text:
WORKERS REVOLT:
THE GREAT CAT
MASSACRE OF THE
RUE SAINT-SEVERIN
THE FUNNIEST THING that ever happened in the printing shop of Jacques Vincent, according to a worker who witnessed it, was a riotous massacre of cats. The worker, Nicolas Contat, told the story in an account of his apprenticeship in the shop, rue Saint- Séverin, Paris, during the late 1730s. 1 Life as an apprentice was hard, he explained. There were two of them: Jerome, the some what fictionalized version of Contat himself, and Léveillé. They slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat. They found the food especially galling. Instead of dining at the master's table, they had to eat scraps from his plate in the kitchen. Worse still, the cook secretly sold the leftovers and gave the boys cat food,old, rotten bits of meat that they could not stomach and so passed on to the cats, who refused it.
This last injustice brought Contat to the theme of cats. They occupied a special place in his narrative and in the household of the rue Saint-Séverin. The master's wife adored them, especially la grise (the gray), her favorite. A passion for cats seemed to have swept through the printing trade, at least at the level of the masters, or bourgeois as the workers called them. One bourgeois kept twenyfive cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl. Meanwhile, the apprentices were trying to cope with a profusion of alley cats who also thrived in the printing district and made the boys' lives miserable. The cats howled all night on the roof over the apprentices' dingy bedroom, making it impossible to get a full night's sleep. As Jerome and Léveillé had to stagger out of bed at four or five in the morning to open the gate for the earliest arrivals among the journeymen, they began the day in a state of exhaustion while the bourgeois slept late. The master did not even work with the men, just as he did not eat with them. He let the foreman run the shop and rarely appeared in it, except to vent his violent temper, usually at the expense of the apprentices.
One night the boys resolved to right this inequitable state of affairs. Léveillé, who had an extraordinary talent for mimickry, crawled along the roof until he reached a section near the master's bedroom, and then he took to howling and meowing so horribly that the bourgeois and his wife did not sleep a wink. After several nights of this treatment, they decided they were being bewitched. But instead of calling the cure the master was exceptionally devout and the mistress exceptionally attached to her confessor they commanded the apprentices to get rid of the cats. The mistress gave the order, enjoining the boys above all to avoid frightening her grise.
Gleefully Jerome and Léveillé set to work, aided by the journeymen. Armed with broom handles, bars of the press, and other tools of their trade, they went after every cat they could find, beginning with la grise. L&eacuteveillé smashed its spine with an iron bar and Jerome finished it off. Then they stashed it in a gutter while t'he journey men drove the other cats across the rooftops, bludgeoning everyone within reach and trapping those who tried to escape in strategically placed sacks. They dumped sackloads of half dead cats in the courtyard. Then the entire workshop gathered round and staged a mock trial, complete with guards, a confessor, and a public executioner. After pronouncing the animals guilq and administer ing last rites, they strung them up on an improvised gallows. Roused by gales of laughter, the mistress arrived. She let out a shriek as soon as she saw a bloody cat dangling from a noose. Then she realized it might be la grise. Certainly not, the men assured her: they had too much respect for the house to do such a thing. At this point the master appeared. He flew into a rage at the general stop page of work, though his wife tried to explain that they were threatened by a more serious kind of insubordination. Then master and mistress withdrew, leaving the men delirious with "joy," "dis order," and "laughter. 2
The laughter did not end there. Léveillé reenacted the entire scene in mime at least twenty times during subsequent days when the printers wanted to knock off for some hilariity. Burlesque reen actments of incidents in the life of the shop, known as copies in printers' slang, provided a major form of entertainment for the men. The idea was to humiliate someone in the shop by satirizing his peculiarities. A successful copie would make the butt of the joke fume with rage—prendre la chèvre (take the goat) in the shop slang—while his mates razzed him with "rough music." They would run their composing sticks across the tops of the qpe cases, beat their mallets against the chases, pound on cupboards, and bleat like goats. The bleating (bats in the slang) stood for the humiliation heaped on the victims, as in English when someone "gets your goat." Contat emphasized that Léveillé produced the funniest copies anyone had ever known and elicited the greatest choruses of rough music. The whole episode, cat massacre compounded by copies, stood out as the most hilarious experience in Jerome's entire career.
Yet it strikes the modern reader as unfunny, if not downright repulsive. Where is the humor in a group of grown men bleating like goats and banging with their tools while an adolescent reen acts the ritual slaughter of a defenseless animal? Our own inabiliq to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an at tempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting some thing—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly mean ingful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to "get" a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.
It should be explained at the outset that we cannot observe the killing of the cats at firsthand. We can study it only through Contat's narrative, written about twenty years after the event. There can be no doubt about the authenticity of Contat's quasi-fictional autobiography, as Giles Barber has demonstrated in his masterful edition of the text. It belongs to the line of autobiographical writing by printers that stretches from Thomas Platter to Thomas Gent, Benjamin Franklin, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, and Charles Manby Smith. Because printers, or at least compositors, had to be reasonably literate in order to do their work, they were among the few artisans who could give their own accounts of life in the working classes two, three, and four centuries ago. With all its misspellings and grammatical flaws, Contat's is perhaps the richest of these accounts. But it cannot be regarded as a mirror image of what actually happened. It should be read as Contat's version of a happening, as his attempt to tell a story. Like all story telling, it sets the action in a frame of reference; it assumes a certain repertory of associations and responses on the part of its audience; and it provides meaningful shape to the raw stuff of experience. But since we are attempting to get at its meaning in the first place, we should not be put off by its fabricated character. On the contrary, by treating the narrative as fiction or meaningful fabrication we can use it to develop an ethnological explication de texte.
The first explanation that probably would occur to most readers of Contatts story is that the cat massacre served as an oblique attack on the master and his wife. Contat set the event in the context of remarks about the disparity between the lot of workers and the bourgeois—a matter of the basic elements in life: work, food, and sleep. The injustice seemed especially flagrant in the case of the apprentices, who were treated like animals while the animals were promoted over their heads to the position the boys should have occupied, the place at the master's table. Although the apprentices seem most abused, the text makes it clear that the killing of the cats expressed a hatred for the bourgeois that had spread among all the workers: "The masters love cats; consequently [the workers] hate them." After masterminding the massacre, Léveillé became the hero of the shop, because "all the workers are in league against the masters. It is enough to speak badly of them [the masters] to be esteemed by the whole assembly of typographers."3
Historians have tended to treat the era of artisanal manufactur ing as an idyllic period before the onset of industrialization. Some even portray the workshop as a kind of extended family in which master and journeymen labored at the same tasks, ate at the same table, and sometimes slept under the same roof.4 Had anything happened to poison the atmosphere of the printing shops in Paris by 1740?
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the large printing houses, backed by the government, eliminated most of the smaller shops, and an oligarchy of masters seized control of the industry.5 At the same time, the situation of the journeymen dete riorated. Although estimates vary and statistics cannot be trusted, it seems that their number remained stable: approximately 335 in 1666, 339 in 1701, and 340 in 1721. Meanwhile the number of masters declined by more than half, from eighty three to thirty six, the limit fixed by an edict of 1686. That meant fewer shops with larger work forces, as one can see from statistics on the density of presses: in 1644 Paris had seventy five printing shops with a total of 180 presses; in 1701 it had fifty-one shops with 195 presses. This trend made it virtually impossible for journeymen to rise into the ranks of the masters. About the only way for a worker to get ahead in the craft was to marry a master's widow, for master ships had become hereditary privileges, passed on from husband to wife and from father to son.
The journeymen also felt threatened from below because the masters tended increasingly to hire alloués, or underqualified printers, who had not undergone the apprenticeship that made a jour neyman eligible, in principle, to advance to a mastership. The al loués were merely a source of cheap labor, excluded from the upper ranks of the trade and fixed, in their inferior status, by an edict of 1723. Their degradation stood out in their name: they were à louer (for hire), notcompagnons(journeymen) of the master. They per sonified the tendency of labor to become a commodity instead of a partnership. Thus Contat served his apprenticeship and wrote his memoirs when times were hard for journeymen printers, when the men in the shop in the rue Saint Séverin stood in danger of being cut off from the top of the trade and swamped from the bottom. How this general tendency became manifest in an actual work shop may be seen from the papers of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN). To be sure, the STN was Swiss, and it did not begin business until seven years after Contat wrote his memoirs (1762). But printing practices were essentially the same way every where in the eighteenth century. The STN's archives conform in dozens of details to Contat's account of his experience. (They even mention the same shop foreman, Colas, who supervised Jerome for a while at the Imprimerie Royale and took charge of the STN's shop for a brief stint in 1779.) And they provide the only surviving record of the way masters hired, managed, and fired printers in the early modern era.
The STN's wage book shows that workers usually stayed in the shop for only a few months.6 They left because they quarreled with the master, they got in fights, they wanted to pursue their fortune in shops further down the road, or they ran out of work. Compositors were hired by the job, labrur or ouvrage in printer's slang. When they finished a job, they frequently were fired, and a few pressmen had to be fired as well in order to maintain the balance between the two halves of the shop, the casse or composing sector and the presse or pressroom (two compositors usually set enough type to occupy a team of two pressmen.) When the fore man took on new jobs, he hired new hands. The hiring and firing went on at such a fierce pace that the work force was rarely the same from one week to the next. Jerome's fellow workers in the rue Saint-Séverin seem to have been equally volatile. They, too, were hired for specific labeurs, and they sometimes walked off the job after quarrels with the bourgeois—a practice common enough to have its own entry in the glossary of their slang which Contat appended to his narrative: emporter son SaintJean (to carry off your set of tools or quit). A man was known as an anekn if he remained in the shop for only a year. Other slang terms suggest the atmosphere in which the work took place: une chèvre capitale (a fit of rage), se donner la gratte (to get in a fight), prendre la barbe (to get drunk), faire la déroute (to go pub crawling), promener sa chape (to knock off work), faire des loups (to pile up debts).'
The violence, drunkenness, and absenteeism show up in the statistics of income and output one can compile from the STN's wage book. Printers worked in erratic spurts—twice as much in one week as in another, the weeks varying from four to six days and the days beginning anywhere from four in the morning until nearly noon. In order to keep the irregularity within bounds, the masters sought out men with two supreme traits: assiduousness and sobriety. If they also happened to be skilled, so much the better. A recruiting agent in Geneva recommended a compositor who was willing to set out for Neuchâtel in cypical terms: "He is a good worker, capable of doing any job he gets, not at all a drunkard and assiduous at his labor."8
The STN relied on recruiters because it did not have an adequate labor pool in Neuchâtel and the streams of printers on the typographical tours de France sometimes ran dry. The recruiters and employers exchanged letters that reveal a common set of assumptions about eighteenth-century artisans: they were lazy, flighty,, dissolute, and unreliable. They could not be trusted, so the recruiter should not loan them money for travel expenses and the employer could keep their belongings as a kind of security deposit in case they skipped off after collecting their pay. It followed that they could be discarded without compunction, whether or not they had worked diligently, had families to support, or fell sick. The STN ordered them in "assortments" just as it ordered paper and type. It complained that a recruiter in Lyon "sent us a couple in such a bad state that we were obliged to ship them off'9 and lectured him about failing to inspect the goods: "Two of those whom you have sent to us have arrived all right, but so sick that they could infect all the rest; so we haven't been able to hire them. No one in town wanted to give them lodging. They have there fore left again and took the route for Besangon, in order to turn themselves in at the hôpital." 10 A bookseller in Lyon advised them to fire most of their men during a slack period in their printing in order to flood the labor supply in eastern France and "give us more power over a wild and undisciplinable race, which we cannot control."'' Journeymen and masters may have lived together as members of a happy family at some time somewhere in Europe, but not in the printing houses of eighteenth-century France and Switzerland.
