I made another blog for all my fanfic stuff and I'm a lot more active over there! DM me for the name!

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@fiveraccoons
I made another blog for all my fanfic stuff and I'm a lot more active over there! DM me for the name!
Hmm I think my OCD has pavloved me into not wanting to leave my house more than I thought. Because every time its this whole exhausting thing of checking the stove and the outlets and the cats and the locks, over and over again. And I've gotten it mostly better! I only have to check twice now, usually, and I can brute force my way through it!
But holy fuck is that a lot to go through when I already have to scrounge up spoons to do something hard.
It's been a while since I said "this person wins the internet", but today it is merited.
(via bsky)
(The classic XKCD comic)
@ perfectunion
Official Post of Massachusetts
the shitstains at youtube memoryhole’d propane genesis evangelion but I had already downloaded it because I know youtube is full of absolute cunts so here it is
Drinking my delicious smoothie with fear in my heart because I'm scared to getting a gross fruit chunk in my mouth.
Jacek Yerka - Tsunami --
Finding my peace #mypeace
I think I'm going to remember this phrase every time I cook for the next five years
You are 60% water and every lake, river, pond, swamp, creek, and ocean you encounter wants to reclaim it desperately. Be careful out there.
Good, I hope it haunts everyone about to enter a body of water so bad that they wear a life jacket. 🙌
Every single person I knew (past tense) who has drowned was "a strong swimmer." Water in the wild does not care how good you are at swimming.
I mean this with all due respect:
You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.
Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.
Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.
If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.
You may be unable to return to shore. Rescue may be unable to find you quickly.
Scheduling this for when weather starts warming up. Be careful swimming this summer
Seriously, this. I had a really scary experience going through rapids while white water rafting, which would have been the dumbest way to die, especially because it was terrifying even with the life vest on. The panic doesn't make you smarter, it makes you fucking stupid.
I was very close to trying to catch myself on the bottom of the river, which is how you get your feet trapped and drown, and then I got tangled in the rope someone tried to throw me, and my brain finally got the message to freeze and just wait. If I hadn't been mostly through the rapids at that point, it might have been very bad.
Rivers are scary and you are a teeny tiny human. Take all the help you can get. You fucking need it.
401 towards london by jack chambers, 1968-69
north americans will literally have religious experiences about highways
through pottery we domesticated rocks
KRISTEN BELL?????
been thinking abt like early pearl and garnet because they have such a funny dynamic to me. Like garnet’s the leader and we see especially in s1 how high of a pedestal pearl holds her on and she’s like constantly clinging onto her but garnet Wasn’t always like that. When we see her rejuvenated shes very naive and innocent and has no clue whats going on ever and she was GENUINELY terrified of pearl when they first met. I feel like for a while they had this dynamic that was like the scene from tangled w eugene and rapunzel right after raps left the tower
I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.
Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.
It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.
It wasn't just the hoity-toity ritual magic stuff, either. Popular media often frames a fundamental opposition between the Church and practitioners of the Old Ways™, but on the ground, any given medieval European community's foremost practitioner of traditional folk magic was likely to be the village priest. And again, they very much were not supposed to be doing this. There were some very pointed letters going around reminding people to cut that shit out, not that we're naming any names, Jeremy, and no, "if you invoke the saints first it's fine" is not going to fly with the bishop.
I feel like a lot of folks in the notes are missing a critical piece of context here because they're not clear on what the Church's official position toward magic actually was during the Medieval period.
In brief, the idea that magic is a. real and b. Satanic was not the party line for the greater part of the Middle Ages. Obviously the particulars varied both regionally and over time, but for the most part, the official position of the Church was that there is no power but God's and magic is fake. The Church's principal objection to the practices of divination, spirit-binding, etc. was that they were fraudulent, not that they imperilled one's soul. Sometimes this was even carried to the point that accusations of witchcraft would result in the accuser getting in trouble rather than the accused; after all, if your neighbour is pretending to do wizard shit, that's fraud, but if you actually believe your neighbour is capable of wizard shit, that's heresy!
The hardline "magic is the work of Satan" stance that most folks are thinking of when they think of magic and the Church wasn't particularly widespread until very late in the Medieval period, and is really more characteristic of the post-Reformation era – which adds an extra layer of hilarity to the aforementioned local clergy doing wizard shit, because from the perspective of their superiors, the problem was less "oh no, our priests are consorting with Satan" and more "god fucking damn it, our priests keep scamming people with this wizard shit".
