar), but there's nothing textual here to say anything concrete or say anyone's wrong.

Another tidbit of information: you don't get paid for sitting in as a judge unless you're taking bribes from interested parties. It is not a career, it's an occasional hobby. "I was a magister" = "Sometimes people bribed me to decide who lives and who dies and I probably decided based on the highest bidder and/or who was less likely to shank me for making this ruling."

#Baldur's Gate is so fucked #I will say human ancestry could explain the undertone of his skin though #which should be blue rather than pink - that's a decidedly N'Quess undertone. (Alternatively: gold/bronze or violet... not pink)#Which doesn't really need much explaining past “Larian”#we're familiar with me being irate about the physical appearance of underdark races in this game yes?#I feel like Vel and Dal would have a lot in common. Medical science; lack of ethics; politicking... I would've romanced her #/astarion #long post

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elk-scribe · 1 year

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What fate a slugratcat?

Anyway, all the in-game dialogue suggests they're more rodent like than the name suggests. I mean 5P literally calls you a rodent or a wet mouse several times. So, I went at the skeletal anatomy of a slug cat from the perspective of a very weird hairless rat with front-facing eyes and a very stubby face.

#rain world #rain world fanart #slugcat #speculative biology #art #fantasy art #fanart #also i have a theory that lantern mice are related to slugcats via common ancestry #there's a lot to point towards this being possibly true #elk art #if anyone wants to hear my theory and why i think that idk. say so in the replies or something

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captainofthetidesbreath · 1 year

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when it comes to the possibilities for Fjord's ancestry, there's something amusing to me about the idea that Fjord's non-orcish parent was water genasi

#Fjord and Jester's kid is teal not bc he's green she's blue but bc they both have water genasi ancestry and it's a common water genasi color #Critical Role things #CR #this is not a post about what generally you think are funny possibilities for Fjord's ancestry. it is about the idea he has genasi ancestry

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casualfruit · 10 months

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I think it’s so funny that Columbo is Italian, because he does look Italian, but in fact Peter Falk was 100% Ashkenazi

#‘has extremely Jewish ancestry but doesn’t look Jewish’ is another thing we have in common lol #Columbo #Peter Falk #casual convo

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kemetic-dreams · 2 years

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#Fula #balanta #Mende #ma Dinka #african #afrakan #kemetic dreams #brownskin #afrakans #africans #brown skin #african culture #common #deep reddish brown skin #african ancestry #african dna #Chicago

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trans-cuchulainn · 1 year

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btw the reason i did not vote for arthur/bisclavret in the previous round of the ship poll is that i do not consider the king in bisclavret to be arthur (i think it would tell us if it was, other lais give more details about setting, it is far from unambiguously arthurian – tbh i'm not sure it's at all hinted to be arthurian in any way) and thus to me while i'm sure arthur and bisclavret could have a nice time together, i could not split bisclavret from his actual love like that

(tbh i didn't know anyone did consider the king to be arthur, that never came up in anything i read about bisclavret back when i studied it, but from the tags on those posts it seemed it's not an unpopular interpretation, so maybe it's just in different strands than the areas of study i was working within, who knows)

#notably bisclavret is breton and the court / noble structure does not match most arthurian stories #it has never felt like an arthurian story to me #now. melion on the other hand.#if you want arthurian werewolves we can have them #bisclavret #for real though where are you all getting the idea that it's arthur #arthur does not have barons #is this purely bc of the proposed common ancestry with melion that does involve arthur or did i miss something

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ppeachx3 · 11 months

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About Amy's family, how do you feel about Amy being part echidna? Since nobody knows who her parents are and with Amy super strenght and downward quills it's a popular headcanon. It would also be very cute, Knuckles and Amy are kind of like siblings making her part echidna it could mean they could be related somehow, maybe distant cousins. What do you think?

i love this theory! i think it's super interesting and also raises some interesting questions about what happened to the echidnas, are there any others living in hiding on the surface, and what this means in terms of amy and knuckles as relatives...

personally i do think they're related!! the easy answer is 'duh they're red and pink think about it' but my answer as a jewish person who has worked with elders tracking down family trees across generations? they're related, but it's distant enough to where if they Were to somehow have their relatives all lined up in a neatly organized tree neither of them would know who tf the other is talking about until they find a shared ancestral branch from like 300 years ago LOL

but also i dont think either of amy's parents are fully echidnas... her quills and fur color are probably something that's been passed down.

