#ghost's jew stuff

[theoscout]

don't get me wrong I love Hamilton the musical but I'm just saying if I ever met Alexander Hamilton's ghost in real life the first thing I'd do is draw him snogging Odom's Aaron Burr right in front of him for no reason other than pissing him off

Also Phillip x Theodosia for the win

[haylanmakesstuff]

For Sale: Unique Ghost Box

“Portraits of my Friend” is a six sides box, hand painted, and one of a kind. It’s available on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/shop/HaylanMakesStuff). Each side of the box and the inside are completely different from one another!

It’s an upcycled box, with acrylic and colored pencil to create the design. I wanted to consider what a ghost would do while they spend all their time trapped in the haunted house to which they are bound. 

It opens up to reveal 4 little box containers inside. 

I have really enjoyed creating all the Halloween boxes and clocks in the last few years, and I really, really an in love with this one. 

[feverinfeveroutfic]

hanukkahbingo 2023

Fic or Art/Graphic Title: alone in the dark, chapter six : “Some Kind of Ghost” Author/Artist Name: josiebelladonna Fandom: Testament (Band) Jewish or Jew-Ish Character(s): Alex Skolnick (and how) Bingo Squares Being Filled: family, miracle, smashing fascists 🔥 Rating: Mature Warning(s): Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings Link to Work: x @aimmyarrowshigh

I was still shook up from the incident with Christine's father, such that my hands trembled as I brought the bites of latke and applesauce up to my mouth. Christine herself meanwhile never left my side as she indulged in her plate, and I could tell that she was enjoying it because it was humble and delicious while we were living in a cold house with no electricity and nothing better to do other than read books and play cards. She huddled up close to me but she never actually touched the side of my body, however. Though it was cold in the house, I started to feel warm again from the taste of those potatoes with the sliced and diced onions and the minced garlic. Though I had been jarred from my place, I still needed to eat, and I still needed to get back home to my parents, too. I blew on the next bite of latke before I slipped it into my mouth.

“How are they?” Wendy asked me.

“Delicious,” I said with my mouth full. “They taste almost as good as my grandmother's latkes.” I swallowed and took another sip of my coffee.

“Nothing beats Grandma's cooking,” she replied with a little smile on her face.

“Not at all! When I was a kid, my aunt and my grandma would also make my brother and me babka for Hanukkah, which he and I always loved. It was from there that I realized that nothing beats the real thing. Nothing beats the thing that came straight out of the home.”

“I think I've actually seen that at a bakery before,” she said as she took her seat next to Christine at the far end of the couch. “It's like a cross between a Swiss roll and a bread, isn't it?”

“Sort of,” I said. “It's definitely kosher in comparison to a Swiss roll, I would think, but it's more like... phyllo dough with chocolate drops, some cinnamon, and some melted chocolate rolled up and then coiled into a tin. We always like a little chocolate babka in our life.”

“We should make that at some point, Chris,” Wendy suggested.

“You've got chocolate babka, there's also cinnamon and apple,” I added. “Chocolate is the best, but I also love me some apple.” Right as I said that, I scooped up a bit of applesauce, which I could tell was sweeter than I was used to. But I wasn't going to complain.

“By the way, Wendy, is it all that flooded out there?” the grandfather asked her.

“Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you that, too,” I chimed in as I took another bite of applesauce.

“Actually, no!” Wendy assured us. “Although, I suppose it is elsewhere, but there's just some big puddles outside of the sidewalk. You know, you have to be careful walking along the storm drain because there are literal rivers out there. But it's not like immense flooding, though.”

“Plus, it's going downhill,” I added as I took another bite of latke.

“It's all going downhill, exactly,” Wendy declared. Christine then turned her attention over to me with a slightly annoyed look on her face.

“I hope this shit's not boring you,” she whispered to me.

“Hey, I would much rather chat about this than what happened with your dad back there,” I assured her.

“Oh, yeah, anything beats that, to be honest,” she said with a nod. “But you know, boring grown-up stuff.”

“You know, you're going to be a boring grown-up yoursself soon,” I pointed out to her as I took my last bite of latke.

“I kind of don't want to be,” she confessed. “You know, just because you reach eighteen years old doesn't mean you have to actually grow up and become boring.”

“You know, it's the funniest thing,” I told her as I set my empty plate down on the coffee table before me and I picked up my coffee in lieu of it; “I feel the exact same way. Who says you have to give up what you are once you've reached a certain age?”

And she showed me a smile at that.

It was right then I noticed that the rain had slowed down on the roof overhead.

“Is the rain stopping?” her grandfather then asked from the kitchen table.

“I think it is, Dad,” Wendy replied. I sipped on the coffee and the vagabond in me came alive right then. All the times that Testament travelled somewhere in the world or even there in the States, and the sheer sight of the hotel room all around me only made me want to go out and explore the town. Wendy then offered to take mine and Christine's empty plates, much to my pleasure.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said.

“Yeah, thank you, Wendy!” I added, and once again, I swore she flashed me a wink. I finished the rest of my coffee and turned my attention to Christine.

“Wanna take a walk?” I offered her.

“I'd love to,” she replied. “I have to get dressed, but I'd like to do that, though.”

“Go out and get some fresh air,” I added. “I have to find my shirt, anyways.” I couldn't help but chuckle at that, either.

Once her mom and grandparents were paying more attention to each other, she and I returned to our rooms for a quick change, whereby I found my shirt tucked under my pillow for some reason. But then I realized why and I couldn't resist chuckling again as well as wrinkling my nose and sticking out my tongue.

Once I had my shirt back on, I returned to the hallway and Christine dressed in faded denim jeans and a little black windbreaker.

“Shall we?” I asked her. “We shall,” she replied.

Once we told the three of them what was happening, we left the house and stepped outside to the gray morning. Though the place hadn't flooded like Wendy had said, small puddles still formed all across the yard, and the storm drain was one deluge away from overflowing onto the sidewalk as well. Nevertheless, we still walked up the street together, and I had a feeling that she was going to show me the stump.

“We go in the other direction and we'll be swept away by the flood waters,” she pointed out to me, to which I chuckled.

We reached the next corner up before we hung a right. The next corner up and we hung a left.

It was all so we could keep going uphill and away from whatever raging waters that came our way.

