It’s very relaxed up at the North Pole ever since the top demands for toys changed from handcrafted to mass produced. Most of the elves are in “qualify control” these days (very important to check those video games for violence, y’know), and Santa and Mrs. Claus are basically reindeer farmers most of the year.
Then, in late autumn, Santa checks his list.
He checks it twice.
He checks it a third time, and then he calls Mrs. Claus over to the computer, because clearly he’s messed something up and deleted something he shouldn’t have. Mrs. Clause waves him out of the chair, sits down, and starts checking the settings.
I didn’t think Ninjas were real, just spy’s and sometimes assassins but no one you’d specifically call “ninja”
Ninja is something of an affectation from later eras being backwards projected onto history. However, there were a number of groups that specialized in infiltration, sabotage, assassination, espionage and other “irregular warfare” tactics, often passed down in familial lines. The Iga clan of the Tokugawa period is a notable example.
The general distinction for the historical ninja groups as opposed to someone who just performed irregular warfare (like a guerrilla or a spy), was that the ninja in question had to be a mercenary, operating outside of the feudal hierarchy, and had to be a professional, so no slitting throats as a side-hobby.
Hey, wanna know why the modern idea of ninja is “wears black clothes”?
These are “Kuroko”.
Kuroko are men and women fully dressed in black and that wear tabi on their feet. They are Kabuki theater stagehands. When they are on stage, the audience is supposed to ignore them, pretend they aren’t there, as they are “special effects”, not people per se on the stage.
Well, see, some Kabuki plays liked to play with this idea.
In certain plays, a notorious character will suddenly get stabbed by a Kuroko and die. This is shocking to the audience because Kuroko are just straight up not supposed to exist as people or characters in the play, but suddenly, one of these special effects just murdered someone. Then, they’d remove the face covering veil and reveal they were one of the characters all along.
It was a meta manner of narrative, basically. A plot twist, if you will.
That’s why the modern image of Ninja was derived from Kuroko: Unexpected Assassins, striking when no one is supposed to strike, and gone like the wind, just like that.
“Ninja” actually looked like this:
Just your regular run of the mill peasant.
That was the entire point.
To not be noticed. To be one with the crowd.
Espionage history !
As both a ninja AND a theater kid- this pleases me
I love the picture from the stage up there – your eyes do sort of just slide right over the Kuroko helping the actress stand and show off.
I’ve seen this concept before and it is SO MUCH better with pictures
Let’s say your matrilineal line is fairly consistent and everyone has their daughter at 25. So four women in your matrilineal line are born every hundred years. In a thousand years, that’s only 40 women. Like the math is so simple and yet ? You don’t think about it. So in 2000 years, 80 women. So basically, 0 AD started roughly about 80 mothers ago. That’s it.
I’m……… i’m a little drunk n cannot deal with this right now
Yep
The advent of agriculture around 9500BC was about 450 mothers ago
you can’t just say shit like that without a warning
Many, many mothers ago, when the world was new….
Many of the notes here are saying “But women used to have kids earlier”
Okay. So, assume every woman had her daughter at 20 instead.
That’s five mothers in a century.
Fifty mothers in a thousand years.
One hundred mothers in two thousand years.
That is five hundred and seventy five mothers since the dawn of agriculture.
Less than six hundred women, between you and the dawn of civilization.
You are never so far from your ancestors as you think.
I love this method of making time comprehensible by humans.
The Science of Discworld breaks time down into “Grandfathers” of about 50 years.
On an even bigger scale, Richard Dawkins’s Ancestor’s Tale breaks evolution down in terms of when we split from which species to tell the history of life on earth in terms we can kind of understand. If you start counting evolutionary generations with the split of human ancestors from chimp/bonobo ancestors, there’s only 37 generations until the very first cell.
Compromise: hobbits smoke both & lump them together as ‘pipeweed’
u never kno what ur gonna get when a hobbit offers u some “pipeweed”
‘pipeweed’ in the Shire just means ‘herbs u can smoke in a pipe’ and it’s common knowledge that there are pipeweeds that are smooth & relaxing to smoke and pipeweeds that’ll get you stoned and they know which is which.
For whatever reason only tobacco caught on outside the Shire so middle earth’s other smokers just took to calling it pipeweed bcos that’s what the hobbits they bought it from called it.
I kept wondering if I should post this but fuck it, I’ve read enough about him to know Stan would have loved it.
The story goes that there was a magazine that wanted to do a story about Marvel Comics, and the reporter showed up with a photographer to shoot some images to use in the article. Someone cracked a joke about doing nude photos, and one of the other artists couldn’t even finish jokingly refusing before Stan Lee was taking his pants off.
He was very saddened that Marvel put the kibosh on the magazine using this photo of him naked with a giant-sized Batman Vs. Hulk comic preserving his dignity. I like to think this is how he’d like to be remembered. Especially the sunglasses.
Stan Lee was a marketing genius, a showman, a storyteller, he was flashy and he made a lot of really…strange business decisions, he made one VERY strange musical album, and he worked for Marvel Comics in one incarnation or another for over seventy-five years. He held some opinions I wouldn’t agree with, but he did a lot of good, too.
He never thought of comics as respectable but he did think of them as important and that’s how I think of him: a flashy weirdo, but an important flashy weirdo.
He chose Stan Lee as an alter ego, like many of his creations. He was saving his name, Stanley Lieber, for the career as a novelist he never quite got around to having, and in the end he said he was proud of Stan Lee.
blackash26 