Posted by Greg Jensen

https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/live-itadakimas/

Entry syndicated from Bulletin Board Nonsense [feed link]

Postcard credit: Kyuukyoku no Chef wa Oishinbo Papa (Vol. 2, 1989).

Cutout: Ilya Milstein.

Stickers: Taco Bell.

https://belarius.neocities.org/bulletin-board-nonsense/post/live-itadakimas/

Posted by Sortition Social

https://nickyflowers.com/blog/2026/post_042726.html

Entry syndicated from Nicky FloweRSS [feed link]

04/27 - Around my neighborhood // Fujifilm X-S20 // XF16-50mm // Custom Acros recipe, 12800 ISO

_{i am very close to getting over my latest bout of depression, with a dash of being terrified of everything}

_{i have been stewing, and not the yummy kind}

_{tonight, i had a breakthrough:}

_{none of what i worry about will mean anything in 20,000 years (this *is* comforting to me)}

Nicky Flowers - If you are reading this in the year 20,2026: We tried very hard, despite what you may have heard. - 04/27/26 - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

https://nickyflowers.com/blog/2026/post_042726.html

Posted by Sortition Social

https://blog.dante.cool/iconoclasm-the-state-and-payment-processors/

Entry syndicated from videodante [feed link]

This is a bit of a long rambly one. I am not citing my sources which is bad journalism. But if any of this historical stuff interests you I'll recommend a few things at the end. Use this footnote.¹

So probably one of the most important events (really, sequence of events) in Byzantine history is the so-called Byzantine Iconoclasm — a century or so of heated arguments in Byzantine public life and leadership in the mid-700s CE about the correctness of the worship of icons in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

The term "iconoclasm" comes from Greek, which of course at the time was the predominant language of the Eastern Romans. It means something along the lines of "the struggle of the images".

In essence, the argument around iconoclasm was about whether or not Christianity (in the Eastern Orthodox fashion) should or should not allow images of holy/religious/divine figures to stand in for the divine. Obviously, Christianity (along with other of the Abrahamic faiths) cares deeply about the concept of the image, the icon. Early Judaism was able to carve out a unique space for itself in the pantheons of the Eastern Mediterranean in no small part due to its insistence on the primacy of a single god-figure, either as the ruler of all other gods or as the only god, depending on who you ask.

Ultimately, the iconophiles ("image-lovers") won the argument against the iconoclasts ("image-breakers"), but it took about a hundred years for that to happen and plenty of blood spilt (literally and metaphorically).

Obviously, tracing any historical event to a specific cause is a bit of a fool's errand — such is the multifarious nature of existence — but one of the most convincing arguments that I have heard about why iconoclasm happened and why it happened at the specific time that it did is, of course, material: the rise of Islam, and with it the extremely powerful Caliphates of the 600s.

religion in the early medieval

Christianity, unlike the broad Roman polytheistic state religion that preceded it in the empire, was by this era strictly ²monotheistic. It was also an apocalyptic religion, and one that had a… complex relationship with states, and specifically the Roman state.

Christianity had very specific understandings of how power flowed, and it was pretty clear about this: Power came from the heavens — which is to say God — and from God flowed through to the rulers of men, which ruled in accordance with the structure of the heavenly order. Thus, in order to be good rulers of good states, the rulers and the people must be correct Christians, else they risk angering God and dooming their civilization. This is important for later.

The adoption of Christianity by the Romans (West and East) meant that for the first time, Christianity found itself at the head of a major world power. It was no longer strictly the religion of the Mediterranean underclasses, it had real power. The Pontifex Maximus passed from a pagan position to a Christian one, the Roman emperors pledged their Christianness, and the Empire itself changed its practices (slowly, but surely) in the direction of the prevailing Christian ideologies.

The idea of a "unified Christendom" entered the societal horizon — that all of the earth could be united by both State (Roman state) and Religion (Roman Christianity). This would not come to pass in a literal sense, but it remained as a pillar of Christian world understanding through the Medieval and into the Early Modern periods.

The fall of Western Rome threw a wrench in this, but not overwhelmingly so. The apocalyptic nature of the fall is a bit exaggerated in my opinion — you have to remember that the Roman state gaining and losing territory was, by this point in history, extremely well understood. There was no reason to believe that this crisis would be one that served as the death knell for the grand imperium, that had stood for literally longer than any records at the time could tell. The concept of Rome falling was, in the minds of many Romans, as unbelievable as the idea that the sun would simply cease to rise. Sure, it could happen, but that would be ridiculous.