Contat himself believed that such a state had once existed. He began his description of Jerome's apprenticeship by invoking a golden age when printing was first invented and printers lived as free and equal members of a "republic," governed by its own laws and traditions in a spirit of fraternal "union and friendship."12 He claimed that the republic still survived in the form of the chapelle or workers' association in each shop. But the government had broken up general associations; the ranks had been thinned by alloués; the journeymen had been excluded from masterships; and the masters had withdrawn into a separate world of haute cuisine and grasses matinées. The master in the rue Saint-Sevérin ate different food, kept different hours, and talked a different language. His wife and daughters dallied with worldly abbes. They kept pets. Clearly, the bourgeois belonged to a different subculture—one which meant above all that he did not work. In introducing his account of the cat massacre, Contat made explicit the contrast between the worlds of worker and master that ran throughout the narrative: "Workers, apprentices, everyone works. Only the masters and mistresses enjoy the sweetness of sleep. That makes Jerome and Léveillé resentful. They resolve not to be the only wretched ones. They want their master and mistress as associates (associes)."13 That is, the boys wanted to restore a mythical past when masters and men worked in friendly association. They also may have had in mind the more recent extinction of the smaller printing shops. So they killed the cats.
But why cats? And why was the killing so funny? Those questions take us beyond the consideration of early modern labor relations and into the obscure subject of popular ceremonies and symbolism. Folklorists have made historians familiar with the ceremonial cycles that marked off the calendar year for early modern man.l4 The most important of these was the cycle of carnival and Lent, a period of revelry followed by a period of abstinence. During carnival the common people suspended the normal rules of behavior and ceremoniously reversed the social order or turned it upside down in riotous procession. Carnival was a time for cutting up by youth groups, particularly apprentices, who organized themselves in "abbeys" ruled by a mock abbot or king and who staged charivaris or burlesque processions with rough music in order to humiliate cuckolds, husbands who had been beaten by their wives, brides who had married below their age group, or someone else who personified the infringement of traditional norms. Carnival was high season for hilarity, sexuality, and youth run riot—a time when young people tested social boundaries by limited outbursts of deviance, before being reassimilated in the world of order, submission, and Lentine seriousness. It came to an end on Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras, when a straw mannequin, King Carnival or Caramantran, was given a ritual trial and execution. Cats played an important part in some charivaris. In Burgundy, the crowd incorporated cat torture into its rough music. While mocking a cuckold or some other victim, the youths passed around a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl.Faire le chat, they called it. The Germans called charivaris Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats.'s
Cats also figured in the cycle of Saint lohn the Baptist, which took place on June 24, at the time of the summer solstice. Crowds made bonfires, jumped over them, danced around them, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid disaster and obtain good fortune during the rest of the year. A favorite object was cats—cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cats burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (cour à mioud or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine they danced around a kind of burning May pole with a cat tied to it. In the Metz region they burned a dozen cats at a time in a basket on top of a bonfire. The ceremony took place with great pomp in Metz itself, until it was abolished in 1765. The town dignitaries arrived in procession at the Place du Grand-Saulcy, lit the pyre, and a ring of riflemen from the garrison fired off volleys while the cats disappeared screaming in the flames. Although the practice varied from place to place, the ingredients were everywhere the same: afeu de joie (bonfire), cats, and an aura of hilarious witchhunting.16
In addition to these general ceremonies, which involved entire communities, artisans celebrated ceremonies peculiar to their craft. Printers processed and feasted in honor of their patron, Saint John the Evangelist, both on his saint's day, December 27, and on the anniversary of his martyrdom, May 6, the festival of Saint Jean Porte Latine. By the eighteenth century, the masters had excluded the journeymen from the confraternity devoted to the saint, but the journeymen continued to hold ceremonies in their chapels.l7 On Saint Martin's day, November 11, they held a mock trial followed by a feast. Contat explained that the chapel was a tiny "republic," which governed itself according to its own code of conduct. When a worker violated the code, the foreman, who was the head of the chapel and not part of the management, entered a fine in a register: leaving a candle lit, five sous; brawling, three livres; insulting the good name of the chapel, three livres; and so on. On Saint Martin's, the foreman read out the fines and collected them. The workers sometimes appealed their cases before a burlesque tribunal composed of the chapel's "ancients," but in the end they had to pay up amidst more bleating, banging of tools, and riotous laughter. The fines went for food and drink in the chapel's favorite tavern, where the hell raising continued until late in the night. l8
Taxation and commensality characterized all the other ceremonies of the chapel. Special dues and feasts marked a man's entry into the shop (bienvenue), his exit (conduite), and even his marriage (droit de chevet). Above all, they punctuated a youth's progress from apprentice to journeyman. Contat described four of these rites, the most important being the first, called the taking of the apron, and the last, Jerome's initiation as a full-fledged compagnon.
The taking of the apron (la prise de tablier) occurred soon after Jerome joined the shop. He had to pay six livres (about three days' wages for an ordinary journeyman) into a kitty, which the journeymen supplemented by small payments of their own (faire la reconnaissance). Then the chapel repaired to its favorite tavern, Le Panier Fleury in the rue de la Huchette. Emissaries were dispatched to procure provisions and returned loaded down with bread and meat, having lectured the shopkeepers of the neighborhood on which cuts were worthy of typographers and which could be left for cobblers. Silent and glass in hand, the journeymen gathered around Jerome in a special room on the second floor of the tavern. The subforeman approached, carrying the apron and followed by two "ancients," one from each of the "estates" of the shop, the casse and the presse. He handed the apron, newly made from close-woven linen, to the foreman, who took Jerome by the hand and led him to the center of the room, the subforeman and "ancients" falling in behind. The foreman made a short speech, placed the apron over Jerome's head and tied the strings behind him, as everyone drank to the health of the initiate. Jerome was then given a seat with the chapel dignitaries at the head of the table. The rest rushed for the best places they could find and fell on the food. They gobbled and guzzled and called out for more. After several Gargantuan rounds, they settled down to shop talkand Contat lets us listen in:
"Isn't it true,", says one of them, "that printers know how to shovel it in? 1 am sure that if someone presented us with a roast mutton, as big as you like, we would leave nothing but the bones behind...." They don't talk about theology nor philosophy and still less of politics. Each speaks of his job: one will talk to you about the casse, another the presse, this one of the qmpan, another of the ink ball leathers. They all speak at the same time, whether they can be heard or not.
At last, early in the morning after hours of swilling and shouting, the workers separated—vetted but ceremonial to the end: "Bonsoir, Monsieur notre prose [foreman]"; Bonsoir, Messieurs les compositeurst,; "Bonsoir, Messieurs les imprimeurs"; "Bonsoir Jerome" The text explains that Jerome will be called by his first name until he is received as a journeyman.19 That moment came four years later, after two intermediary cere monies (the admission à l'ouvrage and the admission &a grave; la banque) and a vast amount of hazing. Not only did the men torment Jerome, mocking his ignorance, sending him on wild goose chases, making him the butt of practical jokes, and overwhelming him with nasty chores; they also refused to teach him anything. They did not want another journeyman in their over-flooded labor pool, so Jerome had to pick up the tricks of the trade by himself. The work, the food, the lodging, the lack of sleep, it was enough to drive a boy mad, or at least out of the shop. In fact, however, it was standard treatment and should not be taken too seriously. Contat recounted the catalogue of Jerome's troubles in a light hearted manner, which suggested a stock comic genre, the misère les apprentis .20 The misères provided farcical accounts, in doggerel verse or broadsides, of a stage in life that was familiar and funny to everyone in the artisanate. It was a transitional stage, which marked the passage from childhood to adulthood. A young man had to sweat his way I through it so that he would have paid his dues—the printers demanded act yments, called bienvenues or quatre heures, in addi J tion to razzing the apprentices—when he reached full membership in a vocational group. Until he arrived at that point, he lived in a fluid or liminal state, trying out adult conventions by subjecting them to some hell raising of his own. His elders tolerated his pranks, called copies and joberies in the printing trade, because they saw them as wild oats, which needed to be sewn before he could settle down. Once settled, he would have internalized the conven tions of his craft and acquired a new identity, which was often symbolized by a change in his name.21
Jerome became a journeyman by passing through the final rite, compagnonnage. It took the same form as the other ceremonies, a celebration over food and drink after the candidate paid an initia tion fee and the journeymen chipped in with reconnaissance. But this time Contat gave a summary of the foreman's speech: 22
The newcomer is indoctrinated. He is told never to betray his col leagues and to maintain the wage rate. If a worker doesn't accept a price [for a job] and leaves the shop, no one in the house should do the job for a smaller price. Those are the laws among the workers. Faith fulness and probity are recommended to him. Any worker who betrays the others, when something forbidden, called marron [chestnut], is be ing printed, must be expelled ignominiously from the shop. The work ers blacklist him by circular letters sent around all the shops of Paris and the provinces.... Aside from that, anything is permitted: excessive drinking is considered a good quality, gallantry and debauchery as youthful feats, indebtedness as a sign of wit, irreligion as sincerity. It's a free and republican territory in which everything is permitted. Live as you like but be an honnêtc homme, no hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy turned out in the rest of the narrative to be the main characteristic of the bourgeois, a superstitious religious bigot. He occupied a separate world of pharasaical bourgeois morality. The workers defined their "republic" against that world and against other journeymen's groups as well—the cobblers, who ate inferior cuts of meat, and the masons or carpenters who were always good for a brawl when the printers, divided into "estates" (the casse and the presse) toured country taverns on Sundays. In entering an "es tate," Jerome assimilated an ethos. He identified himself with a craft; and as a full fledged journeyman compositor, he received a new name. Having gone through a rite of passage in the full, anthropological sense of the term, he became a Monsieur.23
So much for ceremonies. What about cats? It should be said at the outset that there is an indefinable je ne sais quoi about cats, a mysterious something that has fascinated mankind since the time of the ancient Egyptians. One can sense a quasi human intelligence behind a cat's eyes. One can mistake a cat's howl at night for a human scream, torn from some deep, visceral part of man's animal nature. Cats appealed to poets like Baudelaire and painters like Manet, who wanted to express the hu nanity in animals along with the animality of men—and especially of women.24
