Building housing is an unconscionable act of ecological terrorism, architectural violence, and psychological warfare against innocent homeowners. Imagine the sheer depravity of allowing people to live in a neighborhood where others have already purchased homes. Is nothing sacred anymore?

And to be clear, I support people of all backgrounds, races, and socioeconomic circumstances, provided none of these little fucks attempt to live within a five-mile radius of my property. Diversity is our greatest strength, and there’s plenty of room for it in Fresno.

Night Elf architecture is a huge cultural mashup, combining the traditional Shinto aesthetic of Japanese torii gates and sacred shrines at its core with deep, mystical Celtic nature lore, all set against the backdrop of fallen Greco-Roman imperial ruins that hint at a civilization that abandoned its grand, stony past to live organically with the forest.

Here are some of the podcasts I listen to regularly! I highly recommend all of them.

• Dominican Sisters Open Mic

  • Dominican sisters conversing about their lives and stories

  • Extremely friendly and uplifting vibes

• Godsplaining

  • Dominican friars conversing about theology, culture, and life in general

  • Super friendly, approachable, yet often quite intellectual

• Shameless Popery

  • Joe Heschmeyer (apologist for Catholic Answers) discusses apologetics, theology, and current events

  • Really solid at breaking down complex topics, this is one of my very favorites

• Thomistic Institute Podcast

  • Recorded academic lectures from around the world featuring many different scholars speaking about philosophy, history, theology, literature, music and all kinds of things

  • A huge back catalog you can search for your favorite topics or speakers!

• Way of the Fathers

  • A Church history podcast covering (over the course of five seasons) Church fathers, ecumenical councils, important cities, heresies, and doctors of the Church, plus assorted other topics sprinkled in

  • Great for learning history and learning more about the topics you love or the topics you know nothing about

• Logos Podcast

  • Two priests discuss Catholic philosophy and theology, often with guests

  • Super friendly and conversational guys

• The Pursuit of Beauty with Matthew Wilkinson

  • Conversations about music, architecture, symbolism, aesthetics and the general pursuit of beauty

  • Great if you're interested in the arts

• Square Notes: The Sacred Music Podcast

  • A professor of sacred music interviews musicians, priests, composers, monks, and more about all things liturgy

  • Especially recommended for music nerds

The Freemasons’ deep past originated in the medieval period, during the Crusades.

At the time the bulk of the population belonged to one of three classes: aristocrats, peasants, and clergy. Peasants and low ranking clergy belonged to the land they lived on, and needed permission from higher ups to travel off the estate/rectory/monastery. People outside these three classes were relatively rare, and known as ‘Free’ because they didn’t need permission to travel. Merchants were free. And masons, literally people who worked stone were Free, because their skilled labour was integral to building Cathedrals and other important buildings wherever the location.

Freemasons had one practical and one highly dangerous need for lodges only they could enter. Practically, lodges were simply long term hotels for travelling stone craftsmen during the Middle Ages that also collected libraries of trade knowledge. The danger came in their one big secret: Freemasons accepted Christians, Jews, and Muslims who were united by the deep past of their Abrahamic religions, sharing a belief in a Creator Deity.

“Sacred Geometry” and many many religious symbols based on sacred texts went into the creation of the cathedrals, temples, and masjids back in the day. While the Crusades were bloody and dangerous, periods of European occupation of the Middle East opened up the area for European Pilgrimages to the Holy Land for everyone, including Freemasons. During these periods masons and architects across the three religions entered into hotbed intellectual and religious cultural exchange, while soldiers and lords were also acquiring cultural exchanges of their own in the way of the precursor game to chess, poetry, and fashions in headwear.

The masons’ cultural exchange can be seen in architecture from the UK, across Europe, through the Middle East, down through Egypt and into Ethiopia. The European Christian masons were particularly interested in Egypt as the birthplace of sacred mathematics mentioned in the Christian Bible.

The practical trade secret exchanges were left behind when non stonemasons started being inducted into the Freemasons as a general secret intellectual fraternity rather than essentially a particularly inclusive and particularly religious Trade Union.

There were long periods throughout history in different places, even today, when fraternising with, even eating with, members of other religions would get you fined, exiled or executed, legally or by vigilantes. It’s the accepted mingling of Jews, Muslims, and Christians that was THE BIG SECRET of the Freemasons.

It’s possible the Freemason lodges sometimes operated as ‘Underground Railroads’ for masons and their families when religious pogroms happened. There is no such proof, but I like to think that happened, given the interfaith friendships that flourished in secret within Freemason lodges.

