#sacred structures

[words-after-midnight]

Me: *working feverishly on the remaining Act I chapters every spare moment of my day*

The essential dialogue for an entire phone conversation that I'm now seriously considering adding to the end arc because it would flawlessly solve a minor plot issue I've been trying to work out: ✨heyyyy✨ 👀

[merlions]

Wow I was trying to guess the definition of this word and was trying to figure it out by using related words, so I was like uhmm really important? A workhorse? Transitional? Full of vital soups and sauces? Full of chyme??? But when I looked it up I discovered none of that is true and it just means boring.

Holds some pretty funny implications into the mind of the guy who was responsible for naming the anatomy of the lower abdominal organ system! "Ah yes I love the 3 segments of the small intestine: the duodenum, the ileum, and uhh idk the boring one"

[andy-clutterbuck]

[punk-pins]

louis du pointe du lac what happens when you give a vampire catholicism. look at it. he’s got anxiety

[distrxst]

i like to think that the iterators actually do have magnets in their hands , as weird as it sounds . a sort of sentimental thing brought about by the puppeteers . something never outrightly said , but still there . they never understand why they're there . iterators are physically isolated , after all . but maybe that was just a bit of humanity and it's love seeping into it's own invention . they aren't meant to be alone , and that magnet beneath the plates and wires that make up their bodies are supposed to be a reminder .

[witchofanguish]

yayyy purim is next month

and if that's not a draw, this video parodies how bad most biblical translations are very well

[fandomfloozy]

If the mass effect fandom on Tumblr has done anything for me, it's take away my fear of cluttering my page with reblogs.

Do you know how long my account lay barren post-creation???

Years.

ME fandom scruffed me by the fucking neck and said

and I abandoned my sleeper agent ways

[zebratoys]

MERKABA New Arrivals https://www.etsy.com/listing/1510140668/merkaba-paper-craft-merkavah-rainbow-diy

[urlocallesbiab]

sometimes i feel my story nagging at the back of my mind, gnawing, clawing, breathing down my neck, demanding "i need to exist", "i want to exist"; its desire and will powerful and overwhelming.

when it will be written, it won't be the most beautiful or smart or sophisticated story ever, i know that even now, it may even come to be overall unremarkable; and yet towards it i feel sheer, unfiltered awe, simply for the fact that it is a story and posseses a will to exist, a great and awesome will, and i am the sole witness of it, the sole prophet and worshipper to this decisive power. a story, it feels to me, is a separate mode of being, something vaguely and imcomprehensibly conciousness-like, but abstract and untethered, while human conciousness is unseparable from the intimacy and realness of us being animals. a story needs us, our animal bodies and lives and minds, our hands and mouths and neurons, to help it become real, to take it and bring it onto earth: something halfway between a symbiotic relationship and a religious experience. i find myself subservient to it, to art as universal divinity and to my story as my personal deity that embodies the former.

this loyalty to sublime makes me feel more at peace and in tune with the mundane than anything ever before it. i realize, in a sudden grace of acceptance, that in order to serve my story, to write my god i need to be alive, a blessed animal, and to be alive i need to take care of myself, which means i have to do the dishes and find a job and various et cetera; everything shifts and makes perfect sense. i no longer feel confused or burdened as to "why should i bother", and my body moves lighter and easier.

but the thing about unwritten stories is that they don't yet exist in any physical sense, not as electronic signals or pigment on paper or air vibrations or projected light or anything else; my story in its full form resides only in my head, and thus my awe and loyalty and service towards it are directed, ultimatey, unto myself, in the most sefless and selfish fashion simultaneously — self-love through division and synthesis. to serve art is to love yourself, and to love yourself is to make sure you're alive; to want your story to exist is to want yourself to exist. it's a complex system, but beautiful. with that thought, i'll go finish the dishes, and maybe cook something.

[katoska]

The Union(/humans?) has strange attitudes to medical brain procedures.

Claire said that [that reddit planet] didn't have the technology to perform an attitude-adjustment medical procedure. Implying, 25th century humans do have that technology (we later learn they definitely have mind-wipes). She didn't seem overly outraged that they would do that as punishment, either, only that they were doing it badly.

In From Unknown Graves, Claire said she felt bad about asking Isaac to change his brain for her and that she didn't want him to think he wasn't enough for her as he was (though she did kind of... say exactly that to him later...) and Kelly responded that it was just like asking your bf to go to therapy.

Also what Dr Vilka described in that same episode about her and Timmis backstory is pretty much: She and her father found a barely-alive enemy soldier, disarmed him, healed him (before or after they changed him? Perhaps relatedly: how did OG Timmis die?), experimented with and changed his neurology, and now he's on their side. They medically experimented on a prisoner of war. Everyone on the Orville was really impressed with their results.

In the tie-in novella Sympathy For The Devil, Mercer mentions that they don't have prisons or executions anymore, instead people get therapy and get re-integrated back into society. (Which obviously is a good thing... as long as these people give free and informed consent to the therapy. But what do they do with those who don't want that?)

Individually, none of them seem indicative of a societal issue within that universe. But as a pattern, it's imo very disturbing.

[error-soup]

god has put me on earth in this form specifically so I would convince the cis men with curls around me to use conditioner

[crazydiscostu]

Cosmic Summit 2024

In the realm of intellectual exploration and historical speculation, few events hold as much promise as the Cosmic Summit. This annual gathering attracts some of the brightest minds and most curious souls from around the world, eager to delve into humanity’s mysterious past and the enigmas of Earth’s history. Following a successful debut in Asheville in June 2023, the Cosmic Summit returned with…

[judahmaccabees]

malnourished and toyed with,

Wisdom's daily bred,

Air withheld,

And Earth

[iamnotanearthlingmotherfucker]

Ok, ok I get it. Calm yo tits. There’s no need to take that tone with me, and there’s no need to scream at that volume 😳 The attitude 🤣 Major Arcana across the board 😳

[beroebluejeans]

I love how Tamsyn Muir was like, in this world everybody’s totally cool about gender and sexuality, but there’s a new invented binary that’s culturally and religiously defining and dictates who people are allowed to love and/or fuck and the roles they play in society.

They’ve written volumes and volumes of religious texts about how to conform to these sacred binary roles and filthy porn about people fulfilling or breaking the stereotypes of these roles. The role a person fulfills is determined before they’re born and dictates every aspect of their life. Once in a while someone who’s supposed to be on one side of the socioreligious binary is born more suited to the other side and has to hide it all their life (Coronabeth). Sometimes people fall in love in a way the socioreligious binary declares blasphemous and they decide to love each other openly anyway, and it shocks and scandalizes people no matter how wholesome and lovely and mundane their relationship is (Abigail and Magnus).

And these sacred binary roles are not equal, oh no, as much as the religious doctrine crows the importance of both roles, one is supposed to sacrifice endlessly and unquestioningly for the other, body, mind, and soul. And these binary roles have existed for ten thousand years and were created by God and underlie the whole structure of the universe! But here’s the secret: there was a time before this sacred binary existed, and God is just Some Guy who made this shit up.

[buttercupadventures]

Husband all winter: I hate winter, I hate the cold, I hate the lack of sunshine and everything this season has to offer.

Me: Oh, don't say that. All seasons are beautiful. Winter is beautiful. All cozy and cute and calm. It's just so satisfying to find beauty in every state of nature.

Me at the end of January: WHERE ARE YOU, SPRIIIIING??? I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.