“I hope I'm not being too intrusive about it,” I confessed to her as the neighborhood around us grew much more overgrown with trees and bushes, all of which were dark and sparse for the onset of winter in the coming weeks. “You know my whole thing of 'I really don't want to impose on anyone'.”

“You're not being intrusive,” she assured me with a shake of her head. “Especially since he came after you.”

She fetched up a sigh and stared straight ahead: I followed her gaze to the veil of clouds over the mountains. We weren't far from the base of them as well as the sparse snow banks that capped them. At least it didn't snow that much.

“I love my dad but he's got his problems, though,” she pointed out. “He and my mom have separated, and he's still kind of raw about it. Then again, he should talk about it to me. He likes to drink, and my mom doesn't really like that he does that, especially in front of me. I remember one time he downed a whole bottle of gin over the course of a single day, and my mom was like 'no way' and she got me out of there. He's not a very good drunk, either.”

“I've known a few people like that,” I told her. “Where the members of my old band and I would have a drink or two and then we'd giggle and fool around and shit, there was always someone on the crew who would have a few too many and start yelling at us for no reason.”

“Exactly like that!” she exclaimed. “And it's always really scary to be around and watch right before your eyes, too, because you don't know if they're going to punch you or do something awful to themselves. So, my mom got me away from him for a bit but I wanted to be with him again because—like I said, I love my dad and I want to see him get better. So they split and I stayed with him for a whole summer before he promised me to stop drinking. When he did, I went to go stay with my mom, and that was when my own relationship fell apart and then I dyed my hair after that as a change of sorts. When he was at the door earlier, I could smell a little booze on his breath. I've grown up around alcohol enough to where I can smell even just a few drops of it from clear across the room. It also helped that the wind carried it into the house, too.”

“Oh, wow, I didn't even notice,” I confessed as I ran my hand down from my chest down to my stomach. “All I could smell was the latkes and the coffee your mom got for us.”

But she bowed her head a bit and looked down to the drenched pavement and the small rivulets in the storm drain below our feet.

“The first man I ever loved,” she said in a soft voice, and I tilted my head to the side at the sight of her there next to me.

“First man you ever loved and had a relationship with, too,” I added.

“All of that before my ex showed up, and before you showed up, too,” she continued it.

“He promised you that he would stop drinking—actually promised you—”

“Right to my face, too,” she added, and she lowered her voice to a near whisper.

“—and yet there he was, right there at your grandparents' house, just reeking of it,” I followed along, and she nodded her head at that with a crestfallen look on her face.

“Mmm, I wouldn't say he was reeking of it,” she corrected me with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “but I could tell you that he had had some to drink before he showed up.”

“Which means he also took off in his car after that...” My voice trailed off, and I shuddered at the thought of someone climbing behind the wheel after they had had just a little too much to drink, especially with that person being her own father.

She and I fell into momentary silence with our gazes fixed on the storm drain beneath us; all the while, I noticed a few circles along the surface of the water, and I could tell that the sprinkles were going to give way to even more rain after that. Though things were not very flooded at the moment, I knew that it was definitely a possibility, and I could potentially miss out on the first couple of nights of Hanukkah with my parents as well.

I then turned my head to the right, to the stretch of sidewalk that snaked up the street beside us.

“So, tell me,” I began again to her. “Where's this stump at? The stump of the tree that fell on you?”

Her expression never changed as she strode around behind me, and I followed her right at her back. The storm drain seemed to swell as we moved further along, and then we reached the next corner and crosswalk up before us. Across the street stood an old house that looked to be empty, and behind that was an empty lot entrenched in mud and large puddles that could probably flood a bit should the rain pick back up again. With a quick glimpse in either direction, Christine and I crossed the street, albeit with a hop over the rivulets in the storm drains.

She brought me to the corner across from us, and I looked on at the empty house. Something about it gave me a weird feeling in my stomach, as if something happened there before and I should be worried. But I wasn't worried, and I shook it off once we reached the empty lot, which consisted of nothing more than slabs of blacktop and patches of dark mud.

“It's right here,” she declared, and she brought me to the dead center of it all, barring we avoided the mud all around us and treated the blacktop as stepping stones instead. Indeed, there stood a large round stump right in the middle of the muck and the mud, one that was wide enough for the two of us and maybe Wendy, too, to have a seat on. The cuts on the stump had eroded with the passing of time, and thus, I knew she was telling the truth. I looked on at her and the thoughtful look in her eyes: the fine mist that fell over us left tiny droplets on the crown of her head accentuated the red of her hair. The gray sunlight around us washed out the color to her face, and her skin resembled porcelain as a result.

I gazed up to the gray sky overhead as I tried to picture that big tree that fell over on top of her. Those wandering branches as they cascaded over her, and the earth took her in its arms. To think that she had taken the path that she had taken, and she was still standing there on the sidewalk next to me. She continued to stand, with her hands in her pockets and the scars that she bore all to tell the world about it. If only there was a way in which she could overcome it and use it to her advantage, and I could tell she was on her way given how she liked to joke around with me and be all cozied up next to me.

I was more stunned by the fact that she had survived it all, and more so when I shivered from the wind picking up courtesy of the mountain slopes off to our right. The rain was coming, and yet the silence was all that we could do right then.

“An absolute miracle that you're here with us right now,” I whispered to her over the winds behind us.

“It really is,” she whispered back to me, and she extended one hand out towards me as if to hold mine. I swallowed as I extended mine to her own: her fingers gripped onto the side of my palm, and I let my own fingers curl around her hand. A chill ran up my spine right then, and something told me that it wasn't the wind.

“When my ex and I were together, I often dreamed of this,” she confessed.

“You never got to hold hands with him?” I asked her, taken aback, and she shook her head at that.

“Not even one time,” she said. “I would often dream of kissing him and holding him, just like how I did with you back at the house. But I never could do it. I could never find the courage to do that.”

“Why is that?” I asked her.

“Like I said, I just never felt good enough. I never felt like I was worthy of kissing him or holding him. I never felt like I could really tell him as to how I felt about him.” She nibbled on her bottom lip right then. “And that's why he's my ex.”

“So I should consider myself lucky,” I muttered. The rain picked up as the words left my lips, and Christine tugged the hood over her head with her free hand.

