Geektastic!

& specifically i find it very interesting that realizing that penises were likely spiritually important did not automatically translate to gender inequality. like the assumption we tend to make is that Good Feminist Spirituality (tm) in a society where women are empowered will feature a lot of vulvas and menstruation and birth in the spirituality, whereas Bad Patriarchal Spirituality (tm) is very into the penis as a symbol of dominating conquering power and women can't access it.

but there's actually evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük viewed the penis as spiritually potent, while also not seeing that potency as exclusive to those born with penises:

On the basis of research in twentieth-century Papua New Guinea, Strathern proposes a non-Western concept of the person as “dividual” rather than individual: an entity at once more partial and more expansive than the modernist monad, and constituted through multiple heterogeneous incorporations rather than existing as a unitary essence. This notion can help us make sense of the sex of the Çatalhöyük body, especially if we concentrate on its parts. Consider the penis. Meskell identified a number of the ceramic and stone figurines at Çatalhöyük as “phallic” – but she notes that these small objects are surprisingly ambiguous. Some are simultaneously male and female: when rotated, a penis and testicles become breasts or buttocks. This visual punning suggests an attitude that emphasizes the mutability, not the fixity, of bodily sex. The little penises are usually pierced for wearing; they are detached body parts that can be attached to any kind of body, male or female, adult or child. Detachability of body parts and substances is key to Strathern’s theory, since it indicates a body that is partible rather than unitary. The detachable penis, like the bucrania [bovine skulls], does not inevitably serve as a metonym for a whole gendered person, for masculinity as an abstraction, or for “phallic” power. Instead, elements of maleness and femaleness may be intrinsically partible, inhering in the products of men’s and women’s labor, as well as in manufactured body parts. These detachable gendered objects and substances can be exchanged, ingested, incorporated, expelled, discarded, or temporarily held by “dividual” persons. The idea of the body as partible is immensely helpful in understanding Çatalhöyük attitudes toward skeletons. Just as a female child might make and wear a clay penis, so too living persons at Çatalhöyük handled the bones of the dead.

(from "The Hau of the House" by Mary J. Weismantel in Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society edited by Ian Hodder)

Reminder that Anne Rice was always fierce.

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

@thatlittleegyptologist

(Relatedly, 2.5 x 8 is a weird aspect ratio to fit text to, especially when it wants three line breaks for readability.)

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now