soc.octade.net is a Fediverse instance that uses the ActivityPub protocol. In other words, users at this host can communicate with people that use software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc. all around the world.
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Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Novel (1889), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Part 3 “The Tale of the Lost Land,” ch. 8 “The Boss”
More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/85029/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #twain #marktwain #aconnecticutyankee #convention #culture #custom #heritage #ideas #socialchange #socialconventions #tradition
People projected all sorts of emotions onto the face of a Black woman surrounded by Patriot Front members, captured in a viral photo recently. Resistance. Stoicism. Fear. @NOTUSReports tells the real story of Bernita Bowlding.
‘Nearly Erased From History’: This Famous Sculpture Of Cleopatra Disappeared For Over 100 Years. It Was Being Used As The Gravestone Of A Horse
By Braden Bjella
Edmonia Lewis' 1876 sculpture The Death of Cleopatra received critical acclaim, but the work of art — and the artist herself — were then forgotten for over a century.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/death-of-cleopatra-sculpture
More information about Edmonia Lewis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonia_Lewis
Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré (1865)
https://imgur.com/gallery/destruction-of-leviathan-by-gustave-dor-1865-JFCVHP0
#illustration #illustrator #drawing #draw #engraving #graphicart #book #ebook #scifi #sciencefiction #novel #readers #earth #sea #author #vintage #retro #art #culture #history #mythology #fantasy #literature #gustavedoré
Space Drift
from The Serenity Path
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/track/space-drift
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #musodon #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #berlinschool #electronica #ambient #drone #soundscape #atmospheric #experimental #sciencefiction #spaceopera #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
@standardebooks The Horned Helmet by Henry Treece
I loved it so much my grade 4 teacher let me keep one of the books from the class set (they were all falling apart anyway)
This is that same copy she gave me, i've had this book almost 50 years
Today's slow rollout of the shocking findings in the AP/NORC survey includes:
Jews think both parties suck but will vote Democrat anyway, Jews are more concerned about antisemitism than non-Jews, and avg Americans think Trump supports Jews more than Jews think he does. 🤯🤡
Anyway... the comments are the real America. Worth perusing.
"The new #survey of 1,022 #Jewish adults — including people who identify as Jewish by #religion and religiously unaffiliated people who identify as Jewish through #culture, #ethnicity or family background — offers a rare detailed accounting of a key demographic that sits at the very center of some of the nation’s most divisive #political debates."
Same art, different name: would you see or hear it the same way?
A mislabelled concerto and other errors and tricks show that reputation affects how art is perceived, sometimes radically
by Rikki A Wolpowitz
https://psyche.co/ideas/same-art-different-name-would-you-see-or-hear-it-the-same-way
Books in Music at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/50
A Bandcamp #Review for "Electron Rock""
lucidscreamer said "Takes me back to when I was a kid in the 70s falling in love with synthesizers and groups like Tangerine Dream. Favorite track: Electron.".
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/album/electron-rock
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #musodon #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #berlinschool #electronica #ambient #drone #soundscape #atmospheric #experimental #sciencefiction #idm #techno #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
Tempus Fugit (Again)
from Missing Time
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/track/tempus-fugit-again
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #berlinschool #electronica #ambient #drone #soundscape #atmospheric #experimental #sciencefiction #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
Electro Waves (Alternate Take)
from Electronic Patterns
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/track/electro-waves-alternate-take
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #berlinschool #electronica #ambient #drone #soundscape #atmospheric #experimental #sciencefiction #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
If you're around the Earl's court or Brompton areas then you might be interested in our free poetry walking tours https://roguegunners.com/index.php/walking-tours/ #Culture #Poetry #UK
This morning I awoke thinking about sex – actually gender – of borrowed Latin words. Get your mind out of the gutter.
👉 https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/we-still-bury-the-dead
I wrote a piece about it, but I was truly conflicted on my journey, especially as I compared English and French approaches, and a potential feminist rift.
#philosophy #language #sociolinguistics #etymology #english #french #latin #gender #writing #culture #feminism #linguistics #reform #administration
This content is a NotebookLM summary of a YouTube video comparing Colombia and the USA. I don't add anything to the content, but I thought the summary was worth sharing.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/10aXf3Ul0ey61sRETEDvRs?si=le63_1oqTdqyVZ3_u0yHYQ
#philosophy #history #law #politics #culture #society #salience #podcast #video #perspective
This engraving is an illustration by Edouard Riou entitled "Pterodactyls - The World before the Deluge" (1865).
#illustration #drawing #draw #engraving #illustrator #graphicart #vintage #retro #ancient #art #culture #history #author #book #literature #poetry #writer #sciencefiction #archeology #fantasy #animals #edouardriou
What is "Ultraman"? And what lessons does the superhero have for humanity? A documentary asks — and answers — these questions through interviews with Hideaki Anno, Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and other cultural luminaries. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/07/02/film/origin-of-ultraman/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #culture #film #ultraman #tbs #japanesetv #japanesefilm #hirokazukoreeda #yutakanakamura #kazukiyoshida #masahiroonda
Luminescence:
- Emission of light by a non-incandescent body.
- Émission de lumière par un corps non incandescent.
Luminescence (432hz)
from Electronic Patterns
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/track/luminescence-432hz
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #ambient #drone #soundscape #atmospheric #experimental #sciencefiction #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
"In those 1990s clubs and car shows, you could see and feel that Asian Americans weren’t assimilating culture. We were creating it."
Ky-Phong Tran for Zócalo Public Square: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/my-midlife-crisis-corolla-fast-furious-fully-modded/
#Longreads #AsianAmericans #Vietnamese #Cars #Japanese #Toyota #Culture #Identity
Do You Feel It (Preview)
from Electron Rock
https://solarphasing.bandcamp.com/track/do-you-feel-it-preview
#music #fedimusic #mastomusic #electronicmusic #experimentalmusic #ambient #electro #dance #idm #techno #experimental #sciencefiction #synthetizer #synth #spacemusic #art #culture #bandcamp
Browse 5.8 million works of art at the Last Museum
by Rob Beschizza
https://boingboing.net/2026/06/29/browse-5-8-million-works-of-art-at-the-last-museum.html
Last Museum:
https://lastmuseum.com/
Books in Art at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/11
John Singer Sargent Painting Reveals Hidden Image During Conservation
A restoration of the work by the Mesdag Collection has uncovered fingerprints and a pair of legs.
by Vittoria Benzine
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mesdag-john-singer-sargent-restoration-indigo-2784316
Books illustrated by John Singer Sargent at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/36606
The Owl and the Mice, illustration by Gustave Doré (1867). The Fables of La Fontaine.
https://imgur.com/gallery/owl-mice-illustration-by-gustave-dor-1867-fables-of-la-fontaine-joWeeUJ
#illustration #drawing #draw #engraving #illustrator #graphicart #vintage #retro #ancient #art #culture #history #author #book #literature #poetry #writer #fables #sciencefiction #fantasy #animals #gustavedoré #delafontaine #jeandelafontaine
A 18th century print depicting the Beast of Gévaudan.
"La bête du Gévaudan".
Engraving taken from the dummy collection of pieces relating to the beast of Gévaudan, created by Gervais-François Magné de Marolles.
#Illustration #engraving #drawing #draw #print #vintage #ancient #art #culture #history #story #legend #beast #monster #hauntology #18thcentury #gévaudan #wikipedia
Painting by David A Hardy (1974). Called Artificial Planets.
https://imgur.com/gallery/painting-by-david-hardy-1974-called-artificial-planets-X4uy4Ye
#painting #paint #illustration #drawing #draw #sciencefiction #scifi #space #planets #illustrator #retro #vintage #cover #art #culture #history #book #literature #graphicart #davidahardy
Wait until the editors over at JNS actually read a history book some day. 
"Today, the #American covenant is under serious pressure from two directions simultaneously.
The left has been replacing the covenant’s universal terms with group identity. The relevant question, in this framework, is not what you accept but what you are: your #race, your #gender and your position in a hierarchy of historical grievance. From the right, #ethnonationalism defines the nation by #ancestry and #culture rather than by shared obligation. In both models, the covenant is conditional, depending on which group you belong to.
Both abandon America’s founding logic. Both make #Jewish belonging in #America contingent in ways that Washington explicitly said it never could be."
https://www.jns.org/opinion/eldad-tzioni/what-george-washington-really-said-to-the-jews-of-newport
Painting by illustrator Darrell K. Sweet - Cover Art
https://imgur.com/gallery/painting-by-illustrator-darrell-k-sweet-cover-art-ZcHgUve
#painting #paint #illustration #drawing #draw #sciencefiction #scifi #space #illustrator #retro #vintage #cover #art #culture #history #booky #literature #graphicart #darrellksweet
A sermon from Matthew 9:24-10:39

“Let’s get real.” We say that sometimes when we’re trying to banish illusions or wishful thinking.
