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secondlina

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lastoneout

this is my entire stance on the "american food is bad" discourse summed up

thebeatleshermajestydotmp3

Listen man, its a work week, you just got done your shift at the dollar store, youre in a rural area and the local waffle house is a 35 minute drive away and driving from the waffle house back home will be another 45 minutes, so what youre gonna do is youre gonna pick these four bad boys up from the dry goods aisle, drive home, cook some Carolina long grain rice with a little bouillon cube stirred into the cooking water, and in a separate skillet, youre gonna add a tsp of veggie oil or if youre lucky some butter and cook down some of that garlic. Then add a little extra oil and if you have spinach or any hearty greens, youre gonna throw them in your skillet with some salt and cook them down, if not thats okay. But youre also gonna transfer your rice from the pot into the skillet with your garlic (and veggies if youre lucky) and stirfry that rice for a minute or so. The bouillon cube didnt quite season your rice to your liking, so youre gonna throw a little extra pinch of salt. Perfect. Then youre gonna turn off the flame and add parmesan to taste. You take a look in your fridge and you see that you have a little parsley left from the last time you were able to clock out early enough to stop in at the local Food Lion and its still in good condition. Youre gonna wash that parsley, dry it, give it a quick chop, and finish your fake risotto with it and a couple splashes of lemon juice.

You have some rice left over so you know whats for dinner tomorrow night and you can sleep soundly. Country girls make fucking do.

lastoneout

Peer reviewing bcs prev knocks it outta the fucking park.

ladybrythwensinclair

Hail Loki

Hail to the mighty and loving One Hail to the cunning Lie-Smith Hail to the progenitor of mighty beings Bless and walk with us this day

ok anyways. post this beast

foxonrollerskates

I HAVE THE OTHER PART TO THIS PHOTO

sashayed

but ykw at least i'm not on mount everest. at least i'm not paying tens of thousands of dollars to slowly suffocate in a 300-person line at the gates of hell. never in my life will i have to be steered in a hypoxic stupor through the maze of poop and corpses atop mount everest. on this earth a lot of horrible things can happen to you without your permission but there are a few that you have to opt into. you can just say no thanks! and be guaranteed never to have to be on mount everest. much to be grateful for actually

sashayed

still not on mount everest this morning 😌 alhamdulillah

feminist-space

baddywronglegs

The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that

shrewreadings

Не верите. Доверите.

Do not trust: verify.

blaquesails

In her last years, along with her sons, daughters and grandchildren, she added at least 16 tigers to Ranthambore’s population. What would have happened to Ranthambore without her is unimaginable, but she rode out the crisis years, and finally handed the prime range of the lake areas to her daughters to fight it out. She moved several kilometres away to lead the last years of her life. Her teeth were worn out — one was broken, and as the years rolled by, she lost all of them and still managed on occasions to kill and eat deer. Though she was helped by the park management, I still could not believe her ability to survive. By the end of 2015, she was the world’s longest living wild tigress. I saw her in early 2016, scaling a mud wall with such surety — it was just astonishing. Twice in her last year of life, she walked back to her original range of the lakes, spending a week each time at her old haunts. Few other tigers fought with her. They seemed to accept the fact that she was the grand old lady of the lakes.

— Valmik Thapar, “The Machli I Knew: Remembering the grand old dame of Ranthambore National Park”

professorsparklepants

The turn of the century was very troubling for tigers. Big hauls of tiger skins were reported across India and the booming illegal trade in China had put a price on every tiger’s head. It was in this climate that Machli conceived her first litter. There was a severe drought in 2002 and most of the lakes were drying out; it was at this time that the tiger–crocodile conflict was at its peak. One hot afternoon, while Machli and her cubs fed on a sambar deer, an enormous crocodile tried to join the feast. Machli’s devotion to her cubs was legendary, and to protect her food and her cubs, she raced towards the 12-feet crocodile. Her ferocity was unimaginable and the battle lasted nearly an hour. Machli smashed its head with her powerful paws — the crocodile died a slow death but Machli had rewritten the natural history of tigers for the world to see. It was the first recorded encounter of a fight between these two predators and remains etched in the annals of natural history. Fateh Singh had been proven right — she became a star as several BBC documentaries recorded her life. She was the tigress of the lake and entertained every visitor with her unruffled demeanour. More than anything else, she stirred the soul of those who saw her. Her base for herself and all her litters was the ruined Mughal summer palace at Rajbagh on whose balconies she lazed and watched the world go by. Today, her daughters do much the same.

theperksofbeingahugefuckingcunt

Okay listen I have another disability related thing that’s important!!

If you have any disabilities linked to tooth decay/erosion, through direct cause or secondary symptom, it is vital that you get one or both of the following items: Sensodyne toothpaste and enamel repair mouthwash

This includes health conditions such as acid reflux, diabetes, thyroid conditions, fibromyalgia, chronic pain & mental illnesses such as depression that create poor hygiene routines, sensory issue disorders like autism and ADHD, and any health condition that causes frequent vomiting / increased stomach acid, including eating disorders and migraines.

