Something Like a Star

to stay our minds on, and be staid.

[milksockets]

robert chouraqui in marquis magazine no. 2

[phaeton-flier]

And more generally: I know people often use "humans were not meant for X" in the metaphorical fashion, to describe how doing X is unsustainable etc. But to be frank even if God came down and said you were personally designed to do double shifts as Wait staff, that doesn't matter except as information; what you personally want is the only guide you need care for

[phaeton-flier]

This is important: you cannot outsource your meaning or your morality, to anything. That's not advice. It's something that's already true, inside you. When some external thing—religion, evolutionary biology, philosophy—implies you should make a wrong choice, you can already see why that's wrong.

If someone told you believing in evolution meant you should require women to be mothers, you wouldn't agree; because it doesn't matter what happened to ancient humans, what matters is that you care that women can make their own choices, now; that everyone should be free to make their own lives!

If God came down to you, and said you were made to be eaten by a wild lion because it would be funny, would you care? Would you accept it, merely because he said so? No (hopefully), you'd go back to what you were doing, because being eaten by a wild lion sucks and you'd rather play DOTA.

It's alright to want to get an answer, to want some Good Guy to give you all the arguments you need without the stress of being unsure. But you still need to evaluate them yourself, or how else will know when poisoning wells is wrong when the Good Guy says to?

[thesadandterriblejoxworld]

[avicecaro]

genuinely one of the most annoying things is when you criticize religion and someone has to come in like umm 🥺🥺 but the text has been altered over time through faulty translation 🥺🥺 if you look at this one rare version of the text from several hundred years ago as practiced in one town maybe from a certain angle while hanging upside down you can see that my god didn’t MEAN for all of this misogyny and rape and slavery and conquering and cruelty to happen in his name 🥺🥺 or maybe even her name or their name 🥺🥺 if we all returned to the TRUE version of the faith you’d see that it was good all along 🥺🥺 like girl ! i do not believe in your god. he cannot be misinterpreted because he is not real and has not spoken. the church is an institution which is made up of people! it preaches certain values and arranges certain orders and has an obscene level of influence in our supposedly secular government, and all of these things are carried out by people with agendas who have the arrogance to believe they are imbued with divine authority. a religion is precisely what it is in practice and nothing more or less!

[doctors-star]

highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.

[doctors-star]

me: oh thomas cromwell, we're really in it now. every day i get emails.

the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: i was on committees with the duke of norfolk. and they beheaded me.

me: yep. good point.

[theodysseyofhomer]

every time someone says odysseus “just” loves his wife or “just” wants to go home, i get so agitated… you don’t understand. odysseus wants everything. he wants to be at home, and he wants to be a hero. he wants to die, and he wants to live. he wants his family, and he wants to lie to them. he wants to tell the story of his life, and he wants to keep his secrets. he wants to go back and for everything to be as it was, and he wants the glory and wealth and reputation he hard-won. he wants to be at peace, and he wants to do violence. he wants to sail past the sirens safely, and he wants to hear them. he wants the war to end, and he wants it to mean something. he wants to have his cake and eat it too. he’s the man of many ways. he’ll get his damn homecoming but he’s a rube goldberg machine. he doesn’t “just” anything.

[two-bees-poetry]

twenty years across the sea

[yesterdaysprint]

New-York Tribune, September 10, 1916

[torchwood-99]

While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they'd have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.

[mousemilf-deactivated20250508]

i know i probably think abt weddings more than the average person bcs of my job but it is really just like. insane how all the little details of het weddings are so intensely misogynistic and everyone just dismisses it and doesnt think its that deep. its beyond me how any ostensibly feminist woman could participate in the whole spectacle of a proposal, her father "giving her away," giving up her own name, etc and not throw up from everything all of that represents. i get that everyone seems to do it but you literally dont have to! theres no reason to force yourself to get over all that symbolism. if you dont agree with what it represents dont do through all those motions. i am not crazy for thinking this and no one can make me feel crazy.

[ahotknife]

oh emily wilson translation of the iliad we’re really in it now

[deathlessathanasia]

People will be like I love Greek mythology but I hate everything that involves incest, infidelity, violence, slavery, misogyny, undeserved suffering, questionable relationships, ethically dubious heroes and gods,and morality that is foreign to me.

[uncanny-tranny]

Honestly, there is a certain type of fetishizing of violence that occurs when you are the victim of abuse - wherein people talk directly to you about how much they fantasize about your abuser/s dying and being killed - "all abusers must be killed!" they say.

As a victim of prolonged abuse, I never felt cared for when people indulged that information to me. It often feels like my abuse is being exploited for others to enact their own violent fantasies and secret desires - my abuse means nothing to them in the same way that I didn't matter to my abusers. It's not support - it's just another cycle of violence.

I'm begging people to care more about victims and survivors than they do about retribution of abusers. Nowhere along the way should your focus on the abuser outweigh the people affected by their abuse. If you truly want to support abuse victims and survivors, start with us

[midnightstillness]

Waking up feeling like shit and giving myself grace like

[max1461]

Everybody's really excited about identity these days so I'm starting a new thing like gender or race but it's called SNINFT and I think it's gonna be really big. There are five sninfts and everybody has two of them and the five sninfts are called norble, wizit, needo, somp, and rud. your first sninft is inherited from your great grandma and then your second sninft you pick when you come of age and you can't change it later even if you don't like it BUT there's a bonus thing which is you can swap your first and second sninft whenever you want so if you are needo/somp you could switch to somp/needo and that would be fine. anyway I'm thinking we can all start worrying about sninft all the time and having wars over it and killing each other and stuff and then get more enlightened because of progress and change our minds to it doesn't really matter.

[dungeon-bitch]

[sometiktoksarevalid]