#Significant Difference

[livinglifeagainblog]

Daily Devotional

In Galatians 6:2, Paul instructs us to "carry each other's burdens." This is a powerful call to action rooted in the heart of Christian community and love. It is a reminder that we are not meant to walk alone in our faith journey. Instead, we are to look out for one another, offering support and compassion

Reflecting on this, we see that true community is more than just gathering together. It is about being deeply involved in each other's lives, understanding their struggles, and lending a helping hand. When we carry someone else's burden , we mirror Christ's love for us. He carried the ultimate burden for humanity on the cross, and by following His example, we fulfill the law of Christ, which is the law of love.

In today's world, it is easy to become isolated or to focus solely on our own problems. Yet, this verse challenges us to step out of our comfort zones and be there for others. Whether it's a friend going through a hard time, a neighbor who needs help, or a stranger in distress, we are called to act.

Consider this:

How can you carry someone's burden today?

Is there someone in your life who needs your support, a listening ear, or a helping hand?

Take a moment to reach out to them. It might be a small gesture, but it can make a significant difference.

Lets pray for the strength to support one another, for the wisdom to see where we are needed, and for the love to act selflessly. As we do, we dot only build stronger communities but also become more like Christ.

Questions to further reflect on:

Who in your life is carrying a burden that you can help lighten today?

[bereft-of-frogs]

There’s that post that’s like ‘everyone should get into a tiny niche fandom at least once’ fully agree, that was really fun -- but I would like to add that everyone should get into a fandom where their opinions run counter to major fanon because it really teaches you about sticking to your guns and trusting your interpretation of the text without having to rely on peer validation

because WHAT are people talking about sometimes

[firestorm09890]

Project Moon seems to actively avoid saying anything at all about gender (which in itself does say something- they seem to write their characters blind of what gender they're going to be and maybe even flip a coin to decide, in the end saying "we're all people and anyone can be in this social position and have these personality traits", but that's not the point here) but it was still awesome of them to make one of the six female characters in the main cast a mother figure anyway- which sounds sarcastic but I promise it isn't, because that character happens to be the violent chainsmoker who speaks in esoteric acronyms and refuses to explain them and only enjoys herself when she gets to engage in her favorite form of art (murdering people). that's the mom. and they practically tell us “she loves her child like a defensive spider mother who will hunt for food for her babies and devour anyone who tries to squash her kids” through giving her some form of Spider Bud EGO three times.

the reason this is better than no mothers at all is because instead of having to explain why [x] character (Rodya mostly) is not at all a mother figure and having to elaborate on Project Moon’s ideals and the way they write their characters you can go “actually you’re wrong the only milf on the bus is Ryōshū” and also because it subverts expectations so much more than if there just wasn’t any moms. with a complete absence you could still have the “ideal” mother in your head imagining that she could exist in the cast, but instead we have this

[aegisprecisionkinetics]

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[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A whole new meaning to Gay Chicken.

(For: Anonymous raffle winner!)

[teratomatica]

you always land on all fours

[isaacz]

These are not finished in the slightest but i wanna share anyway, rainworld doodles cuz i've been playing alot with friends lately First couple of designs are: five pebbles, no significant harrasment, seven red suns and looks to the moon respectfully. And as for the slugcat, thats my oc, his name is rascal and he's part lizard, his ability is that his stomach is basically a hammer space and can keep any items inside, literally any, like give 5 spears to this mf he can keep it for u(also he's moons body guard AHEM AHEM). The other slugcat is my friends oc @sleeepybacon :D

[papayasector]

category is: hands

[obibail]

"Still not helpful."

[nitewrighter]

Okay so the distribution of the previous poll kind of bugged me and I feel it didn't really tell us a lot because the majority of the data was just spilt between individual years of the 90's so now I want to know...

[sakurabraches]

i dont think intermission glinda would dream about a world where she got on the broom. i think intermission glinda would dream of a world where elphie stayed or a world where elphie came back and everything was better. post canon glinda, though? she definitely dreams about getting on that broom

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

OH YEAH if i made you laugh or just inserted regrettable thoughts into your head against your will this year, now's a real nice time to drop a coin or two! (bc devastatingly i am also trapped in this mundane capitalist hellscape w/ the rest of u suckers)

[canisalbus]

Hi!

I don't know if this has been asked before, but do you ever plan on making a webtoon/comic about Machete and Vasco? I think it would look super cool, and heck, I'd even pay good money to sponsor it.

Love your work (And ur little gay dog men)!!

I really, truly wish I could, and I'm terribly flattered to hear you'd be interested in reading such a thing, but I don't know if I'll ever have the time and energy required to undertake such a massive, long term project. It's just not feasible considering my current life and health situation. I can hope and dream, but I can't promise anything, sorry.

Comics are a wonderful form of storytelling that I appreciate tremendously, but they're extremely laborious to make. I don't know why, but whenever I try to test the waters with something short and seemingly easy, consisting of just a handful of simple panels or a couple of pages at most, I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of effort that goes into the comic making process.

