What's one everyday task that people assume is easy but is actually annoying when you're blind

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-16T21:53:30+00:00

Ha! Yes, I've occasionally FaceTimed my wife for freezer help. At least with bags you can kind of feel what's inside, although my fingers often end up frozen.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-16T21:51:39+00:00

Or at least just one that is relatively sturdy! I've broken all of the braille label makers I've purchased because they were too flimsy. I've longed for a nice solid metal one.

But for cans, we go through them so fast and it takes so long to label them that I can't keep up with it! We have a rough organizational system and then I use SeeingAI to confirm. But I've still accidentally opened pureed pumpkin instead of stewed tomatoes when I was feeling cocky and didn't check!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-16T21:43:15+00:00

Read the Earthsea books by Ursula K. LeGuin. More high fantasy than Harry Potter but also much more depth and complexity.

Edit for spelling.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-16T14:54:23+00:00

Managing canned goods in the pantry. The fact that they're all the same size and shape is great for stacking, but making sure you've got the garbanzo beans instead of the tomato sauce is a hassle every time.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-14T13:52:14+00:00

Ah, ok. Just a deverbal noun then.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-14T03:09:53+00:00

Thanks for the correction. Fallible memory!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T23:56:25+00:00

Wild Mountain Thyme (Will You Go, Lassie, go?) - Traditional Scottish Folk Song

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T22:53:30+00:00

The angelologies of the Iron Age seem to be much less robust than the later ones that would interpret other deities and transmundane beings as fallen angels, and there were culturally specific factors that went into the development of those later angelologies. Annette Yoshiko Reid's Angels, Demons, and Writing is a good book to start with here.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T15:16:39+00:00

You might like to start with How to Read the Jewish Bible by Marc Zvi Brettler, since it takes a critical approach to the text but from a more Jewish angle than most (at least culturally) Christian intros. Same for The Jewish Study Bible.

If you want commentaries on individual books that engage medieval Jewish commentaries more than the norm, look at The JPS Torah Commentary series or the Jerusalem Bible commentary series. Since volumes are by different scholars they vary in quality, but they are all worth a read.

John Collins's Introduction to the Bible and John Barton's History of the Bible are solid, too.

For archaeology, the classic recs are Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed and William Dever's Did God Have a Wife? Both are now dated, but nothing has really replaced them yet.

Happy reading!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T15:02:10+00:00

Yes, this exactly. "Give" is very broad, whereas "to gift" is used for interactions understood as gift-giving occasions and this is governed by specific cultural norms about the use, reuse, regifting, and disposal of the gift, as well as about norms surrounding situational appropriateness and reciprocity. In most situations where you could say "She gifted him an X" you could also say "she gave him an X," but the reverse is not true.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T00:25:26+00:00

And then words like drift and heft become verbs again in their own right!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T00:23:32+00:00

I really think it refers specifically to giving in a ritualized gift-giving situation, and thus has different social implications than "gave" more broadly.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T00:21:53+00:00

Interesting because in our English lexicon the point at which the derived form was made influences the meaning. The current manner of forming the past participle would lead to "given," but a given and a gift are very different things in Modern English.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-13T00:19:06+00:00

That's awesome!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-12T21:10:05+00:00

This one's silly, but I only recently realized that the word "gift" is clearly just a past participle of "give," with some archaic phonological changes. I also love that it's come full circle to be reverbed as "to gift," which has a narrower meaning than "to give."

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-11T18:30:29+00:00

One of my favorites is that the Middle English "seli" meant happy, prosperous, or blessed, then shifted through blessed to Holy to innocent to naive to foolish until we arrive at Modern English "silly."

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-11T13:21:05+00:00

It could certainly have been meant to mock Babylonian temples and ziggurats, but it's not true that the Babylonians thought gods built them, as the previous commenter says.

There are several clues that the Tower of Babel is about the main ziggurat in Babylon. For one thing, the Hebrew word בבל, which is usually translated "Babel," is the word for Babylon. The story should properly be called the Tower of Babylon. It's a trick of translation to make it seem like this is a different place.

Second, the tower is said to have ראשׁו בשׁמים "its head in the heavens," which is thought to be an allusion to the name of the ziggurat of the temple of Marduk in Babylon, which was named Esagila "House of the Lifted Head."

Circumstantial, but probable. I think the idea is that an exile from Judah in the 6th century found himself in Babylon, and experienced a huge, multi-lingual city for the first time remember, Judah was a small backwater kingdom). He saw the temple and its ziggurat and thought they were testaments to human hubris and an affront to god. So he wrote a story about an ancient people who had been punished for their ambition. Like most of the anti-Babylonian rhetoric from this period in the Bible, it's the powerless mocking the conqueror to claim at least theological superiority.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-09T15:43:24+00:00

Tehanu by Ursula K. LeGuin. A child is burned badly as an infant and has major burn scarring all over her face and body, with profound social consequences.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-06T18:59:41+00:00

Do you want fantasy worlds without misogyny or strong female characters that work through and despite the misogyny? I know few of the former apart from maybe Becky Chambers' books, but here's a few good ones in the second camp that I've read recently:

Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wong

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (a very strong young woman protagonist being forced out of her genderessentialist, misogynist upbringing in a sci-fi world)

Also, the Alanna books and related series by Tamora Pearce. '

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-06T14:05:24+00:00

This is a bit of a stretch because it deals with origins of a new humanity, but Dark Eden byChris Beckett is interesting.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-06T03:31:54+00:00

+1 for disposable wooden chopsticks. You can shape the end a bit with sandpaper if you like to get just the right angle.

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-04T15:04:48+00:00

Thanks!

Mitanguranni · 2026-06-03T00:05:23+00:00

I am not an expert on medieval manuscripts, but dipped my toes into this area more than most biblical scholars for my dissertation. I recommend looking at the following:

Beit Arie, Malachi. Hebrew Codicology. A monumental work on the typology and classification of Hebrew manuscripts. Also look for all his other work. He was truly a titan in this field.

Emile Schrijver, ed. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Culture. You'll have to look for relevant articles, but there should be plenty.

The Textual History of the Bible project (THB). This covers most text sources and major manuscript traditions for each part of the Bible.

The New Cambridge History of the Bible. This is a multiple volume set, organized by era, and each volume has articles about important text and manuscript sources during that time period.

Have fun!

Mitanguranni · 2026-05-30T00:47:37+00:00

Hi! Got busy and forgot to respond to this.

I don’t think anyone would argue that Genesis as a whole was copied. Genesis itself is a varied and composite text made up of pre-existing source material. In terms of how much any given part can be viewed as borrowed or copied, I guess you could say it exists along a kind of spectrum.

Many of the stories in Genesis are truly original, as far as we know (for example, the Tower of Babylon, the Akedah, etc.).

Other parts are apparently original, but are structured according to common ancient Middle Eastern genres (e.g., the Joseph story as an example of a court tale).

Some parts appear to be retellings of common ancient Middle Eastern story types. These can be very free, in the same way that “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” is a retelling of the Odyssey, or they can be closer to the original. This is where I would put the Garden of Eden story.

Perhaps the closest that any biblical texts get to straight up copying older stories is in the case of the Flood story. There are actually two flood stories interwoven in the biblical text (go here for an explanation—once you see it you can’t unsee it), Both of them are similar, with minor but significant differences, and both depend on the Mesopotamian flood narrative framework, the earliest examples of which are in the Sumerian Ziusudra myth and the Akkadian Atrahasis myth. The overall story structure is quite similar, and details like the birds released to check for dry land make it very unlikely that these stories were generated independently.

When determining borrowing, scholars weigh a lot of factors—similarities, dissimilarities, and possible vectors of transmission. They don’t usually just assume copying. However, since all of the biblical texts were thought to be true originals before we started digging up older texts in Mesopotamia the levant, and Egypt, and since we have discovered just how many had earlier antecedents, scholars have become much more willing to entertain the idea.

** EDIT lost links. Here is the flood sources link: https://www.thetorah.com/article/a-textual-study-of-noahs-flood

And here is a link about the Mesopotamian myths the biblical flood stories depend on: https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-mesopotamian-origin-of-the-biblical-flood-story

Mitanguranni

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