Some others from the esoterica.

It’s really tragic how much conspiracy spaces have been overtaken by scary alt right ideologies. I think there was some purposeful targeting of seriously mentally ill and vulnerable people with some of those conspiracies.

I want a return to like Whitney Strieber’s Communion. I would shit myself with delight given the opportunity to attend a conference where people talk about the wars between the Dracos, and whether or not the Greys are on our side, but part of the Dracos plan is making us gay or something. There’s always been the antisemitism on the periphery, but David Icke started making that impossible to ignore.

Spirit Science guy I think still steers that line (Jews are space aliens, just good ones).

Roswell, New Mexico is amazing - the town eats that shit up, the museum is awesome, the McDonald’s is done up like a UFO.

I once went to a lecture on Bigfoot in a used bookstore in a small town, where a man described an encounter where he was terrified by a family of Bigfoot into staying in his RV to a captivated audience of 8 people, including myself, my ex husband (who was not eager in his attendance), the book store owner, and few elderly couples. It was great.

I have taken some classes in religious studies, although I don’t know if I can say I formally “study” it. But it has been a lifelong “special interest.”

I just grabbed Hymnody from the thrift store so haven’t read it yet. But yeah, I read most of them.

As far as criteria, it’s complicated. I get a lot of books by thrifting - there’s usually a lot of bulk generic Protestant stuff, which I don’t usually pick up because one probably could fill an apartment with just shit associated with the Left Behind series or the Purpose Driven Life. (Or I Kissed Dating Goodbye in that above picture, that just got pruned into an art project because I could get another one for $1 pretty easily).

I’m usually seeking ideas that I haven’t encountered yet or things that are so ridiculous and kitsch that they amuse me. (Which goes for my book collection as a whole.)

Ie, the value in that SDA textbook Light Bearers to the Remnant is comparing what SDAs claim about Ellen White and the Kelloggs to mainstream history, and it would be fascinating to write an article on. Or I grabbed a copy of modern reprint book from the 1800s that argued that the wine in the New Testament wasn’t alcoholic, and watching someone contort themselves in knots claiming that Jesus turned water into grape juice is amusing.

The really kitsch stuff I enjoy stoned. I’ll watch videos warning Muslim women of the evils of painting their nails (you can’t clean your hands properly for prayer apparently, because water can’t get to the nail) or Bibleman or those classic Mormon cartoons.

As far as personal beliefs, I’m something like a Discordian ultimately. I don’t really “believe” in her, but I have rituals I do to worship Eris. (She wants me to get stoned, pretend to be Jackson Pollock and commune with her by typing random letters in the YouTube search bar - which is what I want to do anyway. She’s an awesome Goddess like that.)

The most immediately accessible gems of the collection.

I have a genuinely Scientology folder thing for a course and a Spanish DVD of Dianetics, but that’s at a friends.

Oh yeah, if you have old BoM before some of the fun changes. Watchtowers would be fun too, only have got read through PDFs.

(I have training manuals for Mormon missionaries, the textbook on Seventh Day Adventist history as used in Seventh Day Adventist colleges, and watch the Left Behind with Kirk Cameron at least once a year or so.)

No!!! They are so much fun to collect! Keep them and send them to me!!!

The aliens show up and the world is supposed to end July 5, 1998, but the Conspiracy has deceived us such that we don’t even know what year we are in now.

Yes, this is a Chick tract, which are real comics you are supposed to give to people to convince them to become (Jack Chick’s specific variety of) Christian.

“When I was a waitress, a man and his wife would leave a tract for me with a tip. Eventually, they asked me to join them on a Sunday for church and the rest is history. Praise the Lord, these people cared for my soul…a complete stranger.”

Eternal salvation - or triple your money back.

The flying saucers are supposed to be equipped with lasers and I think attractive aliens to have sex with.

The Lost Generation, by Jack Chick.

God’s Cartoonist is a good documentary if you want to learn more about Chick. He’s a mysterious figure, like as mysterious as Thomas Pynchon imho.

He’s a huge inspiration to the Subgeniuses. Subgenii? Either way, I sent my $30 to Bob and can’t wait for the flying saucers.