#headcanon #edit: i brought up being jewish here because its a very common occurrence given the history of #our communities in eastern europe to find out another jewish person with ancestry from the same country has a shared relative somewhere #and angel island isnt exactly the biggest place on the planet yknow

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arctic-hands · 10 months

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Related to my tags on the Irish American reblog, how long have bastardized "Celtic" crosses been neo-Nazi symbols? I wasn't aware of this stupid use until I was an adult and my father was equally unaware until I learned about it, and in our Celtic (American) Pride we often used Celtic cross imagery in decor and accessories. Granted these usually did resemble actually woven/knotted crosses (which by no means meant they were authentic. At best a few came from local Celtic Pride fests–which as I said in those tags was plagued by Confederate and Nazi imagery), but most of them came from like JoAnn's or Michael's or Walmart whenever Saint Paddy's Day rolled around. That said, the woven pattern of a Celtic cross is a bitch to draw especially when you have yet to nurture or be nurtured in any art skills, so when my borderline-Gothic ass would doodle graveyards in my school notebooks I would often doodle simplified Celtic crosses as grave markers, which unfortunately just meant a simple cross with a simple circle in it, unfortunately reminiscent of the neo-Nazi symbol.

Me and my family were staunchly Indiana liberals (to be fair that wasn't that shocking in our democrat enclave city) and have only become more leftist as time goes on, so those who knew me well would know I didn't mean anything by it, but like I have to wonder/worry that those who didn't know me well (like most of my classmates. I was pretty lonely in high school) or people who would briefly visit my home or come across us while we were wearing Celtic pins that day or something came away with the wrong impression. I'm especially dismayed at the thought that the kids I knew to be actual neo-Nazis might thought I was one of them

For the record I left school in like twenty eleven and had been doodling graveyards for years and wearing Celtic imagery for even longer. I can't really find out when the "Celtic" cross became a dogwhistle

#Celtic cross #Celtic Pride #tbh when going to those fairs it was under the pretense of being (mostly) Scottish #it was all a farce my dad leaned into because he was adopted by a Scots-Appalachian man with a Scottish name going back to an actual clan #BUT i was never supposed to know he wasn't my biological grandfather (even tho it was pretty damned obvious)#so my dad played heavily on Scottish pride #that said we had Irish ancestry from other branches of the family so we indulged in Irish pride and imagery too #plus we just felt the knotted crosses were pretty and cool looking #anyway i/my dad did end up having more Irish genetics than Scottish pending our DNA tests #the Scottish is there but the Irish is more. especially in me because my bio maternal grandfather was also Irish Appalachian #(i have some Ulster Scots too but less so. which is more surprising because it's more common for 'Irish' Appalachians to be Ulster instead)#somewhat-Gothic because i usually aligned with goths in personality and depression but rarely wore black #i usually wore boys graphic tees with stupid sayings and memes on them #at least until the obscenely stupid dress code went into affect (search my blog for that if you're interested lol it's a saga)#i was lumped in with the goths for lack of better placement anyway but arguably i was more boy scene #my high school didn't really have cliques or anything strictly categorical so like goths would hang with 'preps' and such anyway #but i did have more commonality with Goths and most of my few friends were #anyway I'm losing the thread #rambling in the tags

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 7 months

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By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Nov 13, 2023

“I say, Jarvis, cluster round.”

“Sir?”

“Close on me – if that’s the right expression?”

“A military phrase, sir, employed by officers requiring the presence of their subordinates.”

“Right, Jarvis. Lend me your ears.”

“Equally appropriate, sir. Mark Antony . . .”

“Never mind Mark Antony, Jarvis. This is important.”

“Very good sir.”

“As you know, Jarvis, when it comes to regions north of the collar stud, B Woofter is not rated highly in the form book. Nevertheless, I do have one great scholastic triumph to my credit. And I bet you don’t know what that was?”

“You have frequently adverted to it sir. You won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at your preparatory academy.”

“Yes, Jarvis, I did, to the ill-concealed surprise of the Rev Aubrey Upcock, proprietor and chief screw at that infamous hell-hole. And ever since then, although not much of a lad for Matins or Evensong, I’ve always had a soft spot for Holy Writ as we experts call it. And now we come to the nub. Orcrux, Jarvis?”

“Very appropriate sir, or ‘nitty gritty’ is these days often heard.”

“The point is, Jarvis, as an aficionado, I have long been especially fond of the book of Genesis. God made the world in six days, am I right, Jarvis?”

“Well sir . . .”

“Beginning with light, God moved swiftly through the gears, making plants and things that creep, scaly things with fins, our feathered friends tootling through the trees, furry brothers and sisters in the undergrowth and finally, rounding into the straight, he created chaps like us, before taking to his hammock for a well-earned siesta on the seventh day. Am I right, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, if I may say so, a colourfully mixed summary of one of our great origin myths.”

“But now, Jarvis, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Dregs Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”

“That’s the baby, Jarvis. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jarvis, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Dregs Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jarvis.”

“If I might take the liberty, sir, you appear to be labouring under a misunderstanding. Mr Darwin does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and we are descended from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees are modern apes, which have been evolving since the time of the shared ancestor, just as we have.”

