Oops! 22 for me tee hee
KIROKAZE

Origami Around

Love Begins
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

JBB: An Artblog!
hello vonnie
Keni

No title available
No title available

No title available

#extradirty
Peter Solarz
Sade Olutola

blake kathryn
i don't do bad sauce passes

Andulka
No title available
🪼
we're not kids anymore.

Product Placement
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Guatemala

seen from Malaysia

seen from Switzerland

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from France

seen from Austria
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Switzerland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
@ofinfinitespace
Oops! 22 for me tee hee
If there's more of us, then we're not rebels.
The entire Discworld fandom on the 25th of May.
I must have seen the Glorious 25th of May posts in previous years - the people I follow on Tumblr are exactly that kind of nerd - and just not registered them because they didn’t mean anything to me.
I noticed them last year for the first time, because it just so happened that my partner and I were reading Night Watch - we were maybe half way through? And so in the morning, I saw the posts and thought “oh wow, what are the odds, it’s the Glorious 25th of May!” It was like this bright spot of serendipity in a very drab months of early pandemic. I said as much to my partner when we read that night.
And then we didn’t read the next night because our friends in Minneapolis were building their own barricades.
And we didn’t read the next night, or the night after, because it was just too much to read about police (even fictional ones) and uprisings. Sometime in mid-September we got back to it, but the City Watch is different for me now. (And don’t get me wrong, it’s good that it’s different. I am a white person who should be re-examining police in all the media I consume)
And it’s not like anyone is doing anything wrong: this is a me thing, this indelible link between Night Watch and George Floyd’s murder. But it is WEIRD seeing so many Glorious 25th of May posts without mention of other, less glorious, 25ths of May.
So I’m mentioning it.
Always true but especially true after this winter.
encountering veggie tales on tv at my friends’ houses was really scary for me because they would always act like it was totally normal television and I’d just be standing there gaping at like. the fact that it was allowed on TV at all without some kind of disclaimer and no one around me thought it was weird at all. fucking stepford wives moment for first graders.
Veggie tales are like how sometimes the seemingly innocuous thing is antisemitic, expect this seemingly innocuous thing is evangelizing (and let’s be real, creepy as hell)
btw your antizionism does not have to incorporate blatant historical revisionism. it makes you seem stupid and conspiracy brained when you do that.
it is factually true that modern Jewish people descend from a group that at one point lived in the levant. it is even true that certain parts of the levant are religiously significant for Jews; we pray facing jerusalem and we have done that for thousands of years. but what really matters is that the truth in those statements in no way justifies the state of israel (which claims to but does not represent all Jewish people) murdering, starving and ethnically cleansing palestinians. it’s that simple.
"It's so weird that your cat and I can do the same thing with our eyes."
--@magnesiumflare, learning about slow blinking.
Somewhat in my defense Gal is the sum total of my experience with cats!
Further evidence that @magnesiumflare may be a cat
"We're all looking for the guy who did this!" chimes the chorus of people who helped us get to where we're at now.
There's this really frustrating goyish idea that Jews are always finding "loopholes" or "tricks" to violate the "spirit of the law" when it comes to observing Jewish law. No, they're following Jewish law. All ways in which one can follow the law are equally "in the spirit of the law" because the law's purpose is to be followed. The idea that finding easier ways to observe religious rules means "tricking" god or doing something otherwise shameful is reflective of Christian philosophy. Suffering is not virtuous in Judaism. Penance is not the purpose of Jewish law. Judaism is meant to enrich the current lives of its community, not ritualize hardship for some unknowable divine purpose.
(I'm a goy, for context. Specifically raised Norwegian Lutheran, not American. Also this went into a big nerdy ramble, which is probably fitting for the topic.)
I think it also comes down to what the purpose of the law is, whether or not "loopholes" are okay. Loopholes are morally neutral.
For secular, societal law (be it a country's legal system or the rules of a forum), the law is supposed to have a specific purpose to prevent something bad. Traffic laws prevent injuries, for example. In this case, finding a loophole is bad because it endangers people.
Of course, laws can be badly written or ineffective, and they can also be created for other purposes, to give power to a certain group. In that case, loopholes are seen as bad by the people in power, the people who benefit from that law.
However, we'd generally agree that finding loopholes in an unjust law is a good thing, right?