And “getting real” definitely sums up the tone of Jesus’ message to the disciple-apostles here. Jesus is telling it like it is. People are rejecting him. People are going to reject his disciples, too. The disciples can’t expect to get any better treatment than Jesus himself is getting.
By implication, there’s no point following Jesus if they want to be looked up to by bigwigs in their world. Because that’s not about to happen.
And completely realistically, Jesus wouldn’t have to tell these disciple-apostles not to be afraid three times in one paragraph if they weren’t facing something Jesus knows they could be afraid of, and might be afraid of, and will need this reassurance to face those fears with courage.
Especially because Jesus knows – and is letting them know – following Jesus is going to lead them into, not away from, conflict. It’s not going to be the “path of peace” in the sense of harmonious relations with everyone in their lives.
Yes, we think people have been waiting for someone sent from God who is going to be called the “Prince of Peace.” And yes, we think Jesus is that Someone, and we think the disciples thought so, too. But Jesus is telling them flat out that one of the first consequences of that Someone’s arrival is the exact opposite of high five’s all around.
Because Jesus’ arrival, which brings near the kingdom of the heavens, as he’s been saying over and over since the beginning of the gospel of Matthew, is the arrival of Reality, Truth, in a world that is based on and devoted to unrealities and falsehoods. That creates a stark dividing line, between two incompatible worlds, with two incompatible worldviews that go with them. The people following Jesus are likely to find themselves on the other side of that dividing line from people they love, and ought to love, for that matter, and will want to keep loving and being in relationship with. That won’t feel like peace at all; it will hurt.
So, far from telling the disciples they have nothing to lose, Jesus is telling them that they have plenty to lose – at least, according to one way of looking at things, according to the common sense way of looking at things that prevails in the world around them, the world they know perfectly well.

And Jesus’ big underlying point here, the one he’s laying out for the disciples, and for us, is: you-all have to stop looking at things that way. You-all have to start looking at things my way, from the perspective of the kingdom of the heavens, the perspective of the active reigning of God. When we look at things Jesus’ way, we’ll realize, very clearly, that everything we stand to lose is nothing compared to what we stand to gain in following Jesus.
[Something like … the way any of us will immediately change course if we find out we’ve been travelling away from our destination, instead of towards it. Assuming we want to get there, there’s no alternative.]
These disciples are following Jesus, or so we think, because they embrace who he is (at least, as well as they understand that at this point), and they embrace what he teaches because of who he is.
But that commitment will already set them at odds with the world around them. And will do so more and more as time goes on, as they realize even more clearly than they do now that Jesus is the Lord of all, the one who is the definitive authority about everything in heaven and on earth and about all things, seen and unseen, the one who rightly and truly says what’s good and what’s bad, what’s healthy and what’s unhealthy, what’s right and what’s wrong, etc. etc. etc.
Because the world around them is definitely going to deny that authority, and keep on denying that. Is going to ask them “What about Caesar?” “What about the gods?” “What about Our Way of Life??” The people around them aren’t going to drop all that, certainly not at first, especially not when going along with all that gives them any power or position or prosperity. They’re going to want to reject the disciples’ story about who Jesus is, and to reject what Jesus teaches, because it disrupts their business-as-usual world.

Jesus is telling the disciples here that in following him, realistically, they are definitely choosing sides. Eventually, yes, everything is going to be made clear; the truth will be plain for all to see. But for now, the disciples’ task is to help make that truth plain, in a world in which it’s still far from obvious, and certainly isn’t what most people take as common sense.
And so their message, far from leading to [social] peace, will lead to rejection (because the message is unwelcome); it will lead to peril (because the guardians of the status quo will try to suppress that message); and it will lead to loss. It will lead to loss not only of every false value, but of some real ones – because community is a value, the love of friends and family is a value, life is a value. Losing those things in this cause will be real suffering and loss. But it will be suffering and loss in the service of – so we believe – the greatest value of all, the greatest good: the good being brought into the world by and through Jesus.
At least that will be suffering and loss in the service of Reality. It won’t be the tragic suffering and loss everyone always already faces in the service of every other cause, that ultimately amounts to total waste, because it’s in the service of unreality.
As Jesus lays it out here, the disciples’ real choice is genuinely either-or; there’s no “win-win,” as they say in the negotiation literature; when we recognize Jesus as Lord of all, revealer of reality, we can’t honestly accept some other way as equally … real.

