BEHOLD...

Mare Tranquillitatis, the “Sea of Tranquility” // Niall MacNeill

At the bottom of the image is the landing site of Apollo 11!

little ones

My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.

My mood during winter

Your daily dose of cat memes

Cats on WOOD! Heck yeah! Digital Wooood texture! I'm excited because I am trash at priming surfaces to paint. I tried before on a wood chopping board, then I messed it up!

nah, pornography is inherently bad and harmful, I know you think your logic has no flaws but (and let's keep in mind that you are doing this rant for the solely purpose of justifying sexual books) it's the same logic paedophiles use when justifying fictional loli anime or similar stuff, and I mean the SAME "a book does not have real people" "a teenager is still using their imagination". I haven't spent my teenage years hating on anime watchers to not recognize their stupid logic when I see it.

I’m gonna keep going on the porn v real sex post btw cause I think it very neatly ties into what’s happening with book bans.

Parents of children know their kids are being exposed to sex at exceptionally young ages.

But parents of children also don’t or cannot admit that the way their kids are mainly being exposed is through items in the home: iPhones and iPads, streaming services, even quite explicit music on the radio or Spotify.

No parent wants to have to change something fundamental about their home has been running for years, like replacing smartphones with flip phones or putting time limits on non-homework computer use.

So they turn to the schools and the public libraries as places where teenagers are getting “porn” by banning books like A Court of Thorn and Roses.

But here’s the thing - a book does not have real people being really degraded. A teenager reading a “spicy” novel is still using their imagination even while consuming a book with sex in it. No one was harmed in the making of that book. And unless that teenager is literally finding fairies or whatever to have sex with (lmao), then reading that book at 15 is probably not going to have the same effect on the brain that we’ve been seeing happen to young brains and violent porn consumption.

And I wish it were appropriate to somehow bring this up at a book banning administration meeting without sounding like a crazy person.

Your daughter probably isn’t gonna be ruined by reading Philip Gregory romance novels from the public library. But there’s a very real chance your son might start choking out his first girlfriend during sex from watching violent porn on the smartphone you bought him.