“We should probably get home,” I advised her.

“Yeah, I think we should, too,” she said. “I'm starting to get cold.” She squeezed my hand before she let go of me, and then she huddled up close to me. The two of us began to walk along the sidewalk, away from the empty lot and the swelling puddles there, and I hoped that the rain and wind wouldn't pick up at any point on the way back to the house. We reached the house on the corner, whereby I caught a glimpse of the dark roof and the trees that protected it from the elements. I spotted the witching window at the back and a shiver ran down my spine. We passed the two windows that looked out to the street, both of them as black as night, and then the corner of the house and the edge of the yard. All the while, I glanced back to it.

There was just something about the house that gave me such a weird, indescribable feeling, and it was one of those things that was going to drive me absolutely batty for the rest of the day if I did nothing about it. We reached the corner when I finally stopped, and I took a good long look at it. Christine stopped right next to me and closed her coat lest a gust of wind come up before us.

“I should probably tell you that my ex and his family used to live in this house here,” she told me.

“They used to live here?” I asked her, slightly stunned, and she nodded her head at me.

“Not for very long, like not even a year but—yeah, they actually used to live out here.”

I turned my head for another look at the house again, and I tried to picture what exactly happened there, especially since it was giving me such a weird feeling whenever I looked at it. Maybe it was the garage door and the way that it struck me as a little odd in comparison to the rest of the house: it was a yellow house with black trimming but the garage door appeared to be a slightly different shade of yellow, almost white.

Something off about it all.

“Did he or his parents tell you why they moved away from here?” I asked her, and she shook her head.

“I mean, I have a couple of theories—they hailed from New York and so, you know, maybe they just didn't like it out here. It's too much of a high desert where New York is more tempered.”

I had my doubts about that, however. I looked on at the house, at the awnings right outside of the two front windows that looked out to either side of the street given it stood on a corner, at the second floor, at the brick chimney which gave me an even weirder feeling than that of the garage door. Maybe it was just the color of the door looking off by comparison, but something about that left me wanting more out of that. Add to this, I struggled to picture him and his family living there.

I walked on over to the mouth of the driveway, which was slightly sloped from the garage door. Maybe it was an optical illusion. Maybe I really did have nothing to worry about and I was just going to drive myself far beyond the point of meshuggah. But something about it was going to drive me absolutely meshuggah regardless of what happened. I turned my attention to Christine, who strode on up to me with her hands tucked in her pockets and with a bewildered look on her face.

“Nobody lives here anymore, right?” I asked her once she came within earshot.

“As far as I know, no,” she replied. Cautiously, I strode up the driveway to the garage door. The panels were crisp and sharp, but the paint drooped a bit in a few places. I took a closer look to the one closest to my face.

Something buried underneath. I let my eyes wander down towards the base of the garage door itself to see it in full. Though it had been covered up, whoever did it did not do that well of a job, at least not for me, anyway.

The black outlines. The shape it made plus the angles.

The mere sight that haunted my own nightmares as well as that of my relatives.

“Just as I thought,” I muttered.

“What?” she asked me, and the chills ran up my spine. I took her by the hand and led her away from there.

“Alex, what is it?” she asked again, but I never replied. All I knew was I had to get away from there, and I had to get away from that particular part of the neighborhood as well. Our shoes padded on the pavement and that was the only noise I could hear. With a quick leap over the storm drains, we crossed the street from the house to the opposite corner; Christine stayed behind me as I led her away from there. At one point, I could feel her looking back, and I wished that I could completely tell her about what I was feeling. The thing is I had a hard enough time reading emotions on someone's face, let alone fessing up my own to someone like her.

We slowed down to a quick walked right before we reached the line of trees again. At least we were safe from the feeling that house gave unto me. Nevertheless, I still shivered and closed my coat to keep in the warmth. I was missing the warmth of those latkes her grandparents made for us.

I leaned back against the trunk of the tree closest to the sidewalk, and she gathered next to me as if we were hiding from something.

“God...” I breathed out, and I gazed up to the canopy of the trees over our heads. Though the leaves had gone for the autumn, the branches still protected us somewhat from the impending rain beyond us. I was not a man of prayer by any means but I could only pray that the rain spared us there in the trees for the time being.

“Makes me sick to think about,” I confessed to her with a shake of my head. “Regardless of whether or not he's your ex. It still makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.”

“What?” she demanded, and I licked my lips and ran my fingers through my hair.

“I really don't know if I can tell you,” I told her, “like I don't really know as to how to put it.”

“Well... start from the top,” she began. “That's what my parents' therapist says, just start from the beginning.”

“But... you said your ex was Jewish.”

“Yeah.”

“They lived here... not even a year, you said,” I continued.

“If I remember correctly, they moved here in July and they were gone once school was let out in June, so yeah, not even a year. I remember talking to him about it, too.”

I nibbled on my bottom lip yet again, that time because the mere suggestion only deepened the pit in my stomach.

“You know how you said you'd stand for me if something happened to me all because of my own heritage?” I recalled to her.

“Yeah,” she said, and she squinted her eyes at me as if she knew where I was going with this.

“It's so weird to me, because... you don't think of Nevada as sinking that low,” I admitted. “I mean—shit. 'Battle born.' Became a state in the face of the Civil War. You don't think of... something that hates me and your ex and probably wants the two of us dead, and maybe you, too, because you're associated with both him as well as me now. You don't think of—you know, that—as being here.”

Her mouth then dropped agape and her eyes widened. She brought a hand to her mouth, and all I could do was nod at her.

“Are you sure?” she asked me in a hushed voice.

“That fucking thing could be buried under six feet of black tar and I would still recognize it,” I told her in a single breath. “I knew what I saw, and I know for a fact that they're in that neighborhood.”

I peered out to the street. All the houses were shuttered and calm for the incoming rainstorm, but I still had my feelings no matter how they looked to me.

“Yeah, we should probably—” But before I could finish, she once again took me by the hand and yanked me away from there. Her hood fell right off her head as we ran as fast as could back to her grandparents' house with the wind and the rain at our backs; both picked up the pace as we reached the edge of the property and the welling up of the puddles in the front yard, and I was glad that we ran home when we did and as fast as we did, as well. The only exception was I never looked back to that house.