What this can mean, practically, probably is better illustrated by a story that comes from a society less like ours … in which we have the idea that our “religion” is sort of a neutral matter of private belief – and in which we’ve made a lot of space for differences of religion, for good reasons. We need a story from a society that’s organized around a more traditional model, in which every institution of the society is integrated with the ideas people have about the world of spirits and the unseen and how people have to work together to keep those forces on their side …
One like the first disciples’ context. Especially for gentiles, who were living in a Greco-Roman world in which worshiping the family gods, sacrificing to the genius of the emperor, etc., was part of staying in faithful step with one’s family and friends and one’s whole society.
Or a society like the one in which the composer of the hymn “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” lived … at least, according to a story that grew up about the origins of that hymn. According to the musical scholars at the United Methodist Discipleship Ministries website, the Indian evangelist Simon Kama Marak is the most likely composer, the story is that the tune comes from the Indian region of Assam, and the words were taken from the last words of an early Assamese convert to Christianity, who was persecuted along with his entire family for embracing the new vision of Reality offered by Jesus Christ.
At that time, around the last quarter of the 19
th
century, the life of the many different indigenous people of this region of India was completely, thoroughly organized in various ways by their ancient traditional understanding of the world as dominated by powerful spirits, who had to be addressed properly, whose favor had to sought in particular ways by everyone in the community to ensure, for instance, the defense of a village or the success of the year’s crops, etc. And they weren’t too enthusiastic about the colonial powers, either, and all the changes they were bringing to their environment.
So when this particular villager announced that he and his family had been listening to the missionary who’d come to the area, and had become convinced of the truth of their story about the world and God and God’s love as shown in Jesus Christ, the chief of the village responded immediately with terrific hostility. He got all the members of the community together, they dragged this family in front of the whole village, and they said, you’re traitors to our village, and we won’t let you get away with this. We’ll kill you first.
But the man and his family wouldn’t back down. The father chants to them in a traditional tune “I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back.”
The chief says “You’re giving us no choice.” First he ordered the village archers to shoot the man’s children, which they did. And the chief says “Now what do you say? You’re going to lose every member of your family.”
And the man says “Though none go with me, still I will follow. No turning back.”
So the chief ordered the archers to shoot the man’s wife, which they did. And then he says to the man “This is your last chance – come back to our ways, or lose your life.”
But the man sang again, “The cross before me, the world behind me. No turning back.” The chief gave the nod, and the archers shot the man dead like the rest of his family.
But by now, everyone had seen the utter fearlessness with which this father and his family faced their deaths, and the chief was so moved that he declared, “I too want to belong to Jesus Christ!” The other villagers were moved in the same way. Which is how it came to pass that this entire village embraced the man’s faith in Jesus Christ, crossing the line into a new Reality, the one in which God, out of love for the world and its people, comes into that world, shares all its pain and suffering, is faithful even to death on a cross, all for the sake of bringing that world back to God and God’s love.

And we should notice something about this story, and the many other stories we have like it in our tradition, and the way it relates to Jesus’ instructions to his disciples. We don’t have them because God is so keen on Christ’s disciples dying. God is a God of life, and wants people to live; Jesus comes to give people life, and that more abundantly.
But that is precisely why the cost of loving Jesus more than anything and anyone is so steep. Because Christ’s mission is to bring that life to the world. So although the untransformed world is hostile to Christ’s message, Jesus’ way leads back into that hostile world, in love, and in service. Jesus’ way leads back towards humanity, back towards the fathers and mothers and mothers-in-law and all the rest, whom we do still love, to be “lost,” in love, and in service, in the name of Jesus Christ.
In whom we find our true lives.

Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Illustration by Denis Beauvais for Dragon Magazine (December 1985)
https://imgur.com/gallery/illustration-by-denis-beauvais-dragon-magazine-december-1985-Ruhd5os
#illustration #drawing #draw #illustrator #cover#author #vintage #ancient #art #culture #history #graphicart #dragon #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #scifi #sciencefiction #fantasy #rpg #tabletop #heroicfantasy #dragonmagazine #denisbeauvais
Bonne Fête de la Musique 2026,
par Plantu.
#illustrateur #dessinateur #illustrator #illustration #draw #drawing #plantu #art #culture #music #musique #fêtedelamusique #fetedelamusique #musicfest #france