Kaymyth

Even better if you can get Solarcaine. It's aloe infused with a topical analgesic, usually lidocaine.

Eh, it makes it balance better. 1+1 is <3 doesn't quite have the same ring to it. And it just occurred to me. I doubt it's a truly original idea, but I think I thought of it spontaneously.

I've been roped into helping with Discordian rituals before. It's one of the things I love about my peculiar little church; we've got so many people walking so many different paths on the Ritual team that I'm always being exposed to something new and different. But in my book, belief isn't necessary. And religion (or lack thereof) is a deeply personal thing. Ever notice something? Nobody says, "I practice X religion." They say, "I am an Xist." What we believe or don't believe is a fundamental part of our identity. I think that's a big reason why discussions on religion can spiral out of control so easily; it's hard to separate oneself from the thing you're talking about. I think perhaps your problem has been teachers, because there's more than one way to teach math. Not everyone's brains process concepts in exactly the same way. The fail point wasn't you, it was that the lessons weren't designed for you. 1+1=<3 There you go. A mathematical equation for love. And it's technically true!

As in all things, it depends on the individual. There do exist completely asexual people. This isn't what I was saying at all. Attraction and lust isn't an all-or-nothing deal; you can be attracted to people of a particular sex and/or gender without being attracted to all people of that type. You can Riot someone's lust all you want, but you can't control where that lust is directed. If you already know that someone is attracted to an individual, ramping it up will cause all sorts of fun and consternation. But if you kick someone into overdrive while they're sitting next to someone who is not at all attractive to them, it's not going to change that baseline. For example: me. I'm mostly on the hetero side of the Kinsey scale, but I'm not quiiite all the way over. There is a rather narrow subset of women that I could potentially find attractive, like, say, Eliza Dushku. 'Cause dang. But Rioting me near some random woman from down the street may not get the results you're looking for. And while I have a much larger subset of men that I find attractive, there is no amount of Rioting in the world that could make me want to jump some men's bones. Like Brad Pitt. Ick. I know. I'm weird.

Just a word of advice... If you find that you have a bumblebee nest built into a burrow that was made underneath an outdoor shelving unit, it's probably a good idea to assume that the nest is snuggled into the base of the shelves themselves, not deeper into the ground. That way you're not shocked when knocking over the shelves results in a torn-open nest and several dozen startled bumblebees. Also, there might be mice behind it, too. If you're lucky, they'll fall into the nest and attract the wrath of the bumblebees whilst you and your spouse have a chance to flee for safety. edited so much because I apparently misspelled 'nest' as 'next' a zillion times

But Rioting only works with emotions that are already there. You can make things more intense, overwhelming even, but you can't create emotions out of nothing.

Or at least didn't during the Final Empire. Post-Origin and the Alloy of Law era are a completely different story.

Ooooh, he doesn't like cheese. This would explain the pizzalessness. Now I find myself faced with a challenge - how to make pizza without cheese? It...might be possible...

Hah! I'm the TARDIS! I win! I'd actually take that statement as a lot more scary if it came from River. Sure, anyone with a can opener can crack open a Dalek, but how many people can make one beg?

I think we might have to. Unless his pizza-less-ness is due to some unknown dietary restrictions, allowing such a state to continue would be a travesty.

I can't make up my mind whether Discordianism would drive you crazy or appeal to you just out of sheer hilarity. (Followers of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos. You know that whole golden apple mess that wound up kicking off the Trojan War? Yeah, that was a practical joke on her part.) But this is familiar, because this is more or less how my husband thinks. Everything has to make sense for him to believe it. I'm pretty sure at this point that a god, any god, could pop into being in front of him and say, "Yo, I exist!" and he'd say, "No, you don't," and go looking for whoever drugged his drink. Or possibly check himself in for psychological evaluation. Some people just don't need that sort of faith-thinking to be fulfilled; they'd rather know how the world works than worry about whether anyone built it. There's a reason we have Nova on our regular DVR recording list. And at the end of the day, I have a religious faith structure that I follow and he doesn't....and guess which one of us is the baseline gentler, nicer person? I'll give you a hint: it ain't me. This has actually been a huge sticking point for me when it came to my final break from Christianity, probably mostly because I was taught that included in parts 2 & 3 were "You have to believe W." I thought, well, that's kind of mean, isn't it? There are billions of people on this planet who by default don't believe W, and most of them are probably perfectly nice people, even nicer than certain other people that do believe W. So these people who don't believe W are just up a creek, even though they were raised in R, Q, or E and W is some weird foreign thing to them? Why do they have to believe W? How is this at all fair? And that's when the most important piece of my puzzle fell into place: Whatever (G)god is or isn't, he/she/it/they have to be just. Part of what appeals to me about Kemeticism is the idea that believing in the gods is not a requirement for making it into the Good Place. The ceremony of the weighing the heart against the Feather of Truth objectively judges whether a person is worthy or not. And it's not as harsh as it sounds, for the feather weighs exactly what it should weigh - is the heart exactly as heavy as it ought to be, given the deeds that this person has done? Because people aren't perfect - we screw up. And then we feel guilty about it, and hopefully, that guilt drives us to do better next time. And let's face it - the most important person in my life is an atheist. I have zero interest in getting into any paradise that he's locked out of just because he doesn't believe. Unverifiable Personal Gnosis Basically meaning that our experiences are ours and by their nature unprovable. But they bring meaning to us, so that's what's important.