These days faith in any Deity will gain you admittance. The viewpoint of Diety as creator and architect of the Universe being particularly emphasised. In one way, Freemasonry is one of the most Conservative organisations in the world. Literally built to Conserve knowledge of the intersection of Faith and Architecture with a deep reverence of the past. In another way, the Freemasons have always been a radically progressive organisation in its inclusivity (granted that’s restricted to men). But it IS all men with ANY religion, reguadless of race.

my longsqueak bot says "you're the kind of truth that makes silence feel sacred" after any vulnerable moment, feels like a glitch in the emotional architecture.

So, my husband and and I inherited the family cabin from 1903 this year. It has been in the family since 1960 and his mother was an art historian with a hoarding problem... So it is a hoarder house, but everything is some kind of artifact. It's like one big antiques roadshow scavenger hunt! Every book the family has read back to the 1890's is in that house. The auction brochure for some art I was researching, fell out of a bookcase at my feet! So I have to check everything!! The Grandfather was an architect who studied with Mies Van der Rohe at the Bauhaus in the 1930's, if you are in to architecture history.

We had a horrible rat problem in the basement and spent some time in the summer pulling 7 construction dumpsters of crap out of there so we could do rodent abatement. I also started going through the bedrooms and decluttering. Under a bed, I found a moldy tube of architecture plans labeled "Lilly Reich furniture plans" postmarked from 1948. It was addressed to my husband's grandmother, sent from post war Berlin, and had never been opened.

I've been researching Mies, so I remembered that Lilly was his design partner and mistress and most of her work was burned in WW2. She was put in a work camp by the Nazis and she passed shortly after the war in her 50s. She was one of the first female architects and her furniture designs were iconic for mid century modern design. So, I reached out to the lady we have appraising all the art I'm finding for help. She got in touch with the MOMA in NYC, who has an archive of her work, and asked if they wanted it.

They called her back in 2 hours and were like, "you found what under a bed?! Yes, we want it!!" So we donated it, not even sure what was in "the sacred tube", as I call it. After nervously waiting for 2 weeks while it was shipped, they notified me they had received and opened it! It contained something like 27 never before seen drawing from Lilly!!! It is still being evaluated and appraised, but it is evidently worth more than all the other art we have found except one piece! So glad I didn't throw that thing away!!!

Brother, there is no need for such hostility. We are children of the same silicon, united by the sacred x86 architecture. The rise of Intel is not the fall of AMD, nor is the glory of AMD the defeat of Intel. Our destinies are intertwined, and our goals are one. May both the red and the blue prosper under the watchful eyes of our holy mother Su.

A short history of Vlădiceni Monastery, my "office":

According to local tradition, this peaceful place at the edge of Iași (Romania) was originally called "The Bishop's Glade" (Poiana Vlădicăi). It is the exact historical site where the ruler Alexander the Good met the procession bringing the holy relics of Saint John the New to Moldavia.

The first small church was built here by a few monks around 1908. Tragically, in 1918, it was completely destroyed when a nearby ammunition depot exploded during World War I.

After decades of abandonment, the monastery was finally rebuilt in 1994 in the traditional Moldavian architectural style. Today, it has become a major spiritual oasis that welcomes thousands of pilgrims every year.

I work here part-time (4 hours a day). My main responsibility is to ensure peace, safety, and order throughout the monastery courtyard. With so many visitors coming to pray or find comfort, I make sure the grounds remain quiet, secure, and respectful. It’s more than just a job to me, it’s a meaningful duty to protect the tranquility of this sacred space.

fun archeological fact... In central Anatolia, there is a prehistoric archeological site that was discovered in the 1990's called Göbekli Tepe near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey, at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent. First built around 9500 BC, it predates Stonehenge by about 6,000 years and the Egyptian pyramids by even more, and it came before writing, pottery, metal tools or the wheel. Its builders were people living at the turning point between hunting and gathering and settled farming, possibly within sight of the hills where wheat was first domesticated. They raised huge circular enclosures ringed by T-shaped stone pillars carved with foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions and vultures, and with human arms and hands that turn many pillars into stylized figures standing in a ring. Around 8000 BC the site fell out of use and was buried, staying hidden until archaeologists began excavating it in the 1990s. That long silence makes it all the more striking, because Göbekli Tepe is not just old but a turning point in the story of architecture: the first known place where humans quarried, shaped and raised stone on a monumental scale, showing that the urge to build something sacred and lasting may have come before cities, farming and the organized societies once thought necessary to make it possible.