This ambiguous ontological position, a straddling of conceptual categories, gives certain animals—pigs, dogs, and cassowaries as well as cats—in certain cultures an occult power associated with the taboo. That is why Jews do not eat pigs, according to Mary Douglas, and why Englishmen can insult one another by saying "son of a bitch'' rather than "son of a cow," according to Ed mund Leach.25 Certain animals are good for swearing, just as they are "good for thinking" in Lévi Strauss's famous formula. I would add that others—cats in particular—are good for staging ceremo nies. They have ritual value. You cannot make a charivari with a cow. You do it with cats: you decide to faire le chat, to make Katzenmusik.. The torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. You have only to look at Ho garth's Stages of Cruelty to see its importance, and once you start looking you see people torturing animals everywhere. Cat killings provided a common theme in literature, from Don Quixote in early seventeenth century Spain to Germinal in late nineteenth century France.26 Far from being a sadistic fantasy on the part of a few half- crazed authors, the literary versions of cruelty to animals expressed a deep current of popular culture, as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his study of Rabelais.27 All sorts of ethnographic reports confirm that view. On the dimanche les brandons in Semur, for example, children used to attach cats to poles and roast them over bonfires. In the jeu du chat at the Fete Dieu in Aix en Provence, they threw cats high in the air and smashed them on the ground. They used expressions like "patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out" or "patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled." The English were just as cruel. During the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vest ments, and hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside.28 It would be possible to string out many other examples, but the point should be clear: there was nothing unusual about the ritual killing of cats. On the contrary, when Jerome and his fellow workers tried and hanged all the cats they could find in the rue Saint Severin, they drew on a common element in their culture. But what significance did that culture attribute to cats?
To get a grip on that question, one must rummage through collections of folktales, superstitions, proverbs, and popular medi cine. The material is rich, varied, and vast but extremely hard to handle. Although much of it goes back to the Middle Ages, little can be dated. It was gathered for the most part by folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sturdy strains of folklore still resisted the influence of the printed word. But the collections do not make it possible to claim that this or that prac tice existed in the printing houses of mid eighteenth century Paris. One can only assert that printers lived and breathed in an atmo sphere of traditional customs and beliefs which permeated every thing. It was not everywhere the same—France remained a patch work of pays rather than a unified nation until late in the nineteenth century—but everywhere some common motifs could be found. The commonest were attached to cats. Early modern Frenchmen probably made more symbolic use of cats than of any other animal, and they used them in distinct ways, which can be grouped together for the purposes of discussion, despite the re gional peculiarities.
First and foremost, cats suggested witchcraft. To cross one at night in virtually any corner of France was to risk running into the devil or one of his agents or a witch abroad on an evil errand. White cats could be as satanic as the black, in the daytime as well as at night. In a typical encounter, a peasant woman of Bigorre met a pretty white house cat who had strayed in the fields. She carried it back to the village in her apron, and just as they came to the house of a woman suspected of witchcraft, the cat jumped out, saying "Merci, Jeanne."29 Witches transformed themselves into cats in order to cast spells on their victims. Sometimes, especially on Mardi Gras, they gathered for hideous sabbaths at night. They howled, fought, and copulated horribly under the direction of the devil himself in the form of a huge tomcat. To protect yourself from sorcery by cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and you would break its malevolent power. A maimed cat could not attend a sabbath or wander abroad to cast spells. Peasants frequently cudgeled cats who crossed their paths at night and discovered the next day that bruises had appeared on women believed to be witches— or so it was said in the lore of their village. Villagers also told stories of farmers who found strange cats in barns and broke their limbs to save the cattle. Invariably a broken limb would appear on a suspicious woman the following morning.
Cats possessed occult power independently of their association with witchcraft and deviltry. They could prevent the bread from rising if they entered bakeries in Anjou. They could spoil the catch if they crossed the path of fishermen in Brittany. If buried alive in Bearn, they could clear a field of weeds. They figured as staple ingredients in all kinds of folk medicine aside from witches' brews. To recover from a bad fall, you sucked the blood out of a freshly amputated tail of a tomcat. To cure yourself from pneumonia, you drank blood from a cat's ear in red wine. To get over colic, you mixed your wine with cat excrement. You could even make your self invisible, at least in Brittany, by eating the brain of a newly killed cat, provided it was still hot.
There was a specific field for the exercise of cat power: the household and particularly the person of the master or mistress of the house. Folktales like "Puss 'n Boots" emphasized the identifi cation of master and cat, and so did superstitions such as the prac tice of tying a black ribbon around the neck of a cat whose mistress had died. To kill a cat was to bring misfortune upon its owner or its house. If a cat left a house or stopped jumping on the sickbed of its master or mistress, the person was likely to die. But a cat Iying on the bed of a dying man might be the devil, waiting to carry his soul off to hell. According to a sixteenth century tale, a girl from Quintin sold her soul to the devil in exchange for some pretty clothes. When she died, the pallbearers could not lift her coffin; they opened the lid, and a black cat jumped out. Cats could harm a house. They often smothered babies. They understood gossip and would repeat it out of doors. But their power could be contained or turned to your advantage if you followed the right procedures, such as greasing their paws with butter or maiming them when they first arrived. To protect a new house, Frenchmen enclosed live cats within its walls—a very old rite, judging from cat skele tons that have been exhumed from the walls of medieval buildings.
Finally the power of cats was concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chaste, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as "pussy" does in English, and they have served as obscenities for centuries.30 French folklore attaches spe cial importance to the cat as a sexual metaphor or metonym. As far back as the fifteenth century, the petting of cats was recommended for success in courting women. Proverbial wisdom identified wom en with cats: "He who takes good care of cats will have a pretty wife." If a man loved cats, he would love women; and vice versa: "As he loves his cat, he loves his wife," went another proverb. If he did not care for his wife, you could say of him, "He has other cats to whip." A woman who wanted to get a man should avoid treading on a cat's tail. She might postpone marriage for a year—or for seven years in Quimper and for as many years as the cat meowed in parts of the Loire Valley. Cats connoted fertility and female sexuality everywhere. Girls were commonly said to be "in love like a cat"; and if they became pregnant, they had "let the cat go to the cheese." Eating cats could bring on pregnancy in itself. Girls who consumed them in stews gave birth to kittens in several folktales. Cats could even make diseased apple trees bear fruit, if buried in the correct manner in upper Brittany.
It was an easy jump from the sexuality of women to the cuckold ing of men. Caterwauling could come from a satanic orgy, but it might just as well be toms howling defiance at each other when their mates were in heat. They did not call as cats, however. They issued challenges in their masters' names, along with sexual taunts about their mistresses: "Reno! Francois! " "Où al ez vous?—Voir la femme à vous.—Voir la femme à mod! Rouah! " (Where are you going?—To see your wife.—To see my wife! Ha!) Then the toms would fly at each other like the cats of Kilkenny, and their sabbath would end in a massacre. The dialogue differed according to the imaginations of the listeners and the onomatopoetic power of their dialect, but it usually emphasized predatory sexuality.31 "At night all cats are gray,,, went the proverb, and the gloss in an eighteenth century proverb collection made the sexual hint explicit: "That is to say that all women are beautiful enough at night." 32 Enough for what? Seduction, rape, and murder echoed in the air when the cats howled at night in early modern France. Cat calls summoned up Katzenmusik, for charivaris often took the form of howling under a cuckold's window on the eve of Mardi Gras, the favorite time for cat sabbaths.
Witchcraft, orgy, cuckoldry, charivari, and massacre, the men of the Old Regime could hear a great deal in the wail of a cat. What the men of the rue Saint S´everin actually heard is impossible to say. One can only assert that cats bore enormous symbolic weight in the folklore of France and that the lore was rich, ancient, and widespread enough to have penetrated the printing shop. In order to determine whether the printers actually drew on the ceremonial and symbolic themes available to them, it is necessary to take an other look at Contat's text.
The text made the theme of sorcery explicit from the beginning. Jerome and Léveillé could not sleep because "some bedeviled cats make a sabbath all night long."33 After Léveillé added his cat calls to the general caterwauling, "the whole neighborhood is alarmed. It is decided that the cats must be agents of someone casting a spell." The master and mistress considered summoning the cure to exorcise the place. In deciding instead to commission the cat hunt, they fell back on the classic remedy for witchcraft: maiming. The bourgeois—a superstitious, priest ridden fool—took the whole business seriously. To the apprentices it was a joke. Léveillé in particular functioned as a joker, a mock "sorcerer" staging a fake "sabbath," according to the terms chosen by Contat. Not only did the apprentices exploit their master's superstition in order to run riot at his expense, but they also turned their rioting against their mistress. By bludgeoning her familiar, la grise, they in effect ac cused her of being the witch. The double joke would not be lost on anyone who could read the traditional language of gesture.
The theme of charivari provided an additional dimension to the fun. Although it never says so explicitly, the text indicates that the mistress was having an affair with her priest, a "lascivious youth," who had memorized obscene passages from the classics of pornog raphy—Aretino and L'Academie des dames—and quoted them to her, while her husband droned on about his favorite subjects, mon ey and religion. During a lavish dinner with the family, the priest defended the thesis "that it is a feat of wit to cuckold one's hus band and that cuckolding is not a vice." Later, he and the wife spent the night together in a country house. They fit perfectly into the typical triangle of printing shops: a doddering old master, a middle aged mistress, and her youthful lover. 4 The intrigue cast the master in the role of a stock comic figure: the cuckold. So the revelry of the workers took the form of a charivari. The appren tices managed it, operating within the liminal area where novi tiates traditionally mocked their superiors, and the journeymen re sponded to their antics in the traditional way, with rough music. A riotous, festival atmosphere runs through the whole episode, which Contat described as a fête: "Léveillé and his comrade Jerome preside over thefête," he wrote, as if they were kings of a carnival and the cat bashing corresponded to the torturing of cats on Mardi Gras or the fête of Saint John the Baptist. As in many Mardi Gras, the carnival ended in a mock trial and execution. The burlesque legalism came naturally to the printers because they staged their own mock trials every year at the fête of Saint Martin, when the chapel squared accounts with its boss and succeeded spectacularly in getting his goat. The chapel could not condemn him explicitly without moving into open insubordina tion and risking dismissal. (All the sources, including the papers of the STN, indicate that masters often fired workers for insolence and misbehavior. indeed, Léveillé was later fired for a prank that attacked the bourgeois more openly.) So the workers tried the bourgeois in absentia, using a symbol that would let their meaning show through without being explicit enough to justify retaliation. They tried and hanged the cats. It would be going too far to hang la grise under the master's nose after being ordered to spare it; but they made the favorite pet of the house their first victim, and in doing so they knew they were attacking the house itself, in accord ance with the traditions of cat lore. When the mistress accused them of killing la grise, they replied with mock deference that "nobody would be capable of such an outrage and that they have too much respect for that house." By executing the cats with such elaborate ceremony, they condemned the house and declared the bourgeois guilty—guilty of overworking and underfeeding his ap prentices, guilty of living in luxury while his journeymen did all the work, guilty of withdrawing from the shop and swamping it with alloués instead of laboring and eating with the men, as masters were said to have done a generation or two earlier, or in the primi tive "republic" that existed at the beginning of the printing indus try. The guilt extended from the boss to the house to the whole system. Perhaps in trying, confessing, and hanging a collection of half dead cats, the workers meant to ridicule the entire legal and social order.
They certainly felt debased and had accumulated enough resent ment to explode in an orgy of killing. A half century later, the artisans of Paris would run riot in a similar manner, combining indiscriminate slaughter with improvised popular tribunals.35 It would be absurd to view the cat massacre as a dress rehearsal for the September Massacres of the French Revolution, but the earlier out burst of violence did suggest a popular rebellion, though it re mained restricted to the level of symbolism.
