Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 1h

This may be the greatest post I’ve ever seen on this site.

Saoirse ☀️ @scratchcarddust.bsky.social · 3d

If you know basic kabbalah it's actually not too hard to make a golem out of a labubu. Don't recommend it though. They have a pre-existing body-dharma. As soon as they wake they run straight for the sea. V hard to counter. Lost the first one. No idea what it's doing out there. Moved like lightning.

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sandifer

Eric O. Scott @ericoscott.bsky.social · 7h

If you want to read people who actually have intelligent things to say about Watchmen, look up @eruditorumpress.com or @thathoberekguy.bsky.social.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 17h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sandifer

Penn @penn-fp.bsky.social · 11h

Some people’s love language is gifts, some want acts of service… our marriage is grounded in comic timing, and recognizing a set up when you see one.

Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 11h

Out of context marriage:

Me: Are you about to throw me under the bus?

@penn-fp.bsky.social: I’m trying to figure out how, but yes.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 11h

Honestly we should do Emmylou as well. Dolly Parton’s great and all, but the Internet desperately needs to learn a second iconic country singer.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 11h

Ooh I’ve got you covered there! www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/queen-s...

Queen Shit: The Case for Joan Baez

This post, and work like it is only possible because of the support of my Patrons. And speaking of Patreon, we're currently $450 a month in pledges away from Doctor Who reviews being posted to the sit...

www.eruditorumpress.com

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sandifer

Tom Ewing @tomewing.bsky.social · 13h

New theory that DC are releasing the Jesus Swamp Thing issues to get a coveted Thiel review

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 11h

Two of those three are also widely thought to have insane drug habits.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 11h

Out of context marriage:

Me: Are you about to throw me under the bus?

@penn-fp.bsky.social: I’m trying to figure out how, but yes.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

(I’m lying. I don’t actually hate “As Girls Go.” I figure if you must deal with chasers, you can do a lot worse than Suzanne Vega.)

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

Would pay a solid $10 extra for a copy of Suzanne Vega’s 99.9F° with deliberate scratching on “As Girls Go” so the needle just forward skips through it.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

This is not the face of a wellness nut.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

Idk I find sloppy plotting more forgivable than intellectually dishonest fascism apologism.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

All the news sources I consume do this, and I encourage you to improve your media diet until yours do too.

(The NYT and the Guardian mainly. Both obviously have massive flaws, but anything with an international desk does, and that really ought be a litmus test for one’s primary news sources.)

pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 17h

Journos need to always challenge the right-wing framing of "antifa" being a specific organisation that can be banned or restricted. Just straight up be like "but that's nonsense, it doesn't exist" every time

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

Whoops. Link. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/last-wa...

Chapter Eight: This is the Future (Old Ghosts)

The core of the problem was that from DC’s perspective, the lesson of Watchmen could only ever be one thing: things like this sold. And within the post-Crisis reality of the direct market, what DC spe...

www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

It was a clip from InfoWars that I’m not sure is still up. I write about it in the b-side essay here. (Scroll down to the big block quote about 80% of the way through)

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 12h

As net worth approaches a billion, a techbro’s odds of massive drug use become a certainty.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 13h

I knew abandoning you in the catacombs was a good parenting strategy.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 13h

Impressive work at age five.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 13h

It’s doubly embarrassing to be incapable of writing coherently on Watchmen when off your face on drugs given that Alan Moore is, in point of fact, routinely off his face on drugs.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 13h

Peter Thiel knows writers who don’t contradict themselves in consecutive sentences and they are all cowards*.

*in less of a k-hole than him

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 15h

Peter Thiel does about as bad a job reading Watchmen as Alex Jones, although he does an appreciably better job of writing individually coherent sentences, or, given his apparent drug habit, of paying a copy editor.

(Jones was of course working orally, but you somehow doubt he would have anyway.)

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 1d

Can honestly say that in over fifteen years of active magical practice I have never once been stupid enough to even consider getting into a fight with a frog wizard.

Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 2d

Imagine being a dying WW2 veteran and the last thing you see on earth is your great-grandson invading Portland for fascism and losing to a frog wizard.

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 2d

On Patreon, a wave of mutilation

LWIA 4.3: The Best of All Tailors | Elizabeth Sandifer and Penn

www.patreon.com

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Reposted by Elizabeth Sandifer

Lack(ey)-o'-Lantern @riotlackey.bsky.social · 2d

Thiel summed up in four words:

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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 2d

New chapters on the 31st of the month through October 2026.

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