hmmm

Man, it's genuinely really cool that I can post something like "hey I wonder why the Quuran does this." And get responses from like eight people who are really passionate about Quranic exegesis.

In old ass times you had to be some noble failson with the spare income to travel to Baghdad for conversations like this. All I have to do is liveblog my dumb ass stumbling through the Quran.

This starts out as a nice gesture, then quickly becomes absolutely ridiculous.

1,024 dice. Man.

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

So, for reasons I may talk about later, I was thinking about my grandma today. She passed away about half a year ago, having outlived two husbands.

At her funeral, there were gifts given: a spoon from her kitchen, and a copy of her macaroni and cheese recipe, codified properly for the first time. It's not a fancy recipe, nor is it complex, but she made it for decades at every family gathering until she couldn't anymore. She was suffering from dementia towards the end; my mom had mentioned it a couple times (though she and my dad divorced over twenty years ago, they're on good terms now and she's still an honorary member of that side of the family), as had my dad.

Thankfully, her kids were well-off enough to pay for at-home care; she lived a few hundred miles away and I regret that I only saw her once after she'd gone on palliative care.

But I did make the trip. I made sure people knew I was coming, and dropped in around lunch time because she was more likely to be awake and alert.

This was really not as successful as I would have liked. One of the first things she managed to get out was asking whether someone had picked up the boxes. She didn't know who brought them, where they came from, were they would have been kept, or who would have picked them up, but she was wondering regardless.

We ended up talking to the caretaker a fair bit. The topic of food came up (a subject I tend to get interested and passionate about), and she mentioned that while she was mexican, she had grown up with the kids descended from the german and czech enclaves and that was really her food. She mentioned sauerkraut, which set my grandmother off: GRANDMA: "I want sauerkraut!" M.A., THE CARETAKER: "I'm making it, grandma, but I don't have it here." G: "Well, go get me some!" M.A.: "I can't do that, grandma, it's at my house." G: "...well why can't I have sauerkraut?"

[repeat several times] M.A.: "I can't go get the sauerkraut because if I leave you alone your daughters will be very angry with me." My grandmother, a small and frail czech woman in her mid-nineties, seemed to accept this, hunkered down with her sandwich, chips, and root beer, and muttered with a soft certainty, "This is bullshit."

(I have related this story to her kids, and some of my cousins, and pretty much all of them just laugh. Grandma was a firecracker who had been actively censoring herself as long as she'd had grandkids to behave herself around, and that was not some cantankerous dementia speaking, it was entirely her.)

After a few hours, we got ready to go. I told her I was getting ready to head to Dallas, and she lit up, beaming. "I've got a son up there!" She said.

"I know." I had to respond. "That's my dad. Would you like me to say hi for you?"

"Oh, that would be lovely."

I wish I'd visited more. But I'm glad that I did at all.

op disabled reblogs so here

Let's irresponsibly breed a dog together!

Share as much as possible that dog gotta be atrocious by the end of the week

kill the shift manager in your brain

sample size of friends too small. what’s the best cookie (rbs appreciated)

i just pointed out in my judaism class that it’s interesting to me that when asked God’s name, God did respond with the ineffable name (the tetragrammaton) but put a much greater emphasis on who they are the God OF (I’m the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, etc.).

and my teacher said she feels a kinship with that because she remembers the joy that came with the first time she was called “(son’s name)’s mom”, and how beautiful it feels be named for who you love. and i almost burst into tears

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

Once more for those in the back.

Important safety information about the eclipse on Monday

You *can* remove the eclipse glasses during totality; not before or after.

If you find yourself falling apart instead of falling in love, turn around, bright eyes.

It is no longer considered best practice to cut the beating heart out of a human chest at the top of a pyramid to bring the sun back; nowadays, they just short out a LUCAS device.

If you are imprisoned by an evil bishop, break out, and look for a hawk and a wolf who are in love.

Most critically - No matter what, do not buy any strange and exotic plants which mysteriously appear during the eclipse.

I want to preface this by saying this is not victim blaming. This not calling people online lazy or grifting or whatever.

But an underlooked proponent on why some people are nearing homeless and crowdfunding heavily rn is bc society has failed you by making it as inconvenient as possible to learn about social systems and programs that already exist to help your situation as well as not having enough programs and aid.

Lemme give some examples. I have been unemployed for 10 months. My mom told me about a paying job training program a month ago after I already decided to mive in with her to find work, because nothing was coming up in my own city. My best friend didn’t know about affordable housing assistance in my state until she talked to my dad about it on a chance encounter. Some people on here have to see posts about much cheaper alternatives to their current prescriptions or medical plans because its not in the interest of their doctors paychecks to tell them about it. I would have waited to get vaccinated and not have crowdfunded for Uber money if I had known they were going to give free vaccine rides the next month. But I wouldn’t have really known this until I opened the app once that program started, because it is in their interest to keep taking my money until its their desired time for me to reap their “generous” services.

What I’m trying to say is that this is an under discussed aspect of how capitalism fails people. When you are forced to make your life and work and finances so singular and self interested, you are cut off from community and equivalent social services to proper government assistance. You literally don’t know that there is help somewhere out there for you unless you’re told.

The Gelatinous Cubes of Highmark

And Surrounding Countryside

The City of Highmark is not only known for its robust trade, well-respected Adventurers' Guild (and, more recently, the Explorers' Union), and being the home of the dragonmarked Houses bearing the Mark of Making, but for its clean streets and high levels of public sanitation.

This is due not only to a well-constructed and -maintained sewer system, but also to the ubiquity of gelatinous cubes in nearly every home, from the poorest shack to the grandest manor. The Temple of Erathis, our beloved Goddess of Civilization, Patron of Bureaucrats and of Highmark itself, is the current administrator of the gelatinous cube trade, and a young cube is often given as a housewarming gift to those setting up their first home.

The first incidences of immature cubes were recorded in the dorm rooms and offices of the Adventurers' Guild, where they were kept first as an unofficial mascot, and their presence soon discovered to keep down both the levels of dust and detritus of city life, and also solved a pernicious bug infestation that the Guild had been battling for several months.

This continued for several years, until the initial cubes were too large to safely share space with, and after a number of methods of cube containment were tested unsuccessfully, city officials had to step in and remove the remaining cubes.

Then followed a period of time where the city experimented with using the cubes within the local sewer systems. This was only a partial success, as while the cubes DID (and continue to) provide excellent sanitation, they were able to eat enough to set up a wild breeding population, which still exists to present day. [1]

Soon after, the Temple of Erathis began to keep their own, mature gelatinous cube for aboveground waste removal, stored within a pit large enough to contain its entire mass, to reduce the cost and danger of retrieving young cubes from the sewer systems. When this also proved advantageous enough to the mature cube to allow it to bud, the newborn cubes (often only an inch in size) were used elsewhere within the temple complex, and soon within other homes and businesses within the city.

Nowadays, the cubes have been carefully bred to reduce their external acidity and make them safer to handle, and many households grow emotionally attached to their cubes, with false eyes and small hats being popular (albeit temporary, given the nature of cubes) decorations.

When a domestic cube is of a size that it cannot remain in a home, owners are encouraged to visit the Temple of Erathis to trade it in for a new, younger cube, and home-cubes over a certain size are punishable by fine. The Temple then sells the adolescent cubes to a variety of local businesses, the most popular of which is a specialized confectioner unique to Highmark itself: the sugared cube seller.

These candymakers take the unwanted cubes and, depending on the quality of the product to be produced, purge the cube with a period of fasting[2] and (optionally) feed the cube items chosen to impart specific flavors, such as fruit, flowers, or herbs. Then, the cube is cut into pieces, rolled in sugar, and allowed to dry. The finished candy is very sour, with a texture that ranges from gummy, to chewy, to quite tough, depending on how it was dried.

These candies are very popular among all levels of the population, with the unflavored and tougher varieties being lower in price, and thus more likely to be found in poorer sections of the city. Visitors to the city are often surprised by its ubiquity, as the candy is often sourer than most non-Highmark residents prefer, and it is a popular inclusion in care packages for those who have moved away.

The Adventurers' Guild was initially suspected of releasing immature cubes into the sewer system, and fined for doing so, but managed to successfully demonstrate in Machel et. al. vs. the Adventurers' Guild of Highmark that the amount of waste produced by the city was more than enough to grow a cube to maturity and budding, and the fine was dropped. This did not stop the Guild from maintaining a regular contract to manage the cube population within the sewer system, culling cubes over a certain size range when encountered, and most sewer maintenance teams employ at least one former adventurer for this reason. The early establishment of the cube population within the sewers also means that they display wild-type traits such as the presence of pseudopod limbs, and are therefore more dangerous than the domestic cubes bred within the temple complexes.

Local bylaws state that all cubes must be purged in this fashion in order meet safety requirements for humanoid consumption, but unscrupulous manufacturers have been known to shorten or even skip this waiting period, with the worst among them poaching wild cubes from within the sewer system to further reduce overhead.