I was today years old when I learned that in Magic: the Gathering, the Avatar creature type (the Ur-Dragon, Arahbo, etc), the purest version of the creature's essence that exists in the Blind Eternities and from which all other material summons of that creature emanate... is just Plato's Forms.

This past week I kept wanting to text my MAGA parents after almost a year of no contact to see where they are on some of these current events, but then I remembered I don't like punching myself in the face.

So I did finally finish Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and I'm elated about it. Putting together my five most impactful takeaways to publish on the Substack by the end of the month. #philosophy

Like clockwork every night, a pack of coyotes howls discordantly in the wild spaces near our property. I thought it was unsettling at first, but I've lately grown fond of their evening ritual. "Listen to them—children of the night. What music they make!"

I think my word for 2026 will be "ritual." I'm focusing on consistency, being in the moment, and experiencing the magic in day-to-day life.

Ah, I've gotten to the "idk man, what even *is* reality?" part of the philosophy book: "We can achieve only the cognition of appearances, never of things in themselves." (Yes, it's still Kant.)

Witches, pagans, romantics, and exvangelicals with a complicated relationship to the divine, I wrote something for you here. It's free access, in both article and podcast form, so you can read and/or listen at your leisure. open.substack.com/pub/amycheek...

About to start reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and I spent the morning figuring out how Kant's use of the word "practical" is different to how Aristotle uses the word "practical," and that both have little to do with how we use the word "practical" today.

If you regularly yap about ethics, applied philosophy, or literary theory, interact here or say hi so I can follow you. I'm studying to go back to school for this in a few years and would like to build my circle of geniuses.

Optimistically, I would imagine I only understand about 45-55% of what Kant is arguing in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals on my first passthrough. I think I'll do some secondary reading and come back to it again when I've absorbed more of his glossary.

I tell my students all the time—a work of art is completed in the mind of the audience and is therefore permanently chimerical. It WILL mean something different to everyone. That said, the artist's intention is valuable and definitive insight, which is coming from the opposite side of the work.

Lord Godalming is an underrated foil to Dracula who is the leeching aristocrat, who hoards his wealth and lets it spoil, draining the lower classes. Arthur, however, philanthropizes and democratizes his wealth, allowing people below his class to use his name and funds as needed for the cause.

Among the many ways the Catholic church ignores consent is the fact that once you are forced through a Catholic baptism in your infancy, the church considers you a Catholic for all time. You can't "unbecome" a Catholic in their eyes, nor will they ever strike you from their headcount.

I have some grounds of disagreement with Kant, for sure, but I haven't stopped being impressed with his teleological argument for morality as the natural purpose of reason since I read it over a month ago.