#did not mean to say average climate. just climate is good

[captaindeinony]

Do y’all think the Survey Corps changes uniforms each season, I’d hate to think that they’re wearing thick clothing in the summer

[dirtyspongesoften]

Slut!

Jumin was a handsome man. He was dashingly handsome, an eligible bachelor, smart, rich. You managed to capture his heart, however the public did not agree with his view on you. But when you're with him, the sticks and stones they throw freeze mid air, because when it's just you and him, nothing else matters.

(If you couldn't tell already this is Taylor swift inspired, I think that in today's social media climate MC would definitely be criticized simply because people were jealous that she has the one thing they wanted, or people would definitely leave hate comments of some sort. But of course, her sweet, gentle, loving husband to be would smooth the creases between her brows and soothe all her worries.)

1.5k words

Jumin was one of Korea's most famous eligible bachelors, which changed when you waltzed into his life. You seduced him, black mailed him, and had been trained to do this. That was what the media said about you after the news aired the story of Jumin proposing to you at the RFA party. It had been almost a week since then, and the media still did not stop their endless commentary on the event. Of course they did not know what really happened, they thought you were there for money, for fame, for anything besides love. You tried desperately to ignore the comments, but after public outings with your fiance   everything only got worse. More people discredited your love, they scrutinized the way you held his hand, the shoes you wore, the makeup applied to your face. It was hard to cope but here, in this moment all of that felt miles away. 

The moon was full and high in the sky. It reflected off of his skin and made the pool look ethereal. You sat in Jumin's lap, his soft hands rested at your waist rubbing comforting circles there. He looked beautiful in the moonlight, his nose and dark hair made him look like a prince. You could feel him solid under your fingertips, he was real and he was yours.  You whispered and giggled amongst yourselves, sharing kisses and expensive wine while relaxing in the rooftop pool of his penthouse. 

       “My love, would you like to come to the office tomorrow to have lunch with me? I would love to have you there to give me motivation.” you brushed the strands of wet hair off his forehead and gave him a chaste kiss. 

     “I would love to babe, it's just..” you trailed off remembering the comments you heard from the women in the bathroom, ‘she's pretty average, probably looks really bad underneath the makeup, she obviously has other assets that attracted him to her if you get what I mean’ they broke out into giggles ‘yeah, she looks like a slut’ another fit of giggles. 

Jumin noticed how you went quiet and moved his hands from your waist to delicately cup your cheeks.

     “Darling, what's wrong? Please tell me, we can fix whatever it is.” You were hesitant to say anything, out of fear of getting someone in trouble, or making things worse with the media. You quickly smiled at him and hid in the crook between his neck and shoulder. 

     “Nothing, around what time would you like me to be there?” 

      “Are you sure? If someone at the office is saying something please tell me. I will take care of it.” Always so protective. 

      “It's nothing, I promise. Now what time would you like me to be there?” 

     “Around one, I'll have Mr. Kim come pick you up, are you sure though?” 

      “Yes Jumin, it's fine no one has said anything, I swear on everything I hold dear” You giggled as gave him a quick kiss and looked back while you sauntered out of the pool to get your towel. He quickly followed behind with the promise of a lovely night. 

Around midday the next day you sat in your Pjs still, Jumins side of the bed had long gotten cold and it was just you scrolling through X (formerly twitter). You sat chewing your lip as you read another ridiculous article. You knew they were never good, but some small part of you hoped that someone would write a good article, that could show just even a bit of how much love you and Jumin shared. So sometimes you would stick around and read them, this one was about your age difference. You were 20 and he was 27 although the age gap was not illegal to many it seemed strange, almost predatory on his part, and definitely fetishizing on your part, according to them. When you first fell for each other you didn't consider the seven years between your ages. It was a big talking point for the media unfortunately. Your phone dinged with a notification, snapping you out of your thoughts. Mr. Kim was downstairs waiting and you had been so caught up in the article that you completely lost track of time. You text back a quick apology and explanation before you rush to get ready. 

When you arrived to C&R there were a couple of paparazzi already gathered at the door. You felt like sobbing, how did they know about this? 

Mr. Kim quickly came by to open your door and shield you from the harsh questions from the reporters and from the dizzying lights of the cameras. 

