Willemite Crater
LightNews LightNews
banner
willemite.bsky.social
Willemite Crater
@willemite.bsky.social
62 followers 50 following 1.5K posts
It's me, that guy you know from real life, or maybe from Twitter!
Making my name unsearchable to fundamentalist evangelicals since 2020.
Posts Replies Media Videos
willemite.bsky.social
HO LY CRAP

This might be the most important thing I've read in my *entire life* for understanding modern evangelicalism. This is from a section talking about the Scofield Bible, which enshrined Fundamentalist and Dispensationalist theology in evangelicalism.

My jaw literally dropped as I read this
From The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald, pg. 101: "Like Darby, he assigned Jesus' life to the older Jewish 'dispensation of the law,' rather than to the Christian 'dispensation of grace'—thus relegating the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer to a pre-Christian era."
November 21, 2025 at 8:16 PM
willemite.bsky.social
I have discovered a new worst ad in existence. YouTube now has ads for audiobooks that are literally just an AI voice reading from the book with AI pictures behind it, FOR 20 MINUTES. If you're not able to get to the skip button right away, it'll JUST KEEP GOING.
A screenshot of a YouTube ad for Pocket FM with an AI garbage picture, showing the ad runtime to be 23 minutes and 15 seconds.
November 20, 2025 at 2:01 PM
willemite.bsky.social
At last I have found my villain.
The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald, pg 90: "Speaking at a meeting in New York City in 1876, when fifty thousand men were out of work because of the latest financial crash, he declared that the cause of the suffering was that 'the sufferers have become lost from the Shepherd's care.' As he explained it, the poor were responsible for their poverty. 'I do not believe we would have had these hard times if it had not been for sin and iniquity. Look at the money that is drank up! The money that is spent for tobacco! That is ruining men--ruining their constitutions.' In Moody's view there could be no other explanation. 'We live in a land flowing with milk and honey,' he said, 'God has blessed this nation; yet men complain of hard times.' He was not against charity, but charity for him was always secondary to soul winning. And too much charity in his view did 'a great deal of mischief' by encouraging people to expect handouts when they should be working for a living. In the I87Os it was hardly uncommon for Protestant clergymen to preach that the Puritan virtues of thrift and industry would help a man succeed in life. But Moody went a step farther, He preached that conversion itself would bring prosperity."
November 17, 2025 at 9:13 PM
willemite.bsky.social
aHA, so it was D.L. Moody's fault!
The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald, pg. 89: "In any case, his own role was clear to him. 'I look upon the world as a wrecked vessel,' he famously declared. 'God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody. save all you can.'' Consistent with this position, Moody said nothing of social reform or of the obligation of Christians to the welfare of the society at large. While he spoke of doing all for the glory of God, there was no Puritan command to responsibility for the community, no call to disinterested benevolence, or to building the Kingdom of God on earth. The highest duty of Christians, he said, was 'to visit the homes of the poor and wicked and tell them how the Son of God came into the world to seek the fallen and those who were lost.'"
November 17, 2025 at 9:06 PM
willemite.bsky.social
I read this yesterday about a guy named Washington Gladden. It's always crazy to learn that these ideas are in fact over a hundred years old
The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald, pg 66: "...had much to say about wealth, inequality, and labor. "We must," he said "make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world." His philosophy was that, just as individuals practiced the Golden Rule. so employers and their employees should practice cooperation and disagreements should be negotiated in a spirit of fellowship. In an effort to mediate a strike in Cleveland in 1886 he endorsed trade unionism while condemning the warlike tactics of both sides. "Are you not all children of one Father?" he asked. His first strategy was to appeal to the moral feelings of the owners and business executives, but eventual, realizing that altruism was possible only in small groups, he preached a decentralized economic democracy where profit sharing would substitute for wage labor. In the mid-1890s the deepening conflict between capital and labor drove him to a more realistic view of the economy and to an explicitly pro-union stance. He opposed socialism-- or state ownership of most businesses-- on the grounds that it would stifle creativity, but more important because it seemed to him far too grandiose a project for this enormous continent and one that would require an unimaginable degree of human wisdom to work. Still, he believed that the monopolies-- in those days the railroads, the telephone services, the electrical and water supply companies that effectively taxed the public as opposed to responding to the laws of supply and demand-- should eventually be state-controlled. And he came to believe that if the dream of a cooperative economy could be realized, it would be as a form of industrial democracy gained through union-organized collective bargaining. Gladden's views about the means of achieving a just society changed over time but Gladden never had any doubt that social reform was an integral part of the Christian Mission..."
November 14, 2025 at 4:38 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Millennials are truly the IT generation.
Roy from The IT Crowd on the phone saying "Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?
November 14, 2025 at 2:46 PM
willemite.bsky.social
The description of the premise of that show on Just Watch is hilarious in the context of 2025
The description page of Bubblegum Crisis from the Just Watch app. At the top is a picture of 4 mech-suited people, and underneath it says: Bubblegum Crisis MegaTokyo 2033: Tokyo was left flattened as a result from a great earthquake. A new city, MegaTokyo, was then recreated due in no small part from the aid of a multi-million dollar company, Genom Corp. Genom created and mass-produced biomechanical creatures called Boomers to aid in the restoration of MegaTokyo. When the Boomers began to run out of control, the ADPolice at first tried to stop them, but they proved to be far more difficult to deal with than was first imagined. Under the ever looming Boomer threat, a group of four girls from varying degrees of society banded together. Calling themselves The Knight Sabers, they were the only ones with enough firepower and resourcefullness to defend the fledgling MegaTokyo from Genom and it's berserk Boomers.
November 7, 2025 at 4:53 AM
willemite.bsky.social
Wait, I'm confused
A screenshot of my feed with one post saying Gov. Newsom vetoed a bill to put restrictions on minors using chatbots, while the other says he signed a law putting restrictions on minors using chatbots.
October 14, 2025 at 5:57 PM
willemite.bsky.social
I think part of it is that, on the Carson Olshansky Gender Quadrant (fig. 1, below), most hair places put themselves in the very top right and left corners to an almost aggressive degree, and I need somewhere that's just anywhere at the bottom. Which is one reason I just keep going to Great Clips.
Fig. 1: The Carson Olshansky Gender Quadrant (from their YouTube video titled "Theories of Nonbinary Heterosexuality"). The X-axis has "Woman" on the left and "Man" on the right, while the Y-axis has "No gender" at the bottom and "Lots of gender" at the top, and scattered around are pictures of various celebrities based on where they fit.
October 1, 2025 at 3:25 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Getting my vaccines to fight the war on bugs
The Starship Troopers "I'm doing my part" meme
September 30, 2025 at 2:55 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Wildlife!

I'm pretty sure that's a Red-shouldered Hawk, and I think the lizard might be a Texas Spiny Lizard.
A Red-shouldered Hawk (I'm pretty sure) stands in a field on the other side of a stone wall with the sun shining through its feathers as it looks down at something on the ground A lizard (possibly a Texas Spiny Lizard?) perches on a stone wall with its tail in the air, very alert
September 15, 2025 at 6:47 PM
willemite.bsky.social
This is the commander deck I ended up getting. It seems pretty cool, but it also seems like it might be extremely token/counter-heavy with a lot of moving parts 😬
The box for the Magic The Gathering precon commander deck "Living Energy", being held by me in my car. It's a green/blue/red deck, and the box says "stockpile energy / charge up artifact creatures"
September 8, 2025 at 10:54 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Here's hoping the cat poop(?) my dog snatched on our walk this morning doesn't start the whole sick process over again when I leave for my doctor appointment later. I guess, in the end,
Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop in the episode where some people rescue him from burning up in the atmosphere by catching his space ship in a restored NASA space shuttle, only to risk also burning up in the atmosphere themselves. He's sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette, saying, "Whatever happens, happens." Come to think of it, this scene was extremely formative for me when I saw it as a freshman in college about to drop out because nothing in life made any sense.