[red-ruth]

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED AT COTA

30 minutes before race start, it rains. The track’s wet. The majority of the grid is on wet weather tyres. The track then dries. Marc realises they’ve got the wrong tyre choice. You can see, him, sitting on the bike, face up, hat off, waiting for raindrops and There Aren’t Any.  

He tells his mechanics he might leave the grid, he knows he's got a second, dry bike waiting.   At the 4 minute marker, he gets off the bike. Pecco notices. At exactly three minutes before race start, right as the title sequence starts, Marc dips and books it to pitlane. Pecco clocks what he’s doing in half a second. Alex thinks he’s forgotten his earbuds??? (LOCK IN ALEX) And soon the majority of the front three rows + some soon follow. They cut from the intro (which never got finished btw 🙁) to Chaos. Mechanics are everywhere. The riders engage in a 200 meter sprint to grab their second bikes and make it down the pitlane (keep in mind, the warm up lap is still going to start in like 2 minutes)  Maverick Vinalez appears to have unrelated mechanical problems and is running around bikeless. Marc nearly runs over some grid girls. A honda is on pole position. And so they red flag. Restart. And funnily enough the race ended there don’t really remember what happened after that.

  BUT, if you don’t know what happened with the rules, what Marc was plotting and why he’s now master of the dark arts, here’s a comprehensive explanation as to why this all went down...

  The rules state that if you leave the grid before the start of the race, you have to start from pit lane. If more than 10 riders leave the grid before the start of the race, the quick start* procedure is enacted.  

Quick Start: The riders that are in pitlane start the sighting lap from pitlane. When they reach the grid a single mechanic from their team will be standing in their qualifying grid position (unless the grid positions had been changed by race direction WAS NOT THE CASE) The mechanics will then leave. Riders start the warm up lap, and the race start proceeds as normal.  

If 10 or less riders had been in the pitlane, ergo, quick start procedure is NOT enacted. They would have started the sighting lap from pitlane, lined up on the grid in their positions, done the warm up lap, race start as normal etc EXCEPT they have to then take a ride through penalty once the race starts, likely within the first three laps. A ride through penalty is when a rider has to come through the pitlane during the race, taking 20/30 seconds out of their lap time.  

According to Marc, at 7 minutes he asked if the dry bike is set up, and he says he might leave the grid. Also according to him, he knew this rule with the quick start procedure, and he knew if enough riders leave, he would not take a penalty and still be on the right tyres. So why did he bolt at the three minute mark, and not as soon as he realised he needed to change? He was off his bike for a whole minute, waiting. My guess is that the closer to race start he got, the more chaos he’d create and put pressure on riders and race direction.

Remember, nearly a minute before the riders were supposed to start the warm up lap, there were still personnel on the grid, grabbing bikes, there was whatever the fuck was going on with Vinalez, mechanics in the pitlane getting new bikes ready, race direction caught with their damn pants down, they could notttt have safely started with all that going on.  

So Marc needed the grid to follow him, + the chaos essentially, or else the quick start procedure is not enacted and he still gets that penalty. And so what if Marc/no other riders left the grid? Well the race goes ahead as normal, but they'd almost certainly do a pit stop during the race to change to the dry bike anyway. A pit stop takes more time than a ride through because you have to pull in and swap bikes. Its more of a penalty to do a pit stop than the actual penalty for leaving the grid.

I know Marc is acting all confident that so many riders would follow him and the quick start procedure would be enacted, however, he is a lying liar. He probably knew that either option is still better than staying on the grid. That’s probably what made him leave. It actually points out a big flaw in the regulations that it’s beneficial to create more chaos than it is to just do a pit stop in these sort of circumstances where a pit stop to change bikes is inevitable.   Here’s the thing, according to Simon Patterson, MORE THAN 10 riders did not leave the grid. Exactly 10 did Marc Marquez, Fabio Di Giannantonio, Alex Marquez, Pedro Acosta, Franco Morbidelli, Pecco Bagnaia, Joan Mir, Jack Miller, Maverick Vinalez and Fermin Aldeguer Either this is a misunderstanding from race direction who thought the rules state “AT 10 riders in pitlane” rather than “more than 10 riders in pitlane”, ORRRR they DID know that there were not enough riders but because of the amount of personnel in pitlane, on the grid and the general chaos generated by a certain someone leaving it LITERALLY last minute, they decided to enact the rule regardless, which lines up the official statement from Race Director Mike Webb

“We called for a delay and then a quick start procedure for safety reasons. Given the amount of riders, bikes and pit staff on the grid and in the pitlane area, it was impossible to start the warm up lap.” 

HOWEVER, there is a chance that Johan Zarco is the 11th bike which made the red flag come out. If you watch the replay, you can see Johan Zarco come off the bike in the background of a shot.

Johann Zarco very clearly off his bike

The next shot is of the red flag. So either, the stewards saw Zarco appear to intend to leave the grid and immediately red flagged knowing he would be the necessary 11th rider. In which case the statement from race direction is an explanation of the regulation itself, not providing reasoning as to why they disregarded it.     But given that the shot of the red flag is so soon after Zarco gets off it could be his action is simply him reacting to the red flag and Simon Patterson is still correct, the red flag was put out before the necessary amount of riders actually left the grid.     Either way, the regulations are now going to be revisited. Marc is on a level of mind games undiscovered by man. I love this sport.

[columboscreens]

[scribz-ag24]

I've recently seen again a post talking about the Sableye and Dusknoir's relationship so i'd like to put my two cents in the discussion, for I love screaming into the void about PMD. (this isnt meant to discourage any other interpretations btw this is just my take on theirs and Dusknoir's relationship, bc I think they're very fun characters and I am very glad the game actually gives these minions a bit of relevance in se5).

Tbh I don't buy that Dusknoir treats the Sableye nicely, at least not out of kindness. I don't think he's a tyrant or inexplicably mean, of course, and I think his minions ADORE him, but i also believe that doesn't mean he's nice to them, sth that i consider meaningful for their character arcs.

Throughout the entire game he's exclusively giving them orders, in se5 he concocts a plan that involves thrashing them MULTIPLE times (he's lucky Grovyle isn't one to try and kill enemies in battle ig), and the cherry on top is that the first time we see him being fully genuine he does this:

(yes, he is in turmoil in here, but there's not a single thing implying that 1. this is an unusual response towards the sablye, 2. dusknoir feels bad for it at some point or is surprised at himself, 3. this has any impact in the sableye at all. You can argue these reactions happen off screen and we don't see them, they don't happen bc they have pressing matters to attend to or they happen after they return to life, and that's perfectly valid, but i'm sticking with what the game shows us, here.)

I must say, though, the fact that the Sableye, despite having been almost mindless pokémon up to now, STAND UP TO AND ATTACK Primal Dialga for their boss and even try to look after him despite him ordering them to check on Grovyle and Celebi first is SO important to me. they are goons to the bone and they love that scheming ghost so much.

My own view is that Dusknoir is generally polite to them (you wouldn't randomly break your own revolver or weapon without any reason, would you?), but is quicker to get mean with them than with people he doesn't know or he is seeking to manipulate. He doesn't care about their behaviour as long as they get the job done, which is why I think the anime thing of the Sableye climbing onto his shoulder isn't that remarkable, rather it's a very cute moment, one that is showing how they've been working together for long and how their size difference affects their interactions, but it is not necessarily conveying an affectionate bond (this is a bit random, but it reminds me of Disney's Jafar with Iago lmao. throw your pet sableye at your enemies so they mock them and then return to your shoulder). Additionally, Dusknoir letting the Sableye onto his shoulder is probably as close as we are gonna get to a villain turning around in his chair while petting a cat in PMD lol.

[this isn't meant to be a one-to-one comparison, it's just a detail i find cute and shows that this gesture can have multiple interpretations, with none being the only right one]

Leaving that aside, I hesitate to claim Dusknoir trusts his Sableye as allies, as Grovyle makes a point in the main story of how the Sableye (your Sableye, he says, as if objectifying them; not friends, but tools, weapons at Dusknoir's disposal) are lacking compared to the way hero/partner/grovyle support one another (power of friendship and hidden information babyyyy). The Sableye are used to Dusknoir's way of doing things, though, I'm sure. They know what happens when he's displeased, after all.

I think, most of all, the Sableye are meant to look disposable: they are 6 identical pokémon that almost act like a hivemind, and we are not supposed to think at all about how we may hurt them in battle any more than we do with the angry Manectric pack or random dungeon pokémon. This, I believe, is why the game has them stand up against Dialga and gives them unique dialogue at the end of se5. They're meant to show their inner shine, just as Dusknoir managed to do. They suddenly gain an individuality they had never shown while they were working to maintain the dark future.

Where they abandoned Dusknoir in the Old Ruins, now Grovyle has motivated them to look for their dignity and fight for a better world, and that starts with protecting their leader from Primal Dialga's rampage, and supporting his new objective and allies in their quest to save the future. In their own small way, they've also grown as characters throughout SE5.

I believe that, overall, Dusknoir saw the Sableye as tools, but thanks to their growth and clear care for him, there's a possibility he might start to see them (and by extension other pokémon) in a more genuine, less pragmatic / objectifying way in the future. Now that Dusknoir has the chance to live a fulfilling life, he may learn to care for others without surrounding himself by so many walls. If anything, I think their future is quite bright. Not that the Sableye would mind if he still thrashed them around, though lol, they're clearly not bothered much by it (special episode 0 had a great depiction of the sableye imo, you can check that romhack if you haven't yet).

In conclusion, look at these little guys who adore their can-get-mean-but-is-mostly-polite boss and probably have a body count but now are good, they're so cute: