#runnerpost

[somerunner]

Of course, as a practicing member of the church, and being someone who's easily swayed by propaganda, I view the history a little differently. But not all that differently (only just enough to voice that I view it differently), so I'm not going to make a post trying to write out my preferred version of events. That's a far lower priority than engaging with this post on what I agree with.

The thing is, sanding off our rough edges really is a tragedy. I think that sanitizing our history or steel-manning it is a tragedy. Even if it's something that most if not all religious organizations and countries do, if your reported (note: "reported," not "recorded," but records are reports after a fashion, so it really doesn't matter) histories lose the messy complexity of the past, they fail to adequately prepare you for the messy complexity of the present.

The church was and is composed of people, and people get panicky when their in-group comes into conflict with another in-group. The deeper the ideological divide (note: or the deeper divide in any category, but in this case it was primarily ideological), the worse the conflict. And no matter if your ideals are to be peaceful, you get a large enough group together and there will be agitators within it, and followers of those agitators.

I don't think of myself as a good person. I think that's why I stay in the church -- for both of the reasons you might expect from that last sentence (i.e. it makes me better the more I participate in it, and in addition I'm not principled enough to strike out on my own). I feel compelled to both defend and criticize the church in the same breath, because doing only one of those things feels wrong.

I don't know where I was going with this. I hope this didn't come across as a defense of the church any more than your post did, and I hope it didn't come across as too critical either. I think your story linked above (the "I was taught by one" part right before you bring up Fallout) is one of my favorite stories of a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He's a little kooky and quite vindictive, but dedicated to being better and to trusting in God. That's probably the best I can hope to become, though I'd probably be trading vindictiveness for waffliness (i.e. the tendency towards waffling, or failing to decide).

There are plenty of published articles and talks within the church or by active members of the church that I feel have acknowledged this kind of messiness within it, but I feel like only acknowledging this from within the bubble makes me feel some kind of sheltered. I'd still be remiss to not mention them, though, hence this paragraph. Of course, some of them still feel a bit sanitized to me so they'd feel wildly sanitized to most Tumblr denizens, but I think a few might be something the average tumblrite could stomach. My favorite (and one stomach-able by the readers here, I think) is probably the opening sections of Letters to a Young Mormon by Adam S. Miller, that read rather similarly to your autobiographical posts. I still haven't finished the thing after several years, and it's only like 80 pages, and a miniature book at that.

Happy trails, Babylon. I mean, bloody and desperate trails, Babylon.

Would you mind sharing the psalm and why you felt that person was the most humanist Mormon? I'm not religious at all but I find these sort of things very interesting.

In exchange I could offer the reason for my url ?

I'm warning you, this is kind of a mega essay, and it's fucking unhinged. Click at your own risk.

(Alright. You clicked.)

Psalms 137

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

my highest joy.

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did

on the day Jerusalem fell.

“Tear it down,” they cried,

“tear it down to its foundations!”

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

happy is the one who repays you

according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants

and dashes them against the rocks.

———

Mormonism has layers. Different cores of believers, cultures within itself. The largest group of Mormons also dominate its image within the larger culture. You know them as the nerdy, cheerful, bubbly dorks on South Park, or the hopelessly naive childlike weirdos from the Book of Mormon musical. Strangely sanitized, "wholesome" people that are, clearly, unwhole. Missing some essential part of the human experience.

(Pain, maybe?)

I think that embracing this image is letting Mormonism view itself as what it wishes it was. A group with all its rough edges sanded off, all its raw and desperate humanity scrubbed away. A clean and godly and slightly unsettling image of joy.

That isn't how it started.

Now, most people know the story of Joseph Smith. Fourteen year old farm boy starts a cult because the whole world if full of idiots, I won't repeat it because you've probably already got it from South Park. But at some point that weirdo cult did become a religion, and I would point to that moment as the Mormon War of 1838.

I don't know how far after the founding that was. Enough that Joseph Smith was a grown man. Enough that the Mormons had around 15-25 thousand members. They'd moved to the Illinois-Missouri area and were establishing settlements.

(They creeped the locals out. Of course they creeped the locals out.)

Eventually, they got pushed out of the county they'd claimed. Jackson County, it was. The state couldn't actually take that county from the people that expelled them, so to try and make the Mormons "whole" for the land they'd bought (ignoring the houses and farms they'd already set up) it gave them a new county.

Next election that came around, that county was sieged. Voting was blocked. Now, the people of the state were terrified that this weirdo voting block was going to take them over. They probably weren't wrong. Some former Mormons had straggled in from the county revealing a frankly corrupt land dealthat the early church had used to transfer resources to itself, and that served as a tipping point. To prevent their state from becoming a religious basketcase, a mob sieged the Mormon county during the next election.

The state tried to return order by sending the militia in to break up the siege, but the militia mutinied. They joined the siegers. A ground of strange, extremist violent Mormons known as the Danites rode out and attacked local settlements that were known to house the families of the militia members.

The Governor at the time - Lilburn Boggs - sent out an executive decree. The Mormons were traitors, and were to be killed on sight. It is the only religion in the US to have ever had such an order made against it.

The Mormons surrendered their county and went to Nauvoo, Illinois. There were again expelled from that city in 1846, and traveled west.

They died in great numbers and they never forgot the homes they lost.

———

I tried to tell the story as sympathetically to the people of Missouri as I could. The Mormons made messes wherever they went, and they unsettled everyone they interacted with. But they were attacked as well, and had a history of violence against them. It should not be totally surprising that they became insular and strange.

Many (most?) Mormons that learn all of their history wind up leaving the religion. It has twists and turns and knots and it is incredibly, overwhelmingly human. I think that's where the facade of Mormon perfectionism comes from - the shame of that. The desire to be something else. But being human is all I've ever wanted. And occasionally, there are people faithful in the church - layers upon layers deep - that know their history.

And they are angry about it.

I think it's more common than people realize. Did you know that until 1930 Mormons swore literal religious oaths of vengeance against the US government for the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith?

I always felt like these were, in some way, the real Mormons. They knew their history, and they loved their church, and they hated what it had suffered all those years ago.

They scared me, those people. But they seemed complete. More complete than the people that had carved out everything that didn't make them smile. They'd walked into the mirror, and touched their shadow, and danced with. Melded with it.

And I knew a few like that. I was taught by one. And he didn't convince me, but he interested me. Gave me some respect for the people I left behind.

———

In the game Fallout: New Vegas, there is a character named Joshua Graham. He's a Mormon. Not like the silly children in adult bodies that they always use on TV. He has gravitas. He has put away his moral compass before, to pursue the dream of one powerful man. Poured his soul into it, helped that man conquer the whole west in piecemeal. He's a somewhat on the nose analogy of the Mormon people themselves, following Joseph Smith. And when he finally failed, when he fought a battle he could not win on the gates of the Old World Hoover Dam, he was lit on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon to die.

But he did not die.

He says he survived because the fire in him burned brighter than the fire around him. And it seems that way when you speak with him in game. There is something compellingly bright to him. Not shiny like a new toy, or a Utah teenager that hasn't seem just how grim the world can be. He's something blinding, compelling.

But that brightness casts shadows.

He is vicious. He was saved in the canyon by the family he left, the old Mormons of a new world. And he's trying to find that part of him again, regain the soul he lost pursuing someone else's vision. But that old vicious animal part of the covenant is with him. I see Joshua Graham and I see the animal that the Mormons became to survive the West.

And in the game, there is eventually a choice given.

You can lead the tribe Joshua has joined up with out of their Zion. Their Jackson County Missouri. Peacefully and perfectly and inhumnanly transcendant, the way the Mormons wish they actually were about everything. You can give him the chance to be what Mormonism has always wished it could be. Or you can fight with them and help them reclaim their paradise, but get your hands stuck deep in the muck of this world.

Joshua Graham knows his history. He knows all the homes his people lost. And whatever brightness he's trying to regain, whatever soul he's trying to win back from the world that takes and takes and takes and takes - he wants to give it all up again to let these people keep their home.

He knows his past and he is angry.

And as the player, you help him make peace with one of two things: Being human by being fallen, or keeping his soul at the cost of reliving the ancestral trauma of losing Zion yet again.

Both were pretty visceral decisions for a Mormon teenage Babylon to make.

(Tagging @boonebignaturals in this because I need a witness to my madness.)

[somerunner]

Ooooohhhh I’m liking this talk (mainly because it talks about humility and repentance without sounding like a veiled reference to queerness and doubt)

Feels like this talk is directly talking to me about my self-destructive tendencies and telling me “you gotta recognize your faults before you can fix them. This (i.e. scrolling for hours, ignoring others’ needs, etc.) isn’t haha funny, this is actually a bad thing. Now work on it.”

[somerunner]

I follow some variant on the Golden Rule with regards to personal posts. If I post something personal I expect someone to like and un-like it to indicate they’ve seen it. Since I have almost 18,000 likes, I just like personal posts and never un-like them.

The issue is that I don’t know if this is rude or intrusive to the people whose posts I like. So idk. There was one post in particular, a month or more ago, where someone posted a disturbing personal anecdote, so I just tossed a reblog in my drafts so I could remember it. Instead of tossing the like into my likes folder, which will never realistically see the light of day.

Poll time! Most of my mutuals won’t see this but I might as well make a poll for it.

[somerunner]

what's the deal with hydrogen

I like pipe-dream technology ideas, especially ones about cheap energy. I’m more aware now of how infeasible hydrogen fusion is, but I’ve always had a passing interest in it.

In freshman year of college, I decided to create a science-communication YouTube channel, where I’d briefly touch on a science topic. Like, one to eight minutes. And my first video would be on hydrogen fusion.

I never made more than half a video, but I still want to make all those videos I had wanted to make five years ago.

Anyway, posting about hydrogen is like an itty-bitty token step towards working on my fusion video. So I’m making a lot of hydrogenposts.

Oh, and I like doing numbers and it seems like an untapped niche. (Science communication and getting mildly famous are two of my favorite things, not that I’ve ever done either)

[somerunner]

I don't have a very popular blog -- roughly 60 followers not counting bots, and about ten of those are ones I actually see in my Activity feed. So I check my Activity feed compulsively, and occasionally I see that one of my older (well, one-year-old) posts has been reblogged.

And you know, I always wonder how people find my older posts. If you click the header (the area around the OP/reblogger’s icon) an old post, then ones from just before it also show up, as if you’ve teleported through their dash to that date.

Sometimes my recently-reblogged older posts have a tag, so I imagine that whoever reblogged it just found a tagged post they were interested by and started trawling all of my posts with that same tag. But on occasion, they reblog an old post with *no* tags. I can only imagine they were trawling one of my tags and took a detour. Clicking one of the specific posts, then letting the same-time posts fill the screen to resume scrolling on (speaking of that, I need to tag all my posts so they’re easier to trawl through). Or maybe it just showed up in the For You page.

I've posted at least one other post about page-trawling, but I don't know if I'll find it, so I'm posting this separately. I think lurking/archive-trawling should be easy to privately do without getting any comments about it, especially since I lurk and trawl too, but it's (i.e. old-post reblogs) happened a few times recently and I guess I just wanted an excuse to remark about it.

Carry on lurking as usual.

[somerunner]

I'm doing a reading for a class that I withdrew from. It's an excerpt from a book about teaching, and the excerpt itself is about the refusal to learn. The author goes into detail about the difference between refusal to learn and failure to learn, and about why refusal to learn is a concept with its own merit. The price of refusal and its reward are pretty intertwined - you don't get to participate as fully with people who do learn, which can be a wanted or unwanted thing; you are set apart in status from those who learn, which again can be wanted/unwanted; you don't have your mindset changed, etc. etc.

I found it a very fascinating excerpt, though I haven't finished it yet.

[somerunner]

One of my favorite tropes is when characters have traits or mannerisms that reflect their parents. Even if these traits are bad, or their parents are generally bad, for some reason it just makes me smile to see the similarities between characters and their parents. Maybe it’s because it gives me hope I can live up to my own parents; maybe it’s because it indicates that everyone rubs off on each other over time, leaving a legacy behind in how they influence each other; maybe it’s some other reason.

Anyway, the main examples that come to mind here are Kaladin’s curmudgeonly attitude and mostly-inflexible code of honor (both inherited from Lirin, and the second partially also inherited from Hesina), Miles Morales thinking of his parents‘ and uncle’s words at critical moments in the Spiderverse movies (and also him and his dad walking down stairs instead of taking risky parkour jumps), and Yerin’s whole manner of speaking (inherited from the Sword Sage, a father figure).

Funnily enough the thing that brought this thought up was Varic Vallenar and his father Benri having a pettiness/oneupmanship contest every time they talk. It’s just funny and endearing to see them both act so calm while inwardly seething, and both care about their charges so much (Varic’s charge being “the safety of the galaxy” and Benri’s charge being “the financial state of the corporation, and guaranteed cooperation from his son”)

[somerunner]

I have barely worked on my research for a few hours in the past few weeks and one of my research professors is calmly telling me that it’d be good for me to wrap up the current segment, because he wants me to move on to something else I can put on my thesis. He’s calm, but a little frustrated, and I completely understand his frustration. I want to be working too but I just can’t get myself to get off Tumblr/Discord/Youtube/etc. and work.

Anyway, we both have Strava accounts and follow each other. And we keep liking each other’s posts. I think it’d be funny if he ever calls me out, like “I know you have the time to work, you did an hour-long run the other day!” But he probably won’t, because he also runs and knows it’s kind of a necessity (running is a big sanity inducer).

Since we’re about the same pace, I might ask him if he wants to run together and discuss research then. Having more “meeting time” during the week would get me in the mindset that, you know, I need to work. But he might be the opposite and use running to think about non-work stuff, because he actually does work full-time and doesn’t waste the day away like I do.

[somerunner]

I am constantly surprised when I receive praise from an authority figure or get reblogged by an S-tier poster. Like, my parents do it because they're my parents, but someone who doesn't have a personal connection to me? There's no way I measure up enough to be considered your peer

I then justify the praise by thinking "maybe I have a good idea 10% of the time and they're like 'oh yeah That Guy has a good idea. Good job guy! Anyway,' and it's not a big deal. Meanwhile they have good ideas 50-90% of the time. All is right with the world." My preconception that I could never be their equal is still true, which means my other preconceptions about the world are also true.

This phenomenon of "wrangling my definitions and conceptions about 'How Things Work' until they fit new data, but are still largely the same" actually applies to a lot of things in my life.

[somerunner]

These two songs are actually real good though.

[somerunner]

I keep forgetting that I’m best fueled by spiteful compliance. Not malicious compliance, no sabotage-by-the-rules, but just…powering my work ethic with resentment.

My class just had a lecture on using generative AI to create illustrations in the classroom. Also known as something that you can do with stock images and clip art, which have both existed for decades.

EDIT: I forgot to explain why the above two paragraphs are related. Anyway, I’m struggling to care about my classes and do work for them, but by being fueled by anger at this lecture, I think I’ll actually get assignments done on time this week.

[somerunner]

I really gotta stop outsourcing my anxiety to other people. It’s mighty convenient but I’m probably giving up everyone I know one or two statistical ulcers (edit: I mean collectively their stress probably adds up to one or two ulcers) from oversharing.

[runnercomics]

Day 3 - Jig

[loverboy-ish]

loneliness of the long-distance runner shadow come closer so i'll run on further

[somerunner]

Sometimes I just have an idea or project and think “oh this is a good idea” and commit to it for an hour or two, or sometimes a few days. And then I give up on it, because it’s fickle.

This is a rather common affliction, I’m not unique in that regard. So I would be very surprised if this got more than a few notes.

[runnercomics]

Day 2 - reaction image (doubt)

I put this in drafts on accident. Day 3 is also done, each took about 1 minute (I refuse to zoom in while drawing just to get passable eyes, hence why it didn’t take 10 seconds)