capricorn-0mnikorn - Tumblr blog

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[Image description: Black, all-caps, text on a white field, with a red, horizontal divider between the sentences: "White privilege does not mean your life was not hard. It means your race was not an obstacle. Description ends]

This is important so take note

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[Image description: a drawing of a red flying kite at the end of a taut string, against a white sky. Captioned (in two sections above and below the kite): No amount of propaganda should convince you / That some children don't deserve to grow up. Description ends]

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The ability of humans to "Yes. And -!" their way into cooler and cooler stories is, I think, my favorite of our species's adaptive traits.

How did magicians back in the day make seals? Was there a science behind it or was it intuitive?

That's a really good question! The answer is extremely complicated!

When most people these days think of seals they think of goetic seals. But the terminology of "seals" actually comes from the idea of sealing a letter. Specifically, it refers to one of the many apocryphal versions of the story of Solomon and Ashmedai, in which king Solomon uses a signet ring with a special magical symbol on it to command demons.

Now, this is one of those biblical stories that people went absolutely nuts for. Jews, Christians, Muslims, damn near every abrahamic faith has their own take on the story, because let's be honest here it's cool as fuck.

But! The original story from the Tanakh doesn't refer to the seal at all, and focuses much more on controlling the sheyd with manacles inscribed with a secret name of God. The inherent magical power of names of God is a common trope in Jewish literature, but later versions of the tale also include greco-egyptian ideas about the inherent magical properties of language, forms, and mathematics.

So when we look at a contemporary English version of a goetic seal, we are looking at something with literally thousands of years of compiled knowledge behind it. I wouldn't necessarily call it science, or intuition, I would describe it as systematic, and narrative. Closer to how campfire stories are improved over generations as people tell and retell them.

Look at this seal of Belial:

The idea of the seal itself? That goes back to Babylonian Jewish ideas about written text having power to control supernatural entities. (Google Babylonian curse bowls if you haven't already.)

See how the letters are spaced? That's important. That goes back to neopythagorean ideas about regular polygons being fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The little crosses? Those are probably cruciforms! That's how you can tell Christians were involved at some point.

See how some of the lines of the seal end in little loops? That goes back to ptolmaic Egyptian ideas about magic. If the crosses are cruciforms, these are probably ankh-forms! You see shapes like that all over magical texts from the 2nd-6th century Mediterranean!

These symbols are the result of dozens of cultures and people and languages collectively yes-anding each other for literally thousands of years. They are DENSE with meaning.

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[Image description: a super tightly cropped image of the poll above, when there were only 6 votes; "60 Thousand" is just below that. Description ends]

Yes. But not as a solo venture: Truly Chaotic (Beyond even "Chaotic Neutral"): "Pro-Fun Troll Hoedowns" on rec.arts.drwho, back in the early '00s.

I "played" as several OC, non-fandom specific, troll characters as host/mc, to a massive fanfic "pot luck" mostly in the Doctor Who universe, at least for the opening few posts (it tended to spiral off into really strange territory pretty quickly).

i want 60 thousand votes by next thursday

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So I work at a library and about a month ago I helped a little old woman who is legally blind figure out how to listen to our audiobooks on her tablet. We got to chatting and I mentioned that I always listen to audiobooks while I knit, which made her very excited and she told me all about the afghans she used to make when she could still see. She was so sweet and I was so glad to be able to help her figure out a way to still enjoy books without being able to read.

Yesterday I answered the phone at work and when I said my name the woman on the other line got so excited and said “Madeline?? You’re exactly who I wanted to talk to! This is Marie, you helped me about a month ago. How late are you working today?” It was her!! And about an hour later she and her husband showed up, and she was carrying a huge stack of old knitting patterns for me, and her husband brought in a few boxes full of yarn. They couldn’t stay long but I was so touched that she remembered me, and I struggled to not just flat out start crying when she handed me the patterns. When I looked through them later I realized it was her entire personal collection from over the years, including all her personal notes and drawings and even some photographs of her finished pieces. No one in my family knits, and to have someone pass on their legacy to me like that was incredibly moving.

This isn’t what I usually post here, but with life being especially dark lately I wanted to share a moment of happiness and a reminder that a bit of kindness goes a long way ♡

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*Thinks back*

I think it was "Sailor Moon..." I didn't watch it regularly, but I think I caught a few episodes.

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Putting on makeup to get a good grade in being a patient shouldn't be something I feel compelled to do lest the new doctor I've never met before write down that I'm apathetic about my appearance and thus clearly Mentally Unwell when I'm not there to talk about my mental health shouldn't be normal, and yet it's happened to me several times in the past so here we are...

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Not to mention all the microplastics that get washed into our waterways from all the polyester clothes we wear (and throw out; cheap, fast fashion, clothes are taking up an obscene amount of space in landfills around the world).

Here's a report from 2021, From "Nature Communications," on the amount of polyester fibers from our laundry that's ended up in the Arctic Atlantic. I'm not fluent enough in reading scientific reports to be confident enough to say: "Well, actually, it's really our clothes that make up XX% of plastic waste in the ocean!".

