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[elbarkla]

Year of the Snake 🐍 Happy Lunar New Year! 🌞

[inspired-lesson-plans]

Science, Middle School, Earth and the Solar System

MS-ESS1-3: Analyze and interpret data to determine scale properties of objects in the solar system

Assessment Question (constructed response):

Craft an argument for or against the existence of a titanic serpent in our planet's orbital path. Cite at least three pieces of evidence to defend your position.

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Hank

I'm eating a bag of mormon gorp that tastes like gasoline while watching the rain run down the mountain. The taste doesn't even bother me anymore - all homemade gorp tastes like this. It's just a natural consequence of everyone keeping their prepper shit in their garages. 

My dad's out in the clearing, wandering around with his GPS. He's got some pieces of wire out on top of it to try and make the effective antennae bigger, but it just makes it look like he's dowsing. Another mormon tradition. I ask him if he's close to find water yet, and he looks up at me, little rivers flowing off him, and says yeah - he can feel it. 

I'm sure he can. I settle under my tree and watch the droplets roll down the needles. Awaiting the final judgement of Judge GPS. 

A few minutes later, it provides: 

Turns out my dad forgot to record the location of the car this morning. The GPS remembers where we parked yesterday, but by luck my dad knows how to get from there to our car. Downside is that it's a nine mile walk just to get to yesterday's position, then another five miles to backtrack. That's fourteen miles total. 

I'm only thirteen. 

Think you can make it? my dad asks. And it's a kindness that he's worried, but it's not like there's an alternative. What else would I do, sit down in the murk and cross my fingers he finds me again? Ask him to carry me 14 miles? 

I'll be pretty jelly legged, I say. But yeah. I'll make it. 

Attaboy, he says. He fishes a bag of poptarts out and offers me one as - I think - a peace offering. A, sorry you're gonna have to walk 14 miles in the rain because I goofed kind of gift. 

I take a bite and, despite being individually wrapped, it still manages to taste like diesel fumes. We start hiking our incredibly long distance in terrible weather for foolish reasons, and I joke to my dad that the only way to make this day any more mormon would be by pushing handcarts. 

He laughs. Neither of us laugh again until 11 pm, when we stumble like drunkards into camp. My grandpa has stayed up late to make sure we weren’t lost, but he only stays up long enough to see us arrive. We try to eat a dinner of sweet potato stew, but after falling asleep in the middle twice, we agree to just go to bed. 

I sleep in well past nine and wake up to nobody in camp but my grandpa. My dad left with my sister to keep hunting around 5 am. I know that everyone assumes that their dad is invincible when they're 13, but I'm 28 now and part of me still thinks he's gonna live forever. That God made exactly one perpetual motion machine, and it raised me in the desert. 

---

Around noon my grandpa suggests hunting again. If it was my dad, I'd probably tune him out, but I like my grandpa's style of hunting. My dad hikes and hikes and hikes until the elk get tired and just let him shoot them. My grandpa finds the sleepiest, sunniest, coziest field and takes a nap there, figuring if the elk have any decent taste they'll come there at some point.

Man's got a knack for knowing what elk like - he's right more often than not. I think he might've been an elk in a previous life. 

I go with him, and much as I hate to admit it, the hike is good for me. I start off walking like a pirate on two peg legs, so stiff I might as well not have knees, but by the end of the mile and a half walk I'm almost normal. We make it to the edge of the clearing, and my grandpa finds a patch of grass taller and softer than the beds inside the trailer, and he curls up to sleep there. I look across the grass and I watch the comings and goings of critters through the field. Sometimes I use the scope to get a magnified view, but I never do so with my hand on the trigger. The thought of accidentally looking a person through that glass is something that sends a chill up my spine. 

Some deer wander through the glen, but it'd take a fool to mistake one of them for an elk. A few hours later, my grandpa wakes up and asks if I want to wander around a little. It's a lovely day. Rain comes in bursts in Arizona, and the day after is almost always clear as can be. And for a short while, all the desert browns turn green and lush. Hard mosses turn squishy and cacti swell up like fresh baked muffins and for a while you can get why people settled in these god forsaken wastes. 

So I go with him, and we walk on, me with my gun, him just taking in the forest. He looks so peaceful that I get a little jealous, but it's not until my grandpa stops and looks at me that I even notice it myself. Takes a mirror, sometimes, to know yourself.

Being near my grandpa is always a strange thing for me. He's quiet, and he doesn't talk much, and I don't ever get the feeling that he's particularly emotionally intelligent - but it's like he's interacting with a reality more raw and real than mine. Like I'm watching symbols on a screen and he's counting atoms. And sometimes, just being near him gives me access to that raw matter. Just something about how he is breaks the illusions of the world.

He looks at the gun like a foreign object, like he doesn't recognize it, then he looks at me. He speaks and he doesn't mince words. 

What would you do if an elk came across the path and you shot it right now? he asks. 

Well, I'd start cleaning it, I say, and he waves the words away like cobwebs in his face. 

But would you celebrate? he presses.

And I look at him, and I don't actually see any judgement staring back. He knows the answer, and he's at peace with it. He’s asking so I can see it too. He’s being a mirror so I can see my own face.

I think I might actually cry, I admit. And he nods along in agreement before reaching forward to take the gun off my shoulder. 

Lets just walk today, he says. No chance of killing anything. No worrying about that. 

Right, I say. 

He pops the chamber open and tosses me back my bullet. I catch it, and the relief I feel is palpable. 

Can I change my mind? I ask, and he shrugs.

Whenever you want. Hunt or don’t. It’s not the hunting that I’m worried about. It’s seeing you ignore your conscience.

And for a moment, I'm there in the real world with him, and my gloves are off, and reality is a metal cube in my hand: Sharp and cold and heavy.

Or maybe that’s just the bullet.

---

We make it back to camp a bit later than my dad. We get there and he’s waiting for us. If he's tired, he doesn't show it. 

How'd it go? he asks. My grandpa looks at me, and I don't know how to respond. I don't know how to explain it, and I am scared. 

Great, he replies. It's a shame Babs only has a doe tag. We saw a five-point out there. Close enough to hit with a football. 

No, my dad says. If his grin was a half inch wider, both ends of his mouth would meet in the back of his head and everything above his tongue would slide off.

Tell him Babs, grandpa says. And, not for the first time, and especially not the last, I try my hand at spinning a yarn. 

It's pretty good. But at 13, I still have a lot to learn.

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

and she told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and i would go to heaven, and i would be able to talk to the worms, and i would be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident out of excessive Love, and that they would forgive me, because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[lilietsblog]

Wait, you're telling me I spent the latter half of my childhood deathly terrified of worms for NOTHING? That was a lie?

[inbabylontheywept]

huh. you viewed worms entirely mythical regenerative powers as something to be feared. i viewed it as an opportunity. something something The Duality of Man.

[inbabylontheywept]

i am considering that fear produced a better outcome for you and the worm than love did. this feels like an important thought.

[inbabylontheywept]

@caseyuptobat are you a monk or something? the immediate relief i felt reading this was just

[liridi-deactivated20250617]

she was seen, beloved, and carried off by Pluto—such the haste of sudden love. 

- ovid, metamorphoses

[eagleoftheninth]

Wow this place really fell off

[mostlyghostie]

A stack of books that were either never finished, never published, or were destroyed.

Pratchett’s unfinished works were run over by a steamroller as per his wishes, Waugh set fire to his manuscript, Sappho’s poetry was burned by order of the Pope and Lady Wortley Montagu’s daughter threw her journals in the fire for being too incendiary, ironically. The others were either started or planned out but never completed.

[zornofzorna-blog]

Steinbeck’s Acts of King Arthur was published in its incomplete form. It is very good… and then it just stops! The edition I have closes with an appendix of Steinbeck’s letters to his literary agent discussing the book, but the work proper ends abruptly at Lancelot and Guinevere’s first kiss.

It seems fitting, in a way, that it should stop there: the story up to that point has seen Arthur and his knights more or less triumphant, and this moment marks the beginning of their ultimately tragic trajectory, the point where it all starts going wrong. It’s as though Steinbeck were saying, “Yes, we all know how the story ends… but why dwell on that?”

It is, nonetheless, one of my favorite retellings of Arthurian legend.

[bebemoon]

from @romania on ig . “What is it about a winter storm that stirs something ancient in the soul? The Vaser Valley, cloaked in its alabaster raiment, offers a tableau of unearthly splendor. Here, amidst the Maramureș wilds, the venerable Mocănița train, a relic of steam and iron, threads its way through the vortex of snow. Each whistle is a hymn to forgotten epochs, each puff of smoke a specter lost in the whorls of a celestial blizzard. It doesn’t merely move through the storm—it communes with it, drawing the heavens to earth in a cosmic embrace.[…]”

[hauntedfalcon]

thinking about how my husband lamented that Rings of Power doesn't do much with the Valar. thinking about how the Queen of Numenor says faith is a thin thread to hang a nation from, which runs counter to... most of recorded human history, not to mention Tolkien's works, where multiple nations of men awaited their True King to deliver them into a golden age, and Boromir's declaration that "Gondor needs no king" signified faithlessness and that was a negative thing. thinking about how there are articles out there to explain why Galadriel was upset in Rings of Power, to explain that she turned her back on elf heaven, on the selfsame far green country with whose description Gandalf moved us all to tears in Return of the King, and she chose ruin and the world

thinking yet again about how Cersei Lannister blows up a whole church because the Sparrows had become more influential than the crown, and a handful of episodes later she says "hey smallfolk, come into the castle keep to stay safe from this battle" and the smallfolk... do it, instead of saying "fuck no, that's the lady with the wildfire who killed our beloved priests and committed the worst possible blasphemies, and this matters to us because we are peasants and the only thing in our lives is work and religion" and there were no further repercussions because apparently the influential state religion of Westeros was one building and a cool catchphrase

thinking about Tess of the Road, which I almost did not finish because wow it's grueling to be a woman in a fantasy novel isn't it? thinking about the spiritual epiphany it grants its title character in the midst of a kneejerk "Catholicism but even more oppressive" setting because it reads easily I guess (see also all the Dragon Age games). still haven't unpacked all my thoughts from that one tbh but it's rolling around in there and it will be for a while

thinking about how almost nobody wants to write characters who have relationships with their gods, even in fantasy, a genre where characters could have very literal relationships with their gods, be they adversarial or positive or realistically messy. thinking about how writers seem not to want to touch that, either because it's too messy or because of an impression that society is beyond that. thinking about how this extends beyond the fantasy genre. thinking about how sterile Station Eleven's post-apocalypse felt and how part of that was a lack of folk practices or any spiritualism apart from the antagonist's obviously bad oppressive pseudo-Christianity. thinking about Anne McCaffrey insisting there is no religion on Pern in the far future, versus, like, everything about Deep Space Nine. thinking about how Battlestar Galactica felt ballsy as fuck for having monotheistic Cylons and polytheistic humans, but in the end that thread and the implications of robots worshiping a god just... never went anywhere

thinking about how, when religion is included in a work of fiction, it’s almost always with a wink wink, nudge nudge, you know and I know how backward and bogus this is, but it’s almost never played straight, much less validated in the narrative (I love you Netflix’s Shadow and Bone). and when it is portrayed as a positive influence in people's lives, it's in the vaguest, always culturally-Christian, terms of "light" and "darkness" and "hope". thinking about how Midnight Mass told a story about people who took so much comfort in their religion that even after it turned them into vampires and destroyed their community they sang hymns as the sun rose, and how that was such a foreign thing that a lot of the audience found it unbelievable

thinking about the extra layer of hypocrisy in defending a work of fantasy by saying "it was just like that back then" when a) there was no back then because it's fantasy, and b) the work in question ignores the foundational role religion played throughout the medieval Europe all these fantasy worlds use as a template

thinking about how art is meant to nurture the soul, but increasingly neglects to grant one to its characters

