fascinating things that I, a Jew, did not know and have learned about Judaism from reading Christian commentaries on the parables of the lost coin, sheep, and sons:
-Jews are super-legalistic, but the penalty for telling a story anyone didn't like was immediate stoning, no trial
-if a son did anything a Jewish father didn't like, the Jewish dad immediately performed a ceremony that cut his son off from the family
-Jewish fathers didn't express affection for their children
-100% of Jewish siblings hated one another because of competition for inheritance
-Jews hated shepherds, despite pretty much every important person in Jewish foundational peoplehood stories being a shepherd
-if a Jewish woman misplaced a coin, she'd be stoned for adultery because losing money was the same as sexual promiscuity
-Jewish mothers never involved themselves in disputes between their children, or disputes between their husband and their children
-Jewish women were confined to the house all day and not allowed to come outside
-Jewish shepherds broke lambs' legs to teach them to not to stray
-the only reason any Jew would ever obey any rule is to buy their way into heaven
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This is a really great piece of writing on 3500-year-old advice on avoiding burnout.
It also gets at something really key, which is self-care isn't enough. There's a reason corporations love promoting self-care for their employees (thread)
Employers LOVE to encourage self-care precisely because it's SELF-care. It's telling you that if your emotional reserves are drained, you can just... refill them yourself. No outside help needed. Have a bath bomb, a meditation kit: that'll refill your tank.
When I was at Microsoft, our overworked and burnt-out team got an influx of people to help us get the game across the finish line.
Those people had been assigned from another team that had been crunching for 3 years and finally shipped their game.
I mean, it's VERY tough to get into the industry without a degree.
That said, I actually agree that most game design degrees are pretty useless if what you care about is quality game design rather than just... getting in the door.
The point of which was that when I was interviewing people for various game design roles, we'd see a lot of freshly minted game design degrees walk in the door.
And their entire field of creative references was... other games.
So I'm writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hated shepherds.
Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.
So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.
are we really surprised that the guy who wrote <checks notes> "pretty as a swastika" abused his Jewish girlfriend?
like people kept dismissing this crap in Marilyn Manson's songs as "he's just doing it for shock value"
and maybe he was
but if we've learned anything from GG/the alt-right/Trump/etc. it's that a LOT of people move from doing it for shock value, or the lulz, to believing it
and more importantly, you don't get to use marginalized people as fodder for your "shock value"
like, I'm literally not sure how dehumanizing a marginalized group for shock value is different from dehumanizing them for an ideology
Welp, I needed to get some writing done and I can't go to a coffee shop, so I found a nice table with a fireplace outside and got a tea and sat down to write.
And, dear reader, I regret to inform you that my curse of having people have terrible conversations near me is unabated.
I'm listening to two dudes go off on how Jeff Bezos's girlfriend is a gold-digger with "secondhand plastic surgery" (what does that even MEAN?) and how he could have any woman in the world so why is he dating her?
It's just astonishing to me that these men seem to hold, unexamined, both the belief that 1) every woman can be bought for enough money and 2) a bazillionaire should not be dating this particular woman because she can be bought.