What to know about covid (in less than 2 minutes)

my synagogue was set on fire last night during Shabbat at 3:00 AM in an arsonist attack.

no one was injured, which i am extremely grateful for. they have several security cameras, so there is a suspect in custody. the details and motivation haven't been shared, but it can be reasonably assumed to be a hate crime.

this was the first synagogue established in the state, the only one that's not hours away, and certainly the largest in the area. two Torah scrolls are destroyed beyond repair, 5 are damaged. the library where children have religious school and morning Shabbat service is held has been completely burnt down, much of that section of the building that's left is covered in soot and ash. the administrative offices were also lost.

our Tree of Life, which was for important life events like bar/bat/b'nei mitzvahs, was destroyed. i was just looking at it this past Tuesday while waiting for a meeting with my rabbi. it was dozens of bronze plaques in the shape of leaves with commemorations on them placed above a trunk. there is a photo of the wreckage that makes me cry every time i look at it.

we have a rescued scroll from Nazi-era Czechoslovakia (it is thankfully unharmed). we have a Holocaust memorial garden. we have names of dead loved ones displayed. memories in and on the walls. there are so many deeply meaningful and largely irreplaceable things here.

my rabbi was out of state for the last several days. i cannot imagine how he's feeling.

im fucking pissed at the police department. they said that they would patrol the grounds more often in light of the worldwide rise in antisemitism. I have not personally seen them once. they let the only area for our community to gather be set on fire.

i am exhausted. i am angry. i am thankful it is not any worse, because it easily could have been, but tonight i am grieving that little library full of vintage Jewish books.

The same Synogogue was also bombed in 1967. This is the best article I could find so far this soon after the fire.

yes, this is my synagogue. Beth Israel Congregation was firebombed by the KKK in 1967 along with the rabbi's house because he was an outspoken supporter of civil rights for Black Americans.

here are some photos of the aftermath of the most recent fire:

I have been asked about fundraising, so I will be providing a link to donations.

Please help us rebuild if you can.

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hi sweetie do you want brushed too?

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how it all feels lately

Bald ist Fasching. Der Leberkäskrapfen lauert schon um die Ecke. Er beobachtet. Er wartet.

Ja, natürlich. Mein Fehler.....

@brandybradyrandyandyndy

Bruder?

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

Hair and make-up test for War and Peace (1956)

© Christie’s

Things a Serious Egyptologist shouldn’t laugh about:

Plus many more! 

I made this post over a decade ago! These are all still true!

It’s unfortunately just a form a Ra! Those are all Ra actually! No I don’t know why! Sometimes Horus is a very long snake! Egyptian religion is a confusing thing I tend to steer clear of at the complex level (because it’s not my specialism) but I do enjoy the chaos.

#so if you were writing porn in hieroglyphs #would you use the normal penis sign for most of the text #and then the “issuing fluid” one once that person is coming?

Nope! Most words used to write phallus have the D53 (‘issuing fluid’) rather than D52 (the regular phallus sign) as does the word semen (also the word poison). Even the word for 'to copulate’ has D53 rather than D52. (The letter/number combo relates to the designation in Gardiner’s Sign List for Hieroglyphs. I’m using it because unicode on a desktop HATES the phallic signs being used on their own, it just blocks them. Also people can look these signs up using it if they want)

This is because the penis issuing fluid sign is what’s known as a determinative. That is an Egyptological term for the sign that comes at the end of a Middle (or Old/Late depending on language stage) Egyptian word that acts as a categorisation sign. It isn’t read as part of the word, but does tell the reader 'this sign has something to do with X’. So for things like animals or birds, they’ll often use either the exact animal/bird they’re talking about or they’ll use the cowhide sign (F27) as just a general 'this is an animal’ signifier. As a fun fact, the word for bat uses a bird determinative because 'it’s a flying animal’.

In the case here, they’re using D53 because all the words relate to a scenario in which the D53 would be issuing fluid. It’s simply a categorisation of the words. D52, on the other hand, gets used in words like 'man’, 'donkey’, (things with dicks effectively) and even words such as 'examination’ (because that one does have a phonetic sound 'mt’ (the word is 'smtr’) so it appears there). Similarly, D53 appears outside sexual context in words such as the preposition m-bAH 'in front of’ but still relates to the sign because uhh…what’s in front of a man?

TL;DR: it won’t look how you think it will and I’ve spent so much time entering synonyms for 'sex’ and 'ejeculation’ into the online Middle Egyptian dictionary to get the right words to show up that it’s probably going to flag on their systems.

Roommate wanted to share her recipe for her "high cake" for when she gets munchies: Oreos, brownie mix, cookie mix, layered in a pie pan. Cookie mix at the bottom, Oreos in the middle, brownie mix on top.

I figured it was already a thing and I am happy it's called slutty brownies.

I want snakebites so bad it's actually a need

buy a snake ig???

the lip piercing???

i hate the idea that you can be "too woke" i hate the idea that you can be "too progressive" i hate the idea that making progressive /"woke" ideas & initiatives more practical or morally nuanced & effective is making it "less" progressive in some way. i hate the framing of "wokeness" as something that (if it should be allowed to exist) can only be enacted in careful measurements. i hate the idea that wanting to polish & improve a progressive or radical idea or plan is about dragging it back to the center of the fucking horseshoe & not about getting closer and closer to a world where it is the status quo. andy sorkin when i fucking get you

#I’ve been incrementally explaining to the older generation of adults in my life (mainly dad)#that change only comes moderately when we push for the extremes#without the people who are ‘too progressive’ we can’t have meaningful changes#bc people who disagree will always try to pull back on it. and say ‘let’s compromise let’s compromise’#(I left out the bit where I believe we should stop compromising bc we’re still warming up to that)#it’s like haggling at the market. you might want to buy that shirt a vendor is selling for $70 but you think is only worth $50#but you don’t outright say ‘I want that for $50’#you say ‘how about $30?’#and the vendor will say ‘well I can’t do $30 but maybe I can drop it to $65’#and you say ‘well $65 is a lot why not $35?’#and then you go around and around until you reach a price that you deem reasonable#while I don’t fully agree with this stance it at least got my dad around to agreeing that ‘too woke’ politics are still important#and he even was like ‘hm well the conservatives do this too. Trump will say or do something crazy’#‘and then the rest of the republicans will say ‘here we can cut out the craziest bits but we need to keep the rest of it’ and then politics#slowly slide to the right and suddenly you find yourself#in a right leaning political landscape’ and I’m like yeah! exactly!#I am veeeeeery slowly leading my family further left lmao#(they already were fairly liberal but in the more moderate average democrat kind of way tbh)#(I remember my dad took me to Hillary rallies in ‘08)

yes!! all of this!!! my own father is unfortunately slightly further left (voted for Harris 2024 but didn't want any of his friends to know kinda libertarian)

i don't know if this will help but personally my problem with centrism is that it's so shortsighted. to get all democratic confederalist, its anti-civic. the difference between conservatism and progrressivism is the answer to the question "do you want things to change?: do you want things to go back/stay the same, or go forward? and change is inevitable so acting like change must be avoided is ridiculous and designed to fail. change that pretends it isn't change is fascism.

there's Seagull Mischief afoot....

irl Creature btw

You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?

So it was with this desktop greenhouse.

I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.

I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.

I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.

I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…

Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.

I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.

This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.

I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.

Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.

In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…

I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.

Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.

who’s been here since 2011-2014?

hey.