I didn't have to look back because I knew for a fact I was the menorah in the broken window.

[theoutcastrogue]

I found your recent post on wine legality under Ottoman rule very interesting. I have tried to make a study of Ottoman history(I am mostly familiar with it's history from the 19th century onwards and have done deep dives into the rebellions in Greece and Egypt, I could talk all day about either Ali Pasha). Unfortunately since then I've had trouble finding good books on Ottoman history. I was excited by your mention of the book Crime and Punishment in the Ottoman Empire. I was wondering if you had any other books on Ottoman history that you could recommend?

Sure! Keeping in mind that I’m not a historian or an educator of any kind, I just read history for fun (and I’m mostly into rogues and cities, which may show), here’s what I got. Highlights in bold, links are to excerpts I’ve occasionally posted:

Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (2005) [this is a decent single book, narrative and accessible; I’m a big fan of having an easy-to-read introduction that covers a large period as a starting point, and taking it from there; I’m also a big fan of wikipedia]

Halil İnalcık & Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (1997) [this is nitty gritty but I think essential, 2 volumes, pass once and keep handy for references]

Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy (1978) [essay collection]

Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600 (1973)

Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around it (2007) [I like things in context; for the Ottomans you always gotta keep in mind what was going on with Venice, Persia, the Arabs, the Hapsburgs, etc]

Suraiya Faroqhi & Kate Fleet, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603 (2006)

Suraiya Faroqhi, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839 (2006) [these two are volumes from the Cambridge History of Turkey]

Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire: 1700-1922 (2005)

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (2008)

David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989)

The Law and lack thereof

Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2004)

Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2011)

Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law (1973)

Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (1996)

Erol Ozan Yilmaz, Militarizartion of Ottoman Rumelia: The Mountain Bandits (1785-1808) (2016, thesis)

“Banditry in the Ottoman Empire”

Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (1994)

Joshua M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (2017)

Cities

John Freely, Istanbul: The Imperial City (1998) [a joy to read, not really the product of rigorous research, but written by a well-read guy who’s in love with the city, and I think that accounts for something]

Ebru Boyar & Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (2010)

Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul 1700-1800 (2010)

Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the 19th Century (1986)

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (2004)

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries (2004)

Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City, 1400-1900 (1983) [very nitty gritty, you can’t read this for fun, but it’s got demographics and stuff you won’t find elsewhere]

Ulrike Freitag et al, The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity (2011)

Biray Kolluoğlu & Meltem Toksöz, Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day (2010)

Etc

Suraiya Faroqhi et al, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community (2008)

Robert Dankoff & Sooyong Kim, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi (2010)

Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (2007)

Mark Alan Epstein, The Ottoman Jewish Communities and their Role in the 15th and 16th Centuries (1980)

Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (2006)

Stephen Ortega, Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Ottoman-Venetian Encounters (2014)

Douglas Scott Brookes, The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem (2008)

Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Empire (2011)

Dana Sajdi, Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the 18th Century (2007)

Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (2007)

[allycat75]

Real? Fake? Don't care. Just disgusting!

Ok, time to scream into the void. Another long one.

I know I don't know Chris, but what this GQ article made abundantly clear is that Chris doesn't know Chris either. I really shouldn't care, but as part of the social contract I signed when I agreed to be a human being, when I see someone in trouble, I try to help. So here are some things Chris needs to hear since he seems to be surrounded yes (wo)men and sycophants.

Let me start with the petty shit, since we know you can appreciate that. Here are some synonyms for quotidian: prosaic, diurnal, perennial, ubiquitous, de rigueur. You often worry you sound pretentious as fuck in these interviews, and yes, yes you do. And what are you wearing- is that a t-shirt with a mesh tank? I thought a mesh tank on its own was bad. Way to make it worse! The Columbo look at least made me giggle.

Ok, now for the hard stuff.

Since I want this to be constructive feedback, you should know I am fucking awesome. And I got this way not by being perfect or ignoring my flaws, but by recognizing I am perfectly imperfect and each day offers me an opportunity to be a little better. A tragedy isn't a tragedy unless lessons are lost. There are gifts everywhere, but if you are constantly pondering your belly button, you will miss them.

First, the pictures. I know you don't have a lot of say on this, but what's with the dead eyes? There is nothing there, no twinkle or joy. Like a depleted soul- you can't hide that. You certainly don't look like a man who is head over heals in love and happier than he has ever been.

And you say you feel like a spectator in your life. Maybe that is because you are not living it. You don't need to get out of your head, you need to dig in and explore. The focus very much needs to be on yourself- the good, the bad and the ugly. Get to know the amazing stuff, the useless stuff you can ignore and the stuff you need to work on. It's like a messy closet- just because you don't open the door, doesn't mean it isn't there. And the more stuff you throw in there the messier it gets and the infrastructure collapses. Saying the small makes you unhappy doesn't make it go away. I dare say it makes it grow exponentially (ironically). Enjoy the macro, but you must not ignore the micro. It's all connected. Besides, you look pretty unhappy anyway.

It has nothing to do with an "egoic narrative", whatever the fuck that means. Get away from this pseudo-self help bullshit you have been "practicing" for years. I am also concerned you are self medicating with weed. Listen, I love me some weed, but I think you are using it to run away. Try a good therapist who can help you through the dark forest of your mind because you can't stay still, it's too long to go around, and there is nothing for you if you go back.

And as an over planner myself, I would not call you a kindred spirit in this realm. What you call planning is actually perseverating where you get into a constant loop which distracts you, often forcing you to make rash and counterproductive decisions (which is why we find ourselves here now).

Next, no one expects you to be Captain America, but do not think that right now you have any morality or personal integrity to be proud of. You have spent over a year being duplicitous, blaming your fans for everything (now you added Ghosted to that list, a film you co-produced), you have sacrificed your reputation as a feminist, anti-racist and defender of Jews (you do remember taking on David Duke, right?). Take some responsibility for your choices, whether this relationship is real or fake, you have made a mockery of love, manipulated situations ("my girlfriend that I've had for awhile..."; you sound like that kid in high school who tries to convince you he has a girlfriend in Canada; you can't even keep the timeline straight) and made your friends and family complicit in the lies. And now you are king of the incels? I have heard you talk about your legacy, and I now don't trust a word that has ever come out of your mouth, but is this what you want your legacy to be?

Let's be clear, you haven't worked all year because you couldn't book anything and then the strikes happened. And check your Privlege- do not talk about how financially secure you are when your kinsman are picketing in the hot sun and having to go to the food bank to feed their families. This interview was probably done prior to the strikes, but they were brewing and you should have known this would not be a good look. Also, this may not be your decision to make at this point- Hollywood may call your bluff this time. I think you are talented when you are passionate about something and I do not blame you for wanting to get out of the cesspool, but are you prepared to give up the perks and adoration, as well as the creative outlet?

I think that is all for now. I don't think you or your minions lurk here but on the off chance they do, you have said you value meaningful, authentic discourse. If that is true, and since I really am worried about you for some reason, I welcome a healthy discussion and debate, you know, like adults do, if you would like to provide your perspective of this mess.

(No, I don't think he lurks here, just yelling into a void)

[officialyourdailyinspiration]

We are going to look into the Gospel as recorded by Luke and the third chapter. Luke 3:16

I suppose most of us can quote John 3:16 without looking at it. How many of us can quote Luke 3:16? If the first verse is for the lost. The second verse is for the church.  It's the other side of the coin, it should be as well known. Well, here it is in the good King James version.

Luke 3 verse 16: "John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost" and in this version, "and with fire:"  

Because God is a consuming fire.

The Holy Spirit is a Spirit of fire. And Jesus said, "I've come to bring fire on earth." There is no escaping fire. This is a kind of a cliché of mine, but I still get a lift out of saying it, I believe that tonight the world is going to hell fire because the church has lost Holy Ghost fire, it's as simple as that.

Between Malachi and Mathew you've got four hundred years of blackness without any prophetic light.

Four hundred years of stillness without any prophetic voice. And then suddenly, dramatically, unexpectedly this strange man, John the Baptist, came streaking across a sky that was totally black. The Word says he was a "burning and a shining light." Jesus, the greatest character in history, says, "There was no man comparable to John Baptist." Not Isaiah not Jeremiah not any of those towering saints. He is a very, very remarkable character.

John the Baptist appears in the wilderness. It was not only a wilderness geographically,      it was a wilderness morally,      it was a wilderness politically,      it was a wilderness religiously.

You see, you go back in the Scripture and you read about Ezrah and Nehemiah. They established a governership over Israel made of a hundred and twenty priests and rulers. These priests and elders ruled over Israel. Four hundred and fifty years they dominated that nation. I say: this was a jungle, theologically.

In 170 BC there was a man with the strange name of Antiochus Epiphanes. You need to look up his name and his relatives. He took over Jerusalem, he polluted the temple, he made the Jews sacrifice to idols, he built a statue of Jupiter where the altar of the burnt offering should have been. He burnt the Scriptures publicly. He prohibited the worship of Jehovah. And all this horrendous stuff went on. In 37 BC came Herod the Great. He betrayed the nation to the Romans. He fostered immorality. He massacred the noble people.

Now with this horrendous background of murder and rape and debauchery and suffering and agony, John Baptist steps on the stage. A remarkable character.

You see, today we try to organize. We try to get a bunch of people together. God never did that. God takes individual men. He takes Moses to the backside of the desert. John the Baptist was in the wilderness until the day of his showing forth.

Jesus, the Son of God who had left the Glory, spent thirty years in training to minister!      John Baptist thirty years in training.      The apostle Paul at least thirty years.      Moses at least forty years;

And we want to go to Bible School six months and come out like a super prophet! It's the time factor that kills most of us. Tell me how much time you spend alone with God and I will tell you how spiritual you are.

     Not how many meetings you go to.      Not how many gifts you have.      Not how many sermons you preach.      Not how many records you've made.

Tell me what time you spend alone with God and I'll tell you how spiritual you are. The Word here tells m e about this remarkable man, John the Baptist, that he was in the wilderness until the day of his showing forth. Going forth at the command of God Himself, of course.

[dhanilyman]

he’ll be back | d+d

@daisyxlynch​

[text] And I will always be here for you. I’m sorry I didn’t reach out. I was scared too, that you wouldn’t want me. What if they made me hurt you? I still can’t remember!

[text] I don’t understand.. Will he be a ghost?

[text] What about Miss Evie? Wouldn’t she be able to get in because she’s a mistress?

[text] Or a guard! Mister Milo likes me, maybe if I ask him he’ll let you in. That’s not fair! He’s your master, you should be able to see him!

[text] I’ll be over soon, promise. I love you too baby..

[text] Don’t feel guilty, baby. They did this to hurt us, they always do. It’s not your fault. It’s not mine, it’s not anyone’s. We had to.

[text] I don’t know. I keep reading Dante’s fucking letter thinking I missed something. I don’t know what they’ll do. I guess that’s what they’re working on? Why it’s gonna take three whole days?

[text] I know he’ll be back but right now

[text] I mean he’s dead. I have stuff to do. As a Jew there’s all these things and I have to do them.

[text] Can you bring some of your fashion scarves, please? I want to provide ladies head coverings if they start letting people visit his body. Leib has a couple of extra yarmulkes so I have that covered.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance. For instance, after the Washington Examiner’s Byron York tut-tutted that Zelensky was about to tell Congress that U.S. aid to Ukraine so far was not enough, the former First Son weighed in with this:

“National conservative” pundit and Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who played the “obviously Putin is a thug and Ukraine is the victim here, but . . .” game in the early days of the war, went full Putin this time around.

To top it off, Hammer, who shares Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, also accused the Ukrainian President of being a bad Jew—unseemly under any circumstances, but all the more so considering that only a few days earlier, Hammer had been spotted at a New York Young Republicans’ Club Gala in the company of various alt-right types with, shall we say, a complicated relationship to anti-Semitism. (Among them: Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene, the founders of the white-nationalist website VDARE, and erstwhile Jew-baiting troll Jack Posobiec.)

