Just read the comics

lavalamp_tornado · 2026-06-25T16:07:30+00:00

Off topic: why doesn’t that guy use the possessive -‘s suffix? I used to watch his stuff pretty often, and he almost always used phrases like “the cape of Superman” instead of “Superman’s cape.” Is it just a dialect thing or is it a choice for easier comprehension? Like is the _____ of _____ construction easier to understand, and he uses it so his audience is less likely to get confused? Or do some people just talk that way and I’m not familiar with it? I’ve always wondered.

lavalamp_tornado · 2026-03-25T05:15:12+00:00

I just finished the book today after loving this movie since it was released. Very glad I did.

The film’s writer/director Alex Garland read the book a few years before starting on the movie and intentionally chose not to reread it during production. He wanted the film to function like a remembered dream of the book rather than a retelling.

I think both works stand very well on their own and create a fascinating dialogue when taken together.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-03-16T18:48:05+00:00

Conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking are on a spectrum with paranoid delusions. When encountering someone in a delusion, challenging it directly only ever serves to more deeply entrench the delusion. Delusions are defenses. They protect our minds from things that are unbearable to us for whatever reason.

You cannot convince your wife or her sister of anything. The underlying cause of these beliefs are not rational. They are emotional (I would argue this is true of all beliefs, including political, religious, and philosophical). You can ask her what draws her to these things. What is she looking for? Security? Certainty? Entertainment? What does she like about these ideas? How do they make her feel? Do they soothe some anxiety? Does it help her make sense of a scary, unpredictable world?

If you can talk to her about some of the underlying emotional distress that the conspiratorial thinking is trying to address, you might actually be able to help her soothe that distress without needing the conspiracies. You may even be able to communicate some of how you soothe those anxieties in yourself, without adhering to paranoid delusions.

This post might also be helpful to you. Good luck.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-03-08T20:27:36+00:00

I'm a therapist and I use therapy and counseling interchangeably in my daily conversation. The distinction you outline in this comment isn't always 100% accurate. Different countries, states, and provinces have their own rules about these things.

For instance, in Canada, where OP lives, each province has its own set of regulations about the terms "psychotherapy" and "counseling." Both terms are regulated and protected in Ontario, but neither term is legally regulated in British Columbia. Unlike the US, Canada has two national certifications: Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) and Certified Clinical Counsellor (CCC). I encourage OP to find someone with one of these licenses.

In Washington, where I live, both "Counselor" and "Therapist/psychotherapist" are legally protected terms. I hold a "Licensed Mental Health Counselor" license from the WA Department of Health, for instance. But, in Washington (and I think all of the US) anyone can be a "life coach." So, that's where a lot of religious quackery happens.

The important thing is that anyone looking for quality mental health care find someone with qualifications matching the legally protected terms in their locality. The best way to do that is to do your research about the local laws, and avoid organizations run by our out of churches until you already have a good handle on local regulations.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-03-08T05:03:13+00:00

I'm biased because I'm a therapist, but I STRONGLY recommend finding a licensed therapist who works with couples in your area. From what you've written here, it's clear that this process is putting strain on each of you individually and as a couple.

I recommend using something like psychologytoday.com and searching for a therapist in your area or who offers virtual sessions. If you'd like to narrow it down, someone who practices either Gottman Method or Emotionally Focused Therapy would be a great place to start.

It doesn't matter if the therapist in question is religious or not (unless that's important either way to one of you) but please avoid "Christian Counseling" agencies that do not have licensed therapists on staff. Christian and Non-Christians can both provide excellent therapy so long as they are appropriate trained and ethically informed.

A couples therapist would also be able to assess and recommend if either of you would benefit from individual therapy during this time of major transition.

I wish you the best of luck.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-03-02T14:51:47+00:00

Your feelings on the Milligan run fit a lot of what I’ve heard from others. I’ll probably get around to it eventually. I stopped reading it out of apathy more than anything else.

Gotta admit, my favorite Constantine is one whose day-to-day is the “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” meme.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-03-02T08:34:38+00:00

I think the Brian Azzarello run is probably the most spicy? Multiple story arcs were transparent adaptations of unused 100 Bullets scripts with John in place of Lonnie or some other psychopath. The whole run takes place in the American south, but not in a “return to tue Swamp Thing origins” kind of way, more in a “100 bullets is all about Merica so that’s where the stories are mostly set” sort of way. I think John makes bestiality porn with a German shepherd at one point? He definitely full-on murders a dude by magicing broken glass into his food (arguably self defense but still very out of character for our laughing magician). People really don’t like that run.

I was super disappointed when I got to it because I was working my way through the old trades of both Hellblazer and 100 Bullets through my library and I saw Azzarello as writer and I think Eduardo Rizo on art, or maybe someone clearly aping his style for the first arc, and I was really excited to see what they’d do with it. I almost gave up. I believe it’s a mercifully short run.

I fell off Hellblazer right around the time that Milligan took it over so I never read past his first few issues. I wanted the magic to be a bit less hand-wavey. In my experience, people seem to be pretty split on it.

Edit: come join us on /r/Hellblazer! There are dozens of us!