thinking about how if we can't imagine a world where people have a spiritual life that isn't just a tool of oppression, how can we create one

thinking about how much I love the Queen's Thief series and Arthdal Chronicles

[hauntedfalcon]

reblogs are turned on for however long people can be decent. more thoughts:

thinking about the Jedi census phenomenon of 2001 and how easy it is to claim a pop culture religion that has no actual substance in the source material. thinking about how in new Star Wars canon, there is a Church of the Force and we have absolutely no idea what its practices are. thinking about how we've heard and read two prayers from the Guardians of the Whills, and know literally nothing else about their practices despite there being an entire young readers novel called Guardians of the Whills

thinking about how the Force and the Jedi started out as a pastiche of eastern philosophy, most notably Zen Buddhist non-attachment, but in the sequel trilogy it smacks of the aforementioned culturally-Christian light/darkness/hope handwaving. thinking about how two characters in Episode IV refer to the Jedi and the Force as a religion, and both of them are Imperials speaking from a place of having committed a genocide, and in the prequels and all of The Clone Wars and any other media centering pre-Purge Jedi, at no point do we see any practices. thinking about the Mortis Gods arc and the Bendu and how interesting things got there for a minute, before those threads got dropped indefinitely. thinking about how much has gone unimagined and uncommitted

thinking about "I'm a Mandalorian. weapons are part of my religion," but after two seasons of The Mandalorian, the resol'nare still hasn't been reestablished in new canon, we went a whole season without learning anything new about how Din Djarin relates to his religion, and his forthcoming quest to bathe in the waters beneath Mandalore's ruined crust is, mechanically speaking, a Get Out of Apostasy Free card when there could have been many other more interesting ways for him to atone. (his words--the Armorer referred to it as redeeming himself, and that is a very important distinction, spiritually speaking, which the show also did not address.) thinking about how interesting the idea of the manda is, and how interesting the idea of metal somehow containing a person's soul is, and how interesting it is to define a religion as something without conventional deities but which is literally nothing without community, and how they... just haven't gone there

thinking about The Lions of al-Rassan and A Brightness Long Ago, two books where the characters' religions are supposed to be central to them, but are really just used as shorthand and the main characters follow the modern fantasy trend of being above all that in a vaguely enlightened way. thinking in particular about the Kindath and how their similarities to Judaism do not include description of any practices, and only extend to being history's scapegoats and victims of oppression (again, see also the Dragon Age games with the Dalish elves). thinking very carefully about how to phrase what I want to say about this, and I can't quite get there yet, but it has to do with... seeing depiction after depiction and analogy after analogy of a particular religion portrayed this way, and rarely if ever seeing depictions of it being practiced devoutly and joyously, must certainly shape our perceptions of it on some level, you know?

[hauntedfalcon]

thinking, almost every week, about Critical Role having an entire campaign (with threads stretching back into previous campaigns) that hinges on whether the gods can/should be saved, with a main party of player characters who have almost no investment in the gods, positive or otherwise. thinking about a setting that includes paladins and clerics and divine magic and divine visions and temples in almost every town, but in which the prevailing attitudes from PCs and NPCs alike, across campaigns, lean towards ambivalence at most

thinking about how the only openly negative interactions with gods/religion in campaign three have been the Dawnfather's militant oppression, that Ruby Vanguard NPC's memories of religious abuse, and the general rancid vibe of the Judicators. thinking about the Uthodurn temple of the Dawnfather trying to limit who gets to use up prayer bandwidth, while the temple of the Raven Queen is like "come on in, random seeker, and drink some vision-water!" thinking about what exactly the PCs are supposed to balance as they try to decide what to do and consequently how non-starter all their attempted conversations about this situation have been. thinking about how multiple characters have expressed an opinion that since they endured personal struggles without divine intervention, they might as well let the gods die, even as the characters are already experiencing a consequence of divinity being under threat, in the form of resurrection magic not working. thinking about how reflexive it was for Bor'Dor to join an anti-gods cult because his mother was killed--and not even for religious reasons--and how Imogen's first response on hearing the details of Ludinus's ideology was "what if they're right?"