All of these disabilities will erode the enamel of your teeth, not only opening you up to cavities but making it very easy to chip your teeth from such simple things as biting the wrong way on the tines of a fork. (I’ve chipped my teeth at least 4 times this way).

The toothpaste on the left here (sensodyne pronamel) is gentle on your teeth, won’t cause painful sensations from any extreme mint flavor, and will even protect your gums if they’re sensitive from any of these conditions.

The mouthwash on the right (Crest enamel repair) will, as it says, repair your enamel — which is marvelous, because the technology to repair your enamel at all is relatively very new to society! — but it is most importantly non-alcoholic. Meaning that it works well as a once-a-day rinse without any of the burning sensations of antiseptics that typically discourage people with sensory issues from taking care of their teeth.

I know remembering to do these things every day can feel like a lot when you’re sick and exhausted, but I promise a collective three minutes out of every day is going to save you an incredible amount of pain and money in the future. If your teeth are susceptible enough to rot, you can actually die from infection. And as they say, with how little insurance actually covers dental —

Not brushing your teeth??

In THIS economy???

sacredwhores

Christina Hornisher - Hollywood 90028 (1973)

anarchistmemedistro

skaldish

Myth vs. Story

I realized I’ve never written about the differences between “Norse mythology” and “fictional stories featuring the Norse gods” before, mostly because people already know there’s a difference, and that alone is enough for most things.

But it’s recently come to my attention that most people don’t know how they’re different.

Right now it seems like most people distinguish between “mythology” and “fictional stories featuring the Norse gods” the same way they distinguish between “canon literature” and “fanfiction”—they think of the first as the “original story” and the second as AUs/spinoffs. While they know they’re not dealing with the “canon plotline,” they still think they’re dealing with the “canon characters.”

As a result, people still interpret Marvel’s Loki and Thor as “the same characters” as the gods Loki and Thor, just presented in a non-canon environment.

But this isn’t at all the case, and bear with me because the reason why is going to get a little mind-bendy.

Marvel’s Loki and Thor would only be “the same characters” as the gods Loki and Thor if mythology was literary fiction. But mythology falls in the realm of nonfiction.

It’s nonfiction because its purpose is to convey a culture’s understanding of metaphysical reality. Nearly every culture in the world has developed models for how divine reality works, and conveys these models through storytelling. We call the body of tales that come from this “mythology,” and its purpose is to be a guide to help people make sense of the world.

The fact we subconsciously classify mythology as fiction is why so many of us struggle to view polytheism as legitimate. To get around this, here’s an example of one mythology our culture regularly treats as real: Christian mythology.

The fact we call it “biblical history” doesn’t change the fact it’s mythology. Like all mythology, it uses narratives to convey models related to the world’s creation, the nature of divinity, the layout of the heavens, the divine’s relationship with humanity, and “how we got here” and “where we’re going.” We don’t classify the Bible as “fiction” because its purpose is to be a manual to guide one’s understanding of how things are.

Biblical powers aren’t considered “characters” by Christians because they’re understood to be real phenomena. By the same token, pagan gods aren’t considered “characters” by pagans because they’re understood to be real phenomena.

When people create literary characters based off of divine figures, they do it as a creative exercise. These characters aren’t extensions of their divine counterparts and people from their respective cultures don’t mistake them for such, nor do they use these characterizations to “get to know” their deities. Instead, they use mythology, their practices, and their experiences to do that.

There’s nothing wrong with someone being inspired into paganism because they saw gods and myths depicted in media. But the best thing any pagan can do is dismantle the thing in their brain that tells them “mythology is fiction.” Just getting rid of this one thing will clear up so many legitimacy issues they’d otherwise struggle with.

quasi-normalcy

I think that Xena, for all of its ridiculousness and cheesiness, did a better job of conveying the allure of evil than just about any other series I've ever seen. Like it understands that violence, no matter how justifiably it starts out, is addictive, and that hatred poisons you until you can't feel real joy anymore, and it's strange to me that I've never seen it laid out so simply elsewhere.

rachandroll

...so THAT'S what sleeper cell activation feels like. Because yes, YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, because Xena is such an interesting lightning-in-a-bottle-case study! While I would never discount the work done by the writers, Xena as a show is almost perfectly positioned both historically and structurally to consistently explore that theme.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

It's fucking rad and interesting.

skaldish

The reason why I have to reframe holistic knowledge into logical frameworks is because I'll end up saying shit like "To gain the knowledge you seek, you must go to the fields of the mind and listen to the rivers that run there. They'll tell you the answers." And people will go "Wow man, that's some real crossroads wizardshit right there." And I'll go, "I can't emphasize enough that this is a laundry-list of literal tasks you do and not some kind of riddle."

skaldish

I'm actually quite insecure about not being understood. It's what really makes this field especially hard for me, because this fear means I constantly reframe everything about spirituality according to what makes sense to the logical brain.

But understanding things like spirituality, spirit-work, and magic isn't done through logic, data, facts, and figures. Hell, it's not even done through faith or belief.

The knowledge comes from mirroring things.

skaldish

Fuck. I mean something by this.

