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sunshine_challenge returns, as a peaceful afternoons sort of prompting to talk about things that fit the theme for this year, which seems to focus on solid things, things that might be used as jewels, even if they're not gemstones by definition (amber is more properly a resin, and lapis lazuli, the bonus stone, is a metamorphic rock.)
Admittedly, what I know of the Eddas is Thor's Wedding and the Death of Baldr. Possibly some of the broad strokes of Ragnarok. Anything past that, you should check to make sure I'm not remembering the Ring cycle of operas or confusing Marvel's Thor with Snorri's. Or, possibly, the Almighty Johnsons. So I remember, mostly, a general conception of Freyja being very beautiful, but not necessarily of a general disposition to sentiment or crying. But as tears, the associations of amber above (cleansing, healing, protection, renewal) are pretty well aligned, at least to those who believe in the value of a good cry. Certain toxic elements of society believe that there is a limited range of emotional states available that are "acceptable" depending on your gender expression. Even with more campaigns and famous people speaking out about the harms that come from such a restriction, there's still plenty of language, visuals, and politicians more than willing to invoke the idea that being an adult means sealing away a significant part of your ability to be human.
Being visibly out about something that sets you apart from others can be uncomfortable, of course, as there are more than a few people who want to treat you as a specimen encased in amber, for their examination and prodding and intrusion, a thing meant to satisfy their curiosity or to be used as the example of the Other, the out group, Not Us. Sometimes you join the Other willingly and on your own time, sometimes you're put in the Other because what was considered "acceptable" changed because of the group you were in and you didn't intuit the change. Or because you held a boundary and declared that something wasn't okay I'm the presence of others, and in retaliation, you became an Other. The expectation, of course, is that once you are an Other, you're supposed to take all of that intrusion without insisting on your own humanity or that what is happening to you is unethical and immoral. The more you protest your treatment, the more they want to demonstrate it's good for you so that you learn your proper place and to wait until the people who are your betters, who are still Us, decide that is okay for you to come back and enjoy the privilege of being close to Us again. And, of course, without bringing any of the baggage, resentment, or justified aggravation that might have appeared, or even calcified or been captured in amber, during all of that time spent as an Other. The Us wants you back, so you should be overjoyed! What's your problem?
(Sometimes, of course, the joy that comes from being the person you always are, even if it makes you an Other, outweighs the problems that come from living as an Other. And some people, of course, never got the choice about whether they are an Other and still manage to find great joy and community in spite of the treatment from the Us.)
The more common association I have with amber is the nearly mythical preservation properties that are attributed to it. There's more than a few stories in the he science fiction canon where some ancient organism, or parasite, or generic material, or other thing of the distant past is revived or unleashed on the people of the current time, or used with state of the art techniques to do things like reconstruct dinosaurs, mammoths, or other extinct animals. Sometimes to put them in a zoo, sometimes to give hunters the thrill of their lives going against game that will make things exciting again. In most of these stories, of course, something goes terribly wrong and the humans find themselves the prey, rather than the predators, as they have to fight the past. And often times the present, as the kind of corporations that think it's a good idea to try and restrain dinosaurs with electric fences and trust that the power will never go out are also the kind of corporations that tend to send in private security forces to make sure there's nobody left to expose the shortcomings of their grand plan.
At least in the popular consciousness, we're supposed to get excited by amber finds because the thing encased in amber contains soft tissue and other elements that will have long since decayed before the bones became part of the fossil record. In the same way we get excited about finding other perfectly preserved items like sealed amphorae, ancient sourdough, sites buried in lava or sand, or fragments of works that can combine with other fragments to create something that might be complete. Or that might give us insight into what was kept and what was discarded as a religion and its practices evolved over time.
