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Post by En on Aug 20, 2003 10:08:05 GMT -5
Yep, Dora And you're right, it was Henry VIII. In case anyone is curious, Mary's religious issues probably came from the fact that she was Henry VIII's oldest and the child of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who was Catholic. Henry VIII basically started the Church of England so he could divorce Catherine, since the Pope wouldn't let him. So Mary was always bitter about that. Edward was her younger brother and had something like tuberculosis or something, and there were no other sons, so when he died Mary inherited the throne -- and probably used it to persecute Protestants because she was still so mad at her father for abandoning her mother.
But at least she wasn't as nasty as the French kings, who got a big kick out of throwing Protestants out their windows. "Defenestration" they called it, and it was a popular party game.
*bows* Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
The Candyman is a horror novel turned film, and I've neither read nor seen it. But Poltergeist... ack. It really bothered me a lot. Partly because I saw it when I was like 6, and partly because there was an evil tree. Evil trees make the Nialle sad
...I have two mirrors in my new apartment, and they bother me. In my old place, there was one mirror that was about 40x20cm. These two are like 1m high (in the bathroom) and 2m high (on the closet door). *shudders* I don't like mirrors. I'm not a vampire, I just don't like them. Dunno why.
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Natz
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Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Aug 20, 2003 13:34:33 GMT -5
I don't particually like evil trees either. The nice happy trees are fine ;D What about bloody mary who has to be the worst in my opinion she killed 300 servants so that she could bath in their blood for the good of her skin 'shudders'. I don't like creeky doors.
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Post by Rue on Aug 20, 2003 15:54:53 GMT -5
Wow, bathing in 300 peoples' blood. Not only is that disgusting and morally wrong in my mind, but in this time period, that is so unsafe. Yuck. Gen and I were talking a few weeks ago about how awful it would be to be a vampire, because they could get AIDS and all these other really bad diseases. *grossed out smiley*
Here there are only two mirrors in the room, one on the inside of my closest and the other on the inside of my roommate's closet. I am perfectly happy with this arrangement. ;D
Oh, Nialle, about bad trees... not really, but it's close enough. There's this kid I met named Derek, and he's Chinese I think. Anyway, his last name is Lin, and I thought about how that name can be spelled in different ways, because (dun dun duuuuun I hope you don't already know this because that would ruin the effect...) Lin in Chinese means something like forest; trees.
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Post by En on Aug 20, 2003 16:29:02 GMT -5
300 people's blood, huh? Hm... it's not impossible... but I do wonder sometimes how many historical things like that were actually propaganda.
Because, like, the whole thing with the Lusitania was bunk. The president told the press to say, "Bad guys attacked our passenger ship! Therefore we must go to war!" But actually, the Lusitania was smuggling arms -- and we now have some evidence that the passengers knew it and some were even involved. But people still think we went to war because the bad guys attacked our civilians.
Also, one of the things the Romans liked to do to get control over new lands was to spread nasty rumours about the former local leaders. Like that they had weird diseases, or committed strange human rights abuses, or stuff like that. The tactic was so successful in discrediting the former rulers and making the people think that Roman rule was a good deal (yeah, really good deal, they got taxed to death, sent to war, enslaved or even forced to combat lions in arenas for the rulers' amusement) that it was used again by the imperialists of the 17th and 18th centuries to justify genocide of whole native populations on the Asian, African and American continents: all the colonists had to do was say that the natives were cannibals, and wham, the army is permitted to blow them all away. Never mind that we never found evidence of cannibalism in archaeological digs after the fact, on most of them.
Anyway, I'm not saying it's not true because I don't know, but that sure sounds like propaganda to me. I mean, if I had 300 servants to kick around, I'd keep them healthy, happy and well-fed so they'd do stuff for me. If I bathed in their blood, they'd be dead. Besides, 300 people is a lot of blood (about 1500 litres if they were all healthy and averaged 150 pounds; which would fill approximately 8 house-standard bathtubs; yes, I just googled to figure that stuff out, I'm such a geek), and it would smell pretty nasty after only a few minutes because there would have been food and waste particles in the blood that would start decomposing if you kept the blood hot enough that it wouldn't solidify quickly.
