kiya

I should probably do something about that.

Today in splorts: so I have been slowly increasing the number of blaseball-related accounts I follow to make a higher density of my twitter feed composed of eldritch fanart generation content, and at some point I got a message from one of the ones I followed saaying "my manager wanted me to say em hotep to you in this the smallest of worlds", which gave me a certain amount of "...?" so I mentioned it to ardaniel, an eldritch being of certain superpowers, who tracked down a tweet from that account's player that said, more or less, "Bwahaha the indie Kemetic who was a huge influence on me when I started out is now following my blaseball RP account."

I shall have to make some of my art be of that character just because, which should be fun because fanonically she is a four-armed silvery serpentine vampire dragon with an obsession with tea and theft. (Okay, to be fair the vampirism and larceny are canon, not fanon.)

I also managed some support of another behind-the-scenes player in the fanbase, because blaseball cares, and he successfully tagged in the TransCrowdFund so I hope that helps him out more than I could on my own.

Today in religious education: it was our first session of ChUUrchcraft. We had a zoom meeting and then combined it with logging into the server for 100% glorious chaos. First of all, the older kids who are helping run this program had gotten in and planted a bunch of flowers that apparently eat CPU and lining every path they made over a 150x230 block zone meant that every so often someone would actually interact with a plant and the server would fall over. Once the problem was debugged, L (the kid who had caused the problem) logged in solo to fix it, to general razzing.

Then we split up into groups. Now, I am the one instructor with actual Minecraft experience of note. Of the other adults, one is the server guy who has some experience, but on his son's account; one is the other adult in that family; one is an engineer who bought an account to help out but had to have WASD navigation explained to him, let alone all of the everything that is Minecraft. By the end of the session, when he examined his measley row of blocks and compared it to the mosque team, he first asked if copy-paste was possible, and then ordered the team lead K to get her own account because he was not going to flail around at this nonsense alone, another adult needed to be in here to be laughed at by the 10-to-13-year-olds, she wasn't going to get out of being embarrassed so easily.

The kids were having a great time. Some of the kids who were having a great time were having a productive time - the mosque team got a really nice looking building shell started. KJ and I were working on a Hindu temple and I found some reference material for us to run with. Most of the rest of the kids wound up congregating around the Christianity district. They built probably eight or so different Pride flags outside the fence and then, rather than build outlines, proceeded to dig through to the bottom of the world and out the other side, and occasionally plummeted to their deaths while cackling gloriously about their portal to hell. (And teasing Q, one of the kids, about how do you manage to die in creative.)

A good time was had by all.

KJ has just reached an important moment in a young paganish person's life: adding "Lughnasadh" to her computer's spellcheck.

It is the time of the end of February traditionally known as "many packages for Kiya" because of the conversion of birthday money into books and occasional artifacts.

Which occasionally leads to me declaring that I am currently playing the part of whispercricket, who is the usual recipient of Many Package.

Today's many package was, I thought, interesting:

A copy of Stations of the Sun by Hutton;
a "nevertheless, she persisted" t-shirt;
the annual report from my church, with little welcome package of notes.


Meanwhile, in semi-unrelated things, I am poking at a questionnaire from church for a little getting to know you thing that one of the other new members is organising, and trying to figure out how I want to answer "If you could invite any real or mythological religious figure to give a sermon, who would it be and why?"

Um.

I, um, may have sent jenett a sequence of, like, a half-dozen one-line emails squeeing about various things I've figured out how to do with a wiki....

ardaniel: Hakwyw sounds like the forgotten archer god of the Kemetic Welsh

Yesterday, whispercricket and I went to the mall to do various errands and get out of the house a little. We sat down on a wall near the "we buy gold" booth to eat some pretzels with the kids.

One of the people at the "we buy gold" booth I thought might be a guy who was at the "we buy gold" booth in the mall near the old house, and when he started chatting about how much he hated his job because it was basically to take advantage of people in desperate circumstances, and how he got into trouble occasionally giving people more money for their gold than the company would prefer, I was increasingly convinced.

So I watched him closely. He was keeping his arms crossed as he complained - I think he's lonely in addition to having moral qualms about his means of employment. Eventually he moved them and I spotted what I'd noticed when we'd spoken before - a tattoo on his arm of a stylised UU chalice.

"Ha, we spoke at Burlington before. You gave her a balloon," I said, indicating KJ. "I recognise your ink."

"Oh, are you UUs?" he asked.

whispercricket said "She is."

He commented that he had been on break from the seminary he was studying at, and now it's closed down and he wasn't sure what to do. I said, "Oh, my sister's at Starr King."

"Yeah? Starr King is amazing. My mother went to Starr King. And while I take her as a role model - and her spirit continues to guide me - I just. They say you have to kiss the feet of her statue to get into Starr King and I ... need to have my own life...."

So I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm a UU from childhood like he is, rather than, y'know, referring to the sister I adopted a few years ago. ;)

One small three-ring binder, of an appropriate size to be held open comfortably in one hand, colour: white.

Section dividers.

A template file for printing on paper appropriately scaled for said binder.

An assortment of prayers and ritual notes largely taken from the Pyramid Texts, along with the prayers to Nut that luellon posted to the Cauldron a while back, formatted into the template file for said binder.

A file of notes with more texts to look up.

A solution is possible, and went back to sleep.

I was following a link from lupabitch to this post about gender issues at this year's PantheaCon and found a link to this post about mystic reconstructionism. I'm beginning to suspect I may wake up the blogging again as a result of all this crap.

More attempts to comb out my brain, meanwhile. This will be written through the haze of horrific headache, so please bear with me if you want to bother reading it at all.

Brief context summary: in ancient times, most mystery traditions were private offshoots of ordinary religious practice, undertaken by the particularly devoted to that set of stuff, the particularly interested, or whatever else. They existed in the context of a surrounding culture that took their raw assumptions as a given and provided what amounts to specialist knowledge.
( So let's run with that. )

Side note: KJ's eighteen-month checkup went spendidly, she is a healthy and mighty babe. I am not healthy right now, but I have been stabbed gently in the chest, throat, head, wrists, and feet, and seem to be not coughing anymore? Also I have tea.

So, jenett posted a questionnaire thing to her blog, and I read through it and was full of "Wow, a paganism religious questionnaire that doesn't suck horribly" and the sudden thought that I didn't know how to answer it anymore, because I'm in the middle of an intense period of religious turmoil. Which is, on one level, okay, and on other levels very upsetting.

I am answering the questionnaire as best as I can in order to see if I can sort my head out, because filing things neatly is good for thinkybrain and makes it stop panicking quite so much. Thinkybrain is full of panic.

( So the thing. )