After all, Eastern Rome was the richer, grander, and more populous half by this time. Yes, Rome-the-city was now lost to the Romans, but they had New Rome! And New Rome would always be safe for sure, with its money and Egyptian farmlands and reach into the wild east of Persia. Oh definitely. Nothing bad could ever happen to Constantinople.

the material threat

the mid-600s saw the rise of another Abrahamic faith, Islam. This was seismic. Islam changed the map literally. Islam was so invigorating, led by such charismatic leaders, capturing such swaths of the (mostly Arabian) populace, that Eastern Rome now had to deal with an enemy they had never even considered could happen — an alternative to the Christian ideal of a unified kingdom, led by those who believed themselves to be the successors of the Christian faith.

Islam, led first by the Prophet Muhammed and then by the Umayyad Caliphate, swept through miles of Roman land. Massive losses by the Romans in the late 600s led to decades of leadership upset. Food and coinage suffered. Successive plagues ravaged the land and the people.

While ultimately unsuccessful, the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates both laid siege to Constantinople, a feat generally believed to have been impossible by anyone other than Romans themselves (in their myriad imperial squabbles). Something big had changed.

In the wake, New Rome tried to understand why.

how best to serve God

Contemporary Christian theological understanding of statecraft emphasized that, as God was omnipotent, it followed that any hardships or misfortunes were either caused by or allowed to happen by the will of God. It was a spiritual understanding of the world — decidedly non-material, but groping in the dark at the material. Thus, the question of correct worship was not just a matter of individual salvation, but civilizational survival — a society that failed to worship correctly would find itself without divine protection, open to siege or death or plague.

Innovations in worship thus must be scrutinized, argued for and against, and ultimately adopted or discarded. If discarded practices were still in effect somewhere in the Empire, that was a spiritual threat to the nature of the state and must be destroyed. Heresy, too, was not just a matter of individual salvation — again, the state itself needed to concern itself with the nature of religious practice in order to defend itself.

So in the face of such massive material catastrophes, the question facing New Rome was "how had we sinned?"

The answer, as per Leo III (Leo the Isaurian, then-emperor of Eastern Rome) was that the Byzantine practice of worshipping icons (both as proxies for the divine and sometimes as divine objects in their own right) was incorrect as per Christian doctrine.

Again, I think it is useful to remember that the massively successful Muslim caliphates of the time also claimed to worship the God of Abraham, the same God of the Christians and the Jewish peoples of the region. The massively successful Muslim caliphates also had a strict practice of forbidding images of religious figures, something that ran counter to Byzantine Christian practices.

But the Muslims were winning, and the Byzantines were losing. So something the Byzantines are doing must be angering God. That was the line of reasoning of Leo III, and became the line of reasoning for the iconoclasts broadly.

In order to understand their material circumstance, the highly religious (by our reckoning) Byzantines turned to their understanding of the world, which was deeply Christian. The solution to the material must lie within the spiritual, within the ideological space. The hope of the Byzantines — lacking as they did certain modern understandings of geography, resources, information flow, etc — was that if they could only figure out the exact right way to run their society, their society could be saved without needing to resort to massive material reorganizations. They could avoid upheaval by channeling it into arguments of correctness, of rightness of practice, and of rightness of method to serve.

how best to serve payment processors

crisis begets upheaval. upheaval experienced in the societal level manifests in the social fabric as panic, as a need to understand why and — lacking certain levers of power that could right the metaphorical ship — it often facilitates a turn to the religiously puritan, the regressive, the traditional. Tradition offers a balm in times of panic or upheaval. In some cases, this is quite healthy, in others it is, well, regressive.

in our current moment, the United States is certainly on the precipice of a number of seismic material upheavals. Broadly speaking I would say it is hard to deny that the place that the USA occupied in the postwar, anticommunist world order is slipping away in bits and pieces over time. It's nowhere near an instantaneous collapse by any means, but when you've worn a crown for this long, any small loss of jewels is felt. It begets panic.

We've also been seeing an uptick in what I would call "socially regressive legislative stances". These come in many forms — anti-trans "bathroom bills", anti-porn legislature, age verification laws, ID verification for voting, et cetera. All of these focus on curtailing the spectre of marginalized activity in the mainstream sphere. They are ways to "fix" a material crisis by waging an ideological (or in this case mostly legislative) crusade.

I do not bring this up to say that this is 1:1 to a religious crusade a la our friends in the Byzantine Empire. Many of these efforts have religious elements, yes, and there is a throughline one could draw if you wanted to do so between the Roman Christendom of the early medieval and the American Christendom of the 21st century, but if you ask me that's a bit of leftish wishcasting honestly.

What I do think unites our two empires is the turn inward in moments of crisis by the ruling classes. Iconoclasm, from what we know of it, was a cross-class concern… but it was a ruling class fixation.

Similarly, I think we could say that anti-trans hysteria in the United States is a cross-class concern (though, it manifests most acutely in the Rightist spheres) and a ruling class fixation (across the federally represented American political spectrum more or less). I believe this is a manifestation of elite panic, in so many ways, at the loss of American power on the world stage.

We have moved beyond a belief that God rules every aspect of the natural world, yes, but the traditionalist American state religion (loosely Christian in its elements) still believes in a divine order that we can move toward or move away from — in doing so invoking the wrath of… Economics or whatever.

There is a linkage here. The linkage I think comes in the turning inward, the picking apart of minutiae with little concern for the ways it harms actual people. The empire is being chipped away at and that's causing such an acute panic that it manifests in these purity crusades on the homefront, led by the ruling classes who are broadly uninterested in the material conditions of the working and unemployed classes.

We are not so different than the Eastern Romans in that way. Their ruling classes also saw a concern on the world stage and sought to combat it through ideological means, not through material analysis. I would say you could forgive the Eastern Romans, at least in some ways, due to their less developed understandings of material reality and the world.

The Caliphate didn't win over the Eastern Romans due to their correctness of belief. They won because they had the advantage, materially. The Arabic tribes had been united. The Caliphate had manpower and technology. They knew the geography. They were smart, determined. They had wealth and distributed that wealth to their people and their cities, strengthening the bonds between the people and the state.

For many reasons, the Byzantines of the 600s and 700s simply couldn't compete. Military conquests to retake Italy failed. Egypt was lost. The steppes were engulfed in tumult. The legions were underfed and constantly rebelling, constantly in reorganization.

I don't think the United States has the same excuse as the Romans did, but, like I said before, tradition is attractive to those who need a quick balm in times of crisis. Our rulers too, are turning to a question of faith in a time of crisis. The answer is immaterial. The answer doesn't matter. The question is the wrong question to ask.

I am not the first person to say that it is impossible to fully eradicate queerness or sexuality or immigrants from a society. The best a ruling class can do is marginalize those classes into misery and public invisibility. That must be combatted. The fact these laws, these attempts to corral or eradicate are happening is an attempt to assert a world into existence. It is the trauma response of a dying empire.

nothing ever ends cleanly

The Byzantines survived for something like a thousand years after the Iconoclasm. But, as I think is worth noting, they were effectively in decline the whole time. Small bursts of expansion still occurred, but the power that Rome once had never really returned, in East or West.

It's also notable that the Iconoclasm "failed", in the sense that the spasms toward a spiritual change never really coalesced into anything permanent. Leo was deposed. A bunch of other guys came and went. Constantinople became a hub of religion and trade, as well as intellectual production, and even rallied to something of a new height in the Komnenian era. But still — at that point, it was an Empire of a single city and a few satellites.

The King of Constantinople might call himself an Emperor, but that's mostly ceremonial at a certain point.

I don't like to predict the future, I think it's a waste of time. But you can glean a lot from looking at the material aspects (historical materialism one might say) of the terrain of debate.

Bathroom bills or age verification laws or voter ID or whatever are attempts to gain or regain control by a powerful machine that is chugging along on fumes. It's still dangerous. But don't mistake it for thriving.

---

If you liked this, you might like this post where I talk about the early medieval era, or this one about byzantine great works. You might also be interested in a tabletop game I'm writing about this sort of shit.

As always, you can find me and this post on mastodon, or on the RSS feed for this very website. Thanks for reading. I love you.