Wow, do I ever sound like a morbid fiend.
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Natz
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Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Aug 21, 2003 8:53:18 GMT -5
i call it going way to far for vanity. Eww a bath full of solid blood. She didn't kill them all at once it was over quite a long period but quite a short space to go through 300 servants. I suppose most people thought she was unfortunate and all the servants were killed by the diseases. Well they are beggining to think that the romans built good roads is a myth. Personally i do not think it is i think its the fact that they are not as good as todays road but maybe they were good at that point in time. But then alot of history is propanga and two historians never agree with each other. There is another theory that all humans were vegetarians before the ice age and then the ice killed off the plants and then turned to canabalism but i'm not sure about this
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Post by KoNeko on Aug 21, 2003 9:29:25 GMT -5
Ew! Bathing in the blood of 300 servants would be both stinky and unpleasant. I guess it'd leave your skin with a tinge of dirty red, eh?
But then again, some people take the placentas of newborn children and make them (the placentas, not the children) into a kind of soup which is supposed to return all the used nutrients etc. to the mother.
Ahhh, history. Being a former historian myself (well, up until a few years ago, and I did my minor sequence in history anyway), and yeah. History is a matter of interpretation and plagarism. There are only so many theories you can come up with and after that, you're rehashing old hat. And the people who interpret history have a reason for interpreting it a particular way. So as history is seen through a particular set of eyes, it's almost inevitable that it'd be skewed.
(If that sounds really harsh, it's because KoNeko is sad because she lost a mouse. )
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Natz
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Post by Natz on Aug 21, 2003 9:41:33 GMT -5
Aww hands koneko a tissue its always sad when you loose a pet. Yes then when you read the different interpretations a lot of them are saying the same thing and disagreeing with one another. They eat the placenta. I wonder if this does actually have nutrients in it becaue its been taking all the food to the baby.
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Post by En on Aug 21, 2003 10:14:24 GMT -5
*hugs for Ko*
I don't think there's any doubt that in the context of history, Roman roads were incredibly excellent; I mean they're what held the empire together for as long as it lasted. When you have a far-flung empire, good transportation is absolutely essential, and Roman roads made it possible for trade networks and troop movements to make the speeds they needed to keep the empire alive. Like having a good circulatory system.
The trouble with history is that there are events that occurred, and a lot of them; and there's a person, who grew up in a context, trying to interpret the events. The person is always going to have a slight bias based on that person's readings, experiences, education. I mean, if I tried to understand a culture that existed before good transportation, I'd probably mis-guess a lot of their motives in trade and diplomacy because I don't know what it was like to live in a world where a journey from one town to the next was the journey of a lifetime
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Natz
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Post by Natz on Aug 21, 2003 11:55:36 GMT -5
But at the time one perspective was that one guy said that he could not get to york because the roads were dreadful.
Personally i cannot imagine living in a lifetime where the trip to the next village could last for two weeks to get there.
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Post by En on Aug 26, 2003 17:08:14 GMT -5
Ah, well, the world is full of foresight but not often of people willing to act on it.
Yeah, there was this really old lady in McVille once who said just before she died that she'd never been across the river. We all assumed she meant the Mississippi, which cuts almost completely across the US from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico (and also happens to be about 1/2 hour's drive east of McVille). Lo and behold -- she meant the CEDAR River, which is a small river just minutes from McVille. She had never been more than 15km from that one town! *shakes head* I can't imagine that either.
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Post by Nie on Sept 9, 2003 19:58:53 GMT -5
Actully, I think you're talking about Erzebet Bathory, not Bloody Mary. She was a Hungarian Countess who had a rather disturbing lust for blood and torture. She grew up experienceing uncontrollable seizures and rages and when she married, her husband, Count Nadasdy, showed her how to displine the servants through torture, eg. covering a naked girl in honey and leaving her out for the bugs.