August 25, 2025 at 1:53 PM
willemite.bsky.social
My post from November that says, "I just can't believe that AI is anything more than another stupid tech bubble. Is anyone actually profiting off of it? All these companies are pouring so much into it, but afaik everyone either hates it or is just scrambling to figure out what to do with it because the hype makes it seem necessary." A post from Alex Morash from today (Aug 20) saying, "Media outlets seem to have soured on the AI hype machine." with screenshots of 4 news articles with the headlines, "AI is a mass-delusion event", "AI is a big nothing", "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash", and "The Tech Stocks Selloff Spells Trouble For The AI Trade. Why Markets Are Twitchy." A screenshot from the music video for the Dashboard Confessional song written for the film Spiderman 2, with the lead singer looking very emotional and singing the title of the song, "VIndicated"
August 20, 2025 at 5:39 PM
willemite.bsky.social
The little clock from the first painting, shaped like it's been turned to putty and stretched into a vaguely 5-pointed-star-shape The Pokemon Ditto (a blob of pink putty with pseudopods and a head with a big smile, vaguely shaped like a 5-pointed star, sort of)
August 17, 2025 at 4:19 PM
willemite.bsky.social
I found the guardian of our new apartment building. Lying in ambush, no doubt.
A toad has flattened itself into the mud between some rocks and a concrete walkway
August 13, 2025 at 11:32 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Mosquito defense force
Several power lines, upon which are perching about 80 barn swallows
July 25, 2025 at 2:14 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Our doorway has a guardian tonight
A toad has taken up a position in the corner next to our door, perfectly in the crack under the siding, looking like it's keeping watch.
July 17, 2025 at 3:54 AM
willemite.bsky.social
I was reading "On Fairy Stories" by Tolkien on the plane home yesterday and came across this absolute banger
"But out comes the big stick: "Electric lamps have come to stay," they say. Long ago Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he heard that anything "had come to stay," he knew that it would be very soon replaced—indeed regarded as pitiably obsolete and shabby. "The march of Science, its tempo quickened by the needs of war, goes inexorably on ... making some things obsolete, and foreshadowing new developments in the utilization of electricity": an advertisement. This says the same thing only more menacingly. The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insıgnificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even "inexorable." And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarantee that he will stop there: he might rouse men to pull down the street-lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction."
July 5, 2025 at 5:12 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Thinking about this scene a lot the last few days. This whole section of the movie really. Realizing that it's ok to feel scared and also that I'm not alone is really helping keep the despair at bay. And people have faced this thing many times before and overcame it, so we can too.
The scene in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, during the battle of Helm's Deep, where Theoden starts to despair and says, "What can men do against such reckless hate?" and Aragorn says, "Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them."
July 5, 2025 at 6:47 AM
willemite.bsky.social
Turning off motion smoothing, adaptive brightness, and volume normalization on the airbnb TV
The Starship Troopers "I'm Doing My Part" meme
June 26, 2025 at 5:13 AM
willemite.bsky.social
More like
That scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke tries to kill a smiling Palpatine and Darth Vader stops him, except Luke's lightsaber has been recolored red.
June 5, 2025 at 7:42 PM
willemite.bsky.social
Gene Wonder as Willy Wonka, dressed in a white body suit and top-hat dispassionately saying, "No. Stop. Don't."
May 27, 2025 at 12:58 AM
willemite.bsky.social
Happy birthday to me!
A bottle of Chimay Cinq Cents Trappist ale
May 23, 2025 at 9:17 PM
willemite.bsky.social
The first 3 have been pretty consistent since I first discovered this years ago, but #4 was new and fun. Runners up include Hurley from Lost and Al from Fullmetal, which is great.
Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1 Will Byers from Stranger Things Maurice from Beauty and the Beast
May 20, 2025 at 9:04 PM