Hammer’s deputy op-ed editor, progressive-turned-populist Batya Ungar-Sargon (for whom, I must mention, I used to write during her stint as an editor at the Forward), at least made an effort to stay classy while making a de facto pitch for throwing Ukraine under the bus:

That’s more than can be said for the vast majority of the “no money for Ukraine” crowd, from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh (“Get this grifting leech out of our country please”) to Tucker Carlson, who referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager”—apparently because he was dressed in a olive-drab sweatshirt—and asserted that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.” He also insisted that Zelensky is seeking not just to “push the Russian army back to pre-invasion borders,” which even Carlson conceded “sounds reasonable,” but to topple Vladimir Putin and bring about “regime change” in Russia. After Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Carlson brought on former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the “maverick” Democrat from Hawaii, to sing along with his assertions that Zelensky was actually an autocrat muzzling critical media outlets, jailing opposition politicians, and now trying to shut down an entire church because he finds it insufficiently loyal.

(In reality, the situation involving the Moscow-affiliated branch of the Orthodox Church—one of the two Orthodox denominations in Ukraine—is massively complicated; in wartime, there are legitimate security concerns about its clergy’s reported activities in support of the invaders. However, a quote Carlson attributes to Zelensky, threatening “economic and restrictive sanctions [on] any Christian caught worshiping in unapproved ways,” does not seem to have any source other than Carlson himself.)

Then there was this from Red State commentator Brandon Morse, asserting that Zelensky has done much more damage to the United States than the January 6th rioters:

A few other right-wing pundits, including career plagiarist-turned-conspiracy-theory-peddler Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA grifting leech Charlie Kirk, homed in on the really important stuff: Zelensky’s outfit.

Of course Zelensky’s clothes were meant to visually convey the fact that he’s in the middle of a brutal war. When you’re just back from a visit to the front lines in an area that looks like a ghost warscape from World War I come back to life, you’ve earned the right to make that particular fashion statement—even on a visit to Washington, D.C.

But wait, is it a military outfit or a mafia one? The American Spectator’s Melissa Mackenzie has got the goods:

I could go on and on. But perhaps this parade of indecency should come back full circle to a literal obscenity from Don Jr.: a photoshopped image that put a naked Hunter Biden next to Zelensky on the podium addressing Congress. (Warning: this tweet may be hazardous to your eyes.) It’s vile, of course. It’s also the sort of thing you post when you have no substantive way to attack someone.

* * *

The extent and purpose of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is certainly a legitimate subject for debate. Right now, there is a powerful consensus in the United States and Europe that Ukraine, for all the flaws and imperfections of its still-young democracy, is fighting for freedom against an authoritarian Goliath and that its fight is also a fight for the free world and its values.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.

There’s a nineteenth-century Russian fable called “The Elephant and the Pug” in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs—and that’s frankly a hideous insult to pugs.

[fille-lioncelle]

Multifandom December Fic Countdown

Yup. We're doing this again.

Look. This marks the 10th year I'm doing this. I can't not.

-- Whaaaat, I hear you say. How old are you?? Shush.

Tempting as it is, because I am weirdly competitive about the most useless things and also let's not lie, there's always a pet fandom, it feels weird to break with tradition in this, the anniversary year, and fandom-lock my prompts.

So, I'll be using @skepticbeliever-bookclub's lovely prompt list, but I'm opening the list up to any and all fandoms you've seen me reblog stuff for. If you want to ask for something else, just give it a shot! I may or may not treat Watcher requests preferentially on account of abovementioned competitiveness and favouritism but I'll try to hold back on that.

-- But wait, you say. There's only 24 prompts on that list! Correct, I say. I'm adding 7 wild card prompts for AFTER these 24 are done. So I'm giving definite preferential treatment to those 24 but the other 7 are entirely up to you on a first-come-first-serve basis.

I've also reblogged @aimmyarrowshigh's Hannukah bingo - if you give me a prompt that fits that either in combination with one of the 24 or as a wild card, I'm also giving it preferential treatment. As I am not Jewish (or even Jew-ish) though, I ask for goodwill and patience with my fills.

The usual set up applies: I'm not here for rape, abuse, or death fic in this month and I aim for about 1k per fill.

Any other questions, just shoot me an ask or a message.

Without further ado!

Candlelight

Ghost

Ring

Chestnuts

Evergreen

Cosy

Scarf

Hot Cocoa

Cold Toes

Hope

Quiet

Family

Joy

Cider

Snowman

Night In

Candy Cane

Tradition

Eggnog

Haunt

Frost

Fruit Cake

Sweater

Home

Wildcard #1

Wildcard #2

Wildcard #3

Wildcard #4

Wildcard #5

Wildcard #6

Wildcard #7

And here is the Hannukah bingo: (click me!)

Let's go!

[chicago-geniza]

Think I am going to return to that short story "Salvage Ethnography." Wanting to write fiction that is critical and a little hostile but mostly funny, biting. Tár & Zubrzycki's new book pulled me back to the story, oddly--also the feeling that if I don't do something with all this fizzing frustration re: nearly everything I read about Jewishness & Eastern Europe, it will erupt out of me like some venomous froth. Basic premise it's one of those cultural exchange programs, summer, where American Jewish teens are taken to a Polish town for Holocaust tourism & shown around/given a penitent guided tour of the heritage restoration projects local residents are now undertaking, a sort of rapprochement project where American Jewish kids learn Poles aren't all antisemites and small-town Poles get to be ambassadors of goodwill and meet Jews in real life. In my story the teens are, uh, teens, & are very [eye-roll emoji] about the roles they've been conscripted into, but become fast friends & bond over dumb teen stuff, & on the penultimate night of the program get drunk in a restored Jewish cemetery & play Truth or Dare etc. Hauntings & hijinks ensue. It's a pastiche & parody of the Dybbuk/Dziady thing I am always banging on about and also one of the ghosts is a shitty teen too

[doublism]

do you ever see like. a callout post for something that's like bad but not violent or egregious and is from a long time ago and you're like ok idk what you want me to do about that...... to be more specific that post that's like "stop idolizing joy division" and explains the origin of their name or whatever and it's like. my two cents As A Jew about these sort of things is always like. well yes obviously that's a bad thing but they weren't like. for real nazis it was just an edgy thing which yknow is still shitty but there's a difference between that and actually being like a full blown antisemite? and furthermore like what do you want me to do about it in 2022. are you trying to cancel the ghost of ian curtis. i always have this overwhelming feeling that when it comes to "taking action" against antisemitism we as a community/our allies could do to stop getting bogged down in shit like this and start actually fighting against and being vocal about the. yknow. real and extreme and current stuff that actually hurts jews today. just my thoughts!

