PicoBlog

There are key moments for every parent where control begins to slip away. Early on, parenting often feels like planning a class on life, where you introduce ideas and experiences like curated milestones, as your kid’s mind is ready for them and, if we are being honest, when you are ready to have those conversations and engage with those topics. The reality of parenting is that kids define their own path: "

Oh, cream cheese, you unassuming delicacy, you. For various reasons, none that I need share, the past few weeks have been wearing and full of blech. I’ve needed comfort and oddly, it wasn’t a chocolate chip cookie I gravitated towards, or a slice of cake, but cream cheese. Yes, I’ve eaten the ubiquitous cream cheese on a bagel, but also cream cheese and jelly sandwiches that race me straight back to childhood.

The story of the Swamp Thing and Abby Arcane’s romance is a heart-warming story of self-discovery combined with a massive dose of outlandish circumstances. Abby Arcane and the Swamp Thing look like beauty and a beast, but their differences are more than just about their appearances. The Swamp Thing is nature in a monstrous form to ensure that he is able to protect the Green, the elemental force of life. Abby Arcane is from an aristocratic background marked by tragedy.

You've probably heard that a horseshoe—pointed up—is a sign of good luck. In fact, they decorate doors and walls all over my home state of Montana. BUT, this tradition isn't Western, it's ancient. Per Barbara Walker, "Hindus, Arabs, and Celts regarded the yonic shape of the horseshoe as a symbol of the Goddess's 'Great Gate." Yep: It's a sexual door sig… ncG1vNJzZmidnJ7AprjOnp%2BnnZ5jwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXajGrq7OpaCspV2ks27Ax55koaeiqLK0tM6e

CAPTION: Ascending vs. descending. Culturally, we are stuck in the binary, that we must get up, ascend, transcend, escape this realm to get to heaven. But Jacob’s Ladder is a symbol for energy—angels—going up AND down. So much of our culture is fixated on going up and to the right, not understanding that everything is a circle, a spiral—there’s movement,… ncG1vNJzZmidnJ7AprjOnp%2BnnZ5jwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXajGrq7OpaCspV2ks27Ax55kpZmUmbKz

Today is my ‘name day’ in the Orthodox Church, the feast of St Peter and St Paul. It’s traditional to give gifts on your name day, and though this probably isn’t much of a present, my little e-gift to you all today is a summary of everything I’ve written here at the Abbey of Misrule since I began the project more than two years ago. Together this makes up an argument with a three-part structure, which is summarised below.

Last night I saw another Palestinian movie called “The Tale of Three Jewels.” The movie was released in 1996 and is the first full length feature film to be completely shot in the Gaza strip. A week ago, my partner and I were talking about the kinds of images that we’ve all been viewing over the past two months coming from Palestine—horrific images that seem to do little to move the West because of how much they devalue Palestinian lives.

Recently, explicit AI-generated photos of Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelcie, surfaced on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). The photos were eventually taken down, but not before they were shared 45 million times, and many copies of the photos remain online. Images such as these are not difficult to create. First, many pictures of the person are collected. Then, using AI that is easily accessible through “nude generators,” these photos are analyzed and used to recreate the person's features, like their face and body, but in a nude state.

A friend recently shared this article about “Kayla Lemieux,” the teacher who dresses as a caricature of a woman with enormous prosthetic breasts while teaching high school. I wrote about this teacher last fall in “Challenge Accepted: Why Giant Prosthetic Breasts with Protruding Nipples Are Not Appropriate Work Wear.” At the time, it made a painfully obvious point: No matter how one feels “on the inside,” certain items of clothing, such as swimsuits or giant prosthetic breasts, are not considered appropriate work clothing for high school teachers, regardless of whether they are men or women.