Our logical ways of thinking live in the left side of the brain, which deals with facts and figures. It understands the world through frameworks like "Tom is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Tom is mortal," or "1+1=2," or "B is the second letter in the alphabet." It's also the part of the brain that thinks using language.

Then there's the right side of the brain, which deals with holistic thinking. It understands the world through feeling—not "feelings" as in emotions, per se, but "feelings" as in "anything felt." This includes spatial perception, movement, direction, distance, velocity, and any other measurement of change.

It feels these things by mirroring the sensation of them in the body.

This is also how we know what someone's feeling when they don't tell us. We mirror their emotional state. It's also how we experience abstract movements such as "the pacing of conversations," or "the emotional distance between people," or "the weight of a given situation."

And—if I were to be so bold as to say this—it's also how we know when we're talking to deities and spirits. This mirroring has certain dynamics when it interacts with intelligent beings.

Anyway, you learn and know certain things about the world from this mirror-mechanic that you can't learn or know through logic or reason. But again, this is a non-verbal part of the brain that understands things through feeling and abstract motions, so when you try to put it to language it sounds like poetry.

l3irdl3rain

Saw this and thought of you lol

Ohhhh my god. I know he has a thousand kittens running around out there and a kill count in the millions

headspace-hotel

how does this even fucking happen

tiktoks-for-dead-pope

skaldish

Now that I know who I’m working with for sure, I can finally talk about Aengus Óg and the Irish side of my practice in detail.

But first, I need to say something about the Irish deities since they may be new for some of you.

If you know the Norse gods as I do, then you know they’re not picky about who they interact with. They’ll adopt new devotees by walking into their lives, scooping them up, and carrying them back home with no “if’s,” “and’s,” or “buts” about it.

The Irish gods aren’t like that. They’re far more reserved and, from what I understand, will only really involve themselves with people they consider “theirs.” Who they consider “theirs” seems to be based in something other than genetics or nationality, but the criteria still exists.

This is to say that the way I’m going to portray the áes dána is going to be a bit different compared to how I portray the Norse gods. Namely, I can’t pull you all directly into the bit with Aengus like I can with Loki and Odin. It wouldn’t be right.

So bear with me if my language sounds kind of stilted, because I’m still getting a feel for a “happy medium” of depicting my interactions with Aengus, while not misrepresenting what to expect from one of the áes dána.

I’ll start by catching you up to speed:

I first met Aengus in 2020 when he appeared to me as Eochu Bres. Back then, I was going through a pretty bad existential crisis thinking I was a bad person, and...well...I needed a villain to talk to about it.

Bres appeared, and while he was regal and beautiful to look at, his features seemed kind of...uninspiring. But I wasn’t really noticing that at the time. Instead I was focused on how polite he sounded, how intelligent he seemed, and how worldly his way of thinking was. It was really unexpected for someone known for being an inhospitable king.

As the years went by, I began to notice a few things: The first was that he gradually became more honest with his presentation and started to show more personality, expression, and unique features. The second was that he was blisteringly good at communicating through tarot readings. This isn’t a skill spirits and deities learn effortlessly, from what I understand, and every time I did a reading with Bres it seemed second nature for him.

The real tipping point came when I asked him to teach me magic. He was super excited about this and it became very clear very quickly that magic is his expertise. This was exciting but also bewildering because Bres isn’t depicted as magically-inclined in his stories. It got me wondering just what the heck his role was as a deity before getting cast as a mediocre villain.

At some point, maybe before or after this, I began to notice Bres’s energy. It looks and feels like the sky, with lights in it that shift and change with his thoughts and feelings. He also started to appear with blond hair (though he’ll still have black or even brown hair sometimes depending on his mood) and began to wear a formless robe made out of some otherworldly substance. This robe also changes color and character depending on his mood.

Seeing him without a disguise took me some time to get used to, because his appearance shifts when his moods change; when he’s happy he looks and feels like a summer’s day. When he’s sad he gets all gray, dreary, and rainy. When he’s exhausted he looks like a crumbling ruin. And so on. I’ve seen him take on a few inhuman shapes, but he doesn’t typically transform from one thing to another like Loki does. His shapeshifting quality is different, more like he’s embodying a landscape that matches the mood he feels.

He never told me he was Aengus. He let me figure that out myself, and when I did, everything about him suddenly made sense.

The áes dána aren’t the “gods of” things the way the Roman or Greek gods are, so Aengus isn’t the “god of love” nor is he the “god of youth” like we now try to characterize him as. But “loving” and “youthful” are definitely qualities that define my experiences of him. He’s always been exceptionally kind to me. He gives me wonderful advice and helps me whenever I felt low. He shares his insights about the world and his experiences whenever I ask (and I ask a lot). He’s taught me how to care for myself and how to grow in ways I didn’t know were possible. If Loki taught me about fun and freedom of expression, then Aengus taught me about kindness, knowing the spirit of self, and finding home within the self.

I can’t say if he’d have this type of relationship with everyone, and I’ve definitely seen him be dark at times. But I hope to share more about him in ways that people will enjoy, because he’s become as important to me as Loki has, in a different way.

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Organization is the best way to Procrastinate