Don’t get me wrong, I’m agnostic, my viewpoint on the universe isn’t very “religious” and I don’t quite vibe with paganism or a defined spiritual belief system, but I still don’t think religion and spirituality is regressive and silly
i took an astrobiology class in school where we read stuff by medieval and early modern scholars debating about whether extraterrestrial life existed and what stuck with me the most about it is how their framework of the universe was expanded by their religious viewpoints.
I mean, I think I was also mind-blown by the fact that people have been talking and writing about aliens for all of recorded history, even before there was any scientific precedent to guess that they could exist.
But that very thing (asking questions without a scientific precedent) was instrumental to proto-scientific thought ever becoming a formalized scientific method. These guys had a baseline for asking questions. So there are these scholars in the 1600’s seriously articulating ideas like “So if God created the universe, doesn’t that mean it’s likely that every planet is inhabited, since it would be created for a purpose?” And “No, no, that doesn’t make sense, Jesus would have to come to every planet and die, and that would be messed up.” And then “Okay, but what if the people on other planets never sinned?”
And they speculate in great detail about the composition and environment of the other celestial bodies, and it was a real paradigm shift for my mind because of just how little they were working with. They had to debate questions that never occurred to me because I took the foundational knowledge for granted, like “Could the Sun be inhabited?” They thought that maybe if you viewed the Earth from outside, the outer atmosphere would appear bright like the Sun from a distance, so the Sun might be the same “kind” of celestial body as Earth.
I think we often misrepresent the misconceptions of the past too—the geocentric universe wasn’t accepted just because of the Bible, it was also because we hadn’t cracked chemistry yet and we didn’t know how gravity worked, and our models had to explain why everything seemed to be attracted to the center of the Earth.
And yet, the Earth’s circumference was calculated pretty accurately all the way back in Ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder knew that the Earth was a rotating sphere.
I feel like it’s easy to take modern knowledge for granted and not appreciate how tirelessly inquisitive and clever the people of the past had to be to figure shit out let alone pass the knowledge along
like, chemistry and biology are fundamentally built from things that aren’t directly observable without certain technology that is very difficult to make. We can’t directly observe microorganisms using any of our senses. We can’t directly observe how chemical elements are different. The guys who first cracked important parts of chemistry did so through stuff like evaporating the solids out of gallons and gallons of human piss.
There’s a theory that alien civilizations that can’t observe the stars will never develop science because astronomy is thought to have been important on earth for building the fundamentals of scientific thought. Celestial bodies can be observed and understood using math. Humans had to figure out that there WERE consistencies in how the universe works!
Had a dream that there was a furry subculture revolving entirely around popular cryptids where nobody knew exactly what anybody else’s fursona actually looked like because they exclusively drew themselves blurry and out of focus and/or really far away.
it’s so funny to me that conservatives think the reason university students become more liberal is because of the actual course material and not like. the fact that universities in the US introduce are oftentimes the first place Americans are introduced to a walkable environment with affordable health care, with community spaces for any affiliation under the sun where they give you free resources and cheap food. with included public transit and opportunities for training in your field of choice. and you realize that for how much you’re spending on tuition/taxes, yeah, you do deserve these things, it would be insane not to have those. and then you graduate and go back to having to buy a car to drive 20 minutes to the grocery store.
It’s also one of the first places a lot of people raised in insular, conservative areas meet “the other”. People of other ethnicities and cultures, people of other religions, other gender presentations, sexualities, etc. You get to know them and start realizing how much of what you “knew” about them was myth or straight-up propaganda.
It’s a lot harder to demonize queer people when the person helping you pass calculus is a trans woman, or your lab partner talks about his boyfriend exactly the same way you talk about yours. It’s a lot harder to believe that immigrants are out to get you when your Hindu roommate cheerfully shares a care package of homemade goodies from home, or Malia down the hall covers your lunch because you forgot to bring your wallet to study group. You start rethinking some assumptions when the 6 foot spike-encrusted goth who sits behind you in lecture hall shows everyone photos of his baby niece dressed like a puppy for Halloween with all the pride of a new parent, and you remember when your flannel and camo-wearing uncle did the same thing at work last year with photos of your little sister.
Suddenly all those “others” are just people. They’re your friends, classmates, coworkers, and maybe even romantic interests. And that’s a lot harder to hate or fear.
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
the one trope that never fails to Get Me is normal butch x insane femme
butch whos kind of down to earth and rolls with the punches & femme whos utterly deranged and out to win her man (female). shes like hes the specialest girl ever and if you dont clap for him i’ll blow up this fucking building
like 90% of the responses to this post feature characters who are literally not butch but thats ok i too love projecting on fictional characters and lying to myself
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
People don’t like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn’t be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they’re basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it’s just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like “we’re using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can” and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
中 ✓ EN ✓ FR ✓