one thing i've enjoy about the internet is getting a window into aspects of people's story that they would never share in normal everyday life. if you're interested here's one of mine.

my life changed forever here, off the main street in burlington vermont. it looks like this:

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1868662807069397216

i was somewhere around my early teens, in a bookstore. i looked up on a bookshelf and saw a purple book spine. i just grabbed it. there was some feeling of providence about this book. i was called to take this book from the shelf.

this is the book. it's called stencil pirates.

it's about doing graffiti with stencils. the idea is that you cut a design into a hard surface, then spray paint it, and the paint just goes through the part you cut out, leaving your image. pretty simple.

i basically never recovered from this book.

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owen cyclops

@owenbroadcast

Dec 14

if, at some point, you lived around a TV, you may be familiar with ‘festivus’: a holiday george costanza’s father created on seinfeld. as a resident atypical american religion enjoyer, let’s take a slightly academic religious ethnography pass over this (there will be magic).

…

festivus is presented as a holiday created by george’s father as a reaction against commercialism. this holiday is then actually celebrated, and becomes a family tradition.

consciously crafting religion - live. a joke, but its real. is there an existing framework for this? yes.

discordianism is the exact meeting point for the above concepts. it is basically a joke religion, started by nerds, who found religion interesting. the dense node at the center being - if people actually “do it”, in terms of religious scholarship - then its real. it becomes real.

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owen cyclops

@owenbroadcast

Dec 9

johnny hart was an american cartoonist who started a comic called B.C. in 1958. he also created another popular strip called 'wizard of id'.

he was called "the most widely read christian of our time," by a former director of the office of public liaison at the white house.

...

that designation may seem somewhat absurd, but he was still doing B.C. when he died in the 2000s. considering he made two of the most popular american newspaper comics, and ran them for about half a century - in light of how many people read books, it might actually be the case.

his primary topic, prehistoric man, only makes it more interesting that he was a christian. he was raised christian, but after a father son team installed a satellite dish at his home and apparently had some type of gospel conversation with him, he became more serious about it.

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owen cyclops

@owenbroadcast

Dec 8

bizarre unnavigable part of being a parent is that there is no way to reveal the information that you dont give your kid any screens without making other parents upset. even if you intentionally set out to not tell them, if they dig enough, and find out, they then become upset.

you can laugh about it, or blame it on any reason, or pad it infinitely with how much you love screens, or how youre just an idiot and dont know anything about parenting and are just winging it: doesnt matter. people just become upset at the information. its upsetting information

a weird parallel is the home birth thing. im self aware enough to not flex about something my wife did or to make other people feel like i know what medical decisions they should make. but if i need to mention it in a conversation, people likewise take it as a type of challenge.

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owen cyclops

@owenbroadcast

Dec 2

i have critical art history information. a guy named bob eckstein wrote a book called 'the history of the snowman' and this was the earliest image of a snowman he could find anywhere, from a dutch book of hours in the 1380s:

he also claimed this was a snowman, from 1603 (yellow circle). real "that guy" research hours

i only found this because i wondered something similar: is construction of the snowman innate, or learned as cultural? the furthest back i got was, interestingly, japan in the 1760s. this image by harunobu is titled "three boys making a snowman", but, theyre just rolling a ball:

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