Whether we wanted it or not...

Just a reminder that if you are someone who wants to eat Girl Scout Cookies, and you don't have local Girl Scouts to buy them from, and you are realising you can just go online and get them from the Internet, Troop 6000 is...

"...a first-of-its-kind program designed to serve families living in temporary housing in the New York City shelter system.

"Each week, Girl Scouts meet in shelters across the city to take part in activities that help them make new friends, earn badges, and learn to see themselves as leaders. All fees, uniforms, trips, and program materials are provided at no cost.

"As a permanent fixture of the program, we also established the Troop 6000 Transition Initiative, which supports Girl Scouts and their families as they transition to permanent housing. The average stay for a family in a city shelter is 18 months. Remaining connected to the community and opportunities introduced to them through Troop 6000 can help facilitate a successful transition for girls and young people, and it is essential they continue to receive the financial support that allows them to do so."

Click on the link to learn about it and order cookies.

GSA troops can also act as a safe haven for kids coming from stressful or abusive households, and provide an after school activity for latch key kids, structure for kids who have turbulent home lives, and social connections for kids who don't otherwise have comfortable interactions with their school peers.

The GSA helped my low income troop go horseback riding, do gymnastics, go to Great America on Girl Scout day, do a weekend science camp at a marsh where we got to learn about conservation, and experience life the way the local tribe lived before colonization. I was able to go to a specially picked summer camp filled with experiences I wasn't going to be able to have otherwise; I made paper, candles, learned water safety/rescue and first aid, learned to canoe, build fires, identify plants.

Our troop leaders even made sure we got life skills like house keeping, home repairs, sewing, and home safety (what to do when someone got into our home, a lock out happened, an injury, or a fire broke out). They taught us money management with our cookie sales, showing us with our troop bank account how to balance a check book and keep track of money in the days before online banking. They also arranged for us to learn sex ed, reproductive science, birth control and pregnancy options, and different forms of period care from actual gynecologists and other doctors, when it was clear our local schools weren't going to teach us properly. You know, lessons that are hard to find in public school.

So if you have a local troop, support them, as well, if you can. Those experiences can be life changing, and/or life saving.

This beast of a spreadsheet is finally done and all cleaned up and organized!! Here is the public copy of my current Eliksni lexicon. These words are the most current versions and any seen in older posts are no longer accurate. Please consult this document when you need a word!

Parts of speech are broken up into separate sheets that can be navigated using the bar on the bottom of the page. Verbs marked with an asterisk are exceptions to the -is dropping rule.

Light vs Darkness is slowly revealed to be more like potential vs anti-potential. Light is about hope, possibility, and complexity, which means it sometimes risks fucking up and making things worse because a chance to do the right thing is also a chance to do the wrong thing. Like handing out power completely at random via the Ghosts leads to a lot of people abusing that power, but it's all in the hopes that enough of them will choose good to make a difference. Light is good and evil and order and chaos and everything everywhere all at once.

Meanwhile Darkness is all about simplification. It cuts off choices, resolves itself to an inevitable conclusion. It rejects dichotomies like good and evil or order and chaos as just confusing and complicated distractions that get in the way of reaching an end result that can't be averted anyway. When Oryx and his sisters make their deal with the darkness, the worms' price is that they must always obey their nature; Oryx must always explore, Xivu Arath must always fight, Savathun must always scheme. Even at the height of their power and cruelty, the one thing that most unsettled Oryx and Savathun was the possibility that they might have been able to choose differently, because that means they could have chosen wrong.

And there's so many little moments that reinforce the importance of this:

Elsie saying "A side should always be taken, even if it's the wrong one" because it's the choice itself that matters. Light is making a choice, Darkness is resigning yourself to it.

Shin asking "Are you a hero or are you a conqueror? One can harness the other, but the opposite is not true" because Darkness is all about denying possibility, it has to eliminate the Light and achieve dominance, whereas Light has the option of coexisting.

Mara's name and Sjur acknowledging that her actions "allowed the possibility of evil" and "might be responsible for more preventable suffering than anything that has ever existed" and then immediately noting all the good it did and that she cared.

It's like the more the characters question the Light, the more that they allow for shades of grey and enemies to become friends, and the more they prove that goodness comes from themselves and the choices they make rather than an external power - instead of that moving them away from the Light, it draws them closer to the philosophy it represents.

Instead of trying to flip right and wrong and ending up with the same thing but the colors are switched, Destiny does the hard work of actually answering why something is right or wrong and why it actually matters. They take this abstract conflict and connect it to feelings and questions that people have all the time, like "Does it matter if I do the right thing, even when it doesn't change anything?" and "Am I responsible for consequences outside of my control?"