When she was arressted and her home searched, they found her own records of over 650 victims that she had tortured. She had gotten away with it for so long because she had so much power over the servants and serfs. She was only caught when her taste turned to noble women.
You can find out more here.
There are just some people who have no desire to stray an further than from where surroundings are familiar. Some people just like the comfort of familiar surroundsing, some are a genuinely afraid to venture any further. I often feel pity for those people, who create their own iron bars to be locked away behind, but I guess it's also a lifestyle choice.
I guess we also live in a much more global time was well. For us, the world is at our finger tips in so many different ways. But even early last century, many people were content to live their little lives and had no interest in the outside world or what went on beyond their own little world. Some people are just like that.
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Natz
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Post by Natz on Sept 11, 2003 6:06:04 GMT -5
Yes that does sound like the person i'm talking about i must have got the names mixed up but i don't remember the site i went on ever mentioning her lying out girls in the sun with honey on them. 650 people? it just gets worse. Do you think that bloody mary was her nickname or was it a different person? Well that is always one possibility that they did not want to ventrue out their village because it protected them and it was a close knit community. On the other hand there might have been some people who wanted to venture outside but they didn't have enough money or the facilities. The other option is not being allowed by your community. I was watching a programme about this women who wanted to go out with someone from the next village and she was not allowed to even see him because she could not go across her village border what was really sad was when he came back to find her after the plague she had died of the plague
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Post by En on Oct 7, 2003 16:12:10 GMT -5
There are loads of different reasons that some places get isolated -- in 9th century Frankland (now Germany) it was because after Charlemagne died, his descendants were pigheaded idiots and let the roads and justice system fall to shambles, so it wasn't safe. In 13th century Florence, it was because 1. travel took a long time and 2. why go anywhere else when all the worthwhile artists, engineers, merchants and craftsmen are in your town already?
Then in the 15th century, a lot of villages went into isolation because of the plague, to keep it from spreading out or sometimes in hopes of keeping it from coming in. And in 19th century midwestern-USA, it was because each town was an entity unto itself, trying to attract members of each necessary trade if it didn't already have them, so the only reason to move would be if you got outcompeted in your particular trade or if you had a bigger opportunity somewhere else, which would mean leaving the support system of creditors and clients you already had, so why bother?
I mean yeah, there are other not-very-good-reasons for isolation, historically, like the whole intercity wars thing in ancient Greece and just plain backwardness in some towns I know now -- but there were some good reasons too.
*shudders after skimming the site about Erzebet Bathory* Yipes. What kind of sick do you have to be....
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Natz
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Post by Natz on Oct 12, 2003 10:42:44 GMT -5
Yes she was kihnd of sick that women with what she did to people. Thats very true that there are different aspects that contribute to isolation. Such as rivialing villagers not being allowed to go over in case its seen as a peace offering. This one was about the plague and her parents wouldn't let her see her boyfriend because he was from the wrong side of the line. Another thing that shocked me was that on the news the other day someone stabbed someone to death and then drank their blood
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Post by Nie on Oct 12, 2003 18:48:32 GMT -5
You get people like that Natz. Some of them believe that they are actually Vampires. There are people who live like Vampires, getting fresh blood from their local butcher and such and surviving on that. Those people are OK because they don't do anyone harma nd as long as they are happy living like that then it's their choice and no-one should interfere. You even get people who drink the blood of oher people, but in small quantities, and the person they drink from is usually a knowing volunteer, in which case that's also OK, so long as both are OK with it. But you get the other kind that kill people to drink blood and that's wrong. Also the people that drink blood for occult purposes. There are an awful lot of small occult religions all over Australia because by law people here are allowed to create their own religion and no-one is allowed to stop them from it or mock them for it.
We just have some sick people in this world. You'd think that drinking other people's blood would be something everyone would avoid with all the diseses and viruses we have these days that are passed on by bodyily fluid contact.
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