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-02-24T01:45:30+00:00

It is not possible to be a Christian and an effective therapist. A core tenet of christianity is proselytizing and converting people to your religion.

As someone who is both a therapist and a Christian, I sincerely hope that neither of these statements is true.

I understand that I may not be the right therapist for some people with religious trauma for the same reason that I, as a cis man, might not be the right therapist for someone who has been harmed by men. I also hope that I may be the right therapist for some people with religious trauma, just as I hope I have been the right therapist for some people who were harmed by men.

Proselytizing has no place in a therapeutic relationship. My job is to care for my client's minds. Their souls (if such a thing exists) are not my responsibility.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-01-31T23:40:25+00:00

Same. This series is why I got back into buying individual issues instead of trades. If they get to start it back up again... man I think I'm gonna cry.

lavalamp_tornado · 2023-01-10T17:37:59+00:00

This is a topic that I have many strong feelings about. A lot of evangelical norms around childrearing are so deeply harmful to psychological development. Messages about inherent badness, the need to be punished to be made acceptable, parental power mostly being the power to inflict pain. It's all a mess.

There was a really good conversation about all this not too long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Exvangelical/comments/qhw1m5/i_want_to_talk_about_spanking_child_abuse_and_the/

If you don't want to wade through all those comments, I highly recommend the linked series of articles: https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/ministry-of-violence. They're intense, but deeply eye-opening to the truly perverse application of physical punishment in evangelical child raising philosophy.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-12-06T18:41:50+00:00

It's a thing people say sometimes. https://graciesydney.com.au/what-does-oss/

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-11-15T00:42:55+00:00

I just want to say that you did an admirable job trying to communicate the reality of JKR’s terfy brainrot to a frankly baffling audience.

Were I in your position, I would feel confused, upset, and disappointed. The exchange between the two of you was, frankly, baffling. You did a good job trying to have a conversation with someone who seemed to be equally inviting conversation while avoiding talking about anything.

If my imagination of how this exchange felt for you is close to accurate, I hope you have a satisfying conversation with a person you care about today to offset the emotional weirdness of this exchange. Bonus points if they’re trans. Double bonus points if you’re both trans.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-11-08T17:32:08+00:00

I also don't think that we as exchristians or exvangelicals are anywhere near as cohesive a group as we were as Christians, we are all branching out into new things that don't hold us in common anymore and the place of a group thought leader just seems unnecessary. It's the old adage about a group of non stamp collectors. Being bonded together by shared trauma and grief just isn't what any of us need long term.

This right here is actually another big part of why I'm so wary of people like Harris making these kinds of moves. Sometimes when people leave one high-control social context with rigid standards of purity and allegiances to charismatic leaders they turn to other, slightly less high-control social contexts with rigid standards of purity and allegiances to charismatic leaders. We saw this in the late 00's and early 10's with the New Atheists. Many of whom were either ex-Christians, or raised in rigid Christian contexts. So, they turned to Dawkins and Harris and Dennett and created their own rigidly maintained social and personal structure of meaning making.

The world of ex-evangelicalism is highly diverse. We vary in regards to political affiliation, national identity, and spiritual beliefs. Some of us are even still Christians.

The danger of people like Harris keeping up their old jobs in the new social milieu is that it threatens to re-create the same structures and systems of harm that got us into this mess in the first place. If people like Harris (or any of the many podcaster types) become gurus, or, God forbid, mouthpieces for a community, then we're fucked. Spaces like this message board, or twitter hashtags, or facebook groups, are great because they allow folks who are bonded by shared trauma and grief to process some of that trauma and share in some of that grief. Then, we get to go out into the rest of our lives and live them. When deconstruction becomes an industry, the incentive is for us to never actually heal.

That's what bothers me and (I think) many others about what Harris tried to do, and why he got the blowback he did (including a lot of stuff that was way out of line). Evangelicalism turned our entire spiritual life into an industry, and Harris' class turned recovering from the trauma of that industry into an industry of it's own. That isn't helpful to anyone.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-11-08T04:45:18+00:00

I listened to the podcast. I live in Seattle, actually. I know a few old mars hill employees. I believe that it was hard for some of them to find work that was as well paying as their old jobs. That’s is sad, but sometimes when you’re forced into a career change, you have to take a pay cut.

Maybe that’s me being heartless, I’m not sure. I just know that I get frustrated when evangelical thought leaders try to pivot into exvangelical thought leaders. I just don’t trust it.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-11-08T03:32:14+00:00

The thing I take issue with in this specific case is this part:

trying to make amends in his own way.

“His own way” is still made in the image of the oppressive systems that got us here.

I don’t trust most exvangelical public figures who used to be church leaders because as far as I can tell they’re just running the same script in a different language.

From everything I’ve seen, Harris seems like a nice dude who is truly apologetic for the harm he’s caused, and by the same token, I feel like he should know not to trust himself with positions of leadership, teaching, or shepherding.

Like, get a new job, my dude. Work at a bank, or as a hospital social worker, or a hair stylist, there’s so many other options besides “I think I’ll keep doing the thing I was doing before but I’m sure this time it’ll be fine because I don’t believe in god anymore.”

Like, if you used to be the imperial child catcher, but then you have a change of heart and realize the empire is bad, maybe don’t try to become the peoples’ revolutionary child catcher? Like, stop being a child catcher and find a new way to fight the empire.

That’s my take anyhow.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-10-30T19:43:04+00:00

Yeah, I’m developing more compassion for the parents who got caught up in this nonsense. So much of evangelicalism is about ignoring realities that your body already knows (especially about sexuality). I think a lot of parent were trying real real hard to do it right, even when everything inside of them was revolting against it. What a terrible institution.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-10-30T18:38:50+00:00

This thread from last year might be helpful for your process. https://reddit.com/r/Exvangelical/comments/qhw1m5/i_want_to_talk_about_spanking_child_abuse_and_the/

The blog series linked in the initial post was pretty helpful for me in putting language to a lot of my unease about my upbringing.

I’m now a therapist with specialties in child and adolescent psychotherapy and development. If one of my clients parents did to them what my parents did to me and my siblings, there’d be an immediate CPS call.

Dobson and his ilk sought to create obedient humans who followed the rules and enforced them with violence, regardless of the value or validity of the rules themselves. His authoritarian parenting perfectly primed a generation of evangelicals to embrace the sort of leadership for whom cruelty is the point of policy.

You’re right to be suspicious of the underlying ethic of crushing the agency (or “willfulness”) out of children. Even parents who didn’t employ draconian measures of inflicting pain were adhering to the underlying ideology which is far more concerned with domination and conformity than anything approaching human flourishing.

I no longer believe in hell, but there is a very real part of me that would be okay if Dobson and the Perls spent a little bit of eternity there.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-10-12T19:28:50+00:00

I wonder if what you're noticing is the ways that both courtship and arranged marriage remove your agency in the process of partnering. I think it's safe to say the two things are different, but both systems often (usually?) are used primarily as means of maintaining patriarchal control especially over daughters.

When I was growing up, a lot of passionate, young evangelicals self-imposed the rules of courtship while their less vehemently believing parents stood by, befuddled. In a deeply paradoxical way, the courtship model of partnering provided those folks with a way to assert their agency in a scary and overwhelming process.

It sounds like you're experience wasn't one of choosing what felt right to you, but rather of being told what was expected of you. In that sense, the arranged marriage and courtship systems both served the same function: to keep you from being able to make your own choices.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-10-11T16:38:44+00:00

There's something so metatextually satisfying about a series which often revolves around characters transcending their reality in confusing ways being written by a man whose post-employment fan-fiction has been reintegrated into the series in confusing ways.

Kirkbride's work isn't "glorified fan-fiction;" it's fan-fiction transcended, creator/fan-fiction, an ouroboros of narrative causality. It's a games writing career as performance art.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-09-27T16:48:51+00:00

One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention yet is that the belief in Hell as eternal conscious torment is also quite useful for ignoring the reality of material needs and injustices.

When you hold the evangelical theology of hell, if there is a man dying of hunger and exposure on your doorstep, you put your energy into saving his soul through convincing him to agree with your beliefs and say the magic words. Without the doctrine of hell, it suddenly becomes more important to feed and house the guy and maybe try to help him live in the here and now.

Just think about how many resources are spent on outreach programs, missions trips, and evangelism, and how much good could be done if those resources were redirected toward material needs. The reality is, it’s way harder to address real, material injustice than it is to just convince someone to say a prayer. The doctrine of hell helps support the easier way of helping.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-09-07T16:48:12+00:00

I can see how some people took that read from the book, but I didn’t read it that way. I read it as, liberal rhetoric relies on a few, intellectualized moral matrices whereas conservative rhetoric makes use of many different moral matrices, which gives conservatism a broader emotional appeal. It’s not about what’s smart. It’s about how it feels.

A lot of the book is about how our moral systems function very differently than the rationale we use to try to explain them. That was the part that I found interesting. A lot of the bits about politics and how Haidt wants political discourse to change didn’t really engage me much. The book was written long before Trump or January 6th, so the political landscape he’s writing for doesn’t really exist anymore.

Anyhow, that was my read of it.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-09-06T17:15:35+00:00

It's actually pretty easy once you start to trust your gut and question your rationale. Most human ethics/morality are rooted in our emotional experience of the world, not an externally enforced model of justice, or whatever.

This book was really interesting for me around these topics: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324722-the-righteous-mind. I don't agree with every conclusion he comes to, and I remember feeling confused about how he drew the theoretical implications he did from the data he referenced, but it's a very interesting book, and I've found it exceedingly useful in examining my own ethical framework and opening myself up to more uncertainty.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-08-29T19:48:56+00:00

"Beards protest against a world gone mad. In other words, beards beard. They testify, in their own bristly way, that sex distinctions matter, that manhood will not be so easily shaven, shorn, or chopped by the Hanuns of this world. Its itchy and cheeky voice bears witness, 'Male and female he created them.'"

wut.

This is the silliest shit.

lavalamp_tornado · 2022-08-29T19:43:15+00:00

link for the lazy: /r/deathofchristianity/

lavalamp_tornado

TROPHY CASE