(☆) Kit's Den (☆)

Cis folk being asked to do one nice thing for trans people beyond tweeting "trans rights" or something

Reblog for a large sample size!

[Transcript:

He’s just always been really chill. Like, even when he was a tiny tiny little baby he was just always sprawled out on our laps.

And when i finally like, got him- because he was one of my friends cat’s kittens- and when I finally got him, I started swaddling him in one of my old baby blankets.

And I found that he really really liked the pressure, and just having things all around him… So I found my old onesie and put it on him and… yeah! He absolutely fucking loves it. /End Transcript.]

If you like frogs. Or possums. Or cool builds. Or happiness. This is the video for you.

Hot take maybe, but uh, there's a level of cultural wiccanism in a lot of magic and occult spaces, where people who aren't wiccan, don't identify as wiccan, and never expressly sought out wiccan materials are saying magic requires specific things, that are tied to wicca, not magic et al. I honestly think this is because of the fact that wicca is really the only even remotely positive pop culture portrayal of magic and modern witchcraft that we see, and that it has saturated publishing as well

I think you're onto a good overall point, but I really don't think calling it "Cultural Wicca" is appropriate.

I imagine it's derived from how we talk about "Cultural Christianity" and I can see how they look very similar on their face, but cultural christianity is a very different issue with a much broader reach and deeper impact than Wicca. Christianity has been a dominating world force for centuries and is heavily embedded into many different cultures across the globe for generations. It permeates into things you wouldn't consider even remotely related to religious/spiritual practice. It bleeds into the political system. It's something marginalized traditions continually have to fight against on a broad scale in order to combat our own erasure and assimilation.

The occult and witchcraft communities are a subculture at most. Wicca is less than a century old and the overwhelming majority of Wiccans today were not raised Wiccan. Even if you didn't deliberately seek out Wicca, you almost certainly deliberately sought out discussions and information about witchcraft and the occult. Wiccanized conversations about How To Magic have little to no impact on marginalized people as a broader group, especially outside of those spaces.

Wicca isn't a full-fledged culture. It's a movement or a subgroup that is overrepresented within a larger subgroup. If you stepped away from the occult or decided you were done with "all religion," you'd probably shed most of your Wiccan influences very quickly since they are usually only directly-applicable to spiritual practice, but the Christian influences often permeate so deep that 90% of people don't even realize they're not just "the way things are." There is a huge, important difference between these two issues.

Yes we need to talk about how Wicca is overrepresented in these discussions but I beg that we don't coin it "Cultural Wicca." It seriously undermines and minimizes the issues Jewish folks and others have been working hard to try and call attention to.

TL;DR - GO BACK AND READ IT BECAUSE IT MATTERS.

There are a lot of Wiccan fingerprints on the cultural landscape of modern witchcraft and earth-centered pagan spirituality. But Wicca itself is neither old enough nor pervasive enough to be a culture in and of itself.

Noticeable Influence From One Particular Subgroup is not the same as Cultural Saturation.

it bothers me that Kansas and Arkansas are not pronounced the same

I’m from the UK and I have been pronouncing Arkansas as Ar-Kansas my whole life

For all my non-american friends, Arkansas is pronounced ark-an-saw

WHAT

WHAT

Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth. 

Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents. 

Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.

The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.

This is one of the nerdiest posts I’ve made on this site; why does it have notes? I love you. What the fuck.

We tumblr users are like a flock of magpies. We see shiny we inspect shiny then we take the shiny with us. Telling us about ancient shiny things is the best thing you could ever do to boost your post into heavens, just like the shiny thing we are carrying in our beaks right now.

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!

reminder that when you start getting angry online, go offline. i know lots of people know this already but lots don’t and plenty others need a reminder. there’s a lot of stuff online meant to make you mad. there’s a lot of people who get off on making you mad. there are people out there so convinced of their own beliefs that there’s no point trying to discuss with them. blacklist tags, block people, scroll away, and sometimes, take a breath and step back. hate-scrolling is so easy to fall into but you might not realise how much it’s affecting you until it’s too late

Hey folks, friendly reminder that reality shifting:

I keep meaning to do a shifting episode of the podcast.

Fuck I need to rip into this.

People have been cursing and baneful magic-ing since ancient times.

Sometimes, messy problems require messy solutions. Get over it.

Sometimes curses just level the playing field.

I'm just gonna go ahead and say it.

Y'all need to stop comparing Wicca to Christianity.

Stop claiming that a pagan religion that's not even a full century old has the same level of influence or the same cultural and historical impact as one that has existed for more than two thousand years, spending a good deal of that time as the official faith of multiple countries.