     “Mrs. Han, what are you wearing?” 

      “Mrs. Han, how much do you hope to get out of Jumin Han after your divorce ?” Your heart broke in two pieces.

      “Mrs. Han, what do you think about E!News calling you a slut?” Your heart shattered in a million pieces. Tears pooled in your eyes as you walked through the grand glass doors. Jaehee had come down to greet you and as soon as you saw her, you threw yourself in her arms, sobbing. 

     “What happened, are you alright?” She repeatedly said your name to no avail as tears continued to flow down. She led you to the elevator where she separated herself from you and began to ask questions. 

      “Do you know who could have possibly sent the paparazzi? What did they say?” After being unsuccessful in her attempts to ask you questions she simply wrapped her arms around you. “You know Mr. Han will have this swiftly handled. I'm sorry this is happening.” The elevator suddenly dinged and you were aware of the fact that you had 5 seconds to make it look like you just hadn't been sobbing. You loved Jumin and the fact that he was so protective of you, but the last thing you needed was him fussing over this, he was already so busy. Your attempts at looking presentable failed and the door opened to reveal Jumin with a soft smile on his face, which quickly warped to worry upon seeing your disheveled state. 

      “My love, darling, what happened? Are you alright? Did someone hurt you?” He came to sweep you out of Jaehees arms and swiftly ran his hands on your body. He studied your face as you studied his worried expression.

      “Mr. Han, there was paparazzi at the front, I'm assuming it had something to do with that.” 

     “Thank you Jaehee, you're dismissed.” 

Jumin led you into his office, you saw the beautiful layout of food the chef had prepared but none of it seemed appetizing. How could they ask you that? How could they basically wish on the downfall of your marriage before it even happened?

     “They asked me how much money I wanted to get out of you after our divorce, Jumin…were not even married, how horrible is that?” your voice came out suddenly, barely above a whisper. He quickly came to wrap his arms around you. His warmth was all around you and for a second everything stopped. You could feel his hair tickle the top of your and the scent of his cologne. 

“My beautiful angel, I hate to see you cry like this, it makes my heart ache. Please do not listen to them, I will love you forever.” He brushed a stray tear off of your face. You sniffed and buried yourself into him further. “Let's go home okay? I'll take the rest of the day off.” You barely heard what he was saying as he called Jaehee to tell her that he would be taking the rest of the day off, you were too busy trying to get the paparazzis words out of your head. 

When you both arrived home Jumin took your coat and purse and guided you into the bedroom. With soft hands and gentle words of affirmation he helped you into your pjs and into bed. He crawled in behind you, he placed your head on his chest. You could feel and hear his heart beating, through all of the horrible thoughts going through your head about what had happened, his heart beat, steady and true, was the one thing that could cut through the noise. You felt his hands smoothing down your hair. You felt at peace for once this entire day, you felt warm and comforted in his arms. 

      “You will always be the light of my life, no matter what people say, no matter what  they wish for us, my love for you will never change ” You looked up to meet his eyes and saw nothing but adoration in them. 

       “I know Jumin, you're not the problem, it's what they say. It always gets to me unfortunately, but whenever I'm with you I know it's all worth it.” You warmly smiled up at him. You felt complete and whole, in this moment here. No one could take him from you, No one could take you from him. You could feel him rubbing comforting circles on your back, until you drifted off, feeling wholeheartedly content, that he was to be yours for the rest of eternity and that no matter what people said he would always be coming home to you, and you to him.

[reasonsforhope]

"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...

The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

Vanishing Autocracies

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...

Expanding Human Rights

All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...

Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"

-via Vox, 3/20/23

Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it.

