ShifterCat

Thomas G. Aylesworth’s Servants of the Devil (1970) is from the same series as Vampires and Other Ghosts, and like that book it is full of large art reproductions and flare for pleasing graphic design. But where the former book is breezy and light, this one is a sober evaluation of the folklore of witchcraft and the use of the same as an excuse for murder and torture by the churches and governments of Europe and elsewhere. It’s nice to see Aylesworth struggle to be impartial. Any semblance of that falls way pretty early. By the time he mentions Nicholas Remy, the judge who sentenced hundreds of “witches” to burn to death in a span of 15 years, Aylesworth’s anger is pretty apparent. Toward the end of Remy’s life, he was plagued by guilt, not for the deaths but rather because he spared some of the children who came before his bench. What a shit.

Anyway, after that point, Aylesworth is pretty clearly horrified by the persecution of witches. He leaves some room for the existence of witchcraft as defined by Margaret Murray, that is, as a survival of a pagan religion dedicated to a mother goddess. He does this, it seems, because of the absence of evidence either way. As for the diablery described by the witch hunters, he appears deeply skeptical. In all, it’s a rather bracing indictment of cruelty and hysteria.

The curtains were blue because throughout their filmography the director consistently uses cool tones to mark moments of distance between characters. The curtains were blue to tie the events in that room into the broader oceanic motif of this particular novel. The curtains were blue because the assonance evoked a contrast with the following stanza of the poem.

Even the curtains looked expensive: floor to ceiling velvet drapes, in a flawless royal blue. She tucked the saucer up on the windowsill and tied back faded blue curtains with a loop of string. The narrow blinds were the same navy blue as the pinstripe suit of the man who served eviction notice that sent them to this office.

The curtains were blue because the author’s childhood home had blue curtains, which they discussed in their letters related to their feelings of comfort in that place. The curtains were blue because the author’s childhood home had blue curtains, which they discussed in their letters related to their feelings of grief in that place.

The curtains were blue as an allusion to the contemporary joke about literary criticism, an extension of the author’s autocritical approach that will be further discussed in section seven.

The curtains were red, as a pun on;

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

Nugget says trans rights

nugget is incredibly correct