I am fairly certain that, should my life ever be judged by the gods, these questions will be a hell of a lot more important than my take on how elves in a TV series should look. So, please: let's not extend our culture war into the afterlife. Read more
My father is five years dead, and his death was a great blow. But I recovered from that, and the experience transformed my relationship with all of my ancestors, maybe setting my life on a whole new path. Read more
Netflix's adaption of Neil Gaiman's Sandman is...okay. Good, but not as excellent as it might have been. There are some A+ elements, but there are some things that should have been better, flaws ranging from the aggravating to the disappointing. It averages out to perhaps a B+ Read more
"It's what we owe the past. What we owe those who invented speech, writing, mathematics, music, democracy; our debt to the discoverers of coffee, tea, beer, wine, the lever, electricity. We can't pay them royalties on their discoveries, so we pay them forward, our user's fee for civilization." Read more
Be wild. Disrespect convention. Steal ideas, steal fire from the gods, steal the gods themselves. Because the miraculous thing about these sort of "thefts" is that they don't take anything anyway from anyone. Read more
I think the first time I encountered the word "techno-pagan" was in the late 1990s, in Nancy Lebovitz's calligraphic button catalog. But when I saw that, immediately, I was like, "hey -- that's me!" And it's not just me. Any gathering of Pagan folk is likely to have a disproportionate percentage of STEM folks. Read more
As I was thinking about the new year, the word that came to mind is "shifting". It's a word with several meanings useful to the time: to move; to manage to get along or succeed by one's self; to get along by indirect, expedient, or evasive means; to change; to put something aside and replace it. Read more
Perhaps when we wish each other "Happy Holidays" in recognition of the number of festivals which occur around the Winter Solstice (remember, axial tilt is the reason for the season!), we should include Thirteenth Amendment Day in that list. Read more
Dumped into a riot zone by our pathetic-in-the-inadequate-sense mental health care system, unable to obtain medication that might have helped stabilize him, without even a place to stay the night, perhaps Rosenbaum lost himself in an external chaos matching his inner one. Read more
You can't solve the halting problem, you can't make someone love you, and you can't make those you love do what's best for them. And there is a freedom in knowing this. A sadness too; but in the long run even more sadness -- and anger and guilt -- results when we believe we can do the impossible, and fail. Read more