The people of times before ours have complained about both the ease in which records are generated leading to having far more records to classify (and on minutiae and trivial things, to boot) and the lack of important records from the past that could really tell us about what live was like for the people who lived then. Or perhaps the concern about accurate reconstruction is novel, comparatively, to the desire to make the ancient world precisely what you want it to be so you can justify yourself or position yourself as their natural and unquestionable successor. In either of those cases, though, the ephemera, the things not designed to last for centuries, are often the hardest to find and the most insightful about the truth of life in any given time.
Preservation technology has advanced significantly, but the principle is still the same - put the things you want to preserve in a place that can control for the things that will destroy them, as best your can. Seeds go to Svalbard, bodies to the desert (or the peat), books and documents to the climate-controlled rooms. Art and statuary become the way to preserve the name and the deeds of the patron of the subject, and the target for those who argue that these names, these deeds, are better remembered as villainy, the judgment of damnatio memoriae passed upon the works and the people who were praised as virtuous in their time and condemned as vicious in ours.
The daguerreotype reduced the time it takes to create art from days to hours, and removed the barrier of having the skill of sculpture, painting, drawing, or other "fine" art to produce things intended to last. Small wonder, then, that imaging technology rapidly improved itself from there until even the most budget of digital imaging devices can capture a frame in higher fidelity than the eye itself. The capture of sound waves onto other media that can then have those sound waves reproduced means being able to hear productions at a distance from where they originally occurred, at fidelity good enough for the human ear to interpret correctly. We can remotely view and hear things as they happen, or watch and listen to their recordings on a schedule convenient to us. Having so much available to is has also changed our demands of what qualifies as sufficient proof of reality, and brought about an entire industry dedicated to making things real enough to fool us.
We have all become creators as well as consumers, and there simply isn't enough time in our days to do it all, so now we need even more curators and preservers and archivists to try and manage the flow and select those things to make an active effort to preserve and pass on to our descendants. We are inevitably guessing wrong about what the future wants to know about us, and there will be things that have no business surviving that will inform the archaeologists and archivists of the future about us, probably in ways that we would boggle at. Some fragment of us, preserved as perfectly as a creature in amber, that will be as exciting to the future as it is boring to the now.
You would think, as someone who has a loose relationship to time, I'd try to become selfie royalty or otherwise try to document everything so as to preserve the memories on one way or another, but no, not really. Documenting yourself means you have to believe that you're important enough to be preserved, and while I'm sure there's an entire web of connections that I'm sitting on, I don't notice them enough (or trust them enough) to understand them properly. But that's a butterfly effect story, not an amber story. Amber is about catching a moment in time and preserving it in a way that makes the details present, so the observer can understand what happened, even if the participant never does. So someone else has probably taken quite a few good pictures of me, someone else has made copies of stuff I've done because it's important to them, someone else has set their trajectory in life because of a thing I did or a resource I shared. A moment in time, preserved in memory for good or ill. (Or comedy, when someone shares a thing like "introduce yourself using the wildest feedback you've ever received." I work in libraries. Those who know what that means understand that my truly "wildest" feedback is only shared over drinks and in person.)
(The bonus stone, lapis lazuli, in addition to being intensely blue, is one of the stones a Steven Universe character is patterned after. Her gem is cracked, originally, but eventually is healed, and she is convinced to join the Crystal Gems, plot-wise, but her role in the show is often that she's a representation of unbound emotions, including sadness and rage, which gives her great strength when those emotions are channeled to a purpose. She demonstrates for the audience (and to Steven's horror) that it is completely possible to create a hostile fusion where one of the gems in the fusion dominates and subsumes the other and holds them together, even if the other one wants out. Eventually, the hostile fusion gets broken and Lapis finds more of a balance of her emotions through a partnership with Peridot, but she doesn't lose her edge and it didn't always take that much to get her back to relying on her emotions as her source of power. Lapis is terrifyingly powerful for a non-Diamond, as befits someone who can tap into her emotional state.)
sunshine_challenge returns, as a peaceful afternoons sort of prompting to talk about things that fit the theme for this year, which seems to focus on solid things, things that might be used as jewels, even if they're not gemstones by definition (amber is more properly a resin, and lapis lazuli, the bonus stone, is a metamorphic rock.)Amber was believed by the Vikings to be the tears of Freyja, their goddess of love and beauty. It symbolises cleansing, healing, protection, renewal; some have believed it to symbolise a resting place for departed souls due to the preserved insects in the resin. It has been used as a talisman for courage and confidence. Amber is one of the birthstones of Taurus as it's known to increase good luck, as well as helping Taurus personalities in their practical ventures.
Admittedly, what I know of the Eddas is Thor's Wedding and the Death of Baldr. Possibly some of the broad strokes of Ragnarok. Anything past that, you should check to make sure I'm not remembering the Ring cycle of operas or confusing Marvel's Thor with Snorri's. Or, possibly, the Almighty Johnsons. So I remember, mostly, a general conception of Freyja being very beautiful, but not necessarily of a general disposition to sentiment or crying. But as tears, the associations of amber above (cleansing, healing, protection, renewal) are pretty well aligned, at least to those who believe in the value of a good cry. Certain toxic elements of society believe that there is a limited range of emotional states available that are "acceptable" depending on your gender expression. Even with more campaigns and famous people speaking out about the harms that come from such a restriction, there's still plenty of language, visuals, and politicians more than willing to invoke the idea that being an adult means sealing away a significant part of your ability to be human.
Being visibly out about something that sets you apart from others can be uncomfortable, of course, as there are more than a few people who want to treat you as a specimen encased in amber, for their examination and prodding and intrusion, a thing meant to satisfy their curiosity or to be used as the example of the Other, the out group, Not Us. Sometimes you join the Other willingly and on your own time, sometimes you're put in the Other because what was considered "acceptable" changed because of the group you were in and you didn't intuit the change. Or because you held a boundary and declared that something wasn't okay I'm the presence of others, and in retaliation, you became an Other. The expectation, of course, is that once you are an Other, you're supposed to take all of that intrusion without insisting on your own humanity or that what is happening to you is unethical and immoral. The more you protest your treatment, the more they want to demonstrate it's good for you so that you learn your proper place and to wait until the people who are your betters, who are still Us, decide that is okay for you to come back and enjoy the privilege of being close to Us again. And, of course, without bringing any of the baggage, resentment, or justified aggravation that might have appeared, or even calcified or been captured in amber, during all of that time spent as an Other. The Us wants you back, so you should be overjoyed! What's your problem?
(Sometimes, of course, the joy that comes from being the person you always are, even if it makes you an Other, outweighs the problems that come from living as an Other. And some people, of course, never got the choice about whether they are an Other and still manage to find great joy and community in spite of the treatment from the Us.)
The more common association I have with amber is the nearly mythical preservation properties that are attributed to it. There's more than a few stories in the he science fiction canon where some ancient organism, or parasite, or generic material, or other thing of the distant past is revived or unleashed on the people of the current time, or used with state of the art techniques to do things like reconstruct dinosaurs, mammoths, or other extinct animals. Sometimes to put them in a zoo, sometimes to give hunters the thrill of their lives going against game that will make things exciting again. In most of these stories, of course, something goes terribly wrong and the humans find themselves the prey, rather than the predators, as they have to fight the past. And often times the present, as the kind of corporations that think it's a good idea to try and restrain dinosaurs with electric fences and trust that the power will never go out are also the kind of corporations that tend to send in private security forces to make sure there's nobody left to expose the shortcomings of their grand plan.
At least in the popular consciousness, we're supposed to get excited by amber finds because the thing encased in amber contains soft tissue and other elements that will have long since decayed before the bones became part of the fossil record. In the same way we get excited about finding other perfectly preserved items like sealed amphorae, ancient sourdough, sites buried in lava or sand, or fragments of works that can combine with other fragments to create something that might be complete. Or that might give us insight into what was kept and what was discarded as a religion and its practices evolved over time.
The people of times before ours have complained about both the ease in which records are generated leading to having far more records to classify (and on minutiae and trivial things, to boot) and the lack of important records from the past that could really tell us about what live was like for the people who lived then. Or perhaps the concern about accurate reconstruction is novel, comparatively, to the desire to make the ancient world precisely what you want it to be so you can justify yourself or position yourself as their natural and unquestionable successor. In either of those cases, though, the ephemera, the things not designed to last for centuries, are often the hardest to find and the most insightful about the truth of life in any given time.
Preservation technology has advanced significantly, but the principle is still the same - put the things you want to preserve in a place that can control for the things that will destroy them, as best your can. Seeds go to Svalbard, bodies to the desert (or the peat), books and documents to the climate-controlled rooms. Art and statuary become the way to preserve the name and the deeds of the patron of the subject, and the target for those who argue that these names, these deeds, are better remembered as villainy, the judgment of damnatio memoriae passed upon the works and the people who were praised as virtuous in their time and condemned as vicious in ours.
The daguerreotype reduced the time it takes to create art from days to hours, and removed the barrier of having the skill of sculpture, painting, drawing, or other "fine" art to produce things intended to last. Small wonder, then, that imaging technology rapidly improved itself from there until even the most budget of digital imaging devices can capture a frame in higher fidelity than the eye itself. The capture of sound waves onto other media that can then have those sound waves reproduced means being able to hear productions at a distance from where they originally occurred, at fidelity good enough for the human ear to interpret correctly. We can remotely view and hear things as they happen, or watch and listen to their recordings on a schedule convenient to us. Having so much available to is has also changed our demands of what qualifies as sufficient proof of reality, and brought about an entire industry dedicated to making things real enough to fool us.
We have all become creators as well as consumers, and there simply isn't enough time in our days to do it all, so now we need even more curators and preservers and archivists to try and manage the flow and select those things to make an active effort to preserve and pass on to our descendants. We are inevitably guessing wrong about what the future wants to know about us, and there will be things that have no business surviving that will inform the archaeologists and archivists of the future about us, probably in ways that we would boggle at. Some fragment of us, preserved as perfectly as a creature in amber, that will be as exciting to the future as it is boring to the now.
You would think, as someone who has a loose relationship to time, I'd try to become selfie royalty or otherwise try to document everything so as to preserve the memories on one way or another, but no, not really. Documenting yourself means you have to believe that you're important enough to be preserved, and while I'm sure there's an entire web of connections that I'm sitting on, I don't notice them enough (or trust them enough) to understand them properly. But that's a butterfly effect story, not an amber story. Amber is about catching a moment in time and preserving it in a way that makes the details present, so the observer can understand what happened, even if the participant never does. So someone else has probably taken quite a few good pictures of me, someone else has made copies of stuff I've done because it's important to them, someone else has set their trajectory in life because of a thing I did or a resource I shared. A moment in time, preserved in memory for good or ill. (Or comedy, when someone shares a thing like "introduce yourself using the wildest feedback you've ever received." I work in libraries. Those who know what that means understand that my truly "wildest" feedback is only shared over drinks and in person.)
(The bonus stone, lapis lazuli, in addition to being intensely blue, is one of the stones a Steven Universe character is patterned after. Her gem is cracked, originally, but eventually is healed, and she is convinced to join the Crystal Gems, plot-wise, but her role in the show is often that she's a representation of unbound emotions, including sadness and rage, which gives her great strength when those emotions are channeled to a purpose. She demonstrates for the audience (and to Steven's horror) that it is completely possible to create a hostile fusion where one of the gems in the fusion dominates and subsumes the other and holds them together, even if the other one wants out. Eventually, the hostile fusion gets broken and Lapis finds more of a balance of her emotions through a partnership with Peridot, but she doesn't lose her edge and it didn't always take that much to get her back to relying on her emotions as her source of power. Lapis is terrifyingly powerful for a non-Diamond, as befits someone who can tap into her emotional state.)
