Garry Landreth, Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship

new heresy that makes the bible way funnier:

god genuinely had no idea that people would be able to disobey him, when he made them. angels couldn’t! everything in the universe was just an extension or a reflection of god himself, operating in perfect mechanical order. then he put a spark of his own creative consciousness in an animal and it turned out it could disobey him.

like, that’s why he told adam and eve not to access a perfectly accessible tree. nothing else in the universe up until that point would have done something he told them not to.

that’s why he asks cain a perfectly ridiculous question, given that he would have watched the murder happen right in front of him: where is your brother? what did you do to him? he didn’t know cain could lie. even when adam and eve disobeyed him, surprising absolutely everyone involved, they hadn’t figured out lying yet. cain figured out lying.

that’s why god decides to destroy humans and start over only a few centuries later. he has no idea what to do. not only are people disobeying and lying to him, they’ve started completely ignoring him, too. he can control the wind, the water, the plants, the animals, the angels, the heavens, the earth. but he cut a part of himself loose and gave it to this totally unique new critter and now he can’t get it back. he can’t make anyone do anything, and now they know it. he had to carve humanity back down to the one family that actually, for whatever reason, still listened to him, and he had to ride them pretty fucking hard from that point onward to make sure they didn’t just….. stop. because at any point basically any human, ever, even the ones who liked him, could just randomly decide to fuck off and do their own thing.

then like, according to christians, god thought maybe he could get a handle on whatever the fuck was going on with how bad humans were being by making another human who had even more god in him than all the other humans, and that didn’t work either. and also even jesus himself didn’t know what humans were going to do next, which was kill him young. like, god had to break the news to him based on an educated guess, and it was a big surprise to him! he was really upset! there’s a whole scene!

like, i think this is hands down the funniest fucking thing to conclude about god ever. he didn’t know it was going to turn out like this when he started and he didn’t know what to do when it did. he’s been basically scrambling to stay on top of the situation for six thousand years and he’s totally beefed it repeatedly.

god the omnipotent lord of creation knows everything, except what you’re going to do next. god the supreme ruler of the universe can do anything, except stop you. you have a little piece of god inside you and it lets you defy the most fundamental machinery of existence basically whenever you like.

if that’s not funny, i don’t know what is.

@roach-works’ original tags are too good to lose

more good tags from the heretical community:

Tamarian but its memes

In terms of like, Please For The Love Of God Get Hobbies That Aren’t Scrolling Through An App For Six Hours A Day, I understand and experience completely the argument of like. with the stressors of modern work, you don’t have the energy at the end of the day to do anything but mindlessly watch Netflix and scroll through your phone. but like I would like to gently encourage you to simply force yourself for a time to do something instead of pick up your phone, bc the phone is literally designed to light up your brain with no effort from you whatsoever and it does in fact rot your brain. It makes literally anything but scrolling on your phone seem difficult and joyless. But if you stop scrolling on your phone all the time, and start like, reading or embroidering or gardening or going for walks, you will eventually find the joy in them once more

I understand and it is true that it is hard to have a life outside work and scrolling but there is not a near future where that won’t be the case and you should still live a life. And you won’t create a future where that isn’t the case if you don’t have the confidence and experience and drive to fight for it

sometimes im like “tone down the Self to fit in” and other times, the voice of God comes to me in a dream and says “I didn’t make you crazy for no reason”

As long as there is love, there will be grief.

— Heidi Priebe

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

listen. its 2:00 am and i have to talk about this. i think that, in horror, particularly in supernatural horror, the biggest, most scary, most dread inducing thing that can happen to a character is not, in fact, death. it is an unspecified, horrific dread fate that exists only in ambiguity. i like to call this fate Death 2. Death 2 is the scariest thing that can happen to a person. even if none of us can outline what it is, we’re all, for the most part, in agreement that it’s out there, and that we’re very afraid of it. nobody knows what it is, it will never be defined, but what is important is that a ghost, or a demon, or a guy who looks at you, what’s important is those things likely have the power to do it to you. the key, the absolute key to keeping supernatural horror effective is to never, ever eliminate the possibility of Death 2 as an outcome. the moment you reveal too much lore about your monster’s intentions or methods, whether it’s by establishing the rules of their haunting too clearly, or giving them the opportunity to clearly communicate their goals (through a seance or ouija board, for example), or merely by raising the curtain a little too much, you have eliminated Death 2. Now the worst that can happen to the characters gets established as being death, or possession, or pain, and that’s just never going to be as scary as whatever Death 2 is. If you wanted to watch a fun horror movie where the tension was in whether or not people were going to get killed, you could watch something like Alien, or Friday the 13th, or Us. If there’s ghosts or demons involved though, and that’s what ends up happening, it’s like, why did I bother coming here, I could have had way more fun watching a slasher romp if I wanted this kind of horror, because a slasher romp knows what it’s doing and how to use narrative tools to make “what if a guy was coming to kill me” an actually effective plot. you have to preserve ambiguity with ghost stories. with entity stories. you gotta. you have to preserve the possibility of Death 2.

this doesn’t mean people can’t be killed, it just means that you should try to avoid creating a situation where death seems like limit of what can happen. you need it (Death 2).

Op this is fascinating but I don’t quite understand, do you mean like purgatory or like those scenes where a character gets dragged offscreen and disappears

I’m talking less about a specific thing that happens onscreen and more about the shapeless anxiety that exists in our mind when we are prevented with a horrific entity or situation and are left in the dark about what it could do to us. Take this simple scenario, for example: a woman walks past the second floor landing at night, and looks down her stairs into the darkness below. She sees, at the foot of the stairs, a tall figure staring up at her with the big, starry, glass-black eyes of a sea creature, it’s head vibrating in an unnatural way, as if viewed through a camera held in shaky hands. The sense of fear and dread we feel as an audience to such an encounter in horror is not a fear based in “oh no, it’s going to kill her”, its based in “oh no, it’s going to get her”, and that’s a very different thing. it’s based in a terror at a nameless, formless fate that only exists in those moments where the intention of the haunting is not fully defined. That’s the fear of Death 2. If the story went on to show her eaten by the creature, or possessed by the creature, or went on to establish rules for how and why the creature wants to attack people, it would eliminate that terrifying uncertainty.

I feel like the Grudge accomplished this very well when the woman in the hotel is dragged into her bed by the ghost. No trace, no explanation, but still depicted.

—

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.

(via nostalgicfuturity)

if you want to revitalize your relationship with tumblr just abandon it and go be exclusively on twitter for a year and that year is 2020. like choosing to shut yourself in a dark box scrambling your own brain with a cobbler's awl for 18 hours a day. nightmare slide projector of apocalyptic "news" flickering unstoppably past your eyeballs until your blood is so thick with stress hormones that you're essentially circulating pure meth, and the resulting derangement makes you think it is your Responsibility To Post because of Awareness. not here, baby! i love to scroll for an hour and see nothing but gifs from obscure early-'00s luca marinelli movies. oh, sure, you apparently can't put the word "butt" in the tags anymore, but that's barely a blip on the radar of ridiculous social media platform choices. this is the garden of fucking eden to me now

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson

— Total Liberation

—

Chris Hedges (via azspot)

Reading this whole article was like a slap in the face. Brutal yet not lacking in any truth about the current reality of “America’s Death March.” 

(via artemisiasea)

a recap of all the features they announced they will be adding into minecraft during minecraft live because this update will be huge:

(1/?)

caves will esentially generate differently from now on. they will be adding biomes to caves, along with set water levels

mountains will generate more realistically, and have a tree line. It was not pictured but they are also adding the snowier snow, or powder snow. the block will look identical to normal snow but you will fall through the block.

The lush caves are a cave biome featuring new plants and mobs:

glow berries- a light source and is also edible

spore blossom- a giant pink flower that sticks to the ceiling and emits particles

dripleaf plant- a large plant with leaves that you can walk on. if you stand on the leaves too long they start to bend, and you slide off.

azaleas- flower bushes, i am not sure which features they have as i dont remember them mentioning it

this cave biome has giant stalagmites and stalactites. they fall when the block they are on is broken and entities die when they land on them.

amethyst geodes spawn in caves. they are very rare (?) and the purple block they grow on is un-obtainable in survival much like an animal spawner. the chrystals make a pretty chime like sound when you walk on them.

(2/?)

copper is a new ore that can be found in veins. the blocks oxidize over time when left out. you can also craft telescopes with copper.

these are the main new mobs they announced in minecraft live besides the glow squid

wardens- hostile mobs that roam around in caves. i presume that they track you based off of vibrations (?) they are also very powerful. wardens can kill a player in full netherite armour in two hits i think they're extremely overpowered)

axolotls- found in lush cave ponds. they can be put in a bucket. i think you can also tame them in some way? but i am not sure. they attack elder guardians.

goats- they spawn in mountain biomes. they can jump really high and also butt into entities and players.

this is a new redstone feature actually! this entity detects vibrations and emits a redstone signal. the vibrations they detect can be limited or muted by placing wool around the skulk. this can also be used for "wireless redstone". i am pretty sure its because they emit a vibration or strengthen it, so they can pass them on to other skulks in a chain reaction.

(3/3) (i did not realize the formating in the original post was fucked up oops)

this is like a little bag that can stack different kinds of items in one slot in your inventory, they introduced it to help keep inventories clean. i am assuming they have similar mechanics to shulker boxes bc it shows them moving the bundles into chests etc.

you use a brush to find little pottery shards. they are very fragile and break if you arent careful. the shards can be arranged onto a clay pot and then fired.

lastly, this was not an announced feature but i noticed it was in the preview for the warden. it appears that they made candles are place-able light source in game which i think looks really cool :D

This update will be released summer 2021. A lot of the features like the clay pots are still in development and as usual im assuming theres probably more features they will not announce until around the time the update will be released.

Joy Harjo, ‘Perhaps the World Ends Here’

Renowned Feminist Philosopher Judith Butler Tears Transphobic Feminism Apart

Judith Butler says that J.K.Rowling and the transphobic TERFs do not speak for feminism at large.

If you haven’t heard about Judith Butler before, here is a short summary: She is one of the most important gender theorists in modern times.  

When right wing extremists despair about postmodern gender theory, she is probably one of the thinkers they are referring to (not that they have ever read her). 

She has shown how social structures, language,  the stories we tell and the roles we play strengthen the oppression and marginalization of women. In other words: For her gender is definitely a cultural and social phenomenon, and because of that she is on a collision course with the so-called “gender critical feminists” (TERFs) who want to reduce gender to biological sex.

I strongly recommend that you read the recent New Statement interview with Butler, where she addresses the thinking and the tactics of TERFs in very clear terms. The interview is behind a paywall, but you should be able to access a couple of articles for free.

Still – in case you are locked out – here are some important excerpts.

She refuses to think of transphobic TERFs as mainstream feminists.

She dismisses J.K. Rowling’s idea that allowing people to identify as they want will be a threat to women in women’s bathrooms.

She dismisses the idea that the term “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF)  is a slur.

She does not accept the idea that the term gender can be defined once and for all, for example in reference to biology.

She also says:

So there you have it: One of our leading feminist philosophers are comparing TERFs to the transphobic extremists of the right. And she is right to do so.

It is important to stress this: TERFs are not representative of feminism. They represent a toxic fringe movement that at this point in time does more to help right wing misogynists than women. 

Photo: Adorno Preis

Did this really happen? Im googling this and I dont see a peep about this

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-town-hall-abc-news-please-stop-question-interruption-b450091.html?amp

She said,

“Please stop and let me finish my question, sir.”

Y'all really need to stop assigning Black women such aggressive traits. She’s a PhD educated Black woman with a pre-existing condition trying to find answers about the President’s plans for copays, disabilities, and the new healthcare system he plans to put in place.

Do not overshadow her well-intentioned questions with clickbaity stereotypical falsehoods for the sake of likes.

I won’t have it.

@white allies: because i see constant self-deprecation based on your whitness, here’s a detailed explanation of why it’s not helping us (or you).

if you continously go on about how horrible white people are, you may rot your own brain into thinking that these shortcomings are a natural state of being rather than a manufactured supremacist system which is simultaneously widespread, evil, and capable of being dismantled. 

recognizing that you have the same human compassion capabilities as everyone else, regardless of how alienated from them you have become, is the first step toward becoming a better person capabable of helping other people (of color).

don’t mirror the way that PoC talk about you as an oppressor class. the context is different, and the mindset that you develop from it is different.

don’t fall into a mindset where you (act as if you) are a morally compromised being for being white. the ultimate end of antiracism is to denaturalize racial hegemony, including virtuous moralization of the “oppressed”

evaluating your engagement in racism & the benefits you receive from white supremacy is only one piece of this process. the other piece is interacting with other people (of color) as if they are indeed the same species as you.

so instead of demoralizing yourself, look at your actions to determine if they are compassionate. academic stuff aside, this is often a good litmus test for racism; even the unintentional you will soon realize was often a failure to conceptualize how your actions would affect others- not a failure by some innate aspect of your race but by the normalized lack of consideration whiteness may afford you

Link to OP’s ko-fi, where it takes literally about 5 seconds to leave a $3 (or more) tip ❤️

every time a new Star War movie or show is announced all the fans are like “OMG Glup Shitto is back 😭😭😭”