LNH: Net.Elements (was: re: [REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #47)

[Martin Phipps]

On Dec 5, 8:31 am, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 4 December 2007 Jamas replied:
>
> >>>    I don't recall if I was the first, but before Jamas I was using
> >>> the net.elements of thread (water), flame (fire), pixel (earth) and
> >> net (air).
>
> >> Jamas's four elements were flame, spham, crosspost and lag.  I was
> >> going from memory and I misspoke.
>
> > I ripped off...er, used development from Dave. Lag is a part of net,
> > crosspost comes from thread and spham from pixel (haven't used spham
> > actually).
>
> > And the fifth element is TimeIndex (plasma). [Again, from Dave.]
>
> TimeIndex corresponds to plasma?  I must have missed that.  Makes
> sense, but that leads to the mischeivous question: do we have a
> correspondence for the Bose-Einstein Condensate supercool
> (superdense?) state of matter?
>
> Actually, we may as well use this opportunity to sort out the
> Eastern Net.Elemets.  I've been working on-and-of on these for about a
> year, and even pestered Dvandom on them.
>
> Western
> [the first four have been established as far back as Lord Ebon's attack
> against the LNH in _Constellation_ #11 in 1993; see also Dvandom's
> addition to the _Kid Kirby's Guide To The Cosmos_ FAQ]
>   Earth  - Keystroke
>   Air    - Net                        
>   Fire   - Flame
>   Water  - Thread
>   Plasma - TimeIndex

When Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four, he had each one correspond
to a different element: Mr. Fantastic with water, the Human Torch with
flame, the Invisible Woman with air and the Thing with earth.

> Eastern
>   Earth - Net
>   Water - Thread
>   Fire  - Flame
>   Wood  - Processing (a 'living' net.element)
>   Metal - ? Marco

Curiously enough, the different elements are associated with different
planets: Mars with fire, Mercury with water, Jupiter with wood and
Venus with metal.  This is reflected in the powers of the Sailor
Scouts (Sailor Mars, Sailor Mercury, Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Venus)
which are therefore elementals in the Asian sense.

The Chinese elements also come up in Chinese astrology: every twelve
years we have the cycle involving twelve different animals but every
five years you also have a cycle involving the five elements.  Thus
every sixty years is a complete cycle.  (Chinese culture is remarkably
similar to ancient Sumerian culture in the sense that the numbers 12
and 60 are important.  Chinese legend speaks of "Turkish" people from
the West teaching them about the Western practice of dividing the year
into four seasons and planting crops according to the solar [as
opposed to lunar] calendar.  Ancient Chinese astrology originally also
had the solar year divided into twelve equal units -much like Western
astrology- but with each unit corresponding to an animal in the
Chinese and not Sumerian zodiac.  Curiously, while farmers chose to
use a solar calendar to plant crops, people in the cities prefered to
use the traditional lunar calendar so Chinese astrology today ignores
the time of the year in favour of the sixty year cycle.)

It is ironic that the movie version of the Fantastic Four associates
Dr. Doom with elemental metal (in the sense that he gained the
strength of the station's shields rather than be protected by them).
So then we would have to argue that Asian people would naturally
associate the Invisible Woman with wood.  Hmm.  Jessica Alba -->
wood.  It so happens that does actually correspond to my experince
watching the movie.

Martin