Lisa. (Which I wonder if it inspired the video game Lisa at all - similar themes). It’s horrifically fucked up, but of note is that the doctor doesn’t report the dad for letting his friend fuck his daughter (giving her herpes), because the dad finds Jesus and promises never to do it again.

This is how it often happens to this day in parts of the Southern US - like they pulled it because of bad PR, not because they didn’t stand behind the message: it’s not “wow this was fucked up and we’re sorry to have ever thought this was a good idea” but just “we no longer stock Lisa”

It looks like the internet archive took down their copy, which is concerning. It’s been out of print for decades.

I love how LinkedIn sends ten emails a day with names of very promising jobs, then when I click on them and go through the log-in prompt, it just takes me to the home page, and then I go back and click on the job while logged in, and it was posted 8 months ago and is no longer accepting applications.

(I also love ‘you were searched by people from these companies!’ - so useful, and I’m sure that’s accurate!)

Job hunting is very sane and rational.

Electric toothbrushes….

“Boomer” “Sooner” is an acceptable form of greeting in many parts of the state.

Now, the best tradition is the flag run. I got to be on the side that ran at OU Texas one year. Imagine - 80 thousand people watching while you have a big blue Oklahoma flag draped around you like a cape - knowing that in just a second you are going to haul ass like a madman, have to quickly turn around, pivot and then make her wave.

I hate both Oklahoma and football, but that was fun.

The FDA has rules for how much rodent shit or insect legs can be in your food. Realistically, there’s going to be some no matter what food producers do.

Here’s some of the rules for basically everything but dairy. Although you might not want to read them.

Dairy is so complicated that they have a searchable database. I found a couple of numbers for bacteria counts, but it seems to be an “it varies.”

I think maybe there’s something larger with “hustle culture.” We’re all working ourselves to death and are trying to self medicate against the effects of things like blue light from screens and spending most of our time indoors.

There’s just so many varieties of energy drink now. I didn’t get hooked on Red Bull or the original Monsters because they tasted like piss. Thinking back to like twenty years ago, I don’t think that gas stations were wall to wall with energy drinks.

If I could just “opt out” of human society for like two weeks, I think I could detox.

Weed is part of the equation, but it’s also become something I’m kind of dependent on as well. It can really fuck up your sleep if you use it regularly and stop too.

They did go down on each other regularly. Fellatio was common, not cunnilingus. There are lots of fun Latin words for face-fucking.

Roman sexuality just was very penis centric in general. They really struggled with understanding lesbians - they assumed that the more dominant woman would grow a penis or something.

The term for a man who performs oral sex on a woman is cunnilinctor, and this kind of man is highly stigmatized. In the Roman mindset, to perform oral sex on anyone is to make oneself passive, to choose to be orally fucked by that person. According to their phallocentric model, then, the Romans conceptualize the cunnilinctor as a man being orally penetrated by a woman.

Like in a way, they did think eating pussy was “gayer” then sucking off a guy who was higher in social status than you.

This is exactly what Andrea Dworkin was saying in Intercourse. Calling it out explicitly was such a threat to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that they had to turn it into “this crazy lesbian feminist said all sex is rape!”

A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth - literature, science, philosophy, pornogra-phy-calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into (“violate” the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical pri-vacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.

There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions.

Like - yes! A lot (not all) of heterosexual men see sex as domination, as something they have to “get” from partners who might not be eager or willing. The idea that women actually enjoy sex is not supposed to be a part of it. Think about how absolutely frothingly buttmad conservatives got over W.A.P.

Also all of the common Christian preaching about how wives need to ensure that all of their husbands “needs” are met. If she doesn’t put out, it’ll be her fault when his eyes go wandering (whether it lands on a man or a woman or a child). A young Christian girl is to remain pure until she is married and then immediately cater to all of her husbands sexual demands - at no point is she supposed to develop her own ideas about sexual pleasure. (The things Mark Driscoll was telling his congregation both in person and anonymously online are so fucked up.)

Sex is such a powerful instinct that people who want to control others are going to spend a lot of effort working on systems to control sex.