All sorts of stuff in here. Currently living and breathing Critical Role and bunch of random fandoms, as always. You're welcome to message/send me an ask. I may not reply in anything approaching timely fashion, but that's me, not you :)
I first read “if you were lazy you would be having fun” on your blog and it has genuinely been a life-changing piece of advice for me and my friends - I’ve said it to like four of my other executive dysfunction judies and without fail it earns a ten second silence followed by a single revelatory “fuck”
My dad and I actually ran into the speech language pathologist who told me that over 20 years ago at a town hall a few months back—she is retired now, but still advocating for disabled students at IEP meetings and being a nuisance to school administrators. I thanked her for everything, and she was delighted to hear that I was passing her words along to other people who needed to hear them!
Trixie Mattel is right, getting to know your neighbors is the best inoculation against being annoyed by their noise. it only works up to a certain point, but for just regular footsteps or the occasional bass leaking through or a party once in a while, the anonymous Fucking Neighbors are people i will kill for doing their laundry at 10:14pm, but Steven and Ray who live upstairs and sometimes have to jog across their hardwood at 8:39am because they forgot to pick up their Clif bar before they put on their shoes for work are my good pals and i look forward to barricading the building together during the financial collapse.
Also great inoculation against landlord bullshit if you have close relationships with your neighbors!
So this is a visual representation of “are the new users you’re changing the entire app and website layout/features for in the room with us right now”.
TWIGGY & WOODY ALLEN My Generation (2017) dir. David Batty
“His first question was: ‘Who’s your favourite philosopher?’ My heart sank. I wanted to run off and burst into tears. I didn’t know any philosophers. And he probably knew I didn’t. When I said so, he replied, 'Oh come on, everyone has a favourite philosopher.’ It was such a cruel thing to do to a young girl.”
“I was desperate and trying not to cry but I turned the tables on him and asked him to come up with some names - but he couldn’t think of any either! Then he said to me, 'I suppose you’ve read Dickens,’ thinking I hadn’t. So I said, 'Yeah, I read him at school.’ In the end he said, 'Oh, I can’t interview her,’ and left the stage."
And here we see the power of the play or pay contract, which Barkley is alluding to having. A play-or-pay basically says, “We want you to do X for Y amount of time. If we or anyone else tries to cut it off before Y amount of time, you get this giant pile of money.”
Love you, Mr. Barkley. Show ‘em how the money works.
You’re not a bad person for wasting food because you forgot to eat it or left it out or didn’t have the time/energy/executive function to prepare it or didn’t have an appetite or whatever. Unlearn the guilt your parents taught you.
Yes if it’s an option offer your unused food to someone else who can benefit from it, but you’re not responsible for the whole world and forcing yourself to eat something won’t save someone else from hunger.
It *is* a problem that charismatic species are often focused on for conservation at the expense of less charismatic but important species, but threatened species that are the subject of a lot of public outreach and education are also typically strategically selected.
I suspect that monarch butterflies are an example of this. Milkweed is a highly valuable plant for pollinators and a host plant for like. 400+ insect species. Getting people to plant it to save monarchs is funny because you’re essentially finessing people into saving a ton of other insects that they wouldn’t ordinarily care about
“Save the bees” isn’t misguided, it’s just the version of the truth you would tell a 5 year old. If a small kid asks about the colors of the rainbow you don’t start explaining that visible light has wavelengths of 400-700 nanometers
A lot of people don’t even know that there are different types of bees. things like planting native flowers, stopping using insecticides, etc, benefit all bees and all insects generally
ALSO
it’s actually a GOOD thing to have lots of conservation efforts focusing on “Charismatic megafauna,” especially apex predators
Because big animals like tigers need a LOT of space
So creating a preserve to save tigers…saves thousands of other species, because the tigers need miles and miles of habitat to live on, and that habitat needs to be healthy to support the tigers
They’re called “umbrella species” and they’re a great thing.
This is exactly why pandas are great for conservation, and whining about them is myopic childish foot-stamping*. An adult panda needs a 2km square range. A viable population needs many of those joined together into a very big protected area. And if you have that, you also have the habitat for hundreds of thousands if not millions of invertebrate species that are never in their wildest dreams going to get that level of protection afforded to them otherwise
*Also pandas don’t stop having intrinsic value just because you personally decide they’re ‘overhyped’ or 'don’t contribute much to the ecosystem’. Ethically, that is a species that deserves to exist regardless of how 'useful’ it is (side note, absolutely FUCK that capitalist bullshit), and also, if humans are why it’s going extinct, it’s on humans to bring it back. And if they aren’t readily breeding in captivity, the question to ask is 'What aren’t we providing in their environment that they need?’**, not the whiny temper tantrum of 'But why won’t they meet us halfway? They won’t help themselves! I am very smart.’
**It’s a tall tree to climb. This is emerging research but it looks like a vital part of panda mate selection is watching a male climb a tree to show off his tree climbing genes. We have not been including these in panda enclosures, so the females have been looking at these males sitting around and going 'Tch. Pathetic.’
Thank you @headspace-hotel and @becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys for reframing this for me in a way that is super positive and encouraging and giving me new information from which to draw better conclusions. I have learned a new way of seeing things today and am very pleased I will be able to offer this perspective to others going forward.
I full understand that it is not appropriate as response to talking about the various roles of christianity in colonialism and Christofascism,
However as its own thing, I think its an interesting subject how the Bible is supposed to be the fundamental source of Christian doctrine, BUT most of the “traditional values” of christian conservatives and ideas that are powerfully associated with christianity…just Are Not In There, or are only mentioned as brief, isolated side notes amidst much longer and more detailed passages discussing something different
Whereas many ideas that are emphasized HUGELY in the Bible are just totally and completely ignored by these rightwing political folks 
Much of Christianity is not actually based on the Bible, but instead on a bunch of traditions and later writers, but protestants have problems with admitting that.
And as someone who was raised very “sola scriptura” i don’t even get why church tradition matters for anyone. Who cares what Augustine thought about abortion. He was literally just a guy
It’s not like I exactly AGREE with everything in the Bible or identify with any religion anymore, but at the same time it’s kinda rad that this ancient compendium of religious texts is rabidly anti-capitalist and describes the early believers forgoing private ownership of things and communally sharing all possessions according to the needs of each
evangelicals: see this one passage poetically referencing God knitting someone together in their mother’s womb clearly means abortion is murder
also evangelicals: i’m sure jesus didn’t mean it when he said you have to give away your possessions to the poor if you have more than you need, and that even if a rich person follows all the teachings to the letter they will not be part of the kingdom of heaven unless they sell all they have and give it to the poor, and that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, and that we’re supposed to hang out with the most marginalized members of society and visit people in prison and purposefully identify with the lowest social status. Homeless people are probably on drugs and don’t deserve handouts, and poor people should just work harder. Jesus would love capitalism and wants me to have 10 guns
To me, this has to be like a case study in how organizations can end up deviating horribly from the principles they are ostensibly based upon.
Like y'all how could you possibly fuck it up this bad
I’ve seen posts comparing christianity to other religions in the sense of having a robust scholarly tradition that debates and reinterprets things, and Christianity DOES have that but I think the trouble is, Christianity has a tendency to get rid of people that come up with politically inconvenient ideas
There were plenty of Christian communists in like the 50s and 60s. But in the USA at least the Evangelical Right rose to power and now you don’t hear about that very much.
And the Evangelicals are still eating their own and it’s brutal and fucking scary.
Like…y'all know VeggieTales? Yeah so the guy that created VeggieTales has a podcast these days where he talks about things like how evil and heretical nationalism is, and how the white American church needs to repent of racism because racism is deeply embedded in our history, and how American exceptionalism is wrong, and maybe gay and trans people having human rights isn’t an attack on our faith, and the Evangelical Right has basically dumped him and slandered him as a “groomer” and “pedophile”
I think the idea of “modesty” as in “women should cover up their bodies in order to not tempt men” is one of the most egregious cases of this, because the passage used to support this very straightforwardly describes “modesty” as “don’t wear expensive clothes and jewelry to show off your wealth.”
Also Jesus literally said “If your eye makes you sin, then gouge it out ” so it’s not like we don’t KNOW where he stands on the whole “but when I can see that women have butts it makes me think dirty thoughts and that’s not fair to poor little me” thing.
This is a teaching that has hurt so many people and it’s not even IN the text it supposedly comes from
…No actually the worst one is “Sodom was destroyed because homosexuality” one. No you idiot, the story is that angels visited the city and the men of the city tried to gang rape them, and the story Clearly Unambiguously States Outright that the sin they committed was lack of hospitality (you should treat visitors well and raping people who come to visit you is not that).
Imagine if fire and brimstone preachers convinced that God was punishing America with natural disasters actually read the Bible, though. “Fires and hurricanes will keep happening until we stop treating immigrants and refugees badly!”
Oftentimes from my own experiences Christians will literally just completely redefine words until they fit the narrative that they want to push. They’ll take something and relate its definition back to some obscure marginally related root and then tie that back to a different word from another language and then tie THAT word back to another word just to avoid saying rich people are bad. Which sure seems ironic for people who claim to believe that changing the Bible is the greatest sin ever. Oh but don’t investigate mistranslations though nonono our current translation is perfect and flawless. Hey stop looking up when the word homosexuality was added to the bible——-
Yeah so re: the gay thing, according to my dad (who has a Master’s of Divinity and is a former pastor and reads Greek and isn’t particularly liberal on interpretation) there’s only one passage that really could make a credible case that gay=bad, which is Romans 1
But the thing about this passage is…it’s not teaching that being gay is bad. You see, the Apostle Paul is describing the activities of “pagans” in a way so as to provoke shock and condemnation from his audience, just so he can turn around and say “But YALL are way worse than those pagans you just got so high and mighty about!”
It’s all a rhetorical setup for an epic roast and the content isn’t particularly relevant to the message. The strongest case you can make is that there’s a passage that seems to incidentally imply that early Christians disapproved of homosexuality, but it’s not being directly taught. There’s just not much support for the centrality of Gay=Bad in modern christian discourse—it clearly wasn’t a major concern for the original writers
The Leviticus passage that’s like “you shall not lay with a man etc etc” uses a word that is only used in that specific instance throughout the whole canon, so it’s not considered good practice to make firm judgments about what it means.
And of course, Jesus apparently never thought it important enough to mention, or the writers of the Gospels didn’t think it was important enough to write.
Nowadays, people will try to say that the Biblical gender roles imply being gay is wrong or imperfect in some way, but that’s even less supportable (the early church had women in teaching and leadership roles and some translations have tried to intentionally obscure this).
It also has very creepy implications in how it overextends the metaphor of marriage being an allegory for god’s love for humanity—if you imply that a man and a woman are needed to “complete” this image, therefore gay marriage can’t “represent” God’s love, you’re suggesting that no other human relationship represents God’s love, that men are inherently closer to God, that God as a Spirit somehow is limited by genitals, and possibly that God wants to fuck us.
It’s literally a metaphor learning basic rhetorical devices will not kill u
Every once in a while I wonder what Christianity would be if it hadn’t been turned into an imperial religion and codified by the Roman Empire?
I mean, they literally had a council to pick and choose which texts to include and which not.
If the religion hadn’t taken that rather drastic turn, where and what would Christianity be now?
And where can we take it in the future if we try to wrestle it back to its roots and rededicate ourselves to the radical notions that got Christ executed by the state in the first place?
While I am not currently enrolled in college, something I found incredibly helpful when it came to studying and taking notes was fully romanticizing it. And by that I mean going all the way in— I would put on a classical music playlist and set my LEDs to a warm orange tone and pretend I was a young scholar in ye olden days studying by candlelight, and a couple hours later I’d have half a notebook filled with color-coded notes. Another time I put on some film noir jazz and rain ambience and imagined I was a tired, grizzled detective working tirelessly on a cold case that just wasn’t making sense. And sure enough, I would have pages upon pages of notes and work completed by the end of the night. It sounds really silly but I shocked myself with how well it worked, and I wanted to share my experience with it in case it can help anyone else!
so I didn’t know if female jesters had been a thing in the past and looked it up and was introduced to mathurine the fool, who gave one of the best burns in history in a silly little way.
also she apparently stopped an assassination?? amazing.
[ID: She was known for her extravagant costume as an Amazonian warrior, complete with shield, armor, and a wooden sword. She was famous for her sharp wit, and there were many anecdotes about it. One of them was an occasion, in which a lady in waiting complained that she did not like having a fool at her right side, upon which Mathurine jumped to the lady’s other side and announced: “I don’t mind it at all.” /end ID]
if you’re fat and physically disabled you might hear a little voice in your head saying you wouldn’t be disabled if you lost weight. this is actually the voice of the devil and you should not listen to him.
According to the absolute bullshit of the BMI, I am obese. I’m about 170 lbs and 5’ 2-½".
My right hip recently started to show signs of impingement. I know what that feels like because it happened to my left hip about twelve years ago.
When I was 130 and the same height.
You know what caused my left hip impingement? A list of injuries over three decades from the time I was a kid.
You want to know what made the pain better? Doing the PT exercises to strengthen my hip so that it would simply roll through the socket like there’s not an even spot in my cartilage to catch on.
You know what’s helped the pain for my right hip? The same exercises plus a couple new ones my doctor suggested because we think I might have tight hamstrings to boot.
And you know what I’ve done since the first impingement and this one? Gained 40 pounds.
You know what hasn’t happened as I’ve gained that 40 pounds? My left hip getting worse.
Any doctor who looks at your disability and immediately blames your weight deserves to be challenged as hard as you can manage. Bodies do shit because bodies do shit. Because we do shit to our bodies because we are in them.
