Under The Blacklight

magic, paganism, and where boundaries blur

[politijohn]

Source

[sol1056]

the fuck did I just read

[teratocybernetics]

here's a link but Reuters refuses to make a preview card for some reason

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[uncahier]

Since you don’t respect my opinion anyway, quit pestering me to fill out a survey after every single consumer experience. I keep wondering who looks at these surveys. Is the CEO sitting in his wood-paneled office, reading each individual response on an old-timey stock ticker? If so, you can keep doing this. If not, I rate this experience zero stars out of infinity.

[creature-wizard]

A lot of people trying to correct perceived cultural Christianity in neopagan thought and whatnot just end up Christianizing the thing in a different (and often edgier) direction.

[a-walk-thru-the-woods]

Would you know a good resource for deprogramming from cultural christianity without becoming more christian about it?

[creature-wizard]

Unfortunately I don't. The only thing I know to do is to try and keep studying non-Christian perspectives.

[chirotusinfinitum]

"Your blood pressure is at the higher end of the normal range" is a precursor to "you need to drink less coffee"

Frankly I'm a little annoyed by how good I feel at just one cup a day, although it may have more to do with the CPAP

[camblogarchive]

nature documentary but the narration is just weird enough to make you question it

[camblogarchive]

“Some fish can walk out of water, so remember that next time.”

[camblogarchive]

“You might think you’re safe, but horses are omnivores”

[toxicglooo]

please watch the round planet on netflix it’s exactly like that 

[infectiouspiss]

kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3

[infectiouspiss]

you'll say something as simple as "no child deserves to be hit" and people will crawl out of the woodwork to explain why they should be allowed to beat a 6 year old for spilling some water

[infectiouspiss]

you'll say "i think it's weird that adults literally have control over when children are allowed to use the bathroom" and up pops a teacher to say that when they're not shouting at the kids they teach, they're trying to stop them from hiding in the bathrooms

you'll say "i think children shouldn't be forced to eat food they hate" and here comes someone who feeds their kids plain rice and boiled chicken (while eating a nicely seasoned stirfry) claiming that it's okay actually and kids shouldn't be allowed to taste things

you'll say "i think kids should have bodily autonomy" and in comes someone who pierced their babies ears before it was even 24 hours old, frothing at the mouth because their kid wanted a haircut and thats somehow an insult

[infectiouspiss]

children are an oppressed class and everyone should be looking back at their own childhoods and making sure they don't ever make a child feel the same way they felt.

[that-stone-butch]

personalized ads are so funny to me

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

like no i'm good actually. you might be aware that i already have one

[segamascott]

[captain-price-returns]

[transmechanicus]

Revealing the ignorance of my youth here, but who is this and what is she known for?

[boybeetles]

Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate

[flurrin]

Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.

[crazy-pages]

In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.

This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.

[cumaeansibyl]

Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.

That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.

[pieklo]

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

[finnglas]

when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.

[finnglas]

I love how every June this one gets dug up and passed around again, lmao.

[finnglas]

oh no is this what we’re doing now

[finnglas]

…relic…

*crumbles and blows away on the wind*

[boringkate]

You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.

[paradigm-adrift]

I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.

Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.

[terramythos]

holy shit this person in the notes

[discodyke-dogthing]

[chirotusinfinitum]

I think it's fascinating how things gained mystical importance over the years simply because of manufactured marketing hype. Reddit is aflame with aspiring witches asking how to deal with the incredible and untamable power of the Blue Micromoon (tm), from concerns about what rituals are appropriate to people worries going to a party will offend the gods.

Hyping up minor things sure will build engagement, but it's also ensuring an entire generation is only focused on the shallowest trappings of the craft

[a-quiet-nightmare]

If you're practicing craft that includes the moon - there's a whole dissertation about the difference in phases and the effects different refractions have. Say you're trying to cleanse things, you want a pregnant/full/pale moon. That can be golden, harvest or white depending on what you're trying to bash. Red moon alike to brick dust, gold moon alike to brass tools, white moon kind to candles and intentions etc.

Blue moon is significant - it's rare. There's a flourish of aquatic associations and intense celestial body connections that are intensified in the light shift, it's a big bid for communication that usually fails to work. In my own cycles it's considered a time to reframe how you speak if it occurs in your lifetime. Signifies the opportunity to shift assumptions and change perceptions.

However I doubt that is what is being hyped on Pinterest, a place I go exclusively to find monster concepts and pretty fantasy dresses

[chirotusinfinitum]

I know that there is a lot of lore around the moon, and I don't mean to sound dismissive of it.

But there's a big difference between wondering what workings might be ideal on a given blue moon, and being afraid to leave the house.

Likewise, I'm sure that moon water has a lore and function that I just didn't pick up on in the craft, but just going by the content I'm seeing it's the most important tool any witch can have.

But collecting it looks nice on video or photo, so it's used in a lot of content.

And I'm all for the aesthetic too, don't get me wrong. It just feels like there's a lot of emphasis on relatively minor elements of magic and an exteme unease around deviation or experimentation.

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[vasyan-pupkinyan]

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

[directactionforhope]

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

[maimonideznuts]

Voluntary first past the post voting only demonstrates a party's ability to motivate people to vote at all.

-

I continue to maintain that the Australian combination of compulsory voting with ranked choice voting, is the greatest advancement in democracy in centuries.

Compulsory voting shifts the onus ensuring your access to the ballot box to the government. One Citizen, One Vote, No Matter How Remote.

It's hard to restrict the vote when everyone has to vote by law, and compulsory ranked choice voting gives a better median representation of national opinion.

You say "it's my right to refuse to vote", people do that all the time, submit it blank, draw a penis on the ballot, write that you're voting for the Loch Ness Monster. You can also not turn up and pay a small fine.

[maimonideznuts]

I will stress... No matter the system, vote. Always vote. Vote in every election. If nothing else motivates you, just remember that you need to vote because there's someone you cannot stand who is voting in that election, even the local one, for something that is going to bother or hurt you for the rest of your life.

[chirotusinfinitum]

I think it's fascinating how things gained mystical importance over the years simply because of manufactured marketing hype. Reddit is aflame with aspiring witches asking how to deal with the incredible and untamable power of the Blue Micromoon (tm), from concerns about what rituals are appropriate to people worries going to a party will offend the gods.

Hyping up minor things sure will build engagement, but it's also ensuring an entire generation is only focused on the shallowest trappings of the craft

[pupucino]

follow your dreams at a sustainable pace

[alhilton]

500 words a day gets the novel written