Fake Name

When I was 20 and at peak reddit atheist, I decided joining a religion was rational because there were empirical, measurable benefits of membership. I walked into a synagogue for the first time and it happened to be Rosh Hashanah. It was so beautiful and I couldn't stop crying. I autistically obsessed over Judaism every day after that. Every day I learned more and every day I fell more in love. Notably, you do not actually have to believe in God in Judaism- you just gotta follow the commandments Turns out the reason foe that is because they work whether you believe them or not

From a simple idea, to an early tech demo, and now a fully fledged launch on April 16... Here is a look back at how far MOUSE: P.I. For Hire has come 🥹

We have spent billions studying teenagers in captivity and building treatments for behaviors caused by the captivity itself. Consider the orca at SeaWorld. In captivity, orcas display aggression and dysfunction. A naive researcher studying only captive orcas might conclude that these behaviors are inherent to the species. We know better. Wild orcas are intelligent, social creatures who suffer profoundly from confinement. The pathological behaviors we observe in captivity tell us nothing about the orca's nature and everything about the harm of captivity. The same logic applies to studying adolescents. When researchers study teenagers exclusively in school settings, they observe anxiety, depression, defiance, disengagement, and peer cruelty. They might conclude these are inherent features of adolescence. Hormonal inevitabilities. Modern cultural problems. This conclusion mistakes the cage for the creature. Imagine if, for the past hundred years, we had spent tens of billions of dollars studying orcas exclusively at SeaWorld. Elaborate medications and treatments would be designed to reduce the extent to which those orcas bit the walls of their cages. We would never think to question whether the cage itself was the problem. That is what we have done with children. People today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools. When you put young people in environments with agency, meaningful work, and genuine community, the dysfunction disappears. The problem is not the teenager. It is the tank.

This is how you should treat all of gods creatures btw

you don't owe anybody anything! Anyway completely unrelated to that does anyone know why my life feels meaningless and unfulfilling

Culture is what we make, not what we buy

My last two games flopped, and I was down to my last dollar. But I didn't quit. Today, I’m finally hitting 'Release' on my 3rd commercial game, Idle Gumball Machine. It’s chaotic, it’s satisfying, and it’s finally live. Retweet to help a solo dev out? 🥺👇(link in comment)

The problem is, you think you have time.

@spacepunk That's why you start metta by loving yourself, right?

Indras net strikes again

@spacepunk Right? My mind was fucking blown when I realized Bereshit => In the head.

Forever gobsmacked by the layers upon layers of cosmological knowledge hidden in the first couple of verses of Genesis

The Christian female reaction to the wife post from what I have seen thus far has been “your wife was probably a wh0re too!” Really selling the whole Christian wife and family thing. I could not invent a worse pitch for a faith or lifestyle in a lab.

Few (unless you're Jewish ofc) know this but the Hasidic Jewish creation myth is very different from the mainstream understanding of Genesis and it's the main framework that gave Religious Zionism theological legitimacy It's based on the Lurianic Kabbalah: Before anything existed, there was only Ein Sof (Hebrew for Without End). God as pure, infinite, boundless light filling everything. No space, no emptiness, no room for anything else to exist. How can God create a universe if God already fills all of space? The answer is an idea called Tzimtzum (צִמְצוּם), which means contraction/withdrawal. God deliberately pulled back, contracted inward, creating a kind of empty bubble of space, like a vacuum, within which a universe could form. God's first act was not creation but self-exile. God withdrew from a portion of infinity and made a void. God then sent beams of divine light into this empty space. To give this light structure and form, to make actual things rather than just undifferentiated radiance, the light was poured into vessels (kelim). But the vessels shattered: this is called Shevirat Ha-Kelim (the Breaking of the Vessels). The divine light was too powerful, too intense for the vessels to contain. They cracked and exploded and as a result the light scattered everywhere. Most of the light flew back upward to its source. But some sparks, nitzotzot, holy sparks of divine light, fell downward, tumbling into the lowest levels of existence, trapped inside the Kelipot (קְלִיפּוֹת), the "shells" or "husks", which is Luria's term for the forces of impurity, darkness, and evil. The result: nothing in creation is in its right place. Everything is dislocated, fractured, in exile. Even God is, in a sense, in exile, the divine presence (Shekhinah) is fragmented and scattered throughout a broken world. The Kabbalists had a word for this state of cosmic dislocation: Galut, interestingly, the same word used for the Jewish exile. The whole universe is in exile, not just the Jewish people. Jewish suffering is the visible, concentrated expression of a brokenness that goes all the way up to the divine level. God began repairing the damage through reorganizing the shattered world into workable structures. The first human, Adam, was supposed to complete this repair. He was described as a soul containing all souls, a being of pure divine light inhabiting a spiritual body. Instead, Adam sinned. And the cosmic catastrophe happened again, this time on the human level. Adam's soul, which contained all human souls within it, shattered, just as the vessels had shattered. The sparks of every human soul became scattered throughout creation, just as the divine sparks had been scattered. Tikkun (תִקוּן) means repair, restoration, rectification. And the Lurianic system says that every single religious act performed by every single Jew, as in every prayer, every commandment, every ethical deed, every act of learning, etc. has the power to lift a holy spark out of the husks it's trapped in and restore it to its proper place. This framework is also absolutely essential to understand Religious Zionism and its most important theologian: Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Most Orthodox rabbis of the early 20th century looked at the secular Zionist pioneers (atheists, socialists/communists, Sabbath-desecrators draining swamps in Palestine) and saw heretics and rebels. Kook looked at the same people and saw something completely different: divine sparks trapped inside impure husks. Kook essentially took the Lurianic Kabbalah myth and applied it. The secular Zionists, he argued, were unwitting agents of tikkun. What he considered was their fierce love of the Land of Israel was holy energy, even if it was wrapped in an irreligious shell. To him, just as the nitzotzot fell into the kelipot and had to be retrieved from within impurity, the divine sparks animating Zionism had temporarily fallen into the husk of atheism. It was the job of religious Jews to recognize the spark inside and help it rise. Kook added one element to this framework though: evolution. He believed history itself moved in an upward spiral. Every new burst of divine energy appears first in a broken, impure form, and is only gradually refined and elevated. To him, (secular) Zionism was not a mistake to be undone. It was the first rough shattered form of something sacred still taking shape. This is what made Religious Jews later able to incorporate Zionism into their religiosity.

@spacepunk Hmm. What do I owe ya?

@AccountForHacks Ive done work for all sentient beings. God would have to kill literally all of them

Because having money relaxes the nervous system. Satisfying the lower chakras with safety and material security balances the nervous system. I keep saying over and over- if you want homeless people to be less mentally ill, GIVE THEM MONEY

I don't use AI.

@spacepunk I just heard that someone who should've paid me died in a car crash a year ago: be careful of the payoff you wish for!

Welp the TV just started singing "there will come a payday hallelujah what a payday there will come a payday someday" and I am choosing to accept this synchronicity

Most people would try to convince you that your suffering wasn't real. A few would try to take you partying to get you distracted. And the most compassionate might try to get together to beat the crap out of those who wronged you. And they're all ignorance