el-smacko

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Ed, Edd, ’n’ Oedi

rancid news! apparently my sister’s friend’s boyfriend’s name is oedipus, he goes by ‘oedipus’, and he’s named that because it apparently it is his mom’s favorite greek myth

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I love what we can do to language if we believe in ourselves.

Cannot wait for Sphube 2: Hypersphube

Guys I just refreshed the site and everyone's profile pics went round

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I have read a few times that the Greeks innovated vowels from “unused” consonants in Phoenician. That’s bullshit. Matres lectionis—certain consonants of an abjad, an alphabet that is entirely consonantal for scripts that use diacritical marks, like the tittle above English “i,” for vowels—were vowels or semivowels in scriptio plena (literally “full script,” Latin for “longhand”). Further, the alefs (𐎀, ʔa; 𐎛, ʔi; and 𐎜, ʔu) in Ugaritic—the mother script of Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Punic/neo-Phoenician (in ascending order of plena writing)—are all purely vocalic, while in the third/second century BCE Hebrew that was transliterated (converted from script to script rather than translated) into the Septuagint Greek Bible, alef is only ever a vowel, as in Aramaic, and ayin (ע) is only rarely consonantal “ghan” (a separate sign in Ugaritic: 𐎙, ġ; while 𐎓, ʕ, Phoenician 𐤏, became the vowel o in Greek; the Hebrew form appears to be an inverted Old Arabian 𐩶/𐪖, itself from Ugaritic 𐎙), as in the name Gomorrah, Hebrew עֲמֹרָה (ʕOmōrah).

Based on the Ugaritic evidence and the difference in medium (Phoenician on perennial stone where space is at a premium, Hebrew on more ephemeral material preserved by copying), it is also bullshit to say that Hebrew innovated vowels, which I have also seen claimed by at least one scholar (he’s a pop Biblical studies author and modern linguist so he has no citations but, based on his “scholarship,” also wouldn’t have the ability to generate the theory, especially since it’s historical linguistics/philology). We have had all of this information for decades now, early last century for Ugaritic and late century-before-last for Phoenician. There is no excuse to continue saying vowels were “innovated” by people whose localized scripts postdate Ugaritic or its oldest daughter, early Phoenician. It’s all pathetic, nationalist cope and reminds me of an author who wrote in the white supremacist rag Mankind Quarterly that the Greeks independently innovated ship-building because their nautical vocabulary were not loans—except that some nautical vocabulary is Pre-Greek, ie, from a non-Indo-European “substrate” (surviving vocabulary from the languages spoken by the as-yet-inconclusively-identified people who lived in Greece before the Indo-European Greeks), like κυβερνᾶν, “to steer,” whence our “govern” and “cyber.”

I describe my studies as Biblically oriented, but I am constantly frustrated by the field of “Biblical studies” or “Biblical archeology” whose biases are naked to people with a non-Biblical philological, historical, philosophical, or archeological background.

Effective Biblical studies involves less a “grain” of salt and more a “Lot’s wife after he looked back at her fleeing Gomorrah” amount of salt, which literalists and believers in inerrancy are dogmatically incapable of. Regardless of personal belief—and I am no atheist—you must, must, must study the Bible with the conviction that its God is no more real than Zeus is considered to be by Classicists to accomplish academic analysis of it. If you don’t, you will fall into the trap of “proving” the Bible, which will always fail under scrutiny—and that is why your faith will suffer too. If you need God to be proven to you by the accuracy of the Bible, or worse, its authority, you will either tie yourself in knots or lose faith and gain alienation from your faith community, where you will not feel God in the only surefire place God can be found, even if (or especially if) he really is just a psychosocial projection: other people.

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It is an all-male Bund…

But also Roman Empire Guys (who never learned Latin beyond military vocabulary) exclusively support the kind of hawkish oligarchs with reckless disregard for treaties that destroyed both Roman Empires it’s maddening

i hated that "all men think about is the Roman empire" meme bc like, literally all of the Latinists I know are women who talk about Roman senators like they're members of a boy band.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where the divide between left and right can be located and it truly is individual/community.

An individual is in constant competition and under a lot of tension trying in vain to be self-sufficient when we are, genetically and historically, the most social species that has ever existed (as evidenced by our singular linguistic complexity). Because of the premise of self-sufficiency, our actions are the actualization of our essence rather than, as communal organisms, an expression of what our environment has shaped us to be within the potential of our social systems (that is, we offend because offense is possible and offensiveness was put in us).

In our punitive (crime-and-punishment) system of “justice” that emphasizes the hyperindividualist ideas of free will and personal accountability, you are a criminal because you committed a crime. You are what you do, one who sins is a sinner. There is no separation of essence and action. This is why the right (or people who grew up in right wing environments like nearly everybody in the US) have this immediate reaction to something they said being characterized negatively, because in the right-wing individualist paradigm it reflects who they are, for which they alone bear the ultimate responsibility.

In nationalism, the community is turned into an individual in competition with every other community, which necessitates ideas of ethnic guilt and national (racial/ethnic) supremacy. Pointing out systemic flaws meets the same gut reaction, because each individual is a manifestation of their nation: a hero, and soldiers who literally “fight for their country” are the most heroic. The country can do no wrong (when governed by a conservative) because that would make the country and every individual manifestation of it condemnable, villainous (and “villain” etymologically means, approximately, “proletarian”).

A healthy (and successful) community is one in which needs are identified and collaboratively addressed, rather than turned into a competition to make profit that exacerbates the need or even prolongs it rather than risk losing profit by eliminating a problem (health insurance companies have studied whether it is profitable to find cures!)—or worse, creating a problem (arcane, individualistic taxing with underfunded public entities) to profit from its “solution” (TurboTax, et al). But because we have privileged the individual, profit (and the loss elsewhere which it necessitates) is more important than actual benefit… ironically very un-Christian for a supposedly “Christian” country. Jesus would say that their faith is in Mammon—an Aramaic word from the same place as “amen,” signifying that they put their faith in financial “trust” rather than God or his Kingdom, which it is famously hard for the rich to enter.

Some of y'all gotta uncouple your personal self worth from your thought patterns. Me saying something is a reactionary thought pattern and urging you to examine it is not me personally calling you a fascist lmao. Everyone has thought patterns and some of them are going to be reactionary since yknow. We live in a society etc etc

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(co-founded with Marsha P Johnson)

Santa Barbara, CA was where I was at my queerest, dating two married lesbians.

Apparently she is also venerated with cherry branches and I once had a… brief… romantic encounter with a cherry tree. I was in a difficult but very spiritual place, it’s hard to explain.

Santa Barbara is lovely. Nice to know that Saint Barbara also fucks (… metaphorically, she was a virgin)

Christians keep stealing shit from other esoteric traditions when St Barbara is right there.

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He doesn’t want to die

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hear me out…

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Why did we choose HBO vampire romance True Blood’s main protagonist Sookie Stackhouse to communicate this

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Made a wizard PC named Eloisus who was in the Rho Alpha Delta (RAD ΡΑΔ) magic college fraternity

Concept: fratsonas. Create a self-insert that’s a douchey frat bro. Mine’s name is Josh

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by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...

The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.

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One guy made Stardew Valley and peak Minecraft was a tiny team like hello?

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ROT TO GO

Champagne Super Bone-a

what if she was called chappell bone and instead of a singer she was a necromancer who raised strong as fuck skeleton warriors

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Manhood is Skyrim, the game about dragons, and my favorite way to play is “Oblivion 2,” where I never talk to the Jarl of Whiterun so dragons never spawn and my character never learns the dragon language

“gender is a game and i’m winning”

“gender is a game and i’m using cheat codes”

gender is a game and i’m ignoring the main objectives to decorate my base and romance npcs

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Posted for the beauty and eloquence of this comment:

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There’s a new Haaretz article about the first Indo-Europeans so of course they brought on David Anthony to spout some racist horseshit