it truly does
ain’t that what happened to dolores umbridge
this is why I love this joke:
Jesus was fond of telling his followers not to worry about how they’d afford food tomorrow because God would provide. But Jesus told them this while handing out free bread and encouraging them to help people who were in need, making them the outlet through which God would provide for others
My mother was a waitress, we live in an area that has a lot of Christians and people would often stiff her on tips. Instead they’d leave a pamphlet with quotes from Jesus saying not to worry because God would provide
Jesus’ message was never that God would magically put food on people’s tables. God would provide opportunities to help each other, like the boat captains offering to help the dying man. That only works if people actually help each other
When I first heard this joke as a teenager I laughed at the guy who didn’t take the help that was offered to him. As an adult, I think of all the Christian politicians who vote against food stamps and I want to tell them “You were the boat captain but you steered away from the man in need instead of offering him help. Is that really what God wanted you to do?”
There are so many levels to this joke.
also it kinda got overshadowed by uhhhhhh Everything That Happened After but i’m still thinking about how sexy that war council was. all these power players in the same place eating crossaints and strategizing about how to kill undead gods in front of a giant magical war map? strategy and very little argument and the sheer amount of shared history between the people in that room? promises to keep loved ones safe? the knowledge that the whole world rested on the shoulders of those ten people? and just how FAR the band of boobs have come, to find themselves here??? wow…….wow.
girls night
so I read the article and the story is both less and more insane than it sounds.
basically, there's been an ants' nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.
fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what's basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go "holy fuck" start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.
fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.
spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.
tl;dr it's not "oh noes evil ants are on a rampage", it's "ants forced into a horrible situation to survive get to go home"
Fox in court garments, with one of the darkened blades that give the Black Knives their name.
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Trying to relearn rendering after taking such a long break from it was a struggle, but I think I’ve gotten the hang of it again. And in the interim, my anatomy, perspective, and composition improved hugely.
Do not repost, edit, or reblog without my caption.
Please check out more of their oc’s y’all they’re amazing 😍😍😍
If anyone can help, please do! Even if it's just a reblog, if we manage to get her story out there, there will be those who can donate! Every little thing counts.
How to have a conversation about a topic you’re not interested in or don’t know anything about:
- Listen to what the other person has to say about the topic.
- Ask a question about what they said. Asking them to clarify or explain something you don’t understand is great, but any question will do. All else fails, ask them to explain what they like about some part of the topic.
- Listen to their responses and go back to step 2.
- Do this until 5-15 minutes has passed, then change the subject to a topic of your interest, unless you are actually interested in learning more on this subject, in which case, go on for as long as you like.
- Sometimes, they will say something like “I’m sorry to blather on about [topic].” This is an attempt at a conversational dismount. You can either say “no, it was fascinating, thanks” and then bring up your own topic, or you can say “no, it’s fascinating, please keep going” if you want to keep hearing about their topic. Note the tense difference (past -> moving on, present -> keep going).
I just thought I’d write a script for this, because someone who can’t / won’t do this came up in a Captain Awkward column, and listening about topics you have no interest in is a really useful skill to have and not often explicitly taught, particularly to boys and men.
OK the script is good, especially if you ARE interested BUT don’t know anything, a.k.a. if you want to learn. Works to learn about someone, too.
And if you are NOT interested, well, having that script is a good way to remain polite and not look like an asshole, sure, but why do you want to have that conversation in the first place? Why is it a useful skill to have? I think I’m missing the context this post comes from. (Hey, see? That’s point number 2 :p)
Ah, this I can help with.
There are at least two reasons I can think of off the top of my head, why you might want to be able to have engaging and polite conversations about uninteresting subjects.
First, in a professional setting, the ability to network with other professionals can often determine whether you have/get/keep a job, how you are treated at that job, and how well your performance is recognized within that job. For people like myself, who lack the innate ability to socialize competently or learn socialization skills by watching, the leads to a lot of problems. We have trouble getting hired because we’re seen as self-absorbed. We tend to get fired because we’re seen as idsinterested in our work environment. We have difficulty being recognized for our contributions because our lack of social skills causes others to think negatively of us, overestimate our mistakes, and underestimate our successes.
Having a script to help us perform this very necessarily yet intensely esoteric piece of socialization, that is simultaneously expected of us, and yet, that is never taught to us directly, can make a difference in whether we can actually make money and pay for our own lives. Even for those of us who do not/cannot work, the ability to socialize in this manner with peopel who have any degree of conditional authority over you can determine whether they approve your requests for aid, help you receive the medical treatment you need, etc.
This is, of course, fucking obscene, but it’s also a fact of life. As such, scripts like this can, in a very real way, be a matter of life and death.
But in a much less catastrophic sense, they’re also just helpful for building and maintaining relationships.
Your friends and partners are not going to0 be clones of yourself. They’ll have different interests from you, and some of the time those interests will be so different that you just don’t care about them at all. but you still care about your friends and partners. It would be rude, or even cruel, to refuse to talk to them about the things they love. This creates a sense of shame and alienation that can spell the end of an otherwise happy, healthy relationship.
By having a script you can rely on for those circumstances, you can still show interest in and bond with your friends/family/partners about subjects you don’t personally care about, rather than having to walk away from them any time they start talking about the nuances of daemon assignment and culture in the His Dark Materials series and how the latest adaptation, for TV, is incomprehensibly frustrating for just straight up ignoring one of the single most central parts of the novels by throwing out basic considerations on how daemons work.
For example.
I’m an actor, so networking is a huge part of my job. An insane amount of this industry is knowing someone who knows someone. “I’m not familiar, but please tell me more” is a life saving phrase and has gotten me, for example, a contact who’s worked in everything from the BBC to Take That. That single phrase might have gotten me access to someone with the know-how and resources to help me make one of my dreams (to own my own production company aimed at increasing working class access to theatre) a reality. It also hooked me up with an actor who just finished a tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the owner of a theatre here in my home town, a film producer in Manchester, and an award winning indie script-writer and producer.
This shit works.
Some good additions to my old post.
I was focused on “how.” Here’s some great discussion of “why.”
Gryffindor Quidditch Team (with Oliver Wood looking like both his Christmas and bday presents came early in the form of one brilliant Seeker)
Chaotic Good brother.
King
Huge Flex on New Yorkers, old people, and Islanders everywhere
chekovsphaser