witchoflight

[witchoflight]

there is no greater joy on this earth than Making Lists, Categorizing, & Sorting

[witchoflight]

My goal and dream and deepest desire is for every black child and every black adult to know the safety and security and hope and love we all should have been offered from birth. And even if it came late to you, I hope you know that you are still worthy of it.

[witchoflight]

looking for opinions both from americans and non-americans: what would you consider to be the big 4 american cities in terms of like, vibes-based cultural impact?

[witchoflight]

I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

[witchoflight]

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

[witchoflight]

Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

this should be a working gift link

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

"When you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o' Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do. But don't you worry. No more ashes, no more sackcloth, And an armband made of black cloth Will some day never more adorn a sleeve: For if the bomb that drops on you Gets your friends and neighbors too, There'll be nobody left behind to grieve."

from We Will All Go Together When We Go

[witchoflight]

Tens of thousands of notes on a post claiming a bill introduced by the Republicans will make credit card companies support NSFW content, and only a handful going "hey maybe don't support this".

Let's look into how the bill is being reported elsewhere - in fact, from the Senator who introduced the Senate version of the Fair Access to Banking Act

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them."

Hmm. What industries could he mean?

"This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers."

Wow. Who could've guessed that's what he meant

“When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

So it is, in fact, a bill around trying to stop left-wing activists from, say, going after oil and gas companies or private prisons or the arms industry

But - surely it would include NSFW bans too, right? It would overturn them, right? If you read the text of the bill, which is deliberately vague as you'd expect, it explicitly allows banks to deny payment based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards" - it only bans it for "political" or "reputational risk" considerations. And claims that the adult media industry is "high risk" is why payment processors drop it

But let's see who supports it!

"The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council."

Private prison companies, fossil fuel companies, blockchain companies, and the NRA. But surely...? SURELY a bill we're explicitly told again and again is about preventing left-wing activism against private industry, that's co-sponsored by fucking Lindsey Graham, and that certainly seems to include a carve-out specifically to let payment processors continue to deny adult content, but not deny conservative political causes...would secretly be pro-NSFW content?

This bill is all over the internet now, with viral pleas to GET IT PASSED and shutdowns of any criticism of a bill whose real intent is extremely overt. All of this is a simple search away and straight from the horse's mouth, and nobody wants to do even that modicum of research because they would prefer to take someone's word for it that a magic panacea is just a few phone calls away. If you make phone calls asking for this to pass, you're being played: tricked into supporting a bill crafted by the people leading the moral panic that harassed Itch into oblivion that would do nothing to help that, but that would ban any activism against payments for destructive fossil fuel extraction or gun lobbying. The guy who made it just told everyone that's what it's for! Does no one care to look? To read the bill? You can be the one to read it and say it's bad (being the only person to actually read an odious bill is called "Russ Feingold-ing")

Looking up the talk about this bill one theme I saw a lot was people dismissing anyone pointing out a Republican introduced it by saying "I don't care who introduced it! AS LONG AS SOMEBODY DOES SOMETHING!!!!" But you know what? If you saw that a Republican introduced the bill, and your reaction was to go "wow, so a Republican introduced a bill to protect adult content?" without even a pang of skepticism...I have no words tbh

[witchoflight]

"The word pandemonium was coined by John Milton as the name for the Parliament of Hell" is an all-timer etymology. Oh yeah did you hear that Mrs Higgins's dogs got loose at the village fête? It was like a vast golden edifice in which fallen angels debate their strategies for vengeance against god, yeah.

[witchoflight]

[witchoflight]

LGBTQ+ folk what was your gender/sexuality pipeline?

[witchoflight]

Starting a collection

[witchoflight]

just found out in medieval france, having a lion on your coat of arms was so prevalent that there was literally a colloquial proverb to clown on knights for being basic and not having a real coat of arms. the hate game was so strong back then. imagine medieval hate anons

[witchoflight]

this isn’t how it happens

[witchoflight]

Apparently the silksong subreddit has started doing human "sacrifices", where they ritually elect someone to be banned, in order to guarantee the timely release of the game. somehow this isn't even surprising

[witchoflight]

200% on the Kickstarter already? Amazing!!!

[witchoflight]

(band au) get unique!