so i lent my cousin bloodborne, he speaks a little english but he has some trouble reading it, i figured he’d be fine since he plays RPGs and all you really need to understand is numbers going up
so i asked him how its going, and he’s telling me hes stuck on father gascione, and cleric beast gave him hours of trouble. i was like “oh damn at least you beat it tho, gascione is really a test of how good you are at the gun parrys” -“…gun parries?” – yeah! omg, if you shoot something right before it attacks you’ll like stun it for a big hit, im sorry i shouldve told you -“guns?? you get guns in this game?” – yeah..you get the gun along with your main weapon – “????”
so my cousin beat the cleric beast and everything between that and gascione with his bare fucking fists and he’s been under the impression that the game is just really hardcore
YES, so i recently wrote a paper about jewish pirates and merchants for a thesis and used a shit ton of archive information and secondary sources (which are detailed below).
As we know, Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Some remained behind, known as conversos, who managed to hide their Judaism and remain behind. Others went into Calvinist Holland, but a majority of them went to Brazil, which was Portuguese-owned. The Jews there were known as marranos (pigs), but they were the first group to begin harvesting and collecting sugar by themselves. The marranos grew to have nearly 200 sugar plantations that they worked themselves— they traded with the Dutch, primarily. Sugar was hella expensive and Spain was hella jealous.Once the Iberian peninsula split (~1640s), Spain came in and took the land for themselves, either massacring or otherwise coercing the Jews to give up their Jewishness. They were kind of out of options, because Holland was engaged in war with Portugal and England was still not super friendly to the Jews, so they moved to the Caribbean.
Jews had been on Jamaica since about 1510, though they called themselves Portugals. They managed to get together a plea for England to get into Jamaica before Spain took it over, so Cromwell sent the English.
During the time in-between, Jews (Moses Cohen being the most famous Jewish pirate) roamed the seas with other “Brethren of the Coast”s. Because the Iberian diaspora had sent them all across the Old and New World, they had vast intelligence networks. Jewish merchants in Jamaica knew when ships in Spain were leaving, what they were carrying, and where they were going. Jewish pirates took revenge on the Spanish and, unlike the English, release the slaves from their bonds and either kept them on or took them to Haiti.
Jews are the best don’t let anyone fucking tell you otherwise.
Regarding the Jewry, Hereby Expelled from Spain, 1492. trans. Aaron Marx, coll. Jacob Rader, The Jew in the Medieval World (Cincinatti: Hebrew Union College Text), 1999.
Amsterdam Jewry’s Successful Intercession for their Immigrants and Businessmen, January 1625, trans. Jacob Marcus, coll. The Jew in the Medieval World.
Blacker, Irwin. Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1596-1600. Vol 3.
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661-1668. (National Archives, Kew, Surrey, England), 7/24/1667.
Taylor, John. Taylor’s History of his Life and Travels in America and other parts, with An Account with the most remarkable Transactions which Annuaille happened in his daies (1688), trans. John Robertson.
Ockley, Simon. The History of the Present Jews throughout the World, 1791, coll. Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World.
Secondary Sources
Davis, David. Inhuman Bondage (Oxford University Press: New York), 2006.
Finkelstein, Norman. The Other 1492: Jewish Settlement in the New World, (iUniverse: Nebraska), 2000.
Glitz, David. The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, (UONMP: Albuquerque), 2002.
Holzgerg, Carol. Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica, (Lanham: North-South Publishing), 1987.
Kritzler, Edward. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, (Anchor Books: New York), 2008.
Selzer, Michael. Kike! A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford University Press: New York), 1972.
Taylor, S.A.G. The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Jamaican Historical Society), 1969.
Tolkowsky, Samuel. They Took to the Sea, (London: Thomas Yoseloff), 1964.
Zahedieh, Nuala. The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade 1655-1692 (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 1978.
It was nice to be back in New York, Steve thought, after touring the whole country with the Star Spangled Show. Even better, once the show was done here, they were going overseas – not into combat, but at least it was a start. It made him cheer up just to think about it, and he maybe threw a little extra flair into the show every night, took a little extra time at the stage door.
“What’s your name?” he asked, crouching to get on eye-level with the little girl who had been patiently waiting behind several taller, pushier people.
“Ruth,” she said shyly, offering him her autograph book.
“Lovely name,” he replied. “Did you like the show?”
She nodded. “I liked the dancing.”
“You gonna be a dancer when you grow up?”
“Nuh uh,” she said.
“What’re you gonna be?”
“A judge,” she said.
“Yeah? You gonna make sure justice is done?”
She nodded soberly.
