We were given an example of a pan of brownies with "just a little bit of poop" in them. It contaminates the whole pan, right? So why would you consume media with "just a little bit of evil" in it?
It's such a limiting, incurious, fearful, exhausting world. I'm so glad to have been able to move on.
Conveniently, anything speaking ill of the government was evil ("Jesus said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.") Anything showing disobedience to parents (so, 80% of 90s media) was evil. And of course, anything that encouraged re-evaluating what was viewed as "good" and "evil" was evil.
Even The Wizard of Oz was on thin ice. Anything that portrayed anything "evil" without expressly decrying them (extra- or pre-marital sex, "deviant behavior," consulting spirits, anything to do with skulls or death or demons, plus a good assortment of "I know it when I see it") was an evil book.
An evil book is anything that might turn you from "God's path." Or anything that reminds someone of something that resembles that. Harry Potter books were ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOWED. ("Did you know their author did research on real witchcraft and put actual spell words in the book?")
Then there are the truly secular books, that don't say anything worthwhile for Christian teaching, but don't contain anything evil. You have to be careful, though: One Encyclopedia Brown book might be fine but in the next he might talk to a fortune teller, which brings us to the third category.
It's only just now occurring to me how strange it is for me to say "one of them" as though everyone understands the categories I was raised to put things in.
There are Christian books, which can be "secular" (non-divinely-inspired) so long as they talk about God or bible stories.
occasion for "research" because she was a youth group leader) it would be treated specially, never stacked in the usual piles, never put on a shelf, always somewhere she could keep an eye on it.
My parents are evangelicals, and each day I have new realizations of how entrenched they are. I can confirm because I have experienced this first-hand. Within that worldview books absolutely can be evil, even hold evil spirits. If my mother had to bring one of them into the house (which she did on
Jennifer 🍄 @JenYetAgain@beige.party in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with. this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US. Feb 9, 2026 at 4:35:18 PM
YES! YES DO IT! Or something like it!!
Last week Friday my wife and I hosted a dinner party to celebrate my name change being official, and we did a little ceremony and I wore a dress and made a veil and did ALL SORTS of bride stuff I didn't get to do the first time around and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!
pointing at @quailnoises.bsky.social and yelling "we're six years behind we gotta catch up!"
Nancy 3/4/26 💅
move slow and repair things
Baba Yaga's mortar and pestle, and the chicken legs that her hut stands on, are usually drawn as oversized. I've long held that it would make as much sense for her to be a few inches tall. Perhaps the same applies for all witches.
😳💖
And this guy knows what he’s talking about!
Richard Dawkins. Steven Pinker. Lawrence Krauss. Jonathan Haidt. Robert Trivers. Prominent atheists and scientists who have pushed anti-trans propaganda for years. They all had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Some received huge research grants and island trips, and all of them benefited from their ties.
I learned many useful things from my time as a scout, like project planning, leading by example, and that reported assault is rarely taken seriously.
In the years since, I've seen a few positive changes, but I think now's a good time for caring parents to build a better third space for their kids.
(I mean… Blanks did ask that 20 minutes before there was an explainer in the comments…)
Feeling like myself for the first time since I was a child is an absolutely wild experience. I really, really hope that it does all the same for you. Good on you for making this step!
I'm not making any guarantees, but HOLY MOLY the difference is incredible. I still worry about that stuff from time to time but they're OCCURRENCES, not a MODE OF BEING. Socializing doesn't drain me and going to some places even feels like it recharges me.
if my voice sounded wrong, if my clothes made me look wrong, if I was standing right, sitting right... just existing in society was so draining that a grocery store trip meant I didn't go anywhere else for a week or two.
Hey- from someone 1.25 years in: it's almost uncanny how much the way you picture yourself in the last panel of that cluster (excessive disruptive shame) looks like what I was dealing with. 75-85% of my time in public spent wondering
Well, not a bad job per se, it's pretty seamless; just using two angles that aren't quiiiite compatible enough.
And even if it isn't truly her thumb bending that way, I feel like it's way more likely to be a bad job compositing photos from two angles. Like, we've been seeing shit like this in ads for decades before generative AI was a thing.
pourin' out a bit more'n one
It’s a damn shame it grew into what it did because if the people working on it had any integrity, we could have some fun little toys.
I feel like a lot of people never saw it back when it was like that, because it was a niche nerdy thing. By the time most people heard of GenAI it was a monster.
If it was consuming the resources that GenAI consumes now, they certainly weren’t talking about it. And it was almost definitely not trained on stolen images (or really very many images at all.) Of course I messed around with it. It was silly.
Yeah. As someone who works in tech I definitely remember a time when it was being shown off as just this silly little side project NVIDIA was doing. They had a demo where you could draw colored boxes and it would make it look like a photo of a building (always the same one, configured differently.)
Ever since I started puberty, I've had recurring dreams of a woman, old and quiet, her frizzy silver hair done up in a bun. She sits behind a desk at an antique store, or a library, or a museum. (The image contains only text.)
...her white tiger asleep by her side. (A woman as described sits at a sturdy antique desk leafing through an oversized book. Behind her, next to an arched open doorway, is a shelf full of varied antiques. Beside her, curled around the corner of the desk, is a large white tiger, eyes closed, head resting on its paws.)
Vases surround her, and polished silver pitchers, and shining glassware. They never reflect my face, though. All I can see is her. (Assorted metal and glass vessels, stacked together, sparkle with light.)
Perhaps one day I'll get a job at an antique store. (An ornate antique mirror, ready to be picked up.)
(6/6) I don't know why the tiger is there. That's just the way the dream goes.