The Catholic Church, desperately penning their 500th letter to local clergy:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TELLING PEOPLE MAGIC IS REAL
The really funny part is that, by all accounts, some of the priests involved didn't even want to be doing wizard shit. Allegedly, they more or less got pressured into it by their congregations, who expected wizard shit of them and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.
I've been summoned by @artielu to vet this post, and I'm happy to confirm that it is, in fact, fairly accurate and does represent many of the ways in which medieval people did (and did not) think about gender, witchcraft, religion, magic, and practice. I've written quite a bit on this topic before, probably back when I was teaching a class on magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages, but it's been a while.
The boring stereotypical Bad Middle Ages take is that medieval people were all howling misogynists and thus were burning Female Witches (and also midwives, out of an idea that medieval people saw all female-led intellectual practice as inherently bad, which is also uh, questionable) at the stake left and right. As I have carped about many times, Witch Trials (TM) as most people think of them were decidedly an early modern invention. The idea of witchcraft as both a) real and b) specifically and evilly female was also in fact a very late medieval invention; it was most explicitly codified in the infamous Malleus maleficarum of 1485. However its author, Heinrich Kramer, was already a raging misogynist and had been chased out of his parish the year before when for some reason, people got tired of him randomly accusing their wives and daughters of witchcraft. The Malleus is well known as a "witch hunting handbook," but people then tend to generalize its late 15th-century conclusions, written by one tiresome misogynist, as completely representative of The Middle Ages Everywhere. The Malleus also contains some anti-sodomitic polemicals, so there are just a whole stew of gender, queer, and other anxieties being represented here in a late medieval context. See i.e.:
Bailey, M. D., ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960-90.
Bailey, M.D., ‘The feminization of magic and the emerging idea of the female witch in the late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 120-134
Broedel, H.P., 'To preserve the manly form from so vile a crime: ecclesiastical anti-sodomitic rhetoric and the gendering of witchcraft in the Malleus Maleficarum', Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 136-148
Broedel, H.P., The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
Harley, D. ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1-26
Katajala-Peltomaa, S. ‘A good wife? Demonic Possession and Discourses of Gender in Late Medieval Culture’, in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M.G. Muravyeva and R.M. Tovio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 73-88
Stephens, W., ‘Witches who steal penises: impotence and illusion in the Malleus Maleficarum’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 495-529
It's true that some of the most dedicated practitioners of ritual magic, and scholars and conservationists of magical texts, were monks, churchmen, and other religious figures. Some of them started from the position that God possessed the only supernatural power and any claim of other magic was wrong, but many others did believe that magical power was accessible from a variety of sources, even as this interacted uneasily with related notions of heresy, religion, blasphemy, and (demonic) sin. This represented the complex and shifting interaction between institutional Catholic and traditional/folk magic beliefs, which were never fully assimilated or "erased." It was in fact also popular among laypeople, as magical amulets or charms were highly valued for their supposedly protective capacities. Magic and ritual magic was also widely used in medicine and yes, for sex (people have always been people etc. etc.). See i.e.:
Bailey, M. D., Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2003)
Boureau, A., Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2006)
Collins, D., ed., Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West (New York, NY and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Fanger, C., ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud: Sutton, 1998)
Flint, V. I. J., The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Kieckhefer, R., Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Kieckhefer, R. ‘Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe’, in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. Salisbury (London and New York, NY: Garland, 1991), 30-55
Olsan, L.T., ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 343-66
Page, S. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013)
Rider, C. ‘Danger, stupidity and infidelity: magic and discipline in John Bromyard’s Summa for Preachers’, Studies in Church History, 43 (2007), 191-20
I could go on with quite a bit more, but the point is: there is an extensive scholarly literature on this topic, and any depiction of magical and supernatural beliefs in the Middle Ages, especially in popular media, is often the laziest imaginable shorthand for "they all hated women, thought they were witches, and burned anyone who didn't believe in the all-powerful Catholic church." Yet again, this also does vary by time period, as The Middle Ages are not one single undifferentiated block. A twelfth-century author is far more likely to scoff at the credulous fools who think magic is real or can actually compare to the power of God, whereas the early-modern authors, influenced by Kramer, will do far more of the stereotypical "witchcraft is a particularly female-gendered thing and also real, satanic, and evil." And yes, many medieval magic practitioners and enthusiasts were a) monks and the church and b) regular people, because it occupied a complex place in their belief system and was by no means simply evil. This doesn't mean that they were "more" or "less" enlightened according to the also-wildly-erroneous Scale of Perceived Human Progress, but just that they were complicated, stereotypes are stupid, and my kingdom for one (1) single nuanced, thoughtful, or remotely accurate depiction of this in medieval-themed media. The end.