“Well, Ruth, you gotta study hard, you know that, right?” he asked, as he signed her book. “I expect to see you on the bench someday.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, stepping back, and another handful of kids surged around her. Cute kid.
2012:
Steve had always liked Civics in school, but when you had to catch up on seventy years between your last history class and the present, it could get a little overwhelming. On the other hand, celebrity was good for something; when he’d been working on memorizing the names and major cases of the Supreme Court justices, Tony had said, “Well, do you want to meet them?”
A couple of long phone calls and a few weeks later, Steve passed through a LOT of security, down a hallway, and into a courtroom; it was early in the morning, ahead of the open public hours, and the room smelled like coffee. A tiny bird of a woman in a black gown was standing in front of the seating box.
“Captain,” she said, as he shook her hand.
“Justice Ginsburg, right?” he asked. “It’s an honor, ma’am.”
“I feel the same,” she said, and there was something very familiar about her smile. “I wanted to get here a little earlier than everyone else, to speak to you in private.”
He was opening his mouth, about to ask why, when she reached into a pocket of the robe and took out a battered leather book, the kind kids used to collect autographs in.
“I don’t suppose you remember, you must have signed a lot of autographs,” she said. “But back in the war, just before you left for overseas, I went to see your bond show.”
Steve looked down. Scrawled on the page was his clumsy signature and, in slightly better lettering, To Judge Ruth. Study Hard!
He looked up at her, eyes wide. “No, I remember – I asked if you wanted to be a dancer and you said no, you were going to be a judge.”
“You were the first adult outside of my family who didn’t sneer at a girl wanting to be a judge,” she said.
“Well,” Steve said faintly. “Guess you must have studied.”
“Captain America said he wanted to see me on the bench. Couldn’t very well let him down,” she replied, and Steve laughed.
Every once in awhile something makes me take a beat and just think about what it’s like to be a Black woman.
You’re a woman living in a world where men make more money, undermine your authority, feel entitled to your time, and take ownership of your body.
You’re a Black person living in a world set up to cater to whiteness, where law enforcement is a threat, job opportunities are unequal, and assumptions of character are made before you even say hello.
On top of all that, you’re a Black woman, both hypersexualized and desexualized (sometimes within the same conversation), expected to live up to European standards of beauty for not just men as a whole but also to Black men who lavish praise the closer you are to whiteness.
We gotta do better than this. Of course colorism has its roots in white supremacy, but why is it that some of the same people in our community who are quick to call out racial injustice and are quick to dismiss white opinions borne of archaic assumptions about race still adopt the white man’s standard of beauty and apply it to our own women?
One, women are not a status symbol and they’re not property. You aren’t a better man because you found a White Man’s Trophy to accept a ring on her finger, and the same goes for the light-skinned Black woman with long hair.
Two, White America doesn’t respect you more because your wife is closer to Europe than Sub-Saharan Africa, and you shouldn’t even care anyway. That’s where a lot of the colorism from Black men to Black women comes from. We’ve been programmed since birth that white is beautiful and good, and Black men want some of that to rub off on them by having a lite-brite or white woman on their arm. It’s not just the programming of falling prey to Eurocentric beauty standards – it’s also an attempt to increase self-worth by proxy.
Let it go. White America won’t give you a pat on the head for dogging brownskingirls. The most powerful man in the world – a biracial man at that – got to the White House with a brownskinwoman by his side who is descended from slaves, probably field slaves. No Black woman should have to feel like a D-Girl because your insecurities as a Black man in America got you chasing after the Sisterhood of the Traveling Vanessa Williamses.
HOW IS BEYONCE A “B” GIRL ??????????????????????????
So the last time I reblogged this, someone reblogged from me with a comment along the lines of “wait till you see them with swords”. So I went to search it up, and… guys. GUYS.
There are actual sparks flying holy shit =O
and at the very end one ballerina comes rolling up like “you have learned well, my padawans”
I FINALLY FOUND OUT WHY THIS HAPPENS. You see this all the time when there’s a fight or a scrum and suddenly everyone pairs up with a member of the opposite team and they just sort of …hold each other.
Someone on reddit asked about it. And it turns out there’s a logical-ish reason:
all of the other players pair off with their man to prevent anyone else entering into the fight … so it’s a form of self policing.
[…] The players basically want to prevent 2 on 1, etc. fights and by finding a “hugging” partner so there’s no ganging up on one guy, even on accident. They do it because it’s fair. And it’s kind of cute sometimes.
so now we know! it’s fair…and cute.
Aw best part is no ones left out at this dance
hugging partners to keep each other safe. day made.
just moving along like everyone else 