“Hm, well I think I get your drift, Jarvis. Just as my pestilential cousin Thomas and I are both descended from the same grandfather. But neither of us looks any more like the old reprobate than the other, and neither of us has his side-whiskers.”

“Precisely sir.”

“But hang on, Jarvis. We old lags of the Scripture Knowledge handicap don’t give up that easily. My old man’s guvnor may have been a hairy old gargoyle, but he wasn’t what you’d call a chimpanzee. I distinctly remember. Far from dragging his knuckles over the ground, he carried himself with an upright, military bearing (at least until his later years, and when the port had gone round a few times). And the family portraits in the old ancestral home, Jarvis. We Woofters did our bit at Agincourt, and there were no apes on the strength during that “God for Harry, England and St George” carry-on.”

“I think, sir, you underestimate the time spans involved. Only a few centuries have passed since Agincourt. Our shared ancestor with chimpanzees lived more than five million years ago. If I might venture upon a flight of fancy sir?”

“Certainly you might, Jarvis. Venture away, with the young master’s blessing”

“Suppose you walk back in time one mile, sir, to reach the Battle of Agincourt . . .”

“Sort of like walking from here to the Dregs, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir. On the same scale, to walk back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, you’d have to walk all the way from London to Australia.”

“Goodness, Jarvis, all the way to the land of cobbers with corks dangling from their lids. No wonder there are no apes among the family portraits, no low-browed chest-thumpers to be seen once-more-unto-the-breaching at Agincourt.”

“Indeed sir, and to go back to our shared ancestor with fish . . .”

“Wait a minute, Jarvis, hold it there. Are you now telling me I’m descended from something that would feel at home on a slab?”

“We share ancestors with modern fish, sir, which would certainly have been called fish if we could see them. You could safely say that we are descended from fish, sir.”

“Jarvis, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Hake-Wortle . . .”

“I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir? To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins . . .”

“Let me guess, Jarvis, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?”

“A considerable underestimate sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again sir.”

“Jarvis, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.”

“I have one in readiness sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour of your return from your club last night.”

“Attaboy, Jarvis. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.”

“No sir that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.”

“Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jarvis, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?”

“I beg your pardon sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, ‘a change’, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.”

“Like a misprint in a book, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say ‘Mutation proposes, selection disposes.’

“Rather neat that, Jarvis. Your own?”

“No sir, the pleasantry is an anonymous parody of Thomas à Kempis.”

“So, Jarvis, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We see something that looks like a piece of natty design, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.”

“Yes sir.”

“It can’t have got here by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.”

“In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s alcoholically celebrated feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.”

“What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jarvis? Which, by the way, is pretty likely.”

“The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, and the calculation sufficiently approximate, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole . . .”

“That’ll do, Jarvis, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the off. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?”

“To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. Evolution happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitive. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed.”

“But it only looks like the work of some slide-rule toting whizz with a drawing board and a row of biros in his top pocket?”

“Yes sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements in the same direction, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence is prolonged enough to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called ‘Mount Improbable’, sir.”

“Jarvis, that’s a doozra of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I wasn’t too far wrong, was I, when I called it ‘evaluation’ instead of evolution?”

“No sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen as progenitors of future generations. Mr Darwin realised that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.”

“Or tigers, Jarvis. Tigers are very fast, Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Dregs only last week.”

“Yes sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had ample opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large predators.

“By Jove, Jarvis, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are the first ones to grab their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.”

“Yes sir.”

“But this is amazing, Jarvis. This really prangs the triple twenty. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything else?”

“Precisely sir.”

“But Jarvis, wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says, that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, Jarvis, I know what it’s like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.”

“Very true sir.”

“So, well, dash it, I mean to say, Jarvis, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?”

“Why indeed sir?”

“Jarvis, this is astounding. Incredulous.”

“Incredible sir.”

“Yes, incredible, Jarvis. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly as we biblical scholars say. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up, Jarvis. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick, and the binoculars Aunt Daphne gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies, the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me, Jarvis?”

“No indeed sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a further suggestion sir?”

“Suggest away, Jarvis, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.”

“Well sir, if you would care to follow the matter further, I have a small volume here, which you might care to peruse.”

“Doesn’t look very small to me, Jarvis, but anyway, what is it called?”

“It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by . . .”

“It doesn’t matter who it’s by, Jarvis, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gents’ bespoke headwear if you please. I have some intensive marvelling to do.”

Note: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" is by Richard Dawkins. It's a little self-referential, tongue-in-cheek joke.

#Richard Dawkins #Charles Darwin #evolution #common ancestry #natural selection #science #common ancestor #mutation #religion is a mental illness

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