wondering once more when characters get to have a fulfilling spiritual life that isn't a tool of oppression or transactional

trying to balance my continued frustration at vaguely medieval fantasy settings that overlook meaningful spiritual influence, against how fucking awesome it was when Deanna asked the Dawnfather if he was worth saving, and when Ashton said the gods could come pray to them :))))))))))))

[sjmattson]

Sometimes, reading the scriptures through a modern lens can help you understand the cultural context better. For example, replace the story of the Good Samaritan with a few modern characters. This is the NLT version of Luke 10:30-37 with only the characters names switched and all other words left the same:

Jesus replied with a story: “A Trump supporter was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road.

31 “By chance a Republican politician came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. 32 A police officer walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.

33 “Then a despised Black Lives Matter activist came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. 34 Going over to him, the Black Lives Matter activist soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. 35 The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins,[b] telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’ 36 “Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked. 37 The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.”

The love of Jesus is an amazing thing, and should supersede our societal and cultural biases and hate.

[opinionatedoldfart-deactivated2]

Except no Black Lives Matter member would do this so your story is flawed.

[papirouge]

[shatar-aethelwynn]

Anyone who thinks Jesus would be picking a political side if he showed up today has forgotten that his core followers included an anti-Rome zealot and a guy who was until then a tax collector for said Roman rulers. And he expected them to play nice and work together.

[rosiewitchescottage]

Exactly!

Jesus also didn't say that we should give money to the government, hoping that they'll help the most vulnerable in society. He told us to help the most vulnerable, ourselves.

He did indeed consort with the sorts of people that most of the community would have nothing to do with.

And yes, He did it out of Love for them.

But His aim was to show them a better way of living than a life that he could see was leading to unnecessary suffering for them.

[papirouge]

"Jesus also didn't say that we should give money to the government"

Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, literally told us to pay our taxes aka "give money to the government" Romans 13:6-10

How are you all so fricking dense about it??

[transgenderer]

"the abrahamic religions are actually super different from each other and barely overlap at all" is exactly analogous to "the united states is actually 50 different countries in a trench coat". world view so myopic and parochial that you think the difference between your left and right hands is comparable to the difference between you and i, or between a man and a mountain. there are religions that do not share a common source with the abrahamic ones, and while obviously they share some similarities, the differences in fundamental assumptions are immense. especially because the similarity in abrahamic religions isnt just a shared reference text (and that reference text isnt just the tanakh but also the body of greek philosophy, which is a huge part of all 3), its also massive mutual influence for as long as theyve existed. like. they're not the "same religion" by any means, but abrahamic religions are as similar to each other as the different strains of hinduism, or the different strains of buddhism

[afloweroutofstone]

Apparently the dude who popularized horoscopes predicted that childless marriages and poor soil were a bigger concern than a war on the European continent… less than 4 months before Hitler invaded Poland

[cruelssister-moved2]

im sooooo sick of neopagans thinking they invented stuff that literally every religion thats not modern american evangelicalism already has 💀 i dont care if u want to light candles in ur bedroom or whatever, but even when youre swinging at “normie” religions ur still missing like okay catholics LOVE altars. jewish liturgy celebrates moon cycles. whatever youre trying to articulate about an all encompassing divinity of universal love was probably said in verse by a persian muslim centuries ago. your american christian/atheist background is a huge outlier in the global history of religion: it’s not even that you’re missing some niche exception, it’s literally that your entire perspective on “organised religion” is based on an outlier 💀

[gaydhros-nelyafinwe]

Someone requested Russingon in 10 but I guess I blacked out while reading the ask and thought it said Maedhros

[thecollectibles]

Red Woods by Robin Tran

[no-one-speciall]

test

[yaldabaothadeez]

Like most normal people, I have a mental list of cool things that I would say were I very Good At Swords (Or Maybe Kungfu) and semi-frequently had to face other people who were also Good At Swords (Or Maybe Kungfu), but less so than I.