Astral Codex Ten

Cross

9 min read

Cross

Article

Cross is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 01, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “calming a horse with the Cross”; ”‘…like the Virgin Mary or the Cross.’”; “or the Cross”. It most often appears alongside Jesus, Milan, Wikipedia.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: August 01, 2025
  • Last seen: October 24, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research13 suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,14 15 five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers16 as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor17 wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
Inline links: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,27 and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion,28 not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
Inline links: 27, 28
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
As I said, at 1 o'clock, the sky, where the cloud had strayed, cleared; and what was our surprise when a silvery globe appeared, making a small turn and appearing to be crossed here and there by the clouds! This happened three times, with an interval of perhaps three to four minutes.
A natural next question is whether these were a handful of cherry-picked susceptible individuals, or whether everyone present saw the same thing. Of the 60 statements I was able to conclusively establish as real, plus a few dozen more I came across but couldn’t conclusively establish, 2 were explicitly negative, and other ~3 were sort of vague but suggested some people might not have seen it.
We’ll later come across an extremely surprising coda to Manoel’s negative report. For now, we move on to the ambiguously-kind-of-negative statements.
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
If we take the second fork ... [we make] a partial pivot to inner dreamworld visuals ... In this territory, I have seen rows of narrow lines, spirals, vortices, doors, tunnels, canyons, fields of skulls, fingers and mushrooms, insects, snakes, and other strange creatures, as well as campfires, complex patterns that resembled fractals or Spirograph patterns crossed with Aztec writing, vast abstract landscapes, and many other strange images. These may spread out across the whole visual field. Recent conditioning and your own tendencies will likely determine some of this, but other aspects of the reasons for the specific forms this takes may be hard to sort out ... I remember on retreat one time when I managed to craft dragons (geek much?) of the exact shape and colors that I wished, with scales of just the proper iridescence, eyes of just the right glint, and breathing golden fire just like a good dragon should. They would smile and nod knowingly exactly as you would imagine happy dragons doing. When you get to that level of control, whatever you wish to see, you will see it.
If we acknowledge Fatima as a plausible miracle, worthy of our attention, should we be equally charitable to Moon-Khomeini? I can’t actually bring myself to take it seriously - but why not? Superficially, it’s very similar: the pious humble mystic predicting a celestial phenomenon on a certain day, the hordes of ecstatic believers, the secular newspapers admitting their defeat. There’s less documentation, but that’s to be expected - many newspapers were on strike, Iran has less cultural cross-pollination with the West, and there was no Formigao / de Marchi figure to obsessively chronicle and publicize everything.
I have some experience with programming cameras to react to light levels. In short: optic sensors have an ‘integration time’ over which charge accumulates, when the sensor is read, the charge is dissipated. This can be programmatically varied typically between a few microseconds to tens of seconds. The value read by the sensor mostly varies linearly with the exposure time, but must be compressed into an 8-bit value, typically using a non-linear function such as logarithm which roughly matches how humans perceive light levels. Typically, the exposure time is adjusted to fit the majority of sensor values in the 8-bit range, attempting to minimize the number of over/under exposed pixels. For a given scene, increasing the exposure time will brighten everything, at the extreme end everything will be white. Decreasing exposure time will have the opposite effect, making everything darker until it’s all black. Because of the logarithmic function, this will not happen evenly across the image, but it will affect everything including shadows and other surfaces not in direct exposure that are primarily ambient light. While watching these videos, it’s worth remembering that most of our ambient light comes from scattering in the upper atmosphere, so for dimming of the sun to affect ambient light significantly, the interference would either have to be exo-atmospheric or large enough to affect a wide region (think massive obvious storm-cloud taking up most of the sky), while a change of exposure will automatically affect everything, including apparent ambient light levels (shadowed regions of the image will get brighter so long as they are not under-exposed).