Cats as symbols conjured up sex as well as violence, a combina tion perfectly suited for an attack on the mistress. The narrative identified her with la grise, her chatte favorite. In killing it, the boys struck at her: "It was a matter of consequence, a murder, which had to be hidden." The mistress reacted as if she had been assault ed: "They ravished from her a cat without an equal, a cat that she loved to madness." The text described her as lascivious and "im passioned for cats" as if she were a she cat in heat during a wild cat's sabbath of howling, killing, and rape. An explicit reference to rape would violate the proprieties that were generally observed in eighteenth century writing. Indeed, the symbolism would work only if it remained veiled—ambivalent enough to dupe the master and sharp enough to hit the mistress in the quick. But Contat used strong language. As soon as the mistress saw the cat execution she let out a scream. Then the scream was smothered in the realization that she had lost her grise. The workers assured her with feigned sincerity of their respect and the master arrived. "'Ah! the scoun drels, he says. 'Instead of working they are killing cats.' Madame to Monsieur: 'These wicked men can't kill the masters; they have killed my cat.' . . . It seems to her that all the blood of the workers would not be sufficient to redeem the insult."
It was metonymic insult, the eighteenth century equivalent of the modern schoolboy's taunt: "Ah, your mother's girdle!" But it was stronger, and more obscene. By assaulting her pet, the workers ravished the mistress symbolically. At the same time, they deliv ered the supreme insult to their master. His wife was his most precious possession, just as her chatte was hers. In killing the cat, the men violated the most int view the cat massacre as a dressimate treasure of the bourgeois household and escaped unharmed. That was the beauty of it. The symbolism disguised the insult well enough for them to get away with it. While the bourgeois fumed over the loss of work, his wife, less obtuse, virtually told him that the workers had attacked her sexually and would like to murder him. Then both left the scene in humiliation and defeat. "Monsieur and Madame retire, leaving the workers in liberty. The printers, who love disorder, are in a state of great joy. Here is an ample subject for their laughter, a beautiful copie, which will keep them amused for a long time."
This was Rabelaisian laughter. The text insists upon its impor tance: "The printers know how to laugh, it is their sole occupa tion." Mikhail Bakhtin has shown how the laughter of Rabelais expressed a strain of popular culture in which the riotously funny could turn to riot, a carnival culture of sexuality and sedition in which the revolutionary element might be contained within sym bols and metaphors or might explode in a general uprising, as in 1789. The question remains, however, what precisely was so funny about the cat massacre? There is no better way to ruin a joke than to analyze it or to overload it with social comment. But this joke cries out for commentary—not because one can use it to prove that artisans hated their bosses (a truism that may apply to all periods of labor history, although it has not been appreciated adequately by eighteenth century historians), but because it can help one to see how workers made their experience meaningful by playing with themes of their culture.
The only version of the cat massacre available to us was put into writing, long after the fact, by Nicolas Contat. He selected details, ordered events, and framed the story in such a way as to bring out what was meaningful for him. But he derived his notions of mean ing from his culture just as naturally as he drew in air from the atmosphere around him. And he wrote down what he had helped to enact with his mates. The subjective character of the writing does not vitiate its collective frame of reference, even though the written account must be thin compared with the action it de scribes. The workers' mode of expression was a kind of popular theater. It involved pantomime, rough music, and a dramatic "the ater of violence" improvised in the work place, in the street, and on the rooftops. It included a play within a play, because Léveillé reenacted the whole farce several times as copies in the shop. In fact, the original massacre involved the burlesquing of other ceremo nies, such as trials and charivaris. So Contat wrote about a bur lesque of a burlesque, and in reading it one should make allowances for the refraction of cultural forms across genres and over time.
Those allowances made, it seems clear that the workers found the massacre funny because it gave them a way to turn the tables on the bourgeois. By goading him with cat calls, they provoked him to authorize the massacre of cats, then they used the massacre to put him symbolically on trial for unjust management of the shop. They also used it as a witch hunt, which provided an excuse to kill his wife's familiar and to insinuate that she herself was the witch. Finally, they transformed it into a charivari, which served as a means to insult her sexually while mocking him as a cuckold. The bourgeois made an excellent butt of the joke. Not only did he become the victim of a procedure he himself had set in motion, he did not understand how badly he had been had. The men had subjected his wife to symbolic aggression of the most intimate kind, but he did not get it. He was too thick headed, a classic cuckold. The printers ridiculed him in splendid Boccaccian style and got off scot free.
The joke worked so well because the workers played so skillfully with a repertory of ceremonies and symbols. Cats suited their pur poses perfectly. By smashing the spine of la grlse they called the master's wife a witch and a slut, while at the same time making the master into a cuckold and a fool. It was metonymic insult, deliv ered by actions, not words, and it struck home because cats occu pied a soft spot in the bourgeois way of life. Keeping pets was as alien to the workers as torturing animals was to the bourgeois. Trapped between incompatible sensitivities, the cats had the worst of both worlds.
The workers also punned with ceremonies. They made a roundup of cats into a witch hunt, a festival, a charivari, a mock trial, and a dirty joke. Then they redid the whole thing in pantomime. When ever they got tired of working, they transformed the shop into a theater and produced copies—their kind of copy, not the authors'. Shop theater and ritual punning suited the traditions of their craft. Although printers made books, they did not use written words to convey their meaning. They used gestures, drawing on the culture of their craft to inscribe statements in the air.
Insubstantial as it may seem today, this joking was a risky busi ness in the eighteenth century. The risk was part of the joke, as in many forms of humor, which toy with violence and tease repressed' passions. The workers pushed their symbolic horseplay to the brink of reification, the point at which the killing of cats would turn into an open rebellion. They played on ambiguities, using symbols that would hide their full meaning while letting enough of it show through to make a fool of the bourgeois without giving him a pretext to fire them. They tweaked his nose and prevented him from protesting against it. To pull off such a feat required great dexterity. It showed that workers could manipulate symbols in their idiom as effectively as poets did in print.
The boundaries within which this jesting had to be contained suggest the limits to working class militancy under the Old Re gime. The printers identified with their craft rather than their class. Although they organized in chapels, staged strikes, and sometimes forced up wages, they remained subordinate to the bourgeois. The master hired and fired men as casually as he or dered paper, and he turned them out into the road when he sniffed insubordination. So until the onset of proletarianization in the late nineteenth century, they generally kept their protests on a sym bolic level. A copie, like a carnival, helped to let off steam; but it also produced laughter, a vital ingredient in early artisanal culture and one that has been lost in labor history. By seeing the way a joke worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that missing element—laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh slapping, rib cracking Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar.
APPENDIX: CONTAT S ACCOUNT
OF THE CAT MASSACRE
The following account comes from Nicolas Contat, Anecdotes typo graphiques où l'on volt la description des coutumes, moeurs et usages singu liers des compagnons impnmeurs, ed. Giles Barber (Oxford, 1980), pp. 51 53. After a day of exhausting work and disgusting food, the two apprentices retire to their bedroom, a damp and draughty lean to in a corner of the courtyard. The episode is recounted in the third person, from the viewpoint of Jerome:
He is so tired and needs rest so desperately that the shack looks like a palace to him. At last the persecution and misery he has suffered throughout the day have come to an end, and he can relax. But no, some bedeviled cats celebrate a witches' sabbath all night long, making so much noise that they rob him of the brief period of rest allotted to the apprentices before the journeymen arrive for work early the next morning and demand admission by constant ringing of an infernal bell. Then the boys have to get up and cross the courtyard, shivering under their nightshirts, in order to open the door. Those journeymen never let up. No matter what you do, you always make them lose their time and they always treat you as a lazy good for nothing. They call for Leveille. Light the fire un der the cauldron! Fetch water for the dunking troughs! True, those jobs are supposed to be done by the beginner apprentices, who live at home, but they don't arrive until six or seven. Thus everyone is soon at work—apprentices, journeymen, everyone but the master and the mistress: they alone enjoy the sweetness of sleep. That makes Jerome and Léveillé jealous. They resolve that they will not be the only ones to suffer; they want their master and mistress as associates. But how to turn the trick?
L&eacuteveillé has an extraordinary talent for imitating the voices and the smallest gestures of everyone around him. He is a perfect actor; that's the real profession that he has picked up in the printing shop. He also can produce perfect imitations of the cries of dogs and cats. He decides to climb from roof to roof until he reaches a gutter next to the bedroom of the bourgeois and the bourgeoise. From there he can ambush them with a volley of meows. It's an easy job for him: he is the son of a roofer and can scramble across roofs like a cat.
Our sniper succeeds so well that the whole neighborhood is alarmed The word spreads ehae there is witchcraft afoot and that the cats muse be the agents of someone casting a spell. It is a case for the cure, who is an intimate of ehe household and ehe confessor of Madame. No one can sleep any more.
Leveille stages a sabbath the next night and the night after thee. If you didn't know him, you would be convinced he was a witch. Finally' the master and the mistress cannot stand it any longer. "We'd better tell the boys to get rid of those malevolent animals," they declare. Madame gives them the order, exhorting ehem to avoid frightening la grise. That is the name of her pey pussy.
This lady is impassioned for cats. Many master printers are also. One of them has twenty five. He has had their portraits painted and feeds them on roast fowl.
The hunt is soon organized. The apprentices resolve to make a clean sweep of it, and they are joined by ehe journeymen. The masters love cats, so consequently they muse hate them. This man arms himself with the bar of a press, ehat one with a stick from the drying room, others with broom handles. They hang sacks at ehe windows of the attic and ehe storerooms to catch the cats who attempt eo escape by leaping outdoors. The beaters are named, ev erything is organized. Léveillé and his comrade Jerome preside over the fete, each of ehem armed with an iron bar from the shop. The first thing they go for is la grise, Madame's pussy. Leveille stuns it with a quick blow on the kidneys, and Jerome finishes it off. Then Léveillé scuffs the body in a gutter, for they don't want to gee caught: it is a matter of consequence, a murder, which must be kept hidden. The men produce terror on the rooftops. Seized by panic, the cats throw themselves into the sacks. Some are killed on the spot. Others are condemned to be hanged for the amusement of the entire printing shop.
Printers know how to laugh; it is their sole occupation.
The execution is about to begin. They name a hangman, a troop of guards, even a confessor. Then they pronounce the sentence.
In the midst of it all, the mistress arrives. What is her surprise, when she sees the bloody execution! She lets out a scream; then her volce is cut, because she thinks she sees la grise, and she is certain that such a fate has been reserved for her favorite puss. The work ers assure her that no one would be capable of such a crime: they have too much respect for the house.
The bourgeois arrives. "Ah! The scoundrels," he says. "Instead of working, they are killing cats." Madame to Monsieur: "These wicked men can't kill the masters, so they have killed my pussy. She can't be found. I have called la grise everywhere. They must have hanged her." It seems to her that all the workers' blood would not be sufficient to redeem the insult. The poor grise, a pussy without a peer!
Monsieur and Madame retire, leaving the workers in liberty. The printers delight in the disorder; they are beside themselves with joy.
What a splendid subject for their laughter, for a belle copie! They will amuse themselves with it for a long time. Léveillé will take the leading role and will stage the play at least twenty times. He will mime the master, the mistress, the whole house, heaping ridi cule on them all. He will spare nothing in his satire. Among print ers, those who excel in this entertainment are called jobeurs: they provide joberie.
Léveillé receives many rounds of applause.
It should be noted that all the workers are in league against the masters. It is enough to speak badly of them [the masters] to be esteemed by the whole assembly of typographers. Léveillé is one of those. In recognition of his merit, he will be pardoned for some previous satires against the workers.


During the Summer months, our regular schedule changes to suit the families using our services.
Feel free to join us from Monday-Thursday, to meet new people, learn new skills and have some fun!
If you want to know more details about our planned activitites, please call us on 0191 2734942, or drop into the centre to speak with one of our project leaders.
Keep an eye on our facebook and twitter pages for further updates and news!


bartle – Welcome to Spinksville!
Thought for the Day: How social are 'social' games?
Historically, a social game is one that you played with friends so that you could socialise while you were playing. Board games, card games, RPGs all involve having a group of people in the same room and even if you took your gaming extremely seriously, there would be time to chat between rounds.
The social part of MMOs is grouping. Again, you're tackling the game with a bunch of other people and if they are also friends then you can chat while you kill mobs together. Even if you aren't grouped up, an evening in the MMO for a social player means chatting to your mates via various text channels while you pursue other goals in game. But in a facebook-type social game, you interact with people without talking to them at all. Just send someone a virtual cow along with a virtual poke and maybe they'll respond later.
So I wonder, how social can any game really be if you don't talk to anyone? Are we heading towards the ironic situation where Bartle-type social players dislike 'social games' because they aren't social enough and you can't really get to know the people you are playing with?
And like so many facets of MMOs (and human behaviour, even), we still don't entirely know why they are so popular. Yes, people like rewards. They like to achieve a continuous stream of short term goals. But Achievements have become more than just a means to that end, they're sparking off new types of gameplay in themselves.
I think a lot of people write achievements off, saying that they're just there for achievers. And achievers are that nebulous cornerstone of Bartle's four player types whose main goals in a game are to hit the high scores, the speed runs, collect the best in slot epic gear, and other concrete measurements of success in games.
I've always felt that achiever was a misleading name, because all players feel a sense of achievement when they succeed in their goals. A social player feels a sense of achievement when making new friends or running some group content successfully in a PUG. An explorer feels a sense of achievement when they explore some new location or content or theory. A killer feels a sense of achievement when they win a fight against another player.
And this is the brilliant groundbreaking aspect to Achievements. They can give players other than achievers some kind of concrete measure of success. Let's face it, completing an encounter in some odd non-optimal way isn't really the goal of a pure achiever unless they get some extra concrete reward from doing it – they want to beat the encounter, get the loot, move on. They may spend time working on completing the encounter as quickly and efficiently as possible. But by attaching an Achievement to the tactic, it becomes meaningful to players who might not have cared otherwise.
I'm seeing a lot of emergent gameplay springing up around Achievements. They've been plopped into our games, and now we're seeing more of how players are responding. I'm going to use the WoW ones as my main examples.
When you get a new achievement in WoW, it is broadcast to your immediate area and also to your guild channel (if you have one). If it's an impressive achievement, people will often stop to congratulate you. It may even spark a conversation on trade chat or one of the world channels.
In guild, we almost always congratulate achievements, even silly ones. Someone caught 25 fish? Cue a conversation about how dull fishing is. Cue the guild meme of everyone shouting FEEEEESH!! on channel. Cue people who may not even know the guildie well engaging him or her in the guild channel. I've noticed that even people who mostly play solo seem to enjoy the social inclusion.
Someone just hit level 80? It's very likely they'll be offered an instance or heroic run if people are free. Or offered advice on which reputation to work on first, or on gearing or talents. The *ping* of the achievement reminds the rest of us that this guy only just hit 80.
My guild is friendly anyway but broadcasting the achievements makes it much easier to keep up with what other guildies are doing, even if we don't group with them regularly. I was wary at first (after all, do you really want everyone knowing what you're up to?) but I can't think of a bad side to it now.
Some achievements help to chronicle the history of a character. I could look back through my WoW achievements and work out in which order I had run instances, when I had run different questlines, and as a rough gauge of what my characters had been doing at different times.
The achievement log doesn't currently make it easy to read the list as if it was a history book, but it might be something that we see more in the next generation of games. Standard storytelling doesn't handle repetitive grinding and instancing well (I killed an orc, then I killed an orc, then I killed an orc, etc), but if you imagine your story as a list of achievements instead, it may make more sense. Especially if there are extra ways to associate achievements with the memories – you could imagine a game which took a screenshot of your character every time you got a new achievement and stored them somewhere, for example.
Some achievements are specifically present as historical markers. Getting to level 80 or catching 25 fish in WoW are not notable achievements. But they may be interesting rites of passage for a character. Achieving max level is always meaningful to a player, even if it's easy. The same goes for achievements that are given for completing questlines. The quests don't have to be hard, but giving out the achievement makes them more meaningful. It's like saying that finishing those quests was important to that character's storyline.
In CoH there are some missions which give out badges (the CoH equivalent to achievements) and they were always very popular when I was playing. I was never sure if they were particularly good or well written missions, or had been randomly chosen as badge bait. However, because the badges were there, the missions became more important to the playerbase.
I'd love to have some kind of online book available that would tell the story of my character with pictures, achievements, and notable moments. Although guided storylines with awesome cut scenes and NPC dialogue can be vastly entertaining, the story of my character is the story that is MINE. Ideally, I'd like both 🙂 And I think achievements could have a huge role to play in enabling players to tell their own stories.
In fact, I could easily imagine achievements replacing quests as the core guidance through a game in the next generation.
In WoW, it is not uncommon for people running PUGs to ask prospective members to link appropriate achievements before they invite. Sometimes this is taken to stupid levels, but the achievements are giving players the ability to screen others based on what they have done in game.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is entirely in the hands of the players who use it. It's easy to see that if you really want to do a speed run of some instance, it makes sense to look for players who can prove they know the instance already and are well geared. Achievements give players an easy way to do that.
In may be that in future they will be better at helping players to find other players who like to play in a similar way and can prove it by what they have done in the past. For example, to find other people who want to RP being pirates. To find other keen PvPers. To find other crafters. To find other social players.
A new patch comes out. Players log into the game. Some of them (who do not avidly read patch notes) wonder what's new and what they should be trying to do? Go check the latest new achievements. They'll give you some clues as to what the devs had in mind.
The achievements can also suggest ways to interact with the new content that might not have been obvious. And because they are achievements (and rewarded by a *ding*), there's a good chance that other players will want to do them also.
In WoW, we've seen this a lot with the holiday achievements. As well as just doing whatever the holiday quests may be, achievements encourage people to go play. To throw rose petals at each other. To turn each other into bunnies. And so on. I do think they have increased the fun that people have with the in game holidays.
The fact that WoW has an achievement (with a title!) for completing every heroic instance also encourages people to at least try the less popular ones occasionally.
Achievements may have titles, pets, mounts, or collectible items associated with them. So they appeal to people who like to collect stuff. You can only display one title or pet at a time (in any game I've ever played) but it can be fun to change your title or pet depending on your mood and the people you are with.
In CoH there are some badges that you can only get once you have achieved a specific set of other (easier) badges. So working towards a badge that gives your character a title that suits its current role and costume can be a huge part of deciding which achievements to attempt.
In LOTRO, you can choose to display a crafting title, or a grind based title (ie. several zillion variants of 'Orc Killer'), or a funny quest based title, depending on what you want to tell other people about your character and what it has done.
This is the closest use to the classic definition of achiever. I haven't seen much use of this yet in games but achievements could track a player's personal best scores at various aspects of the game. I know in WoW there are addons that will tell you when your raid has achieved a raid fastest time to kill a mob, and we always comment on TS when that happens. It is an achievement, even if the achievement system as it is now doesn't really record it.
But it's easy to imagine an achievement system that would let people know when you'd been part of your personal best attempt on some boss or instance.
And as far as other parts of the game go, WoW does record some economic achievements. You will be told when you have reached 10k gold for example. So it would be possible to also record most gold made in one day, and similar types of statistics.
Remember Angband? Every time you killed a mob, you learned a little more about it. You might start with a sentence or two of information recording what you had noticed last time. Did it run in packs? How much health did it have? How hard did it hit? And after you had killed more of them, the game would start to record whether you'd noticed any special abilities, what sort of locations it inhabited, precisely what stats the mob had, and maybe even what type of items it dropped.
I haven't quite seen a mechanic like this in MMOs, but Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge opened up more lore information about mobs, areas, and items as you unlocked different achievements in the game. I always thought that was a fascinating way to present information to the player (and the fact that the book looked amazing didn't hurt).
The ToK wasn't perfect. It was very text heavy and hard to search. So although there was a lot of information in there, it could be quite painful to retrieve it. But I think the idea is sound, and I really do hope that the next generation of games can do more with this type of notion.
I've barely scratched the surface of how players interact with achievements in games. Feel free to add anything you like about achievements or that you've noticed about how people use them in games you play.
But one thing all my examples have in common – they show that achievements aren't just for 'classic' achievers. Perhaps they never were.
Sara Pickell wrote a brilliant post about MMOs, and the struggle between companies trying to sell them to us as goods vs services. I've tried to come at this from a different angle before, but she does it far more eloquently than I did.
The primary audience of any product will always be the achievers, those who want it for it's own use and to excel within it's use. The secondary target would be explorers, those who are interested in seeing it in it's entirety. You may still want some socialites to build buzz for you, but they are more likely to strain your system without seeing very much content so their presence is more a marketing investment than anything. Killers are last place, to one extent catering to another audience is always a good thing, on the other, killers are more likely to drive away other players or cause harassment issues. Killers are probably only given serious representation now because they simply make up one of the largest minorities in MMOs.
I think it is commonly held (by non-killers) that the 'killers' (ie. players whose primary way to have fun is by attacking other players) are a negative influence on the genre. They're the griefers, the min-maxers, the trouble-makers, the forum whiners. They're the ones who will drive other players away by corpse camping them for hours and then flooding forums with illegible leet smacktalk. They're the kiddies, the guys who just don't know how to play nice with others.
When you get more than one person into a room, in real life as well as in a game, they will compete with each other. It may be subtle, it may be non-serious, but they will compete for any resource available.
The idea that a virtual social world utopia would be completely free of negative vibes is ridiculous. Social competition is some of the most bitter, vicious, cut-throat gaming that it is possible to have. And it's largely based on trying to be popular. Being bitter about not getting enough attention from 'the right people'. Networking. Trying to make yourself useful. Cybering for extra perks (it happens a lot).
You know what guild drama can be like? You know how people fret if they feel left out of a clique? Imagine an entire virtual world which is all about guild drama. I'm not saying that it can't be fun – people are extremely fun. They will surprise and entertain you in ways that no mechanical NPC ever can. But we don't have a good ruleset for social competition.
And this is where the killers come in. The way they compete is far simpler. You kill someone. Or you get killed. You exchange some smack talk. You go back to base and start again. At the end of the session, they leave the game on the table.
Compare that to the extended guild drama bitchfests which can leave people in tears or depressed for hours. Which is the most healthy form of competition, really?
For all that devs and other players complain about the killers in our games, I wonder if we need them there to teach us how to play the things.
Stranglethorn Vale: Hot or Not?
It isn't often that you get a chance to see two notable professionals duke it out about the design of a WoW zone. But Stranglethorn Vale, the marmite of the Warcraft World (ie. you love it or you hate it) inspires strong emotions among players and pros alike.
Richard Bartle describes why he thinks it's such a well designed zone.
He's made good points. When I have levelled an alt from scratch, I've always breathed a sigh of relief when I got into Stranglethorn in the low 30s because it was such an easy, well laid out zone for levelling. I don't agree with all of his points, in particular the flow is less good for Horde than Alliance, but he reminded me of all the fun I'd had working through quests there.
Aside from that, it's an awesome article and worth reading for his musings on the theme of the zone and how he feels the quest and level design feeds into the whole experience. I don't know if was mostly a happy accident with Stranglethorn or if this is the kind of thing MMO level designers think about all the time — I'd like to think it was the latter though.
Lum picks Stranglethorn apart and describes why it drives him nuts.
This isn't as well executed an article or as persuasive an argument, but he's right that the zone covers too wide a level range, and the jump between them is not smooth. The levelling guides always solved this by presenting it in two parts and sending you off round the world in the interrim. Not something you'd associate with smooth flow.
Do you play like Alice, Dorothy, or Wendy?
If you have ever taken the test that classifies players as socialisers, killers, achievers and/or explorers in MMOs (I'm ESKA, by the way) then you'll be familiar with Dr Richard Bartle's work.
We know that one of the big appeals of MUDs and MMOs is that they support a lot of different types of play. So there's no reason why an achiever and a socialiser can't happily play in the same game, even though they may not want to play together. And this paper is really the seminal work in starting to classify those different types.
But the problem with this model from my point of view is that it dates from about 5 years BWE (Before the WoW Era). The virtual worlds he was observing were MUDs, or very closely based on MUDs. Trends in game design have changed. And there are some new emergent types of play that simply weren't big in the MUD days (or in the types of MUDs he was considering).
So the fact that Bartle's categories don't include the narrative-seeking player or the team player just shows how there are new emergent playstyles coming alongside.
So I was intrigued to read in the Virtual Cultures blog about his keynote speech to the Indie Multiplayer Games Conference (via Massively) about ways in which players approach modern games. And here he's tackling one of the big issues which is the divergence of sandbox games (like EVE or Darkfall) and 'theme park' games (like WoW and LOTRO).
I'd been thinking about this anyway, since Averaen commented on my post this week on virtual hangouts that s/he thought it was a mistake to treat WoW and similar MMOs as if they were virtual worlds. I don't really agree; if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then maybe … just maybe… it could be some odd breed of duck. And WoW is certainly a massive persistent virtual world, it's contiguous (you can fly from one end to the other without zoning), it has consistent-ish storylines, it has cities and villages, it has hangouts and places where players can buy food and drink, it has auction houses and a working economy. How can it NOT be a virtual world?
Anyway, getting back to Dr Bartle. In his keynote he picked up on three different types of play experiences in virtual worlds, using a metaphor of heroines from children's stories.
He's using the play types to describe different types of world, rather than just different players (eg. Alice represents sandbox games, Dorothy represents theme-park, quest heavy games, etc). He also notes that MMOs have been on a divergent path, with social and game oriented MMOs tending to separate. But that this is a bad trend because game-oriented MMOs become repetitive and meaningless, and social MMOs become impenetrable and unfocussed. I can't speak much for the latter but we know that the former is definitely true. What does it even mean for a game to not have an end?
Bartle argues that a good MMO/ virtual world should offer opportunities for all of these playstyles. And NOW we're talking about playing styles I can more easily identify with. Because I enjoy all of these things in games. And in an era where games seem to be becoming more and more focussed, it's a call to arms that I hope someone will hear.
Because dammit, that's the game /I/ want to play.


