#This is just a starting point

[chocolate-eye-candy]

I just want y’all to know, I had the best night of my pansexual life

[prettyhighforawhiteguyblog]

The Problem of Pain. A Reboot

My take on the problem of pain, suffering, death, and evil (and take it for what you will):

Suffering is the price of free will.

Empathy is the price of sentience.

Intelligent sentient empathy with free will gives us the opportunity to do good or evil. It gives us the ability to have love, pity, kindness, and extend help. It also gives us the ability to choose selfishness, take pleasure in cruelty, and to do evil.

All of the universe has freedom. Every atom, quark, and quasar. Chance, time, and physics allow Creation to create itself.

That all over the universe, to varying degrees in various places, physics will lead to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to intelligence, intelligence to sentience is inevitable.

Suffering is inevitable with freedom for it is unavoidable when everything has freedom and no puppet master. Natural disasters and accidents and even predation is the freedom of the universe without a puppet master to form & interact as it develops through time, physics, & chance. Some of the universe, when complex enough, has self-agency & has some degree of choice in those interactions (like you). But most of it is just freedom to interact & react in a purely mechanistic physical way.  

Death, however, is not inevitable. There are some jellyfish that cannot die of old age.

But is death so evil?

For too many it seems it comes too soon. But is death evil in itself? Death releases us from suffering. Death limits the power of individuals and groups who are misguided or evil. Death allows room for new life and makes it possible for a nearly infinite number and variety of life-forms to each have a turn in Creation to live whatever kind of life they can make for themselves in the situation in which they find themselves for as long as their life may last until the freedom of Creation causes death to end their turn.

Intelligence and sentience allow creatures to choose quality of life over mere pragmatic survival/reproductive strategies.

Look at all the sentient creatures on this planet from octopuses to ravens, elephants to bonobos, orca to humans. They all choose as individuals and groups and species what to do with their freedom, intelligence, and empathy in whatever situations they find themselves. 

How to act with abundance/scarcity of resources, conflicts among one another, social structures, other creatures, etc. What kind of cultures and societies to build. What to pass on. How to use their culture, technology, and resources in their present situation. Even how to connect with spiritual realities. Most are pretty cool. Dolphins can kinda be dicks and chimpanzees can be terrifyingly cruel & violent, but otherwise they are all kinda chill in their various ways of living given what they have to work with and the situations in which they find themselves.

Humans have made ourselves as well. We are super social. Seemingly far more so than any of the other social sentients. We live much of our lives outside of ourselves in our social networks and social behaviors. We are innovators and technological geniuses (at least compared to crows). We might have limited individual survivability, but as innovative societies with technology, we have been able to survive and overcome some major bottlenecks, including one that took us down to ~2000 reproductive individuals.

We give up individual physical power and personal autonomy for teamwork, big brains, and social fulfillment. This all has potential for good or ill. Because we are so awesome at innovation our technology, language, and social structures got over-powered way too fast in the last few thousand years when compared to our cultural development. We are just babies taking our first steps compared to the other sentients. 

You know those horror movies about children with superpowers forcing the adults into fulfilling their every whim or else? That’s us.

And unfortunately for the world and ourselves, too many of us can never have enough power over others, stuff, sexual domination, or "freedom" to do whatever the fuck we want to whatever/whomever we want. And we have the technology and social structures, that allow the most immoral/amoral of us to have overpowered dominance our overpowered societies with little fear of effective organized resistance.

As one of the better humans once said "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men [humans]."

Following up that quote: We have invested our efforts in technology, comfort, power, and sociality. But we’ve not made nearly as much progress in spirituality and moral development. Don’t get me wrong, we have been making efforts as individuals and groups to reach out and understand the spiritual realities and whatever God is. But our understandings of those things have all strongly reflected our current understanding of ourselves and our own morals/values.

Our religions are a mix of human efforts to understand the divine, the divine reaching out to us, cultural context, human/cultural static, and perversion for money, sexual domination, and power.

Our religions and our gods have all basically been reflections of ourselves in that state of human development. Sometimes that’s aspirational leading us towards something better. Sometimes that is nostalgic and regressive, encouraging us to revert toward a more terrible version of ourselves. Sometimes it is a reflection of our worst characteristics and fears.

Our explorations and nascent attempts at knowing spiritual realities as highly social creatures have resulted in religions of all kinds. Those religions have both reflected our cultures as we developed in various ways and led our cultures to develop in various directions. Our best religious practices lead us to grow enough to develop better religious practices/understandings and better people/societies. Even if we hang onto the older practices and scriptures they show us where we come from and trajectory, not exactly what to do in the here and now.

Religion and spirituality are at their best when they are inspirational, not didactic.

But humans will do human shit and we are highly social technologists. Spiritual exploration and practice can devolve into technology in our eyes all too easily. We can easily fall into thinking of spirituality as something to be systematically studied/developed/understood and mechanistically used. Or religion as something to be cynically developed and used to control.

But when I’m feeling most hopeful, I notice most of our religions (even the Christians finally) are all now kinda heading the same direction (in the midst of our cultural context, human/cultural static, and perversion for money, sexual domination, and power):

-you can find comfort in knowing you are part of something greater than just you and that also means it's not all about you

-each person, including you, matters in some fundamental way

-we have an obligation to care for others and treat people fairly

-don’t love your stuff, power, and sexual domination so much.

[swan2swan]

Whoever conceived and animated this moment, I hope they're doing well and thriving. This is S-rank romance stuff here.

[mumblesplash]

comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously

[ciderjacks]

losing part of you

[rachelfc-art]

Princess in Shining Armor

[tendermiasma]

The bigger they are the harder they fall 🥹🐟

[platoapproved]

louis + cruelty

[aaarmand]

dontbeafraidjuststartthetape.mp4

[balis77]

Fun fact: Samus' zero suit is a bodysuit in more recent games instead of the tank-top she wore in older games because at this point, she's been spliced with so many species' DNA you really don't want to see what the rest of her skin looks like.

[circuscountdowns]

many centuries down the line they can manage to have a civil enough family game night.

[jjkyaoi]

the headcanon of regulus just being able to cry on command is horrifying but also the funniest thing i’ve ever fucking heard. like i imagine regulus is hanging out with the marauders, post black brothers reconciliation, and him and sirius are bickering and sirius JOKINGLY goes “well it’s not MY fault it’s impossible for you to show any emotion” and regulus blinks. and then just fully starts sobbing.

and james and remus and peter are all like ?!?!?! what the FUCK . RIGHTFULLY SO. and james’ heart is hurting so bad because he’s never seen regulus cry before and he’s trying to comfort him and hold him and regulus, (who is gay and a little shit) is just letting himself be hugged and letting james pet his hair or whatever and remus is like. sirius what the fuck apologize to your brother??????? because sirius has been sitting there the entire time unmoving and he just raises his eyebrows, completely unimpressed and deadpan when he goes, “you guys do know he’s faking right”. and then when remus and james both are like HUH??? torn between bewildered and angry with this reaction, regulus just extracts himself from james, face completely neutral but with tears drying on his cheeks, no sign of the heaving, hyperventilating sobs he’d fallen into literally a second ago and says “i win”. it terrifies peter so bad that he can’t look him in the eyes for a week

[catmask]

sometimes while i think about that while a lot of adults did not treat me very well as a kid i also get a lot of 'in hindsight this person was so good to me and i didnt even realize it until now' as an adult. today i was thinking about how the first anime convention i ever went to was when i was 10 and i asked the man working the manga cafe what manga was/what a good place to start was (because the con was very overstimulating for me and i had gotten lost) and he asked how old i was before recommending yotsuba and asking if i wanted any water or something to eat. its really simple but theres a lot of bad things that couldve happened or he could've been careless in his recommendation, but instead yotsuba has remained one of my favorite manga for years, and probably a large portion of why i continue to read manga as an adult... i think adults who try to involve kids in the world safely/kindly even in little ways make so much more of a difference than they ever really know.

[newtsnaturethings]

Hear me out:

I think Zelda should have kept a couple of dragon traits. Just a few.

[ghosted-jazz]

Species Swap AU! Retired couple gets a fairy godchild to help repair their relationship

[cannibalspicnic]

What cracks me up about Don't Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape is that aside from the vampirism, Daniel's just having such a typical cocaine experience.

He goes home with a guy because he has coke, then ends up listening to the guy rant and bitch about his ex until dawn, then witnesses an implosion between the guy and his current partner, then is forced to answer the question, "Am I boring?" from said partner while trying to figure out the best way to leave.

This is just a regular night on cocaine.