For an extreme example, say there's a law saying you are legally obligated to murder your neighbour if they paint their house on a Sunday. So you find a loophole that says, no, they have to paint their whole house, or it doesn't count. Even the most law-abiding person would probably agree to that loophole, because otherwise that would be really awful, and they'd find ways to justify it. This is a law most people agree is unjust.
Meanwhile, people who hate their neighbour and really wanted to murder them would be happy to have an excuse. Some people who dislike their neighbour and are scared to break the law might also end up murdering their neighbour, even if they don't agree with the law, and they'll justify to themselves saying they just followed the law.
Anyway I clearly got off on a tangent about fascist regimes here which wasn't my original point.
Now, religious law is a different matter, because its purpose is different.
In Christianity, the origins of the laws probably aren't that different from societal law, as explained above. But the purpose of Christian laws as presented to us is often much more focused on obedience - though not always.
Now, I'm raised Lutheran, so I was raised that I can technically sin as much as I want and still go to heaven if I believe in Jesus. Which always seemed really dumb to me, because 1) then what's the point in the laws? And 2) you can't CHOOSE to believe something, you either do or you don't. Or at least I can't. (This depends on your definition of belief, but as a kid I always understood it as "what you understand to be true based on evidence", rather than a choice to have faith.)
So then laws to me have always been presented more as guidelines on how to be a good person, rather than hard rules. Like OP mentions, how loopholes are fine if you follow the SPIRIT of the law. Because the spirit is "be a good person".
In fact, the main repeated prayer, the "Lord's Prayer" (Matthew 6:10-13), which is the only part of the Bible I remember, has only one directive: forgive sinners, and you too shall be forgiven. I heard this FAR more times than I ever heard the commandments or other rules.
Other corners of Christianity though, it's about obedience to an authority. You follow the rules or you get punished, that's the way it is. Loopholes are always bad because it's you trying to outwit your parents, er, I mean god. Loopholes show disobedience.
What OP is talking about, about suffering being virtuous, that's also only a specific brand of Christianity - not my personal experience. But it's connected to the authoritarian view, because it requires you to "trust in god's plan". You follow the rules even if they don't make sense to you. It's the "daddy knows best" idea of faith.
The interesting thing about how Judaism is described by OP though is "the law's purpose is to be followed." Which also implies obedience, but in a different way. There's no "daddy" to punish you if you do it "wrong".
If all ways of following the law are equal, then it's about showing respect to the words themselves - right? Not by blindly following - that's obedience, not respect. Respect is about paying attention to it, giving it due consideration, and accepting it as much as you can without harm.
(Interested to hear input on this btw.)
In that way, I think my experience with Lutheranism has a lot in common with Judaism. There's no punishment for doing it wrong - you follow the rules because you find meaning in it.
Of course, one of the things I missed in my childhood experience with Christianity is that it wasn't nearly as academic and thoughtful as my later (secondhand) experience with Judaism. For me, religion had about the same weight as any storybook with a moral. If I could debate the stories, maybe I would have cared more.
---
Also sidenote - in Norwegian fairy tales, the devil shows up relatively frequently in the form of a satyr, sometimes with bat wings. Probably a Christian adaptation of trickster figures, which are common here. The hero of the story beats him specifically through outwitting him. (There's two ways to victory in Norwegian fairy tales. Being clever, or being kind.)
There's one in particular where a kid traps the devil inside a nut just by challenging him to do if, then has a smith crack the nut open. Nothing else to the story, zero morality, just funny. Another one has the taxman try to talk his way out of being taken by the devil, but ends up thwarted because people hate the taxman.
Anyway the point of this aside is that loopholes and tricks against authorities or enemies are often seen as positives in Norwegian culture, probably because of quiet rebellion against 400 years of foreign rule. This probably colours our Christianity as well.
This is a very good and nuanced understanding, and if I may just add: one additional thing that contributes to this is that in addition to the difference between “respect” and “obedience”, there’s also a difference between “respect” and “love”.
Say someone tells you that they don’t eat nuts. If you obey their wishes not to eat nuts without respecting them, you might find a ton of things that aren’t nuts, but that violate the spirit of the request: nut butter, or nut oil, or nut-flavored alcohol, or seeds, etc.
If someone tells you that they don’t eat nuts and you respect their wishes, then you wouldn’t make them food with nuts, and you would take preemptive steps to make sure that you don’t feed them anything else that might cause them a problem. Maybe you clean your kitchen to make sure there isn’t cross contamination. Maybe you carefully check ingredient lists so that you avoid products that “may contain” nuts, just in case.
But if you love them? Then you go above and beyond for them. You research every part of their restriction. Are all nuts a problem? Why are nuts a problem? Maybe it turns out that they’re horribly allergic to almonds, but only almonds, and because almonds are processed in most nut processing plants, they can’t eat other nuts because they are invariably contaminated with almond dust. Maybe they remember the taste of macadamia nuts from when they were a child – maybe they dream of being able to eat white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, but can’t, because they’ve never found macadamia nuts that are safe. Maybe you go out and you research and you make a bunch of phone calls, and you find a macadamia nut farm on some remote island that grows and processes macadamia nuts and nothing else, and you put in a special order to have those macadamia nuts imported, and you bake them the cookies you know they thought that they could never have again, because you love them. When you really love someone, sometimes “I can’t eat nuts” contains in it “I’d love more than anything to eat something with nuts in it, if only you could find a way to make it work.” And the task of making it work – the understanding of the intent of the rule, the figuring out exactly where the limits are, the working within them to create something that embodies what they actually want, not just what they’d accept, not just what they asked of you – that’s an act of love, in and of itself.
When we Jews say that the law is as sweet as honey, this is what we mean. We mean that the law is both a gift and a challenge – and that interpreting it is the ultimate expression of our love for Hashem.
Look. Remember when New York City (I think it was New York) outlawed bringing dogs on the subway unless they were in bags? And how people reacted by training their labs and greyhounds to sit politely in giant totebags? And how this actually fulfilled the actual purpose of the law, which was to keep dogs from behaving badly, because if a large dog is sitting politely in a bag it is still sitting politely?
It's like that. Using a timer on your hotplate or light for Shabbat might technically be a loophole, but the point of the law isn't not to use electricity. It's to keep you mindful. To keep the Shabbat day and make it holy. It's part of a whole series of ritual separations that Judaism does. If you regularly drink cow's milk or goat's milk, making the switch to almond or oat milk when you're cooking with meat isn't cheating, because it's still maintaining a ritual separation.
@theheroheart's example of killing your neighbor for painting their house has precedent in Judaism, too. There are certain things in Judaism (murder being the most obvious) which are, according to the Torah, supposed to be punished with the death penalty.
But we are also told to break nearly any law in the pursuit of saving a life. So our Sages looked for ways to reconcile these teachings. Are you sure that was the person who committed the murder? Did we have multiple witnesses who saw them do so? Can we be 100% certain the person knew what they were doing would be punished with the death penalty? No, really - did the witnesses warn them that it was punishable by death?
A similar approach is taken to declaring someone a mamzer - roughly translated as 'bastard', but in this case referring to someone whose parents were married to other people. If we declared someone a mamzer, we would be punishing a child for the actions of their parents. So the court should look for any possible loophole to avoid declaring someone a mamzer, including avoiding DNA tests, for the purpose of not casting a member of the community out.
Finding loopholes for Shabbat seems to have been a way of teaching us to find loopholes for the good of the community.
This is very much getting into "two Jews, three opinions" territory, but the other thing to keep in mind is that the mitzvot are additive. The idea is that more mitzvot = more holiness, but you're not getting docked for not adhering to them perfectly - outside of very particular circles - perfection is not something Hashem asks of us.
Some folks here have talked about respect vs. obedience and love vs. respect. Another aspect is faith vs. obedience. My personal understanding (and this is gonna be a bit more controversial) is that Hashem doesn't require perfect obedience (frankly, if that was the case, Hashem maybe shouldn't have picked the Jews, y'know) but that Hashem does want us to have the faith that engagement with the mitzvot in whatever way is true and authentic and appropriately challenging will bring us closer to Hashem.
"But I need wizard school media to live" just develop bad opinions about the X-Men like a normal person.
6 hour workday maximum i’m not kidding, if it can’t be done in that timeframe it doesn’t need doing.
this doesn't apply to jobs like childcare
If i worked in childcare and my 6 hours were up i would start putting babies in ziploc bags and shipping them to Turkmenistan listed as endangered fruits and vegetables
This should apply EXTRA to jobs like childcare
john donne really deserves to be more widely appreciated for coining BOTH the iconic phrases “no man is an island” and “ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” in one paragraph. and he’s also the flea fucking poem man. the range
RJ takes the wheel to teach us a thing about John Donne: Reverend, husband, and mega-horny poet. Enjoy the tonal whiplash as we rocket betwe
One again I beg: please listen to Oh No! Lit Class
Also, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning is simultaneously the most romantic and most raunchy poem ever written.
Told my coworkers that I typically celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve as opposed to Christmas Morning and I am now an honorary Mexican Roman Catholic. Apparently most of Latin America celebrates on Christmas Eve, which I didn't know.
So, a poll for those who partake:
Do you celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning, and what denomination are you?
Christmas Morning, Protestant
Christmas Eve, Protestant
Christmas Morning, Catholic
Christmas Eve, Catholic
Christmas Morning, Orthodox
Christmas Eve, Orthodox
Christmas Morning, Miaphysite/other
Christmas Eve, Miaphysite/other
Christmas Morning, culturally Christian but not religious
Christmas Eve, culturally Christian but not religious
Chanukah button
This is a great time to retell the story of my late grandmother who about 5 years before she died announced one year that we’d always opened a present on Christmas Eve. (We had not) To this day we are unsure if it was the dementia or if she just wanted to open a present.
Gettin' Through the Holidays Mental Health Tricks
If y'all are anything like me, this time of year is triggering AF. Here are some small, very easy grounding exercises that I was taught by my therapist, basically in order of how much I like them for this rage-inducing season. You make like them in a different order, depending on your rage-to-despair ratio.
Push a wall: literally go up to a wall and try to push it over. Really try. I promise you won't push it over, but give it your best shot. Try to hold it as long as you can, and then take a breather and assess whether you need to repeat. Why it works: This is a quick, physical expulsion of the fight-or-flight feeling. It's a bit like punching a wall, but without the potential to hurt yourself/look scary/damage things. You can even do it in front of people and say you're stretching, they'll never know (unless the wall actually falls down, but this will not happen, I assure you).
Shake like a dog: Animals shake to release stress, and you are also an animal. Setting aside time to just shake it out, as vigorously as you can, arms and legs, face, stick your tongue out, pretend you're shaking like a wet dog. You can dance instead, if that feels better, and you can do this to music, but basically the more unhinged you can be, the better. If you are in a place you can scream, scream too! Why it works: like the above, this is a release of pent-up stress and anxiety. Especially if your rage-to-woe ratio is high, some kind of physical exertion is often the best way to burn through the cortisol and adrenaline you're building up.
Bilateral Tapping: Cross your arms over your chest so that your fingertips are at your shoulders, and slowly tap, one hand at a time, back and forth, for about a minute. Breathe slowly. Why it works: This is weird as hell, but because this engages both sides of your brain, it helps override the activity of the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that Makes The Fear. If you're being literally triggered in a situation, i.e. you're having a trauma response, or reliving some family trauma, this is a good one.
Box Breathing: From a comfortable position (can really be seated, laying down or standing), inhale slowly for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, then repeat. You can do it for shorter counts or longer counts, but if you vary the counts make sure the exhale is longer than the inhale. You can close your eyes or leave them open. Why it works: This exercise helps you move from a sympathetic (activated) nervous system response to a parasympathetic (balanced) response. I do this one every day, and it's a good gateway to meditation. Especially helpful in anxious or tense situations, but I find if I'm very triggered I need one of the other ones first, or it can make anxiety worse. Breathwork is amazing but not usually as a first exercise if you're very activated, or have been activated a long time.
Ice: Lots of ways to do this one – hands in cold water for 30 seconds, ice pack on the back of your neck, dip your entire face into a bowl of ice water (this one's the most effective). Why it works: I kinda think this is hilarious, but this activates your mammalian dive reflex. It immediately slows your heart-rate, so if you are feeling your blood pressure and heart rate rising, this one is very good. The only reason this one's at the bottom of my list is because I hate being cold.
I wish you all a very get-through-the-holidays-without-hurting-yourself. Take time alone if you need it.
Slowly being pushed to the edge of the bed by my 10lb dog.
the curse of local theatre is that a show can change you forever and there is no recording of it anywhere at all and after a few years all you have are scattered memories and the knowledge that you were different before.