9-10-23 "Bounce"

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

this is what i mean

Via @bulbaderp

To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!

Okay this is anecdotal evidence but I find this post odd, cause in my town the streetlights attract bugs who then attract bats. They don't seem to mind, is it a species thing ?

Video games will stick a vaguely posh human name on the big scary monster's health bar to let you know they were once human, but isn't that a bit limiting? I think walking blasphemies against the natural order should be allowed to be fancy lads if they want to be. That hundred-foot pillar of screaming teeth is called Dr. Throckmorton Pomberley. What are you going to do, argue with it?

God the like Generic High Fantasy Elf frustrates me so much as a fan of Tolkiens elves who are like. Both balls to the wall insane and canonically fun at parties

They’re fairies. they’re in a musical. They host crazy feasts with live music and hopping dance floors and great booze. If they get too sad they die. They’re psychic. They’re creative and curious and they live forever and never ever forget any of it. They’re ghosts

They committed almost all war crimes imaginable.

This is Dollar Squash

Reblog for something innocuous to be wildly successful, or to receive a huge winter squash.

Dollar squash has been picked, and has been upgraded to FIVE DOLLAR SQUASH. It’s nearly 50 lbs.

Or reblog just to share an epic & beautiful squash with your mutuals.

That is an ENTIRE winter squash right there. November through April squash.

This post was too successful… we have another five of these big boys plumping up on the vine!

THIS ISN’T EVEN ALL OF THEM

I have literally hundreds of pounds of squash

Hundred dollar squishening

Fall success

I’d like y'all to know that we STILL HAVE SQUASH from this pile in the house. It’s been 12 months and we still suffer under the bounty of squash.

I wish you all wealth that just will not leave you no matter how hard you try.

I think the thing that most Christian atheists who are rebelling against authoritarian Christian backgrounds don't get is why Jews remain Jewish.

Like, I get it, you engaged in your practices because you were told that God would punish you if you didn't, because you're told you're supposed to fear God.

(Incidentally, we don't even use the same language about this. The term that gets translated in most English bibles as "fear" is, like many classical Hebrew words, a lot more multivalent than the English term, and has more of a connotation of "awe." (See, for example, the Gilgamesh dream sequence: "Why am I trembling? No god passed this way." A god is something in whose wake one trembles.) It's what one feels when one is faced with something bigger than oneself, something overwhelming. For some people that may be fear of being harmed. For others it may be wonder or even ecstasy, standing outside oneself.)

But in 2023, Jews have the option (and, indeed, still the cultural pressure) to completely abandon Judaism. Very easily. We can, in fact, do it quite passively. If we're not actively trying to engage with it, it will very much drift away from us.

And it's not fear of divine punishment keeping most of us engaged.

The thing is, if you proved to me tomorrow that God doesn't exist, I'm not sure anything about my life or my practice would change. (I'm already agnostic, so *shrug*. I don't believe in a God-person. Sometimes I believe in a unity to reality, a life and a direction to it. Sometimes I don't. I just don't have the arrogance to think I understand definitively the way the universe does or doesn't work.) I still would celebrate Shabbat, I still wouldn't eat pork, I still would have a mezuzah on my doorway.

I do all that stuff because I'm Jewish, not because I think God will get mad if I don't. I do all that stuff because it's part of a cultural system that I see as wise and life-giving and therapeutic and worth maintaining.

And the thing is, the cultural system that Christian antitheists want us to assimilate into, under the guise of "getting rid of religion", is very much a white Protestant culture. It's not culturally neutral. It has practices, and it has a particular worldview, and it has cultural norms that are just as irrational as any other culture's.

It's also very telling that Christian antitheists purport to be harmed by Jews continuing to be Jewish. Why? We don't impose our norms on anyone else, and we overwhelmingly vote (and organize, and engage in activism) against the imposition of Christian "religious" norms, such as the curtailing of reproductive freedom, blue laws, etc.

So you're only "harmed" by our continued existence in the same way Christians purport to be harmed by it: by claiming that the very existence of a group that doesn't share your worldview and practices is somehow an act of oppression against you.

Which is, you know, white supremacist logic.

You're still upholding the logic of Jesus's genocidal, colonial Great Commission even though you supposedly don't believe in the god that ordered it anymore.