You...you've never...had.......pizza? Somebody bring me my fainting couch!

Also, did he plan to come over beforehand? Or just drop by unannounced? It's possible that he had a moment of panic of, "Ack! I didn't call ahead! Now KamorianKandra is going to think I'm a rude lunkhead!"

Yeeeahhh, that lot. I'm pretty sure that no religion (organized or not) is actually willing to claim them. Speaking as someone who lives in the general geographic area that they infest, I can pretty accurately say that their primary purpose in life is to make people angry enough to try to assault them and/or violate their rights so that they can then make money with a lawsuit. I sincerely doubt that they believe half of the drivel that they spew, and the younger family members have been steadily deserting as they grow up and realize that life is better when you act like a halfway decent human being. I have not actually told this story yet. After I made it out of childhood being mildly annoyed that everyone seemed to know more about that odd Bible book than I did, my mom started actually going back to church. I was a teenager and expected to go along. Which was cool enough by me at that point; I started playing my flute and oboe for various things, so it gave me a venue. But the whole Christianity thing always felt to me like I was wearing shoes that were too sizes too big. I hit college, and drifted into agnosticism. I had no idea what I believed, and I wasn't all that bothered by it at the time. I spent some time as a music major at a Methodist college that had the best band program in the state. Being a religiously-affiliated college, there was a required religion course that went over all of the major world religions, as well as some of the more obscure ones. It was taught by a Methodist minister. He spent one day on Earth-based pagan religions. I found the ideas fascinating. Yep. That's right. At the age of 19, I got converted to Wicca by a Methodist minister. The poor man - he realized what he'd done, and I think he was slightly horrified. I spent over a decade as a (rather lazy) Solitary Wiccan. After I moved to KC, I started going to the local pagan Unitarian Universalist church, and started getting more familiar with various pantheons. I'm not going to go into too much detail (because down that path lies copious amounts of Weird, and I'm really not sure you want me to inflict that upon you all), but one of my first rituals there I got "claimed" by Bast. I'm actually at the end of several years of transition from the familiar Wiccan structure into a more Kemetic practice, and I'm still learning things. It's a process.

Ooooh. Yeah, there are so many ways you can stumble onto customer fail at that sort of job. My condolences. You should petition your boss for permission to carry Nerf.

Did somebody ask you for a book that they couldn't remember the title or author of, just told you that it was blue, and expected you to know which book they wanted? Yes, I know. I'm always editing my posts. I'm always typing too fast and leaving off letters.

My mom actually made a series of half-hearted attempts to raise me Christian. When I was a kid, we never went to church, but she'd send me to these day-long camps with the kids of friends of hers that taught Bible stuff. Only I had no real context for what was going on, so I didn't really grok any of it. I remember feeling like I was the only kid who didn't already know everything the teachers were talking about as we bounced from station to station doing craft stuff based on different stories. I was annoyed, too, that nobody seemed to think that it was important to explain what the different characters in the stories had to do with each other. Where did this Moses guy figure in that Joseph dude with the crazy-colored coat? Was that the same Joseph as the Jesus story? If not, what kind of author uses the same name for multiple characters? In other words, my 8-year-old self was convinced that it was all some sort of weird, excerpt-happy book club for a book that nobody had given me to read or offered any context to understand. I hadn't even grasped the concept of it all being a religion, or that the Bible was supposed to cover thousands of years of religious history. And at that age, I was painfully shy; actually asking questions of people was right out, so I just went along with it in a general miasma of annoyed confusion.