Stop transferring your issues with cultural Christianity onto a pagan religion that, until very recently, was the ONLY pagan religion publicly and legally recognized as a religion at all, and which laid the groundwork for ALL of the positive perception and freedom of practice that we enjoy as witches today.

Stop pretending that religions and people don't change and that problematic foundations automatically mean problematic followers. If that were true, there's not a single one of us that would escape being tarred with that brush. ALL of us have been problematic at some point. The point is not to Never Ever Be Problematic At All; it's to abjure what is most egregious (racism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia, etc) and to correct and improve the parts of yourself that need it in an ongoing process. Purity culture is poison and it will destroy us all.

If you really want to get away from the "problematic" ideas connected with the origins of Wicca and the widespread presence of Wiccan ideas extent within the modern witchcraft community, stop going on about unbroken lines and secret goddess cults and the Burning Times, and start examining and decolonizing your own ideas and practices.

Learn to identify the difference between Wiccan ideas and New Age ones. Yes, there is a difference and yes, it matters. And learn your history. We would not be where we are without Wicca. The modern witchcraft community simply would not exist.

fhsksvjags seeing people saying that the 'cryptids' of Europe are harmless and I'm 👁👄👁 are we talking about the same Europe

people on tiktok are trying so hard to convince u the fae are harmless but that's Victorian Propaganda and I stand by that

I'm sorry, they're saying the Fair Folk are WHAT NOW?

Actually, I deleted my last reblog, because @seananmcguire made this cross my dash and she's great at making fairies properly grim in fiction, so I wanted to do this justice. But folks may not know, Fairies have a socio-historical reality, even beyond folk-belief or supernatural experience. So you know what, let's cite some 15th Century English history and politics here. This is from Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, by Dr Francis Young.

"However as well as being painted as sorcerers by propaganda, rebels might also play up to the idea that they were in league with supernatural forces. In 1451, a hundred men 'in riotous manner and arrayed for war' broke into the duke of Buckingham's deer park at Penhurst 'covered with long beards and painted on their faces with black charcoal calling themseves servants of the queen of the fairies" Would that be done if said queen was 'harmless'???? Nope. Whether or not they actually believed that, fairies were powerful enough to be evoked as a threat to the stability of the aristocracy - literally the folks who ran the country. From the same book: "Allegations also circulated that Henry VI's son, Prince Edward, was a fairy changeling." That's not a good thing, folks.

A long meme, but something that should be said

Pencils also shed graphite something you don’t want floating in a cabin with electronics

That’s a long way to say NASA spent millions of dollars of tax payer money on bullshit because space doesn’t exist

I’m glad there’s people like this around here. Makes me feel grounded and sane.

NASA didn’t actually spend any money on it’s development, the Fisher company covered all R&D costs on their own

When Europeans discuss America:

As an American, it so SO FUCKING REFRESHING to hear our problems talked about like this. Hearing someone acknowledge how little fucking power the American people have in our system.

You can blame America as a whole for a LOT of things, and I'm not saying her citizens are blameless in that by any means, but we are very, VERY much victims in this equation as well.

He's right.

He's absolutely 100% hand to Gd right.

And that's a very sad and scary thing to admit, as an American. I can understand why some people would see this and immediately scoff and insist that they have a voice and everything is fine.

It's not true, but I understand it. It's a comforting lie. It's believing that your teddy bear can protect you from the monsters in the closet, meanwhile there are cops in schools to criminalize the children they won't protect. The monsters aren't in the closet.

Part of living in a democracy is confronting reality and then doing something about it.

This time of year is always very nostalgic for me bc I used to be the Token Gentile at an office and every few months there'd be a Jewish holiday and my friend would be like "Hey, I need you to do Gentile things for us" and I'd be like hell yes dude. Gentile Things often meant I'd sign things in exchange for a few dollars on venmo but Pesach was a special time for me because it meant everyone gave me boxes of pasta, cereal, and other baked goods. The first time my friends were like "Hey for reasons we won't bother getting into we're going to give you all of our bread" I was like, it is a powerful responsibility but as an Ally I cannot refuse. Best time of the year, frankly

Reminds me of the year I spent in a house with a Muslim housemate, and he ate nothing during the day throughout Ramadan - then of course he would be hungry af and buy a fuckload of food as soon as he got off work in the evening. Around midnight, he’d realize he just couldn’t eat everything he’d bought on his own, and come knock at my door to ask if I felt like having dinner again.

I always felt like having dinner again. 

I misread that as ‘Tolkien Gentile’ and felt let-down by the post.

On the contrary, it feels very Tolkien for people with unfamiliar customs to show up and give you a bunch of their food with barely an explanation. Like a reverse of the opening of The Hobbit where the dwarves show up and eat all Bilbo's seed cake, or something.

Shabbes Goy, son of Glóin

:-)

anon I need more information. what the fresh hell are you talking about

fear.png

how do you think I feel??

i think one of the things that gets missed by the people who really don’t like my romanticizing adulthood post is that it’s not a passive “oh magical things happen to you as an adult” sort of deal 

it’s a “this is my one and only life, and i’m going to milk it for all it’s worth” sort of deal 

it’s a defiant “i didn’t actually think i’d make it this far” sort of deal 

i’m not trying to say, “oh just think positive and everything will be fine” because that’s not true, but we are what we practice, and i think it’s important to consciously practice joy and appreciation and treating my life like it’s special because it is. 

there are days that fucking suck being a grown up, but going, “joy is fleeting and misery is the norm” does nothing but make you (and the people around you) miserable. i am way more happy than i EVER was a kid or teenanger, and a big part of that is doing special things like buying myself a cup of dippin’ dots just because i can or deciding last minute that i want to go on an “adventure” (even if that’s just walking around a secondhand store i’ve never been to before) and recognizing that these are gifts i’m giving myself because i deserve to live a life i’m in love with. 

— Vincent Van Gogh

Why is dealing with Apple such a fucking chore all the time?

"This is my boss's old computer. She was leasing it. She has a new computer. I am returning this one."

"Okay, you want me to send it in for recycle."

"If that is what you do with old leased computers, then yes."

He fusses around with the computer

"Did you do data migration?"

"Yes. We just want to send this one back."

"And she wants to lease a new computer?"

"We are already leasing a new computer. We want to send this one back."

"Hold on let me get the manager."

He takes the computer with him.

He comes back.

"It looks like this is the old one."

"...yes."

"We need the new one if you want to start a lease."

"We have the new one. This is the old one. I just want to send it back."

"Okay we just need her email to check the leasing information."

I put in the email.

"It looks like that email is not associated with her apple id. Do you have a receipt of the data migration?"

"They told me when I did the data migration that I just needed to bring the computer and nothing else."

"We need something to link the account to the new one."

"Its already linked. We just need to take th ed old one back."

"Do you have anything that might link the apple id?"

I log into her computer and pull up the email regarding her leasing agreement.

"This looks like a business account."

"Yes. It is my boss's computer."

"I'll need to get the business accounts manager before we go forward."

He goes and gets him. I'm starting to become skeptical of the phrase 'genius bar.'

Business manager gets here. Tries to soften the process with a joke, but it feels empty.

"I see you're trying to turn in an old computer."

"This is my boss's computer. She was leasing this computer. She is now leasing a newer model. We would like to send this one back."

"Do you have the serial number of the new computer?"

"I was not told that I needed that."

"Can you call her and get it?"

"Shes out of town and doesnt have her computer with her."

"Let me get the person in charge of your account."

He goes to get him.

There are now three men staring at my boss's computer.

"Do you have the apple id?"

"No."

"Login and I'll show you how to find the apple id."

I log in.

He points.

"This is where youd find your serial number."

"For this computer. Yes. But I need it for the new computer."

"This is the old computer?"

"This is the old computer."

"Do you have the serial number for the new computer?"

Now very frustrated. Now questioning how smart the technology actually is.

"No."

"We need the new computer serial number."

"I dont have that. My boss isnt near her computer to find it. So I cant do this until she gets back from Cleveland?"

"Well maybe she can tell it to you."

"Shes in Cleveland. Her computer is in Reynoldsburg. She cannot give it to me. I'm just gonna leave now."

I went to the apple store today with the intent to return it because I now have the serial number and the appropriate email and phone number and I'm prepared to tell whatever lies I need to tell to get it out of my hands.

I speak to a manager.

"This was a lease with our business plan?"

"Yes. This lease ended. Its wrapped up. The new lease has started with the new computer, its wrapped up. I just need to hand it in."

"Let me get a business associate."

There are no business associates today. He returns.

"We cant take it back for you. Your leases with CIT. They can send you a free shipping box to send it back. I dont know why they said they could take it back and I dont know why they asked for the serial number."

So after that, I still have the computer.

I'm about to scream so loud my pronouns are gonna be ban/shee.

Listen that sounds all ridiculously exhausting and I feel your pain but the sentence > I'm about to scream so loud my pronouns are gonna be ban/shee. is a *work of art* and also hilarious enough I should not have read it with my mouth full of noodles.