[shadowen]

Ask meme: detailed synopsis of a fic you might never write

Re: this post

OK SO. I’m a big fan of all things related to hauntings, demonic possession, and Evil Places, and I’m low-key obsessed with Ed and Lorraine Warren. (If you like spooky stuff and don’t know who they are, definitely look it up.) The fic I want to write is an AU in the vein of those types of movies (The Conjuring, Annabelle, etc.) in which the TOG team are paranormal investigators, with Joe and Nicky as an analogue to the Warrens.

The premise is that Nile’s family somehow acquires the Generic Cursed Object, and Haunting occurs. Nile’s mom has tried every reasonable avenue to figure out what’s going on, and finally turns to this team of “ghost hunters”. Nile, who isn’t part of the team, is understandably skeptical and spends a lot of time hovering over their shoulders and asking questions, which leads to a lot of conversation about how each of them got involved in this and their views on death and spirituality. 

The Buffet of Tragic Backstories features: 

Joe, because being Muslim and gay and psychic in America is not a great time

Nicky, the former seminarian who hates the Church but just can’t let go of being Catholic

Andy, the lifelong Atheist still looking for evidence of Something Beyond

Quynh, the thrill-seeking Old School Goth who once Fucked Around and Found Out (that ghosts are real)

Booker, who presents himself as the Agnostic Jew in order to mask a tumult of deep-seated doubts

with a special appearance by Lykon, who used to work with the team and decided to get the fuck out after an especially traumatic experience. He teaches Wicca classes at a community center in Oregon. They visit him every year for Imbolc.

Our story begins at a deli in Chicago…

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nile isn’t sure what she expected self-professed “demonologists” to look like, but the two guys sitting across from her are definitely not it.

The white guy looks more like a highschool science teacher than anything else, clean cut and casual in his polo shirt and khakis, and he’s got an accent that Nile can’t quite place. The other guy, who Nile thinks is middle eastern, is the complete opposite, wearing a sleeveless Trevor Project T-shirt that shows the maze of tattoos all over his arms, his dark hair in a riotous tangle of curls. They introduced themselves as Nicky and Joe.

[longeyelashedtragedy]

do jewish people believe in spirits/ghosts?? i am considering converting for my fiance but i don't know if my belief in ghosts is a problem.

hi, well first of all, if your fiance is jewish there might be some stuff you already know, so i apologize if i come off as condescending at any point!

ah, the eternal question--whenever someone asks "do jewish people believe--" i hope they are prepared for frustration because judaism has become--de facto if not de jure--a very flexible and individually-customizable beast while still requiring a need for some sort of community. like sure, there are 613 commandments and a whole bunch of rules that we in-community kind of poke fun of, but people in the Conservative tradition, Reform, Reconstructionist, or just unaffiliated often wind up kind of picking and choosing what to believe/do. i assume frum (orthodox) folks are adhering much more in unison to the rules, but even so, judaism and its scholarly tradition requires study and debate, and often leaves a matter resolved with a "we don't know," so this by nature leaves a lot of diversity of belief in its wake.

i hope all jews believe there is only one (1) god, who does not exist in any corporeal form, and i hope we all believe to an extent in some of the founding myths (in all their many interpretations), and in the power of doing mitzvot (good deeds) here on earth in the moment instead of living for the afterlife. and--it's genuinely shocked me how many times i've had to explain this since i left the nyc bubble--very important, we don't believe that jesus was in any way a part of god, or a god figure, or even a prophet--he was just an irl historical figure who was very influential (and very human). well, you probably know that, but maybe someone who is reading this doesn't. Other than that i've seen people believe or not believe all kindsa weird shit, but it's their business.

so does judaism believe in ghosts? hmm. well, i do if that helps--i do very strongly based on personal experiences i've had, and i'm literally employed by my synagogue very part-time to lead services lol. (i used to have a sort of steady weekend gig back in the day but they ran out of money lmaooo whole long story.) i don't believe in like, ghosts in a white sheet going ooOooOoooo, but more like a vibe, a presence you can feel, of a soul/souls or their essence that was trapped in a place. (the way i've felt in certain sites in europe that i literally had no idea had nazi activity, oh boy!) devarim, the 5th book of the bible, has some prohibitions about not trying to contact the dead, which implies to me that maybe whoever wrote down the words of the torah (was it god? or, well--that's a whole nother debate, whoo.) thinks the dead do exist in a state that could be contacted, implying some sort of ghost or spirit.

there also is a lot of jewish mysticism that i don't know a lot about, where i'm sure the supernatural comes up, but another takeaway i can provide is that "the dead" are quite present in religious services even though judaism as a whole focuses very hard on the living and has few answers for what happens in the afterlife. during every service you say something called the "mourner's kaddish" (prayer). normally the kaddish is sung with various different melodies depending on the point in the service, but the mourner's kaddish is chanted by the rabbi or service leader, and the congregation chimes in at certain points. if you are in mourning for a loved one, whether it's within a year of them passing or the anniversaries (yahrzeit) of their death, you will stand to recite the prayer, BUT people also stand "for those who have nobody to stand for them" and during every service, usually sandwiched between some very lively songs, you stop to remember the dead and i swear in that room you can feel something, man, there's something. you're not just there with the people whose faces you can see.

do jewish people believe in spirits and ghosts? i would say you definitely can. you can see if you can work those beliefs into a standard jewish belief system, or if you can't, and they're at odds with other things about judaism you do like, there's meaning to be found in that struggle too. after all one of the patriarchs of judaism, jacob, is eventually given the name yisrael which means "wrestle with god," and that name became representative of the jewish people as a whole, at least in prayer. but i think there's a lot of things about judaism that imply that there other things in a room, in a space, in the universe, that are not corporeal.

this was a useless and very jewish style answer but i hope it can help! good luck to you and your fiance.