Well, remember, he is half-Atlantean. For all we know, the Great Old Ones bred the Atlanteans specifically to be their foot soldiers. Or, like, their utensils or something. Nothing like keeping the ol' tentacles clean like having someone else shovel your food into your mind-twisting gaping maw that you call a mouth. Awww. It's a thing that happens. Either something got it, or something scared it to death. Baby rabbits have notoriously delicate constitutions.

I'm pretty sure Wonder Woman's supposed to be in it, too. It's a Justice League precursor.

You...you mean that not everyone is crazy like I am and hires a Celtic folk band to play the classic Battlestar Galactica theme and a mash-up of Pachelbel's Canon and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme at their weddings? I'm not sure what to make of this world anymore...

I'm just going to leave this right here....

We have a bumblebee nest under our back deck. So far they haven't been terribly aggressive, but I worry what might happen as the colony gets bigger. I don't want to hurt them, because we can use all the native pollinators we can get, but I really, really don't want them that close to our back doors. I've been soaking the ground around it nightly as of late to try to convince the bees that it's a bad place for a nest and encourage them to find someplace better. Hopefully they're not so settled in that they won't move. We also appear to have chipmunks and/or bunnies that have burrowed under our front walkway. That should be easily solved with mothballs. They're cute little critters, but they're devouring my clematis. First world problems, man.

I just got my first book signed a couple weeks ago at ConQuesT. I bought a hardback copy of Alloy of Law specifically for it, though I admit that having the whole Wax and Wayne set in hardback together was a contributing factor. (What, just AoL in tiny, sad paperback next to all those hardbacks? Poor thing. Though right now it's keeping my paperback Mistborn trilogy company.) Interestingly, I find I like the font used on the title of the paperback better than the one they used on the hardback. It's the silly little things... I also just picked up a copy of Way of Kings. It's sitting there, taunting me to read it. But I'm not allowed to until I've finished my fanfic rough draft.

Bast - Known more commonly as Bastet.* She's pretty well-known as the Egyptian goddess of cats, but she's also one of the protectors of the Pharaonic line, and named one of the Eyes of Ra. She can be gentle or fierce, as the situation calls. Her earlier depictions have her as a lioness, but she's eventually more commonly associated with domestic cats. She's also got a motherly streak, and will go into full-blown angry lioness mode when children are in danger. From me, she demands regular offerings of chocolate and delights when I create pretty things. Djehuty - Romanicized name of Thoth (pronounced with a hard 't' on the front and a long 'o'; no I don't know why it's spelled that way, either). He's the god of knowledge, wisdom, magic, and writing. He's also darned clever; not a rulebreaker, but will absolutely game the system and bend the heck out of them to help those he deems are in need of it. He insists that I never stop learning new things and wants me to write more. He also likes fig newtons and macaroni and cheese. Set - Yeah, most people have heard of this one. He's got a rough rep, thanks to the Osiris myth cycle, but the sense I've always gotten is that he did what needed to be done at the time, but nobody else would or could do. He's the god of storms, the patron of foreigners, and generally a force of necessary chaos. He'll buzz in, shake you up, and smash everything to pieces. Then he'll sit down with you and show you how to put it all back together again, only better this time. He is, on occasion, a pain in my rear, but he's also the force that keeps me from getting too comfortable and stagnating. I need regular shakeups to keep my creativity fresh, and he provides those in spades. He likes rum and red foods. *This was actually thanks to a mistake caused by lingual drift. The first writings dug up that mentioned her had an extra 't' hieroglyph on her name. It was originally thought to be an extra feminine ending, but scholars eventually realized when they found earlier writings that ancient Egyptian had undergone a change in language that had caused people to start verbally dropping 't's on the end. The extra symbol was there to indicate that it was to be pronounced and not silent. We still have it wrong anyway, and her name was probably something more in the ballpark of "Ubashte", but I'm really just babbling now.

I know I'm lucky; our relationship dynamic is fantastic. We didn't even meet each other until I was 31 and he was 34, but it was well worth the wait. Kemetic. Kemet is the original name for Egypt; it meant The Black Land, referring to the fertile soil along the Nile. Most of the names that people generally know from ancient Egypt have actually been through Roman filters, and thus are actually completely off from what the people of the time actually used. Egyptus was the Roman name for the land, and that's what got translated more strongly through history. The names of gods people generally know, like Horus, Osiris, Isis, and Anubis, were actually more like Heru, Wesir, Aset, and Anpu, respectively. And even then, some of this is speculation, because the ancient Egyptian written languages don't include the vowels. And that's one really neat side effect of wandering down an ancient pagan path; you wind up learning a lot of really interesting history.