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The history of Baphomet is so absurd and stupid.

In all likelihood it's a corruption of "Muhammad" during one of the Crusades, which would mean it stems from some idiot Islamophobe. In any case, it's a fake name for a fake god that the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping, after they were forced to confess after being tortured.

Then some crackpot occultist, Éliphas Lévi, centuries later, makes up some fake history behind him, invents what he looks like, and gives him attributes he didn't have before.

Then Satanists and right-wing Christians decide that he's a demon of some kind, adding even more fake attributes to an already fake god, which have nothing to do with Lévi's version, just because he looks vaguely like Satan.

That said, I think he looks cool, and there's no real reason to not use him in supernatural horror fiction. I know I intend to. But there's no reason to think he's even remotely real.

I honestly think that if you have intelligent, well-educated parents (like mine) to guide you, you could replace public school almost entirely with television.

Public education kinda sucks. They might tell you some vague outline of the Revolutionary War, like mentioning George Washington and Ben Franklin and Paul Revere, and something about "taxation without representation", whatever that means. What they don't tell you is all the stuff behind it, like the French philosophers and other social commentators who inspired the Founding Fathers, the intense excitement of the violent bloody battles, Ben Franklin's revolutions in newspapers, the idealism, the internal debates, the way King George III went insane.

They might mention how ancient Egypt had mummies and pyramids, and some gods like Anubis and Ra, but never mention the complex mythology, the way every pharaoh tried to gaslight the populace into thinking his version of religion was the correct one, and radicals like Akhenaten and Hatshepsut.

You could learn more about history from PBS and YouTube documentaries than you could in elementary and middle school. I learned more about science from Bill Nye the Science Guy than at a class. I've learned more about practical math from Cyberchase than I ever did in school.

The trick, of course, is to fact-check stuff you watch, especially on YouTube. If you use Wikipedia, check the citations and see if they're a reliable source.

It actually makes me worry about teachers' jobs, especially when it comes to music. I've learned more about music theory and playing guitar from YouTube than I ever did in the approx. 5 years I took guitar classes- although admittedly I wasn't very ambituous back then.

Historians will one day be using social media as one of their main sources.

Think about it: No generation before had the lives of oridinary people so thoroughly documented. Never before were so many small, seemingly insignificant moments recorded for prosperity.

Billions of people are writing down their thoughts and opinions every single second, painting a picture of what we think, how we feel, how society is evolving.

And it probably won’t be for reasons we expect. One day researchers will want to know what books we were reading, and what furniture we were buying, and will look in the backgrounds of videos of our pets being cute.

Historians will probably run into some trouble, however. Videos and posts get deleted, leaving only traces of their impact. People will asking permission to dig through YouTube servers, private cloud storages, asking our descendants for forgotten passwords to their loved ones’ Twitter and Facebook accounts, digging up obsolete mobile phones and devices and retrieving data that might be corrupted.

One of my biggest fears is things of the past going away.

Right now we’re in a point of history where if something still exists (and we know where it is), it’s never really going away. Preservation is bigger than ever, and the concept of “lost media” is a big deal. If someone manages to save a copy of something, it’s here for keeps.

But it wasn’t always that way. I can look back and see many times when something got lost forever because it wasn’t the hip, cool, latest thing. Great films, great architecture, destroyed or forgotten because it was OLD. It was this sort of attitude is what got us Trump Tower instead of a beautiful art deco building.

People will say, “don’t worry, the new thing isn’t going to replace the old thing, you can still enjoy it!”. And while that’s technically true, what I’m more concerned about is whether or not newer generations are able to enjoy it too. Yes, it’s still there, but how many people except the ones who grew up with it know about it? Corporations usually don’t put much effort in keeping anyone but the most dedicated fans aware of it, if even that. It’s usually up to older generations to sit a kid down and give it to them themselves.

There’s been so many times where someone will say, “if the remake is successful, it will spark interest in the original and we’ll finally get it on DVD!”. But I can only think of that ever happening once. There’s so many of my favorite shows I’ve been forced to bootleg off the internet, because that’s the only place to get it.

It makes me sad to think that someone won’t get to experience the joy and excitement that I have. I want other people to have that same feeling of happiness. I don’t want anyone to forget.

One thing I’ve wondered lately- who was it that first noticed that the Americas had some of the same animals as the Old World?

Like, one day somebody had to have realized “hey this place has foxes and bears and weasels too, but there’s an ocean on both sides, what the heck?”.