But going after the fast fashion industry, and greedflation in clothing production in general, will do a lot more good for a lot more people (considering how clothing workers are exploited) than demonizing disabled people for using plastic straws.

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

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This video, which premiered on YouTube on 5 July 2023, showed up in my YouTube recommendations, today. It turns out to be a promotion for a law firm, which is ...fine. At least it opens with talking about the issue of disability representation, before touting their own merit.

I was impressed that it not only has a variation of the Disability Pride Flag as a feature of its thumbnail/opening image, but it also associated the different stripe colors with symbols for the different broad categories of disability (All accept for the white stripe; I'm not sure what symbol you'd use for invisible disability).

There's one factual inaccuracy: They say that the "Catalyst" for the American with Disabilities Act started with the Capital Crawl, in 1990. But the fact is, the first version of the Bill that would become the ADA was introduced in Congress back in 1988 (Timeline of ADA history, here). The reason activists held their rally in 1990 is that they were tired of waiting.

(See also: The Section 504 protests of 1977)

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And not just in other countries they colonized, but in how they treated their own marginalized citizens. The Nazi program of Aktion T4, through which 300,000 disabled people were killed for being "unfit to live," was inspired by the American eugenics movement (also, it was through the Aktion T4 program that Nazi "physicians" perfected the use of poison gas to kill lots of people all at once)

The flip side of the post-World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

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As an asexual, I read that first word as "HoMiness."

And the sentiment still holds true. If I want to put novelty throw pillows on all my furniture, no matter how kitsch, because it makes me feel cozy and comfortable, that's valid, too.

Horniness is not intrinsically less pure than any other human motivation

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Gee -- who'd a-thunk it?

Most of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from the things we deliberately drag through the ocean.

What an effing surprise!

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

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An important difference that often gets lost in translation:

Dog rolling onto their back: I love you, love you, you! Treat me like a baby puppy and rub my belly! Cat rolling onto their back: You have earned my trust. And for that, I love you. I trust you with my vulnerability. And I know you won't violate my personal space.

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My main problem with the "Free Thinker / 'Skeptic" atheist movement (from what I've seen of it)

Is that they are usually White, Cishet, Normate, English-Speaking, American, Men, who were raised Christian (in other words, the most privileged cohort in America today), who realized Christianity they were raised in is Wrong. ...And considering the state of much of American Christianity today, that's not, in itself, an unreasonable conclusion.

The problem is, they then jump to the conclusion that all religion is wrong, and all people who espouse any Faith at all must be unintelligent and/or morally corrupt. They claim (and likely sincerely believe) to have grown past Christianity. But they seem to have bought into the Christian propaganda of being the Only True religion.

So here's my advice: if you're questioning your faith, and you think you might be atheist, conduct some thought experiments with yourself, and imagine the universe being inhabited with different sorts of deities. Do some research on what people throughout history have believed. Like putting on a different set of glasses, to put the world in a new focus. Make up your own deities, while you're at it (It doesn't matter if you're a religion of one).

You may still end up deciding no gods are "actually" real. But at least you'll have a broader idea of what it is you don't believe in.

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Sometimes, the Dreaming Mind™ translates worries you can't put into words, and turns them into private movies. Other times, it just listens to the waking thoughts and goes: "You're right. And you should say it."

dream about disney trying to get in on the harry potter money with a big interactive attraction and I kept thinking "man all this extra worldbuilding could be real cool if I still cared about this world. at least it was written by someone else instead of the joke, that usually makes better quality worldbuilding."

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~sigh~ I had a whole folder of designs I made for Zazzle.com, years ago. But it seems to have been deleted.

(I have no memory of deleting it, but it doesn't show up in any search on my computer)

So I go log on to my Zazzle account, and discover 2 things:

They no longer let me re-download my own designs to my own computer (which is how I was hoping to recover my favorite designs), and

They no longer offer women's t-shirt dresses, which I was wanting to buy for myself.

So anyway, I "Started a new project" and picked the design I was looking for when I discovered the whole folder was missing. And then, I did a screen-cap, and cropped it.

Here it is:

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Okay. So, now I will explain it the way my mother did, as a little fable:

There was once a merchant with many bags of straw to sell, and as he wanted to sell as much as he could in one day, and save himself the trouble of multiple trips on the road, loaded more an more bails of straw onto his camel's back. Even after he saw that his camel was having trouble standing under the weight, he didn't want to stop, but instead, started loading the straw onto his back one piece at a time. But then, he loaded one straw too many, and the camel's back broke, and he couldn't take any straw to market.

I looked that up in Wikipedia, just now:

... And apparently, it was only ever some sort of proverb, and Mother wove the whole fable, with character motivations, and all, from it all on her own (including the implicit condemnation of capitalist greed).

...The more I look up "traditional" fables my mother told me, when I was a kid, the more I find out she actually created them, probably without realizing it.

Anyway, so when someone says: "That's the last straw!" it means they've been dealing with "minor" frustrations for a long time, and they are done trying to hold it together, aka: "No spoons left. Only knives," or "Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

Also: this is the song that prompted this poll, by the Folk Metal band Bloodywood:

I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious: