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For all the Tumblr people that say I cannot support the people in Gaza and vote for Trump, this explains why I can

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You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

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I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!

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Elohim is a plural noun.

A children's storybook, published in Hell, as seen in season 1, episode 1, scene 1 of the Amazon Prime adaptation of Hazbin Hotel, "Overture:"

Once upon a time there was a glowing city protected by golden gates, known as Heaven. It was ruled by beings of pure light: angels that worshiped good and shielded all from evil. Lucifer was one of these angels. He was a dreamer, with fantastical ideas for all of creation. But he was seen as a troublemaker by the elders of Heaven, for they felt his way of thinking was dangerous to the order of their world. So he watched as the angels began to expand the universe. And, in their ways, from the dust of Earth they created Adam and Lilith: equals, as the first of mankind. But despite this, Adam demanded control, and Lilith refused to submit to his will. She fled the Garden. Drawn in by her fierce independence, Lucifer found her, and the two rebellious dreamers fell deeply in love. Together, they wished to share the magic of free will with humanity, offering the fruit of knowledge to Adam's new bride, Eve, who gladly accepted. But this gift came with a curse for, with this single act of disobedience, Evil finally found its way into Earth: with it, a new realm of darkness and sin. And the order Heaven had worked to maintain was shattered. As punishment for their reckless act, Heaven cast Lucifer and his love into the dark pit he had created, never allowing him to see the good that came from humanity, only the cruel, and the wicked. Ashamed, Lucifer lost his will to dream. But Lilith thrived, empowering demonkind with her voice, and her songs, and as the numbers of Hell grew, so did its power. Threatened by this, Heaven made a truly heartless decision: that every year, they would send down an army. An extermination, to ensure Hell and its sinners could never rise against them. But Lilith's hope remained, and her dream was passed down to their precious daughter, the princess of Hell.

Did you notice that? "ruled by beings of pure light: angels" and "the elders of Heaven" and "angels began to expand the universe" and "they created Adam and Lilith," and so on, it's plural nouns all the way. Which, predictably, is driving biblical literalist monotheists spare: where's God in all of this?

But if you've actually studied theology, under any kind of honest instructor, you may remember something most followers of the Abrahamic faiths has never been told: God's name changes twice just in the course of Genesis alone:

He starts out as "elohim," the plural of "el," a word that means "angel." In otherwords, there is no "he" to have a name, just a committee of archangels, all of whose names end in "el," like Micha-el, Gabri-el, Uri-el, and so forth. All translations and explanations and dictionaries that post-date the Persian captivity wave this away, and insist that no, elohim is a proper noun, the pluralization means nothing, but that's grammatical nonsense: there is no "one God" in the first couple of chapters of the Bible.

By the time of the flood, the word that's translated as god is "adonai," a word used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to some specific humans as well, because it just means "the lord," as in the highest authority, like king or emperor. So the first appearance of a king of the angels only barely predates the Flood.

In Moses' lifetime, there absolutely is one Adonai of the El, but when asked for His name, he responds only with "yahawah adonai," which is a short sentence that means "I am who I am, the ruler," and yeah, still not a name.

So yeah, this is your approximately daily reminder that the Bible's staunchest "defenders" are, by the book's own standards, worshipers of the anti-Christ* who, between them all, would have a hard time telling you about anything the Bible says except the Garden of Eden story, the Flood story, a few excerpts from Moses's story, and maybe as few as five chapters out of the whole New Testament. And of the passages they think they know, they misunderstand at least half of it.

(*First warnings about how people who will worship the anti-Christ will wrongly think that they're worshiping the real Christ: Matthew 7:15-23 and Matthew 25:31-46)

Fundies are accusing Vivian Medrano and Amazon Prime of lying about their scriptures by "erasing God" but they're the ones who have no idea what they're talking about.

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My Lackadaisy Patreon “doodle” courtesy @lackadaisycats, Elsa showing off her new dress for Symphony night. Folks, I don’t know if every $20/month “doodle” is as amazing as this one, but SERIOUSLY - it’s worth trying! Thank you Tracy!

#lackadaisy cats #art #patreon #lackadaisycats #elsa #elsa bastion #lackadaisy #tracy butler

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"I Don't Like Bullies."

Abraham Erskine: Do you want to kill Nazis?

Steve Rogers: Is this a test?

Abraham Erskine: Yes.

Steve Rogers: I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies; I don't care where they're from.

Captain America is a hard character to write, because he has an out-of-canon superpower, a form of plot armor. By editorial dictate, Captain America is never on the wrong side or, if he gets fooled into being on the wrong side, catches it and corrects his mistake faster than anybody else. He's written as a man who loves his country and loves wearing its uniform, who lives to serve, but will spot an illegal or immoral order, and disobey it, faster than anybody else.

So how do you write that convincingly? How does he know? Joe Johnston put it the most succinctly in Captain America: The First Avenger: "I don't like bullies."

Steve Rogers walks up on a fight between two people, or two groups of people, and he doesn't know either of them from Adam's off ox. Who does he stop, versus who does he defend?

Disproportionate force: If whoever is winning the fight is using proportionate force, if they're using the bare minimum force to defeat and restrain whoever is losing, that's a good sign. If they're fighting with maximum force, if they're going way past what they need to win the fight, Steve Rogers knows they're the bully. Closely related:

Excessive glee in suffering: If one side is fighting in sorrow, or grim determination, and the other side is fighting in anger, or worse, visibly enjoying inflicting pain? Steve knows the first side are the good guys and the second side are the bad guys.

And there has never been a war, since the day Benjamin Netanyahu became president of Israel, where the IDF has used proportionate force, never been a war in that whole time where they didn't kill four to six times as many civilians as died on the Israeli side. So as bad as Hamas is, Mr. Netanyahu?

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The fastest way to become my enemy is to talk about burning books. I don't care if it's popular, controversial, religious, encyclopedic, or goddamned tax law. The moment you become on the side of the book burners, that moment you are no longer a civilized human in my mind.

My extremely Roman Catholic mother-in-law, who we were living with at the time due to financial circumstances, found a "controversial" book of mine - that I hadn't even gotten a chance to read yet - that was, in her religious view, blasphemous. She burned it in the back yard while I was working. When my wife realized what had happened, she was livid. When I got home, she dragged me aside and told me about it. I almost made us homeless over this. We did move out not too long after, and I never forgave that woman for her action, to her dying day, even though she deeded her house to our daughter before she passed.

Once you're a book-burner, there is no salvaging yourself.

I was a huge book hoarder as a kid and reading Fahrenheit 451 as a kid gave me the same nightmare three nights running, that the Fire-Men were breaking into my bedroom to burn my books.

And my dad was a WWII veteran steeped in anti-fascist rhetoric from when he was a kid. (The timeline does line up; dad was quite old when I was adopted.) I grew up being taught that "wants to censor books" or "attacks libraries" is all you need to know to understand that someone is some kind of monster, or at least a moral imbecile.

But in the years since then, I've lived to see it happen multiple times: each new generation of wannabe right-wing authoritarians learns that the fastest way to get the proverbial Nice White Parents™ to flip from centrist to right-wing authoritarian is to promise to burn books. Dad failed to warn me, probably because he couldn't understand it himself, that book burning is fucking POPULAR.

#books #book burning #book banning #book bans #right wing authoritarianism

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Hamas : Palestine :: School Shooters : United States

You'll get no argument from me that Hamas' actions are horrific and require justice. And indiscriminate killing of Palestinian non-combatants is just as vile as indiscriminate killing of Israeli non-combatants. Both have a right to live.

#palestine #israel #idf #hamas #genocide #gaza

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The Holy Land is sacred, but not to any kind of God of Justice, to any concept of a Judge of All the Dead. Every acre of that land is sacred to the god most worshiped there, steeped in millennia worth of sacrifices to Him: Azrael, the God of Death.

"Holy land" has got to be one of the most pernicious ideas in human history; no generation has escaped infection, we have been unable to breed this idea out of our meme pool, any time in the last 3,000 years. To consecrate a piece of land is to condemn it to being repeatedly, endlessly drenched in blood. Everybody's blood.

The latest war is less than a week old, and everybody on both sides is standing ankle deep in their own children's blood, their own parents' and spouses' blood, their own hands and faces smeared with other people's children's and spouses' and parents' blood, and both sides are nodding solemnly at the blood on their hands and at the blood around their ankles and saying proudly, "Worth it." Why? "Because this is holy land."

Their true God, Azrael, the God of Death, must be terrifyingly proud of them both.

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I'm getting a rare chance - the second of this type in my life - to "beta-read" a novel being prepared for publication. Early stages of prepared, but still. I'm not under any kind of NDA, and the author hasn't asked us to not discuss it, but I'm going to keep details light anyway, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to encourage all of you to read it as soon as it comes out.

Winston Rowntree, the author of Subnormality, is doing a novelization of a graphic novel he wrote about 20 years ago called "Captain Estar goes to Heaven". It's available still out there on the web for free, but I highly discourage you from reading it *for now*, as the novel format will be updated and have a problematic scene corrected. I fully intend to read the graphic novel version after I complete this - his request for beta readers specifically prioritized those who hadn't read the GN.

The PDF version I have is 343 pages (including losses for formatting). I started my read tonight, am 72 pages in, and this book has grasped my attention in ways I did not expect. It is, as you might expect from the author of Subnormality, quite wordy. It took me maybe the first chapter to get used to it, though, and now I'm enraptured. It's a speculative fiction book so far, futuristic sci-fi with a lot of digging into humanity.

I cannot wait to finish it. This is gonna eat up my weekend, no doubt.

#subnormality #winston rowntree #graphic novel

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This Is Not a Dog-Whistle

This is not a subtle Nazi reference. This is one of the most famous photographs of World War II. Even people don't know the whole details know what a "Nazi book burning" is.

(This photo was taken at a huge public sequel to, re-enactment of, the burning of the archives of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, an announced destruction of any library books that were "degenerate" or "unpatriotic" in Hitler's diseased opinion.)

Missouri gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel just staged a re-enactment of it for a campaign video, promising to burn, on the governor's mansion lawn, any library books that he thinks are leftist or degenerate or unpatriotic books if he gets elected governor.

I've said before, and will keep saying, that nobody in history has attacked libraries or librarians and been remembered as anything but monstrous, but compared to this, that was subtle. This isn't subtle. This is straight-up fascist re-enactment.

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I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.

I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.

At least give me a fucking transcript.

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I have, on many occasions, expressed that my deepest wishes for the disposal of my earthly remains should have them unceremoniously tossed in the dumpster. My wife hasn't agreed to that yet.

Atheist condolence card like "sucks that your grandpa no longer exists and you'll never see him again, oh well"

I mean, I'm looking for a condolence card for a Jewish family (found a pretty good one, will be adding a note about a shared memory of the deceased and hopes for the mourners that their memory may be a blessing).

But also I have no idea why people find the concept of an afterlife comforting. Legitimately, that is unappealing to me and the idea that I would be artificially separated from the people that I love and reintroduced to them after a period of separation if there was no need for that time of mourning and loss seems. Bullshit? It seems like bullshit? Capricious and cruel at best?

Anyway when my grandpa died we got a phone call when they tossed is ashes into the ocean and we never saw him again! Being reminded that we wouldn't see him in an afterlife wasn't the sad part, the sad part was knowing that we wouldn't know him anymore, that we'd be on one side of a growing divide, that there was a before and an after and we had left him behind while we had to move forward. It wouldn't have been comforting to think "well perhaps someday when I have lived my life without him, I will see him again in a place where nothing from this life (all the things that I have done, all the things that he taught me) will matter because they were worldly and unimportant."

What was comforting at that time, and after the very many family deaths that I have experienced (and I've experienced a lot! I've been comfortable with the idea that I'll never see my loved ones again when they're gone since I was a very small child!), and what I suspect is comforting even for religious people who have experienced a loss is to be reminded of the people who are still on the same side of that dividing line, who we can still love and adore and support and make memories with.

Anyway. I'm an atheist at least partially because of my grandfather, who was a magician and a skeptic and took great joy in skewering the supernatural. It would be an insult to his memory to think that he was an angel lighting up a star in heaven or whatever the christian condolence cards say.

My grandpa did a sexy comedy magical immolation of my grandmother in front of crowds; there was a devil on the flier.

(grandma's the one on the right)

Pictured: Not someone who had much reverence for death or much patience for the supernatural:

(Funny story, when my dad came to visit this week he saw a 2-post 52U server rack on the driveway from a distance and asked me "where did you guys get the guillotine? Did I leave that here?")

But my family is probably *unusually* atheist and irreverent.

For atheists in general I don't know why people think that it's more upsetting to acknowledge the truth (that once people are dead you won't see them anymore) than to be told "comforting" lies (that you will see dead people again at some mystical place that you have no access to or proof of).

I *hate* hearing "they're in a better place" when I'm mourning someone I loved because that's something that's comforting for a religious person to say but dismisses both the way that I mourn and (frequently in my family) the beliefs of the deceased. They are not in a better place, they are *gone* and I don't want to imagine that they're somewhere waiting for me to join them again, I want to remember them for who they were and accept that they aren't in my life anymore.

"They're in heaven now" "they're with the angels now" "they're with their maker" - none of those things are true and they reflect an extremely limited worldview that I don't share and find pretty insipid actually! Thank you for trying to comfort me you are doing a poor job of it I'm going to go hang out and talk to someone who actually knew them and we'll share stories of what an asshole they were and what kind of crazy nonsense they got up to and what a big, important part of our lives they were and we'll start trying to make sense of how to fill the hole left behind with something practical and joyful and fun and honest that they would have loved instead of cardboard angel wings.

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O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable; ever waxing, ever waning. Hateful life first oppresses and then soothes as fancy takes it; poverty and power it melts them like ice . Fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent. Well-being is vain and always fades to nothing. Shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back to your villainy. Fate is against me in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved. So at this hour without delay pluck the vibrating strings; since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me!

#o fortuna #carmina burana #classical music #music #translation #carl orff

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Weekly reminder that when someone calls you weird (pejorative), it is perfectly acceptable to say YES YOU BORING MOTHERFUCKER I AM with the entirety of your chest and laugh maniacally as you execute your flawlessly flamboyant exit.

Your weirdness is beautiful and those who lack sufficient courage or depth to display their own preternatural plumage are right to be unsettled in the presence of your eldritch greatness.

Be weird out loud. Do it at the top of your lungs, with all your heart, as hard as you can.

And let them squirm.

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