Manley's Aubree leather bag is crafted from the finest Italian textured leather in a structured silhouette. The front panel is embellished with multi colored layered flowers held in place with silver dome studs. This time honoured and detailed work is synonymous with Manley.


welcome | Raising Healthy KidsRaising Healthy Kids | Tools to transform into the family you want to be.
Tools to transform into the family you want to be.
How do you raise great kids in complicated times?
How do you teach kids to make responsible decisions about their bodies?
How do you foster a love for learning in your kids?
You want consistent joy and fun in your family.
You want to protect and empower your kids.
And, you don't have to do it alone.
Raising Healthy Kids is dedicated to the idea that families should be joyful and healthy. We deliver core transformation to families by providing the most reliable and trusted resources to support them in building joy, fun, and respect in their lives.
Call us at (925) 360-3460 to find out how we can partner together!
© 2019 Raising Healthy Kids. All Rights Reserved.


Today I'm up on 49 and Market blog with a new layout featuring the Winter Edges collection.
To begin, I stamped randomly with the stamps 1787 and Bohemian Damask. When done, I primed the background with clear gesso. Next, I added a design with two crackle pastes: one platinum the other one silver.
While the pastes were drying, I die cut some snowflakes and leaves in a watercolor paper. I covered the snowflakes with the platinum paste.
The pastes dry, I colored the background with different colors to match the photo.
I colored the leaves as well as the Stargazers with the same colors I used to color the background.
Next, I die cut a few papers to add under the photo before gluing all the embellishments.
To finish the layout, I added some microbeads and glitters.


