Just Because You Can’t Understand Something, It Doesn’t Mean It’s Wrong.

does anyone know what i came in here to post

SQUIDTEMBER 2024 STARTS NOW!

It's finally #Squidtember!! We have so much coming your way this month.

Together with OceanX & ALCES, we've created a whole MONTH of squid education programming.

We're hosting a competition for the best 🦑!

We'll have art prompts and weekly quizzes on OceanX's social media!

The Squid Zine is OUT! 

Squid biologists from the USA to Spain to New Zealand will be hyping squid all month. It's going to be great. Can't wait to celebrate with all of you.

Follow along with all of the content with this delightful calendar, featuring illustrations by Meg Mindlin!

And of COURSE we have squid merch that supports our program, designed by Philly designer Corey Danks. Thank you for helping us decide which design to use!!

Corey designed shirts highlighting the dangers of deep sea mining, and a very weird very delightful bumper sticker highlighting one of my all-time favorite squid, Magnapinna!

Get 'em both here!

As always, shirts and bumper stickers support science education nonprofit Skype a Scientist! Host of the squid facts hotline, and many many other free programs for science education!

Why do you hate straight people

heres my paypal

i’ll answer your question when i recieve payment :) thank you so much!

A new myth. A myth is not meant to be accurate history, but to tell a story that conveys a deeper spiritual truth. Stories are powerful.

This myth is the over-arcing story of Genesis to Jesus.

I'm not trying to save you or anything. And I don't think God is waiting for us somewhere else. God is always with us, walking with you and me and every other person through time and never turns away. But home is where the heart is. And God wants us to come home to the heart of God where there is Love, kindness, justice, generosity, Creation, the poor, the oppressed, etc. The things God loves and cares about.

I don't even really want you to believe the truths within the story. I just want you to consider the possibility and see if it resonates for you with history, our experiences, scripture, and who we know God to be as revealed in Jesus. You need to wrestle with this angel and make it make sense to you. Especially if you can't understand. The less you understand the more I beg you to listen again and sit with it.

You might hear a bit of anger or derision especially in the first few minutes. I'm not angry or derisive towards you or Christians in general or Jews at all. Any anger or derision towards people/powers towards those much, much higher up the food chain than you or anyone you know (probably).

As I tell the story, I am using lots of voice inflections to tell the story and that include sometimes a sing-song or sarcastic tone. The tone of the story is never to make fun of the reader or Christians. It's never to say that I'm smarter than anybody or put people down or anything like that.

The purpose of the incredulous voice inflections is occasionally to draw your attention to a joke, but usually it is to highlight the absurdity of the story we were given. The absurdity of the theology we were given. And the absurdity of the judgmental, autocratic, 1-strike picture of God we were given.

I really don't want to convince you of anything. If you have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and understanding, you'll probably be able to recognize the messages in here.

Rather than looking to confirm or reject the ideas you are expecting to find, please just consider. These are brand new ideas (for you anyway) using old pictures and familiar stories. But they are not the same ideas or messages. I'm telling a different story.

See how it is different.

Consider what's different about this story & consider a few of these as you go:

-what is different from the original stories we were given (as you know them)

-what is different about the meaning

-is it more or less likely to be true than your present understanding of things, given all we know?

-Does it resonate with who we know God, humanity, creation, & the World to be?

-Does it seem truer in meaningful ways?

-Does it somehow misrepresent God or Truth?

-Does it encourage more things of God?

-Does it more things of the World?

-What do you think of the Paul and Philemon story?

Going through older videos I found this from years ago and thought it may interest you.

This was taken at a tide pool at Bar Beach on the east coast of Australia.

I spotted something in here that didn’t quite look like a rock and it turned out to be this little octopus.

The animal was very curious and interactive and would reach out for my finger so I could pull it through the water.

It felt like it was playing a game with me and this process of holding my finger and getting pulled through the water then darting back repeated for quite some time and it was more me who ended the interaction as couldn’t stick around at the beach much longer.

At no point in the interaction did I hold its tentacle myself so it being pulled by me was entirely of its own decision as if it wanted to it could let go at any time.

I still think about it now and wonder if it tried playing this game with others who got close enough.

This was my first hands on interaction with an octopus and what surprised me was just how gentle and precise it was with its tentacle arm when it reached for and held my finger.

I feel so lucky to have been in just the right place at the right time to have gotten to experience this and I definitely understand how people who have these experiences with octopus say it’s like a bond you can’t quite describe forms between you and it.

————————————

This is incredible and I love this octopus so much

"Look at this video of a child disappointed at their expensive gift! Children are so spoiled these days!"

That's cool. So, why did their parents upload their small child being upset online? In a public video, shared to the entire video? Why did they even save the recording?

Like. The kid in that scenario could be saying the most entitled nonsense in the world, and if their parents post it online to be publicly shamed, I'd still support the kid 100%. Thinking your child's life is a toy to exploit freely for #content is "spoiled"; when faced with mommy vlogers, kids should be demanding three PS5s and a new Bugatti, and we should be applauding them for it

Email to my first year students about the career assessment the university forced on them:

A little over half of you have not taken the assessment yet and you are making the presenter on Monday nervous. Please finish your SII Assessment before the Monday class so you can have it to look at during the class.

To help you find it: on 1/10/24 the link to the Strong Interest Inventory was emailed to all [redacted] students with the subject "SII Assessment,”  sent by [redacted].

A note on the results you will get:

These results tell you about yourself now. You are not carved in stone and you will not be the same person (at least in several important ways) as you are today. The career you choose, the work you do, and the life you live will all change you and you will change and adapt to live and thrive in those places as best you can. In some places, your personality will still be stressed no matter how much you adapt. There are parts of you that won't change. The person I became in the past few years to do life in the way I do today is not the same person I was when I was happily chasing mosquitoes around and helping run our restaurant back in early 2000's. Or the person I had to be to thrive in a research lab a few years ago.

The main point is that this assessment tells you about yourself now, but not who you will become or what kind of job you must work to be happy and fulfilled. 

You will adapt, improvise, and overcome. Use the assessment to learn about yourself. Maybe you do want some career ideas. Maybe you just want to see which directions you want to grow in based on what you already know you want to do. You realize you don't spring forth from your mother's womb ready to be a nurse, doctor, or research scientist. Or father, mother, spouse, or whatever. You suck at those things in the beginning and learn to do them better. And your personality grows and changes to meet your new challenge.

Our ability to adapt and find unexpected solutions are the keys to human success. (along with being highly social and always having community/help)

If you have dreams and desires that don't line up with what the assessment says, or life goes sideways on you and you end up driving a taxi, understand that for most situations you will change and adapt and learn to become amazing and happy in that new situation. Even if it has a rough beginning.

So take it all with a grain of salt and treat it as a tool, not an oracle.

Peace,

Yours Truly

My personal take that that makes the most sense to me anyway, in light of all we know of history, scripture, context, God, and empires is this:

The Beast from the Sea is the representation of an empire's mix of Oppression/Colonialism/Capitalism

The Dragon-tounged Beast that tells the world to worship the first beast is the Empire's religion.

====================

Here's why:

For John of Patmos, that religion was a dragon in his future.

For us, we can look back upon the emergence of the Dragon-like Beast. We see an empire worshiping religion that twisted a beautiful, liberating story. Enslaving all the world to the Empire Beast and forcing them to worship the Empire Beast and approve or even join in on it's exploitation and oppression.

A dragon-like beast that eventually got reformed a bit here and there to become one of the most pervasive world religions today.

Forms of that reformed religion of empires and oppression are practiced all over this world. A more or less reformed religion also practiced with varying levels of reformation in America that most of us now just call "Christianity".

I wonder how reformed our dragons are.

Did I just make the hardest starwars shirt of all time???