BS-Free Witchcraft

89. What Makes Wicca Wicca?

One of the biggest things I think a lot of older witches take for granted is that people understand what makes Wicca, well, Wicca. While we’ve discussed the history before, and last month talked about the weird anti-Wicca backlash, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how this incredibly diverse religion is practiced. Frankly, just the fact that it is largely an orthopraxic religion and not an orthodoxic one is a concept a lot of folks raised in predominantly Christian frameworks struggle with.

So let’s talk about it.

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Ask a Medievalist

97. Non-Roman Calendars

When is Hanukkah this year? When is Lupercalia, or Easter, or Midsummer’s Eve? When is your birthday? Figuring out when big events happen is incredibly important, and humans have been doing it for a long time. But while we can see some similarities in the process of calendar evolution, many civilizations had very different ways of conceptualizing and measuring time. Join Em and Dr. Jesse for a discussion of non-Roman calendars!

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Casual Trek

87. Flesh Katamari

We’re still concerned with the Delta Quadrant as this episode of Casual Trek covers episodes from Modern Trek’s animated series concerning the Voyager, the Delta Quadrant and all those assorted antics. First up is the Prodigy Season One mid-season two-parter ‘A Moral Star’ where Dal and the Protostar gang plan to actually do a Starfleet with a little bit of heist antics as they try to break out the prisoners of their old home and then in Lower Decks’s ‘Twovix’ as Boimler grapples with the possibility of promotion, the crew of the Cerritos discover that when there’s an outbreak of Tuvixes, Janeway was 100% right!

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Casual Trek

86. Star Trek Khan: Lost… In Space

It’s time for a podcast about a podcast! Yes, we’re talking about Star Trek: Khan, the official Star Trek podcast. What happened between Space Seed and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Dr Rosalind Lear wants to know and brings some familiar faces to Ceti Alpha V to dig up some old recordings. Does she want to humanize this space tyrant or exonerate Kirk for his actions? Flashbacks, being stranded in a hostile wilderness, Naveen Andrews… Is this Lost? Kind of. At least, it’s enough for Charlie and Miles to talk about Lost a lot, as well as serialized fiction and the plot of the first three episodes of Star Trek: Khan.

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Casual Trek

85. Star Trek Halloween III – Let’s Get Scotty Laid!

It’s that time of year where we try and delve into the strange and scary for our Halloween episode and this time, we’ve hit upon altered states (not the Ken Russell film) where our heroes undergo a strange transformation. In the TOS episode ‘Wolf in the Fold,’ Bones’s obsession with getting Scotty laid ends in a lot of mysterious stabbings that date back to Victorian London, while in Voyager’s ‘Darkling,’ the Doctor’s attempt to improve himself by adding bits of other people into him starts making him very large in the tooth and a little too psychosexual towards Kes. Then in DS9’s ‘Empok Nor,’ O’Brien, Nog, Garak and a collection of clearly important side characters mission to a deserted Cardassian Space Station to steal some wiring ends with psychotropic drug-induced violence. Typical. Happy Halloween!

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Ask a Medievalist

96. Pope Joan

Starting in the middle ages, a rumor spread of a female pope, elected because of her incredible learning, who went undiscovered until she gave birth to a child. At which point, everyone lost their minds. Join Em and Dr. Jesse to learn about the veracity of this tale and the wacky test it (allegedly) engendered. (Ha.)

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Casual Trek

84. TNG/Doctor Who: Assmilation Squared – The TARDIS Enters Data

Welcome to spooky season and we’re horrifying Miles specifically with a crossover between Star Trek and his favorite fandom! Can you hear the finger of a monkey’s paw curling? Assimilation Squared has been a threat on this show for a while, but why is that? Listen on and we’ll explain the story and the many questionable art choices.

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