Excited about getting more involved in my local area now that I've settled in.

Writing my weird book also makes me happy, even though it is a grotesque nightmare teehee.

Optimistic about the human spirit lately. It is hard to articulate why.

Hey my local catholics are awesome anarchists; they rule also! They do a ton of excellent, concrete work for local people, provide food and housing etc etc.

Leftist catholics aren't super common, especially because of the various communist purges the church went through and the nature of the institution, but they do exist. in some areas there's some cool syncretic liberation theology stuff happening.

ex catholic, many feelings about this sorry.

Francis is in and of himself a complicated figure of course. He did a lot of good for sure and I feel he was one of the better people to be leading the church. I like him a lot and he has a kind of really cool background. Dude was a chemical lab technician for a while, from Latin America, actually lived reasonably non-extravagantly and cared about the poor. Despite memes, his last appearance was NOT the JD vance castigation, but calling for a Gaza ceasefire. The whole "trans people are nuclear weapons" and "letting the abuse scandal fester" bits sucked though but every pope would do this also.

Overall I don't see things getting markedly better with his death. Some people hold out hope for a radical vatican 3 that makes it ok to be gay and stops calling trans people evil and lets women finally receive one of the even sacraments they've been barred from (fuck you timothy and your stupid fucking epistle). Vatican 3 will not happen, though. Vatican 2 was already so controversial it sparked a huge sedevacantist movement and the church is still struggling to actually institute all of it.

Overall I'd say we can look to the history of the church a bit for a picture of what a "moderate" pope looks like with fascism on the rise: Pius XII. Fascism was sweeping europe and killing millions, Pius was content to lightly complain about Germany and focus on excommunicating all communists from the church lol. There's a lot of controversy surrounding him and he was a mixed sort of figure, who did some good! But I hate his guts so you get the very biased version.

The church is very content to work alongside fascist movements. Naziism just went a bit too far for them, but spain's fascism was entirely compatible and theologically sound. If you look into the theology of this stuff you find the church is very very comfortable with totalitarianism, as you might expect.

As a whole I don't expect huge changes even if one of the insane evil guys gets it. Despite everything most Catholics barely practice the faith and are effectively Protestant lol. I've seen my own family flirt with sedevacantism because they're much too far right for Francis.

As with most things it's really down to local concerns. The person's church and diocese is going to provide the biggest influence on them and a changing pope doesn't necessarily change the local conditions a lot.

alternatively next guy starts the childrens crusade 2

but genuinely, if it's another cool guy I will permit myself a Liberalism and pop open a bottle of something nice and celebrate. like it's still a death cult but it's MY death cult and I still feel nice when my death cult guy says something epic

plants tasty :)

I have an electric gooseneck kettle made of stainless steel. It lacks branding and my mom got it for me so I don't know the model really. I like it because it has a lot of discrete temperature settings (I am particular about this) and it looks pretty

I appreciate that vintage story is just, like, minecraft modders' maniacal hubris given form. Absolutely wild to me. Also the nightmarish player models are hilarious I love them.

Terrafirmacraft remains among my very favorite minecraft mods. It is kinda like if that game was just a mod. It also has multiple different independently developed forks for different versions of the game, hilariously

There is something about the "minecraft but everything takes 3000 more steps" concept that drives developers to madness and genius and divine terror. I love it

Happy birthday and merry postjust

I usually like to toss the tofu in a bit of salt and msg, prebake it in convection oven til its lightly browned and slightly crisp, then toss them into the stir fry before I add the sauce!

You can use cornstarch and stuff for more of a coating, but I dont normally feel the need. It's a fun treat if you're craving that crispy fried texture though

Good luck with the tofu!!! It's one of my favorite foods :)

beaming you some through the psionic mass mind.....

Thank you!! That's a good question! There's really not too many Qs, sadly.

There was a 2022 paper proposing three candidate phyla including Qinglongiota. They seem to be a big fan of oxygen poor environments and sediment!

Mesorhizobium qingshengii is a bacteria associated with milkvetch root nodule, which is cool! Those symbiotic relations are awesome. Everyone says its this cool thing plants can do, because our society suffers from serious metazoan bias, but ALL nitrogen fixation [that we know of] comes from bacteria. Some plants just form these symbioses.

Broadly, there's the concept of Quorum Sensing, which is a huge topic but basically accounts for a ton of the cool stuff bacteria do. Basically they can switch up gene expression based on the proportion of various chemicals in the environment. It is insane and awesome.

I was looking up Q related microbes (that sounds like a horrible conspiracy theory thing oops) and was able to find something tangential — queen bees have a really cool microbiome distinct from other bees!

There's also the queen hypotheses. The "Red Queen" one is general biology, basically just claims evolution is an arms race even if one remains static. Black queen is microbe specific and focuses on why certain traits are lost — basically, bacteria are wont to offload labor they don't need to perform. It's adaptive!

Arthrospira platensis, commonly known as spirulina, can take on discrete morphologies depending on environmental conditions: helical as the name implies but also linear! theyre shapechanging out here

Aureispira is a predatory bacterium which uses a heptameric "grappling hook" to catch prey and reel itself in then shotgun blast them to death with a type 6 secretion system

Actinosynnema can grow insane branching fractal mycelial hyphae-like synemata structures in agar medium and into the air. they found that guy in New Jersey!

ok those are 3 interesting bacteria whose names start with 'A' that I can think of rn

consider also a spear, for those hard to reach places

Long ago I made a d666 table for various fluids to be found in d&d style alchemy jugs. I will roll on this table to determine what fluids I get. Please excuse me for being a fluid anarchist at time of making the table

Pinky: Heavy Cream

Ring: Olive Oil (hell yeah yhell yeah hell yeahfgh)

Middle: Carbonated water (HELL YEAHGFH)

Index: Oil Paint

Thumb: Molten Silver

Being nice to random strangers is very fun to me. The drivers on my bus route always seem really happy to see me since I am always saying good day and thank you and suchlike. Some have checked in on me after I was gone for a long while.

I should talk more to my neighbors, we've never done proper introductions or anything. I've only seen a few of them since moving in.

My partner and their family got nearly their whole neighborhood in on a mutual aid thing which is so nice. Been doing it for decades now.

I wonder how I ever lived without "torment chrysalis" in my vocabulary.

just as mycoplasma survive with not cell walls nor peptidoglycan, deprivation has made you stronger. you are presumably highly resistant to antibiotics.

The big question is where is this fiction available?

I have system agnostic ttrpg stuff published in a small magazine!

Been working on a novel, though I write very slowly! but steadily — went into a dwarf fortress style fey mood over it. no idea where it'll end up, but it's a bit too grotesque for the current spec-fic zeitgeist, I figure. might try finding an agent when its finished, but i dont want money, just to subject more people to my gross art :D

I did not see this til just now thank you!!! This is super helpful as a guideline! Super kind of you to take the time to demonstrate this, seems pretty straightforward now :)

happy wednesday, postfriend