That's gotta be one of the saddest things I encounter among my fellow humans.

You took down all the crosses in the church of your mind and chucked them out the window, but you still refuse to step foot outside the church building, contenting yourself with claiming it's not a church, and firing out the windows at the synagogue and mosque down the road, the same way you used to.

Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

HOLY SHIT CLICK THROUGH THIS IS INCREDIBLE

I had a textbook in middlescool that said something like "Tenochtitlán would have been the largest city [Cortés and his men] had every seen, (...) It was by far cleaner than any city they had seen in Europe". I just love how detailed this whole thing is, and it looks amazing

Okay so Victorian erotica is literally the most heinous, morally bankrupt, horrific shit I've ever read - but I've read a fair bit, partly from historical interest but also because a while back I helped a friend with a university project she was doing about censorship and pornography in 19th century England.

Anyway I need to share with you all the most hilarious line that has ever been written, circa 1887:

I feel like this excerpt is significantly enhanced by knowing that the novel in question is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an inexplicably sapient flea who lives on Bella's body, and that's why the third priest's penis is described in this way: from the narrator's perspective it literally blots out the sky.

me when im a flea

Official Sky-Menacing Penis Post

they/them

december 2022, 4 months post top surgery

[image description: a photo of op from the hips up. op is a slim 20s white person with long wavy brown hair. they wear dark colored pants and no shirt, and have top surgery scars. they hold an arming sword over their shoulder. end image description.]

My medieval and ancient ancestors watching me trying to charge my laptop and connect to WiFi: Ah, yes, she must feed her magic mirror on the telluric current and summon the spirits of knowledge from the aether.

My ancestors watching me proceed to doomscroll on Twitter: Alas! She is beguiled by the cruel babblings of the demons within the mirror; soon she will descend into melancholy from the things she has witnessed.

Jews aren't involved in a widespread conspiracy to control American society, but you know who is?

Rich white evangelical christians.

Some books about the subject:

The Family by Jeff Sharlet

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

American Crusade by Andrew L. Seidel

Takeover by Noah Feldman

Also look up Seven Mountains Ideology, the idea that the Church should control the "seven mountains" of society, those being:

What’s weird is that anyone who grew up in an evangelical household knows this isn’t even a secret. It’s very loudly and openly the agenda.

I didn't say it was a secret conspiracy. There's no need for secrecy when nobody (so far) is trying to stop you or hold you accountable.

Appropriate

The podcast Straight White American Jesus does a great job explaining and tracking the goings-on of the intersection between fundie Christianity and American politics. Highly recommend.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

someone should remake lord of the rings as a grandfather telling a fantasy story to his grand child with flashbacks to world war one showing the dead boys and men the characters were based on. grandpa why didn’t they just fly. because they didn’t. they didn’t.

i’m fine

I will never get over how Tolkien & Lewis took the horrors of war and spun them into fantasy.

Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.

I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:

…oh.

Sometimes I read a tma fic that has the tea martin is serving be like some...fancy herbal or floral stuff.

My dude, come here for a second-

This is a workplace in England. It is Tetley. It is PG Tips. It is yorkshire gold.

It is NOT ginger hibiscus or green tea or fuscia with parma violets. it is a cuppa. It is a regular ass cuppa tea with some milk in it. Maybe some sugar.

Serving unprompted herbal tea to a coworker is a violent act of hatred. It is a decree of warfare.

Your boss asks you to make them a cuppa and you put Ginseng Green Sea Buckthorn tea on their desk? You are telling them you hate their guts. You are letting them know that you think they are the worst person on Earth.

This artifact was sealed within the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that runs below the barrows provided an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produced a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in the preservation of the artifacts inside.

This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.

Currently housed at the Hermitage Museum.

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:

“I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you”

They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!

Oh man, It doesn’t end there.

This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:

https://www.space.com/41434-mars-rover-opportunity-wakeup-music-playlist.html?fbclid=IwAR3uL6q4tOmLQTIEhiwYegGc99nv4N01HQKItpCLQiQYIptBOevNN6uIyT8

It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“

This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?

So they started calling it her.

They nicknamed her Oppy.

They told her to take a selfie not long ago.

After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.

And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet

Was play her a love song

Throwback: May 5th 2015 - May Sketch a Day

i don’t see why a “hung jury” would be a bad thing? we love big dicks