1. For Christian studies and early Christianity specifically: Bart Ehrman is a great source, highly recommend How Jesus Became God. I also love Dan McClellan's work and his podcast Data over Dogma. For Byzantium, I am a huge fan of the History of Byzantium Podcast, which is sort of a sequel to the History of Rome podcast. Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Life and Death of a Medieval Empire is also a great read, as is almost anything by Anthony Kaldellis.↩

2. though, if you really want to argue it, arguably it was polytheistic with a heirarchal system that placed YHWH at the top but… look I'm not gonna get into that. That's a whole other story.↩

https://blog.dante.cool/iconoclasm-the-state-and-payment-processors/

Posted by Sortition Social

https://cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev/thematrixrevolutions2003snatcher1994/

Entry syndicated from Cinematic Moments Of All Time [feed link]

https://cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev/thematrixrevolutions2003snatcher1994/

Posted by Sortition Social

https://cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev/therussiansarecomingtherussiansarecoming1966kingoffighters941994/

Entry syndicated from Cinematic Moments Of All Time [feed link]

https://cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev/therussiansarecomingtherussiansarecoming1966kingoffighters941994/

Posted by Flaming_Spork

https://philo.gay/stories/mindcontrol.html

Entry syndicated from FlamingSpork's Website [feed link]

a villainess gets what she always wanted: her long-time nemesis at her mercy in latex (lesbian erotica, 2,600 words)

https://philo.gay/stories/mindcontrol.html

Posted by Sortition Social

https://floral.lgbt/blog/2025-11-03-DomainChange/

Entry syndicated from Razz's Trash [feed link]

PLEASE READ IF USING RSS FEED!

Heya all! I've been using the floral.lgbt domain since 2021. Its been an important thing to me, I've even been using it as my watermark.

I've been using namecheap at the recomendation of people at the time, but unfortunately the price has continued to go up every year exponentially. Back in 2021, it was $15 a year and I had no clue it would continue going up like it has, it's now almost $100.

Despite job hunting since I moved, I've not been very successful and money has gotten tight. Commissions have helped, but I've been struggling to work on them do to the other bajillion projects I'm working on at the moment and hesitate to take more when I already have stuff im my queue thats been waiting a while. Even if I had more commissions to take, it would probably have to go to something more important like food or medication (assuming my medical shit gets figured out, Im currently off my medication since I no longer have insurance and have been struggling Im gonna be honest). I do have an interview I feel pretty confident soon so im holding onto hope for that since I think it would help get my life going in a better direction.

Regardless of if this upcoming interview does well, if the price keeps going up and up and up I dont know if I can justify continuingto pay for it. Especially since I own another domain (deerpa.ws, which I use for my bluesky handle) it really doesnt make sense to own two domains when money is perpetually so tight and it renews around the holidays of all times.

So I may end up change my domain to deerpa.ws since that's what has been resonating more with me now that I'm deer dog thing. Im looking for new options for my domain though and if anyone knows other domain services I could switch to (and also how to switch) let me know! I would like to keep floral.lgbt if possible since I've been using it as my watermark for so long and I would hate for someone malicious to scoop the domain (nightmare scenario). This website has been the hub for me for so long and I feel like the past month I have put so much more work into making it truely mine. It's not like I'd lose it since its on neocities but losing the domain would be tragic.

For peeps using the RSS feed: First off, hi, I really appreciate ya 💜

And secondly, if you're using the RSS link from when I was on cohost you're probably alright! But if you're a more recent subscriber, please use the neocities RSS link instead of the floral.lgbt one! It will redirect to whatever the proper RSS feed link is perfectly fine

AVOID: floral.lgbt/rss.xml

USE: floraltrash.neocities.org/rss.xml

Fingers crossed this doesnt become a shitshow!

★ Razz

https://floral.lgbt/blog/2025-11-03-DomainChange/

Posted by Millennium

https://milliesquilly.com/ive-made-more-things-for-the-jam/

Entry syndicated from Millie Squilly Dot Com [feed link]

No reason I can't make several projects, right?

A more text-heavy thing, I made Ember's Diary, a sort of follow up to my point and click game Ember In The Wilderness.

And a more illustrated and without narrative thing, I drew some drawings.

https://milliesquilly.com/ive-made-more-things-for-the-jam/