[nightcoremoon]

female hyenas have penises. kinda. more on that later.

so as many people following me probably don’t know because I don’t talk about it a lot, I am a furry. when I was a kid some of my favorite games were ratchet and clank, crash bandicoot, spyro, gex, sly cooper, okami, dust: an elysian tail, pokemon… final fantasy 12. I also never played but love the design of banjo kazooie and starfox. I love night in the woods. I love aggretsuko. I love animal crossing. I love five nights at freddy’s…’s visual design. against all odds I love undertale. my default race in the elder scrolls swaps between khajit and argonian. the only races I ever main in WoW are the tauren worgen and pandaren (AND VULPERA)! king is my tekken main. dark souls’ crow demons... enough said. I love zelda and in its later years it started getting more and more furry with each major installment. I love sonic the hedgehog. twokinds is my favorite webcomic. beastars is probably my favorite anime of the 2020s. and none of it is sexual. I just really love anthropomorphic animal characters!

…okay maybe I have a huge crush on a few characters. rivet. coco. carmelita. fran. krystal. isabelle. roxy. blaze. others I won’t name because you’ll just make fun of me. but a whole lot of it is nonsexual. regardless I’ve always wanted to settle on a particular species for my fursona.

fox. cat. wolf. skunk. rabbit. raccoon. ermine weasel.

but every one of these choices has just been me settling. I looked at a list and thought well I might as well pick one of these because that’s what everyone else does. to be a normal furry I have to really vibe with a certain animal and align with that particular choice wholly. completely. like society tends to do for sexuality. you have to pick 1. no more, no less. so I kind of wandered around between them all not really picking any in particular and figured I’d get around to it eventually but as time went on it just didn’t go anywhere. until today.

so I just randomly realized that my name rhymes with hyena. and then I realized hey wait a minute I fucking love hyenas. so I did some research on the cultural impact of hyenas and… it’s really sad. the whole world hates hyenas. muslims hate hyenas. african tribal faiths hate hyenas. the greeks hate hyenas. jews hate hyenas. damn near every single culture in the region hates them. they’re vampires. they’re werewolves (er. werehyenas?). they’re the ghosts of cannibals (if only there was a single word for a creature that was the evil ghost of a cannibal). they’re the evil mounts that evil witches ride in the night. some real fucked up stuff. and I think that’s really sad, as I LOVE hyenas. they’re one of my favorite animals. the way they’re kinda dogs kinda cats kinda neither, the way they’re shaped like fucked up demented little monsters, the way they’re murdering bastards, the way they laugh. and I’ve heard that they taste very interesting. I’d eat em.

so I decided, them. hyenas. they deserve better and I would be one hot and sexy cute and adorable hyena. fursona selected, I’m a hyena now motherfucker!

and then my partner told me female hyenas have dicks. I was like bro what? and I looked it up. lady hyenas have an appendage that looks (if not functions) like a penis.

and I (dfab, trans, no desire or plans for surgery) thought

hell. yes. bonus points. I’m double over a hyena now.

is it culturally appropriative of African culture to pick an African native animal as my fursona? …nope. no it’s not. shut up fuck you do not pass go don’t touch my inbox. :)

[protoindoeuropean]

“declaring a specific word/concept that you (apparently) find meaningless as necessarily meaningless for everyone else as well” you’re missing the context of the post, it was a response to a bunch of so-called new atheists who didn’t actually understand that atheism is solely a lack of belief that in deities, and doesn’t automatically equate hating religion or having any other worldview(esp bc some religions have atheistic strains or allow for atheism). The new state it’s got really nasty and started saying rude stuff to atheist Jews and Buddhists for being atheist the “wrong way,” and refused to believe there were actual examples of who practice religion, so OP found that concept of igttheism from a rabbi and posted it as a RESPONSE to their bullying to shut them up.

ah that's fair, reading up on what was happening it all seems a bit ridiculous, yeah

i've mostly stayed away from the whole "cultural christianity" discourse, i think i once commented in the tags of that post that also included black and white thinking as culturally christian (which, LOL) that i'm apparently less culturally christian than i thought, based on what was listed (including black and white thinking lmao), and another time i wrote this comment, because i mostly assume that people who are atheist are also materialist, though i'm perfectly aware that that's not necessarily the case (also, since the post this comment is on is about jewish atheism, i should make it clear that to me jewish atheists are jews that don't believe in god, no additional caveats, as should be obvious). it's also why i nowadays usually say that i don't believe in the supernatural, which covers everything from gods to ghosts to life force to "being connected to everything" (i.e. when any of that constitutes there being a special power in it, one not described by the laws of physics). that makes me atheist and materialist i guess i also think that a world with a higher power would be one that i would have to resent (including its potential creator), which some describe as antitheism, and in that case i'm antitheist i think that belief in the supernatural, especially a personal higher power, can be dangerous because it can be used as a tool with no internal checks – being convinced that a higher power is telling you to do something cannot be argued against because there are no outside reference points to reach and deal with that conviction. some might also see that as antitheism ig i don't hate people who believe in god or any other kind of the supernatural and in that sense i'm not antitheist

as can be seen with the latter term (and cultural christianity has a somewhat similar problem it seems, though still less pronounced), some labels have been used in so many different ways that using them without clarification can lead to misunderstanding and i for one wouldn't use them without making clear what i mean by them. another issue in the whole debate seems to be that some people understand labels as parts of their identity rather than simply descriptors, so they understand discussions about them as potential personal attacks and that never leads to constructive dialogue; and yet it seems like that's hard to avoid with any label – the same pitfalls exist with "gay", "feminist" etc.

back to the main issue at hand though, as with the linked post above, i still don't appreciate what seem to be basically semantic arguments. i stand by what i said there and even though i understand the gotcha moment can be satisfying when dealing with people that annoy or even harrass you, it doesn't take away from the fact that the gotcha there is just not a good argument; it just smells of sophistry to me, what can i say also going back and seeing people in the notes being like "that's basically what i believe" it's like ... i don't want to put words in your mouth but

[tom-at-the-farm]

do you have any thoughts about, like, UFOs? aliens, martians, little green men etc. 👽or do you prefer Lemuria or something

The two things I hate the most are outer space and the oceanic depths and I do my best not to think of either, so. I wish I were braindead enough to be a flat earther tbh

But seriously UFO people are so weird! And not just because of the racist stuff like "Jews are reptiles from outer space" or "this ancient civilization that was not European could not have possibly accomplished this, so clearly aliens did it." But honestly mostly because of that stuff, like every alien thing is always within spitting distance of some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory

As a rational Jewish person I prefer to let off steam with ghost stories