text:
Insights Agility Group CSR
The United Nations calls modern slavery – human trafficking, child labor and debt labor – the world's second-largest criminal industry.
Efforts to monitor and crack down on modern slavery have forced companies worldwide to scrutinize their supply chains.
The most widely known attempt to mandate corporate transparency is the United Kingdom's Modern Slavery Act of 2015. As a result of annual reporting by companies, the UK government estimates that at least 13,000 people are victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude, Thomson Reuters reported recently. More than 5,000 potential victims were referred to UK authorities last year, a record number.
Worldwide, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates there are 40.3 million victims of enslaved labor and that one in four victims is a child. The Modern Slavery Act "has done a lot to raise awareness," Kate Roberts, head of office at the Human Trafficking Foundation, told Thomson Reuters. "Unfortunately, in practice, we're still waiting to really see many tangible outcomes from it yet." The Business and Human Rights Resources Centre notes similar "lagging" efforts in FTSE 100 firms with operations in the UK.
Who reports:
Any organization that conducts business in the UK and has an annual profit of £36 million ($50.1 million) must issue a statement within six months of the financial year's end detailing how it has audited the supply chain and operations for slavery risks and violations.
What to report:
There is no template for the report, but it should be concise, written in English, approved by the organization's board of directors; signed by the director or equivalent, and published on the organization's public website, linked to from the homepage. UK subsidiaries, UK branches and global organizations with a significant presence in the UK (including offices, assets, clients and trade relationships) are also beholden to this obligation, a Harvard Law School forum on corporate governance and financial regulation suggests.
How often to report:
Annually. Each year's report should show improvement in corporate transparency – meaning that the organization's workforce is being educated about modern slavery, policies are being created to prevent slavery or protect those who fall within a risk category (seasonal workers, unskilled laborers and those who work in potentially dangerous environments), and resources such as budget and staff are being allocated to address risks within the organization.
Failing to report:
The consequences include an injunction from courts to comply, and possibly a fine.
The Modern Slavery Registry (modernslaveryregistry.org) keeps track of all published reports across 27 sectors, ranging from capital goods and consumer services to pharmaceuticals. This website also measures organizations' compliance with the Modern Slavery Act; as of April 2018, only 19 percent met all minimum requirements.
Agility has been a sustainability leader for more than a decade, and is investing in greener and fairer supply chains. Contact us to learn more.
Contact Our CSR Team
Can We Talk About the Weather?
There can't be a time in human memory when travel, shipping, trade and commerc...
Tech for an Inclusive Recovery
We know that COVID-19 has reversed years of progress in global development. It h...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
By JR on Monday, December 29, 2014
Social psychologists attack the "denier" accusation
Almost any Leftist writing with a pretense at scholarship is conspicuously marred by its one-sidedness. Only "facts" that support Leftist prejudices will be considered. This of course can only be considered as propaganda and will do little to persuade anybody with some knowledge of the field concerned. Jonathan Haidt and a few others have come to realize that such writing is largely pointless. It will only persuade those who are already believers.
So in an effort to upgrade the standards of scholarship in the social sciences, Haidt has spoken the unspeakable. He believes that conservative viewpoints should be included in social science debates. He is swimming against the huge tide of suppressing conservative thought that pervades Leftist discourse. The huge efforts at censorship emanating from the Left are not for him.
I actually feel rather sorry for Haidt and his lieutenants. Haidt has not considered WHY Leftist discourse is so selective in its consideration of the facts. Leftists are selective because they HAVE to be. Reality is so at variance with central Leftist assertions that it just cannot be confronted in full. The historic Leftist assertion about the malleability of human nature, for instance, flies in the face of the whole discipline of genetics. And, as time goes by, the findings in genetics move ever more strongly towards showing an overwhelming influence of genetics on human behaviour. Human beings are NOT a "blank slate".
But Leftists need to say that people are blank slates in order to justify their authoritarianism. Leftists want to CHANGE people (can you get more authoritarian than that?). They even once dreamed of creating a "New Soviet Man". But if they are up against genetic fixity in people, attempts at change will be futile. They may say that it is not people but "the system" that they want to change but "the system" consists of what people do -- so that is a detour that leads nowhere.
So as he lets fact-based conservative ideas into his head, I think Haidt will himself become a conservative. And that will ditch his career!
At any event, I reproduce below a journal abstract of an excellent paper by Haidt and his associates that puts the case for intellectual diversity in science. I also reproduce one example from the body of the paper about Leftist bias rendering research unable to show what it purports to show. The example concerns the common Warmist accusation that climate skeptics are "deniers"
Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science
Jos L. Duarte et al
Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity - particularly diversity of viewpoints - for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diver sity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias m echanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of non - liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self - selection, hosti le climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.
One closely reasoned example of bias from the paper
Denial of environmental realities: Feygina, Jost and Goldsmith (2010) sought to explain the "denial of environmental realities" using system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994). In operationalizing such denial, the author s assessed the four constructs listed below, with example items in parentheses:
Construct 1: Denial of the possibility of an ecolog ical crisis ("If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major environmental catastrophe," reverse scored).
Construct 2: Denial of limits to growth ("The earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them. ")
Construct 3: Denial of the need to abide by the constraints of nature ("Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works to be able to control it.")
Construct 4: Denial of the danger of disrupting balance in nature ("The balance of nature is s trong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations.")
The core problem with this research is that it misrepresents those who merely disagree with environmentalist values and slogans as being in "denial." Indeed, the papers Feygina et al (2010) cited in support of their "denial" questions never used the terms "deny" or denial" to describe these measures. Clark, Kotchen, and Moore (2003) referred to the items as assessing "attitudes" and Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones (2000) characte rized the items as tapping "primitive beliefs" (p. 439) about the environment.
The term "denial" implies that 1) the claim being denied is a "reality" - that is, a descriptive fact, and that 2) anyone who fails to endorse the pro - environmental side of these claims is engaged in a psychological process of denial. We next describe why both claims are false, and why the measures, however good they are at assessing attitudes or primitive beliefs, fail to assess denial.
Construct 1 refers to a "possibility" so that denial would be belief that an ecological crisis was impossible . This was not assessed and the measure that supposedly tapped this construct refers to no descriptive fact. Without defining "soon" or "major" or "crisis," it is impossible for this to be a fact. Without being a statement of an actual fact, disagreeing with the statement does not, indeed cannot, represent denial.
Similar problems plague Construct 2 and its measurement. Denial of the limits of growth could be measured by agreement with an alternative statement , such as "The Earth's natural resources are infinite." Agreement could be considered a form of denial of the limits of growth. However, this was not assessed. Absent a definition of "plenty ," it is not clear how this item could be refuted or confirmed. If it cannot be refuted or confirmed, it cannot be a descriptive fact. If it is not a fact, it can be agreed or disagreed with, but there is no "denial."
Even strongly agreeing with this statement does not necessarily imply denying that there are limits to growth. "Plenty " does not imply "unlimited." Moreover, the supposed reality being denied is, in fact, heavily disputed by scholars, and affirming the Earth's resources as plentiful for human needs, given human ingenuity, was a winning strategy in a famous scientific bet (Sabin, 2013) .
Construct 3 is an injunction that we need to abide by the constraints of nature. Again "constraints of nature" is a vague and undefined term. Further, the construct is not a descriptive fact - it is a philosophical/ideological prescription , and the item is a prophecy about the future, which can never be a fact. Thus, this construct might capture some attitude towards environmentalism, but it does not capture denial of anything. It would be just as unjustified to label those who disagree with the item as being in denial about human creativity, innovation, and intelligence
Construct 4 is similarly problematic. "Balance in nature" is another vague term, and the item assessing this construct is another vague prediction. One can agree or disagree with the item. And such differences may indeed by psychologically important. Disagreement, however, is not the same construct as denial.
Whether some people deny actual environmental realities, and if so, why, remains an interesting and potentially scientifically tractable question. For example, one might assess "environmental denial" by showing people a time - lapse video taken over several years showing ocean levels rising over an island, and asking people if sea levels were rising. There would be a prima facie case for identifying those who answered "no" to such a question as "denying environmental realities."
However, Feygina et al. (2010) did not perform such studies . Instead, they simply measured support for primitive environmentalist beliefs and values, called low levels of such support denial, and regressed it on the system justification scores and other measures (a third, experimental study, did not assess denial ).
None of Feygina et al's (2010) measures refer to environmental realities. Thus, the studies were not capable of producing scientific evidence of denial of environmental realities. Vague environmentalist philosophical slogans and values are unjustifiably converted to scientific truths even though no data could ever tell us whether humans should "abide by the constraints of nature."
It is not just that people have different environmental attitudes; the problem is the presumption that one set of attitudes is right and those who disagree are in denial. This conversion of a widely shared political ideology into "reality," and its concomitant treatment of dissent as denial, testifies to the power of embedded values to distort science within a cohesive moral community
Much more HERE
This seems amusing indeed The report below seems ...
Australia: More pressure on banks over global warm...
Social psychologists attack the "denier" accusatio...
More unscientific science It's Warmist "science" ...
Some desultory post-Christmas thoughts on Christia...
Is Liberalism Intellectually Bankrupt? John Goodm...
The holy day has dawned It's dawned in Australia ...
In re Michael Brown and Eric Garner In the wake o...
Forget glycemic index The glycemic index of foods...
A professor who admits that she hates Republicans ...
Does feeling old kill you? The recent medical res...
Some medical news is so crazy that I just have to ...
Will Xmas carols defeat the Left? Just a small in...
WHY do the old swing Right? Back in 1985, I repor...
Some woolly Green/Left thinking in CA What would ...
A British Lawyer and a Conservative Party "wet" (c...
Is this the rudest necklace ever? 'phallic' pendan...
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE By Dr Dav...
Japanese north–south gradient in IQ predicts diffe...
Reindeer Populations On The Decline Due To Climate...
Emery Barcs -- 1905-1990 Emery Barcs (born Imre B...
Genetic determination of social class Using twin ...
MEGA-PESKY for the Left! Republicans found to be ...
Fall snow cover in Northern Hemisphere was most ex...
Kids from affluent families start out smarter than...
Warmist Rahmstorf is now rubbishing statistical si...
The Mediterranean myth again For years health fre...
Must not mention racial details of Egyptians A f...
NOAA is trying to tell Americans that 2014 is shap...
Good riddance to bad rubbish She was in charge ...
Does ambien make a sleepwalking criminal out of yo...


Here you are at our site, article above Cake Shipping Containers. At this time we are excited to announce we have found an incrediblyinteresting nicheto be discussed, that is Cake Shipping Containers Some people searching for info aboutCake Shipping Containers and of course one of them is you, is not it?
Related Post "Cake Shipping Containers"


text:
Q: Non Blocking & Multithreading - Socksipy & Socks i need to check my Proxies vs a specific server, port. I just use SocksiPy as a Proxy wrapper for Socks. Well it works, but its damn slow :/
I guess its because i don't use non-blocking Sockets. I tried .setblocking(0) but then all my checks "FAIL" in an instant.
#! /usr/bin/python
import time, Queue, threading, socks

t = time.time()
queue = Queue.Queue()

class ThreadUrl(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, queue):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.queue = queue
    def run(self):
        while True:
            host = self.queue.get()
            id = host[0]
            ip = host[1]
            port = host[2]
            type = host[3]
            retry = host[4]

            try:
                s = socks.socksocket()
                s.settimeout(10)
                #s.setblocking(0) <- i tried this but well, when i use this all my proxy checks end up instant with FAIL :/
                if(type == 'HTTP' or type == 'HTTPS'):
                    s.setproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_HTTP, ip, int(port))
                else:
                    #because i dont know if the socks i have is for socks 4 or 5 i have to use this
                    if(retry == 1):
                        s.setproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, ip, int(port))
                    else:
                        s.setproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS4, ip, int(port))
                s.connect(('127.0.0.1', 1337))
                s.send('\r\n')
                data = s.recv(10)
                s.close()
                if( len(data) > 0 ):
                    print "GOOD PROXY: %s TYPE: %s" % (id, type)
            except:
                if(retry == 1):
                    print "SOCKS5 BAD: %s TYPE: %s" % (id, type)
                elif(retry == 0 and type == 'Socks 4/5'):
                    print "SOCKS4 BAD: %s TYPE: %s" % (id, type)
                    #because i dont know if the socks i have is for socks 4 or 5 i have to use this and requeue the proxy with the retry indicator set to 1 (socks5 testing)
                    queue.put([id, ip, port, type, 1])
                else:
                    print "HTTP/S BAD: %s TYPE: %s" % (id, type)

            self.queue.task_done()

def main():

    proxies = ((id,ip,port,type),(...))

    for i in range(4):
        t = ThreadUrl(queue)
        t.setDaemon(True)
        t.start()

    for item in proxies:
        queue.put([item['proxy_id'], item['proxy_ip'], item['proxy_port'], item['proxy_type'], 0])

    queue.join()

main()
print "Established Time: %.2f" % (time.time()-t)

Thanks for your help, Cheers :)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange