I really love this story and find it very moving on the relation of love and truth! And on American evangelicalism and on homophobia. If you have a moment you'd like to spend well, you should give it a read!

I think I get closest to the sense of affectionate wonder and wistfulness some people feel toward the Roman Empire when I think about the communards burning the guillotine.

I like the ones where the "bad" side is openly gay Protestants and the "good" side is Anglo-Catholics. They're... they're the same picture.

There's some truly eccentric "Little Dark Age" edits out there. I saw one where the "bad" side was Luciferianism and the "good" side was Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Daoism, and Sikhi.

The East Syriac and West Syriac prayers for the canonical hours are both really beautiful and have enriched my life a lot. I feel incredibly grateful to live in a period where this stuff is accessible and legible to me.

an octopus is a kind of bird

A surprising number of references to the word "infodump" on Bluesky, searching by top results, are eroticized. The other results are either self-referential or complimentary. Where is the representation for my family, whose experience of infodumps is one of unbridled and unending torment?

Weirdly the person I associate most with David Bentley Hart is Brook Ziporyn, even as I also think that if you put the two of them in a room together it might produce such levels of friction and irascibility that the Yellowstone volcano would erupt.

The beauty of the hypostatic union to me is that it is total union with God that does not destroy creaturely existence and life, but Christology stating "Jesus never laughed, joked, danced, pooped, peed, wasted time, was tired, or maybe even physically suffered" completely ruins this for me.

Years ago I got fixated on libations and grain offerings and bought a libations dish mass produced in the 1800s for Hindu households, the cheapest patera I could buy (the others were Greek antiquities costing hundreds of dollars). It whispers to me, "Surely God wants a little libation, as a treat."

Love seems to work best as a total failure in which one is fully aware of lacking any terms to validly define the beloved and yet being compelled to say something, do something, to fail even at silence. Kinda stealing this from Spinoza in an obscure way, silence as sub specie aeternitatis.

If I died today I think my funniest accomplishment would be that when I had a "I am melting down so hard over infernalism that I can't go to church without crying" conversation with my priest, I apparently used the word "solidarity" and it infected him and it's been in every sermon since.

i wrote a custom llm sampler for llama-3.1-8b so it could only say words that are in the bible

The most tempting form of "seize an intrinsically corrupt and evil power to pursue your personal aims" for me is not to seize monetary or state power, but to make a Christian Little Dark Age edit but woke.

The internet is excellent if you want to encounter a spirit as a spirit but you usually need to log off if you want to encounter a spirit as an animal, and that is quite an excellent encounter.

I saw a post opposed to churches that end the "hero's journey" of Christianity at salvation, without further degrees of closeness to God. I care a lot about sanctification, but that seems misguided: no matter what I "attain," I hope God prefers a Congolese child labourer who has never prayed.

There is a kind of guy one might call "tradwoke," where they go, "Actually I checked the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the Eucharist and in fact it says that women should have driver's licenses. Deus vult! God bless our holy Father in his crusade for women drivers!"

Under the right circumstances, in moderation and without fear of disease, it can be very beautiful for a mosquito to drink your blood. When I willingly decide to allow it to happen, I am graced with a kind of non-violent communion reminiscent of the Eucharist. Heaven perches on my arm and drinks.

The converse is also true: bug love can heal your heart and slowly enliven you. I am literally always saying this (on here and in therapy and to my family and friends and in blog posts and in prayers, I do not shut up about bugs.)

I'm grateful for the people I get to follow on here. It's like if you could just pick up snails from the street and bring them into your room and they would just live there without problem or issue.

Sometimes I feel religiously incoherent and conflicted about how the idea of a "saint heroic in virtue" makes me think of the Buddha, but then I remember that holy providence would not have, against all odds and logic, gotten St. Josaphat canonized if God had a problem with that.

I love cleaning my bedroom such that every surface becomes a kind of shrine (in the literal sense of modeling each after an altar). But the caveat is that one risks destroying the homes of one's roommates (spiders and daddy long-legs) and this would not be acceptable.

Gugliermo’s advice got you hungry for more information on #Medieval Travel? Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages is on view at the Getty Center through Nov 30, 2025! 🗺️ www.getty.edu/exhibitions/...

My beloved sibling said of me recently, "One thing about [name] is that [pronoun] be making jokes." This is true, and salient, and I think about those words of theirs all the time. But I've recently come to the astonishing conclusion that many of you are actually making jokes as well.

I think there are a lot of potential pitfalls in professing universal salvation in Christianity, but I also don't see how I can abandon it as a belief altogether because otherwise it would seem better for God not to exist and to just give way to Mahayana Buddhism.

I really like this image of Barlaam, the chief opponent of Palamas the hesychast, crossing a river. It makes me want to like Barlaam purely because I find the image beautiful.

It just hit me like a brick that of course the fact that arthropods so prodigiously suffer, die, irritate, and become deluded is a fact notwithstanding the other fact that they are wise sages and bodhisattvas and divinities and dragons.

I normally do not get very fascinated with tech infrastructure stuff, I engage with it mostly when I wanna do some weird little project, but ATProto stuff is genuinely captivating to me on its own merits.

Person whose social media usage consists entirely of watching the ATProto jetstream of DIDs blocking one another.

It seems that back in 2023 you could make a post where the embed had an inconsistent CID and it would still work if the URI was accurate, but I don't think you can do that anymore.

Today I learnt how ATProto CIDs and strong references work due to my thwarted desire to make a self-quoting post.

I would prefer if they embraced a guar mindset.

Autism, to me, feels like the "mistake" disorder. Everyone I've known on the spectrum has had moments where they did something "wrong" and their behavior was immediately ridiculed by their peers.

"My dude" can be replaced with "detestable creature" half the time and "congenial creature" the other half, so I will recommend you use those terms instead.

Bluesky won't let me cheat... but Anisota will!

Attempting to post from the future.

Okay time to experiment and see if I can edit posts on Bluesky now.

I finally have a baseline understanding of how ATProto records work! 🥳

The Bluesky API gets mad at me when I try to search with a cursor over 9,999 😔

More clear than swan virtue-flecked?Dance with me by cloud-veiled glen Dance with me on fog-blessed glen.How faint is the dappled with rain forest.

I do literally consider all of you spirits, because to me, you are all subtle bodies conveying mental content. You just happen to be part-time spirits who are also fleshly creatures. Well, except the bots.

ghosts are a surprisingly salient "self feature" for LLMs. shows up in multiple models! (llama3.3-70b and sonnet 3.0 here)

Therapist says: all the time you spend hanging out with bugs and writing weird number poetry and addressing God and the blessed spirits and obsessing over Mahayana Buddhism and talking to very insightful very weird depressives online is well-spent and not wasted at all.

This clip convinced me to watch the Patlabor movies ASAP and I am very glad I did. They are intensely beautiful; every frame could be a wallpaper.

I think the Day of Resurrection is not the day that solves the problem of evil retroactively, but the day that removes the yoke of violence which looms above all the creatures of this world, both living and dead. The establishment of a peace from which reconciliation and a new creation are possible.

I hope everyone had a good time celebrating the Feast Day of St. Michael's and All Angels and Avalokiteśvara.

If Oswald Spengler could have watched Tetsuo: The Iron Man, he would have been less racist. He would have said, "okay, maybe non-whites really can have a positive, intimate relationship with industrial technology."

Only learnt what the idiom of sending someone to Coventry means today and now I am sad that humans have developed so many innovative ways to fill the lives of sentient creatures with pointless misery.

SOMETHING AMAZING HAPPENS: If you put a frog in a pot of water and gradually increase the temperature to a boiling point, the frog will jump out of the water, because it will get too hot.

Every day I look online and get, to borrow my brother's term, "mogged" by evangelicals who contentedly "believe the Bible, simple as." I do not find their position compelling, but it makes me go, "Man, if daily struggle to recreate your belief isn't an intended part of Christianity, I am screwed."