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

INVALID reasons to dislike Taylor Swift as a person:

You don't like her music

You think her fans are obnoxious/annoying

You believe she is not being genuine about liking/appreciating her fanbase or the awards she has received

You didn't fact-check that "study" that claimed she emitted 8,000 tons of carbon via her private jet (I read the article by Yard— not only do they not source their methodology, but other climate experts have come up with completely different estimates, averaging around 1,000 tons)

You believe Taylor Swift (the person) is guilty of queerbaiting

You don't think non-Black people have any place at all in hip-hop

She has friends who are mostly also rich white people

She has had a lot of boyfriends in the past and seems to have moved on from her partner of six years very quickly

She sometimes plays the victim

You think heartbreak is all she writes about

VALID reasons to dislike Taylor Swift as a person:

You believe Taylor Swift (the brand) is guilty of queerbaiting and that Taylor Swift (the person) is content with this business strategy

1,000 tons of carbon is still A LOT to emit and Swift should be more responsible with her footprint, ESPECIALLY now that she's touring

The music video for "Shake it Off" features what many people consider racially insensitive material, disputably using traditionally Black and Latine styles of dance as the butt of the joke and Black and Latine women as props

Swift was politically quiet for years, allowing white supremacists and nationalists to claim her as one of their own and declare her their "Aryan goddess" (though this could be blamed on her marketing team, considering they did not allow her to be politically active until 2018— and she did denounce racists in interviews prior to making her Democratic opinions public)

She is currently dating white singer/songwriter Matt Healy, who has been accused of a) saying the n-word, b) doing a Nazi salute on stage "ironically—" and there is video evidence of this, though it's difficult to tell if it's actually a Nazi salute or just a regular gesture to which he didn't give much thought, c) making fun of fat people, and d) making fun of black women. And probably more of which I'm not aware.

The music video for "You Need to Calm Down" portrays a very naive view of bigotry as angry people holding signs (and a somewhat classist view of bigotry as well, considering the appearance of the "homophobes") and uses queer people as props

She's a rich white liberal and is guilty of many of the sins typical of most rich white liberals

She has played the victim as a white woman and vilified black men (specifically Kanye West) in the process

You believe her releasing new songs like "Mr. Perfectly Fine" and the 10 minute version of "All Too Well" has encouraged harassment of men she dated over a decade ago and there was no need to rehash this hurt.

You believe that the academies (i.e. the Grammys, the VMAs, etc.) are biased towards her as a white woman and she has not done enough to combat or even acknowledge this racism

She has engaged in LGBTQ+ erasure by having one of her brand's official accounts call straight couples "lavender," even though that is a queer phrase, following the announcement of her song "Lavender Haze" and by using the queer dog whistle "hairpin drop" in a song even though she is assumed to be straight, reducing the saying's meaning.

You just don't like her vibes (NOTE: this is a valid reason to dislike her in your personal life, but NOT to diss her)

More can be added to both lists. Please note that many people acknowledge all of the flaws above listed and like her anyway because, as it is important to understand, she is human and will often make mistakes. Doing any one of these things do not make her a "bad person," and dividing people into "good" and "bad" categories— especially people who you don't know— is very binary and unnuanced; however, they do make her a flawed person, and people, Swifties and non-Swifties, have a right to make of that what they will.

[ddejavvu]

In response to the birthday party dilemma, I just wanted to say that you shouldn’t feel too hard on yourself for still reacting and thinking about the situation ‘like a preteen’. You are an adult, but at 20, you’re only 2-ish years removed from a harsh social dynamic you spent ~8 years navigating.

That is to say, you spent ~8 years (almost half of your life!) entrenched in a middle school/high school mind set where people may very well do something like this, and are sometimes very fake and kind of awful. Your brain is very much expecting this to be how people your age will continue to act, even now that you’re older, because this is the pattern it knows to be aware of.

This brand of anxiety usually gets better the more good/neutral interactions you have where people won’t act this way. Where telling you the wrong day would actually be seen as such a weird fucking thing to do honestly, over a funny prank they could pull. It probably won’t go away completely, but it does get better as you get farther and farther away from the weird, catty, social dynamics that middle school and Highschool are known for.

It should also be noted that people may still try to pull very Highschool-esque behavior even when you’re 40. It is however very much easier to deal with and to not take it so personally, and to instead leave that situation wondering just how much free time they have on their hands that this is something they chose to spend it on.

I know you were just venting, but I figured if maybe I could give your anxiety a little bit of relief and help you not be too hard on yourself than it may be worth it to say all of this. Apologies if all of this from a stranger was super overstepping, and I am in no way trying to presume to know anything about your life at all, but the feeling that people may be trying to pull things like that does get lesser the more you deal with your average joe who has better things to do with their time than Highschool mean girl antics.

hi sweetheart, you're not overstepping at all, i found this to be very helpful and comforting.

I don't think i really looked at it that way, that i've been living in the teenage social climate for so long that it hasn't really rubbed off yet! but that makes perfect sense, I just wish it would rub off already so I could trust that people have good intentions 😭

and yes i think that even if she did mean to play an elaborate, mean-spirited prank on me, she'd be so weird to do so! like, at 21! going out of your way to make a fool out of a 20 year old woman for no reason! i would judge someone very harshly for that from the outside so I would hope that her friends/party guests would as well. but then again i'm almost certain that's not even what's happening and that she's a lovely person who just misspoke!

thank you for piping up my lovely thing i do feel much better. i tried taking most of my day away from screens and i deep cleaned my bedroom and decluttered some stuff so i feel more calm now. kisses for you and i hope you have a nice day my sweet <3

[f0point5]

I’ve rewritten this like so many times bc I wanted to get my point across well is that weird? But anyways to me (idrc about Lando saying Max isn’t his best friend that has nothing to do w me) but it’s more so how childish and I guess ignorant lando is and how much he gets away with it. I’ve never seen someone so discontent, jealous, and just self deprecating before and it’s so embarrassing. He takes what people say to heart and I get it I do but it’s come to a point where he’s been here long enough and is old enough to just be quiet… nobody is going to beat him up if he doesn’t share every opinion or say every sarcastic borderline shady thing that he thinks about. And the only reason he’s continuously getting away with it is because people eat up this “goofy” “carefree” persona but idk to me it’s gotten old 😭 I want cocky winners not cocky consistent p4 placers who are gonna get picked off by their newer rookie teammate in the upcoming season.

“No one is going to beat him up” took me out 😂

No one is going to beat him up…except one of those two brain cells in a fist fight up there.

Fr I don’t think it’s that deep to him. I think later on he reads things and is like “damn did I really say that” or “I didn’t mean it like THAT oh shit”.

Should he know better and think more? Ideally yes? Does that mean he can? Not necessarily. Does that mean he will? Probably not.

At the end of the day his words hurt no one but him and the people who take him seriously (probably too many people tbh, but tbh but probably the same people who think Toto and Christian seriously hate each other).

I think Lando will start getting Piastri’d middle of next year and then we’ll see the true extent of that carefree mouth tbh.

But I kind of live for it. In the climate of PR63 and Lord PR-ceval we need some shady bitches in here.

Again, I like Lando at an average of P4. If he is a podium regular next year I’ll probably start to dislike him because 3 good results in a row and he starts to get a bit too big for his boots

[cherubchoirs]

What do you think the world was like a few years before humanity got wiped? With blood being a known fuel source and v1 existing and v2 being made even though peace was already achieved?

honestly i can't fully come to a conclusion on that - all i can really say is that i think things sound incredibly bizarre and something odd was definitely going on with regards to where humanity was at the time. for a timeline, we know that there was a great war, one bad enough to warrant the commissioning of v1's development as well as, presumably, the need to create machines dependent on blood rather than traditional fuel sources. i talked about this a little before, but that to me suggests that the earth was likely drained of many of its resources because of the war, and the only reliable means to continue to power the machines apparently ubiquitous to every corner of society was blood. like it's possible that even non-combat models were powered through blood considering the terminal entry for the nailgun (although it's left vague and those machines may have needed to defend themselves due to others trying to strip them of their parts rather than steal their blood...BUT I DIGRESS). this provides a pretty good sense of scale for the final war, which must have been massive and caused amounts of suffering as well as a certain callousness never before seen (after all, people likely got used to blood as a fuel source knowing full-well where it must have come from) however, things after the war is where it gets way, way weirder.

so the great peace is achieved - how is unknown, but it seems this brutal, gigantic, all-encompassing war was brought quickly to a full, total stop. at least it seems as much, since v1 had to be quickly scrapped and they scrambled to put v2 in its place to suit this new, entirely at peace world. and we know v1 wasn't the only machine to lose its place, with others like the sentry being too specialized to find any niche in a world without combat and streetcleaners similarly shelved without any pollution to attend to (and that's another thing!!! the new peace fixed the climate crisis as well!!!!) but all i keep thinking is that humanity must be irrevocably altered, that going through a war of that scale changes everything about how a society must function and how these are populations now accustomed to using other humans as fuel for their machines. who achieved the new peace, how was it reached, and what did it look like when they believed v2 could be viable in any sense? it's baffling honestly, but i have to imagine this peace just wasn't as peaceful as it seemed on the surface. maybe to the average person that had made it out alive, but where did the pollution go? how did they stop a war so massive dead in its tracks? unless, of course, blood as fuel was now being applied to many, many more aspects of society. that, in a twisted sense, perhaps helped the new peace as everyone now had access to the premiere resource to fuel the world. (i'm not entirely convinced this is the case, but it's all so bizarre that something doesn't add up imo)

then the hell expeditions came. why, in an era of profound peace, do people now feel the need to explore something like hell? was it merely scientific curiosity, but surely the danger it presented would ward people away from it no matter the cost, that it would be sealed away to protect that peace. a charitable reading is perhaps this society is so enlightened that they wanted to help in some sense, agonized by the idea of human souls in eternal suffering. but to me, i think this population, so hardened by a terrible war, simply could no longer fear something like hell. a war that warrants blood-fueled machines on a mass scale is already hell on earth, so why not go to hell if it's there to see. and perhaps they thought it could provide them something, in an earth so hollowed of its natural resources - we know it has "hell energy" and harnessing blood, maybe humans thought they could harness this as well (an aside since it would be mixing classical sources, but paradise lost pictures hell as a place ripe with all the metals of the earth so traditional fuel might be found there as well) so for me, this is a callous, unafraid people, ones that believe the worst has been and that they are now untouchable in their apparently well-secured peace. interestingly, i think v1 was maintained and kept up with certain developments as it seems to know to head directly for hell if it wishes to amass blood for itself. it makes me wonder why something like v1/v2 weren't repurposed themselves for the hell expeditions - too expensive to risk? too precious as their only models? or was it something less innocent, that maybe the two of them showed worrying signs about their obedience or intelligence to the point that they would only ever be deployed if the worst came to pass?

finally, what happened in the end is fascinating as well, especially when we look into the ferryman's diary which seems to account humanity's fall - "Some calamity has struck the mortal world (...) A million weeping souls pouring in each day that the shores can barely contain. (...) Then one day, the current shifted. Wave after wave for minutes on end of millions, billions, as though the throat of the world was cut wide and the head wretched back to speed the pour." humans were dying in mass amounts until, one day, all of them died immediately. billions wiped out together. what could have done that? minos references the machines in man's downfall so it's likely they rose up in some sense, but for every single person to die all at once so that none remain seems unlikely for the machines alone. at this point, it's highly probable that hell itself orchestrated humanity's end, given the document discovered in the arg, and it's possible too that the terminals coordinated with it. they are bored. hell is bored. the document warns them to stop the expeditions before hell reaches the surface. and so all that makes me wonder is how v1 was woken up - we see its boot sequence when starting a new game, so apparently it was asleep. did it see any of the destruction that befell humanity (minos says "the crimes of thy kind" when speaking to it, which keeps v1's involvement ambiguous)? was it woken with a failsafe or did someone boot it up just before their own death as a last resort for help? i'm sorry this is largely a bunch of questions and fairly vague, but something about the new peace is off to me in a way i don't have a full answer to yet!! but i can't imagine the final war left humanity intact and i think something was seriously wrong with society to go seeking out hell.

[altur24]

Climate through the eyes of eyewitnesses. The truth about the ALLATRA project

Not just showing compassion for the dying planet in words, but actually acting to solve climate problems — this is what can be said about the volunteers of ALLATRA projects in the fight against climate challenges.

The participants of the international ALLATRA project “Climate through the eyes of eyewitnesses” do not wait for news from conventional media, but become the media themselves. In this way, each eyewitness saves the lives of all people of the planet, informing everyone about the realities of the climate crisis on the planet.

Climate change through the eyes of eyewitnesses

“URGENT. Eyewitness on the aftermath of the storm in Michigan. More than 500,000 people were left without power. On August 11, 2021, a massive storm hit the state of Michigan, USA. More than 500,000 people were left without electricity for several days.” What people did in such a situation and what they had to face tells Olga from Michigan.

“Usually, the average temperature in May in this region is +13 °C. Moreover, daytime temperatures can reach up to + 23 °C and at night drop to a maximum of +3 °C. We see with our own eyes, climate change is already changing the lives of millions of people today, as climate anomalies have an immediate impact on the entire planet. People realize the global and serious nature of climate events and cannot be indifferent and stay away from what is happening on our Earth. After all, the future depends on the active position of each person. This video report was sent by Natalia from Canada.

“Impossible events began to happen: fires cannot be put out, there is a heat wave in the Polar Region.” Grigory, an eyewitness from the scene, testifies to these facts: “We are located above the Arctic Circle. And since 2012 we have not had such warm weather in May. I honestly tell you: it has never happened. I watched, I watched, but it has never happened. Here is the tundra, you can see there is no snow. Climatic changes are just obvious, and they are not seen only by those who really do not want to see them, who close their eyes, close their ears and say that it has always been like this: there was no Internet, there was no television to show it. There was no weather like this. It’s like this in many places on the planet. Where there have never been tornadoes, they occur, causing damage to people. Where there have never been earthquakes, they are coming.

It is not predicted or explained in any way, and all these are the events of our days. All witnesses and observers are telling the truth. This means that the world has changed, but it is up to the individual to accept this fact. This video report was sent by Grigory from the Polar Region.

What I like very much about the ALLATRA project “Climate through Eyewitnesses” is that it is very easy and simple to join. Every person can, if he/she has also had an opportunity to observe climate anomalies and wants to inform people about what is happening, can send his/her own video observations to climate@allatra.tv at any time.

I can talk for hours about the positive activities of ALLATRA, because I myself am an active participant and volunteer of the project “Climate through Eyewitnesses’ Eyes”. This project unites people’s experience and efforts. By such actions each volunteer changes the climate situation on the planet for the better.

I bring to your attention only a small part of the feedback from volunteers of ALLATRA projects on positive activities aimed at uniting people in solving the world’s climate problems.

Narine, a volunteer from Armenia, has been an active participant of ALLATRA MOD projects for many years. In her video report on the positive activities of ALLATRA, she says that “ALLATRA is a platform for the realization of good deeds”

Participants, volunteers from Poland in their video testimonials about the positive activities of MOD “ALLATRA” emphasize that: “ALLATRA is to give people Light and Goodness”.

Xenia from Italy revealed what for her: “Participation in ALLATRA MOD projects comes from inner feelings”.

Alla, Milan (Italy) said with kindness that for her “ALLATRA MOD brings goodness and light to people”.

“ALLATRA MOD are wonderful people who are incredibly supportive.” That’s how warmly Andrew from Canada speaks about the ALLATRA projects in which he participates.

“ALLATRA MOD is the basis for relationships between people,” Olga from Belgium boldly declares to the world.

Thus I am happy to share information about the positive activities of ALLATRA already in more than 180 countries of the world. ALLATRA is a unique manifestation of true humanity based on the principles of democracy around the world for all people.

JOIN US!

#AllatraTV #tv #media #ALLATRA #witness #climate through the eyes of eyewitnesses #climate #democracy #news #project #future #world #television channel #informing #person #activity #positive #union #initiative #global#social

[aceteling]

8, 11, 35, 39 for Shion; 13, 18, 33, 37 for Josh; 21, 41, 47, 64 for Ethan!

thank you bestie! time to go absolutely insane over my OCs, as always

Shion:

8. What do they believe will happen to them after they die? Does this belief scare them?

Shion thought about this a lot. They aren't convinced about afterlife's existence... until they meet Axciss that is. Someone who was there. Conflicted about how they feel about it, they've came to terms with their initial belief of 'becoming scattered space dust' not being true... although, in a way, they felt an appeal in being at peace like that.

11. If they could make a mark on history, what would they like it to be?

They'd subconsciously want their poems to be remembered, definitely! They write in their spare time, scribble words here and there, and they are good words... they aren't confident enough to show them to anyone though.

35. What is the easiest way to annoy them?

They are pretty patient all things considered, both because of their upbringing but also just generally. Criticising their favorite books without any valid arguments would probably be the thing that annoys them the fastest. They do get a bit nervous about others treating them like a child, but I'd say it's not to the point of annoyance.

38. What does their happily ever after look like?

A peaceful little house somewhere with flowers on the porch. Friends close by, someone by their side to spend afternoons drinking tea; tall bookshelves, slow evenings humming songs, occassionally an adventure to a place they've never been to before. They'd want to be at peace. (bitch same ;;)

Josh:

13. What do they do for fun?

He likes doing things with his hands, specifically tinkering with various parts - taking things apart and putting them back together! Doing research on different topics is also very fun activity for him!

18. What languages can they speak? Where did they learn these languages?

He speaks their world's equivalent of English and German. Learned the latter at school.

33. What is their biggest fear? How would they react to having to face it?

Currently it's losing the friends he's made, or rather, them shunning him away like others did before. He'd probably grow bitter and sad if he had to face it.

37. How easy is it for them to say “I love you”? Do they say it without meaning it?

Despite his genral openness, he'd have a hard time saying it straight-forwardly. He would never say it without meaning, though.

Ethan:

21. What is their favorite thing about their personality?

He likes that he's approachable; he worked hard on creating a pleasant atmosphere around himself and is proud of that. Also, the fact that he's pretty easy-going.

41. What does their laugh sound like? Do they snort when they laugh? How often do they laugh?

His laughter is clear, a bit on the louder side. He never snorts, but he often chuckles, not wanting to do a full-blown laugh. He has a humorous streak, but doesn't usually get ironic jokes.

47. What’s their pain tolerance like?

Higher than an average person, lower than some of his other friends; he trained physically a bit, therefore he knows the limits of his body, and also knows how to manage pain a bit; still, he's never really felt anything worse than a broken bone, so he can't speak on some extreme cases.

64. Do they get cold easily? Do they get overheated easily?

He prefers the warmer climate, nothing too extreme, but he's definitely the type of guy who's first to wear a coat in winter, not shed layers in the summer.

thank you again for the ask, darling!

[batmansymbol]

Panicking about climate change? Consider subscribing to a carbon removal or offset service.

What with the heatwaves, the fires, and the billionaires on their private jets, I've been seeing more climate doomism on here than usual. I get it. Everything feels terrible. And it can be so frustrating to see stuff about personal carbon impact when you're already washing your laundry on cold cycles, biking to work, eating less meat, etc., and meanwhile the US Senate is killing energy initiatives.

But if you have climate anxiety, I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to a carbon-negative project. My carbon subscriptions help me sleep at night. They have been my antidote to feeling helpless.

Some quick math. In the US, there are 74.5 million Netflix subscribers. And in 2020, the US had CO2 emission averages of 14.2 tonnes annually per capita.

So, if every US American with a Netflix subscription took out a subscription that offset their emissions, that'd be 1.06 billion tonnes annually: over 3% of total global emissions (34b tonnes). And that's just if a subsection of the US population did this.

Obviously this is an oversimplification. Carbon offsets are admittedly more expensive than Netflix. Also, offsetting usually works by funding projects elsewhere to reduce global emissions, so it's overall less efficient than, I don't know, the US getting its shit together and funding public transit, which would cut emissions at the source.

But the point remains: collectivism does exist, and we CAN do something about the emissions that we're unavoidably responsible for.

Enter these services, all of which do carbon offsets that are effective, additional, verifiable, and permanent.

WREN. I subscribe to Wren. You pick a dollar amount per month, and they funnel it toward carbon offset projects worldwide. They offer a carbon calculator, personal suggestions for how to reduce your footprint, and are generally awesome. An example of their projects: in the last six months, they enabled 12 Indigenous communities in the Amazon to reduce local deforestation by a staggering 84%, preserving 180,000 acres.

CLIMEWORKS. Climeworks is more expensive per kg removed, but I subscribe to this one too and LOVE this project. It's direct capture, meaning their factories suck CO2 out of the air and sequester it in rock. I want this to scale SO, SO badly. Climeworks doesn't just prevent or reduce emissions—it's carbon NEGATIVE, which is massive. And it's fully permanent: once the Climeworks facilities sequester the carbon in rock, it's there forever (unlike, say, tree-planting, which relies on the lifespan and health of the tree). Climeworks, like Wren, is a no-minimum subscription. You could do a dollar a month.

ECOLOGI. Pretty similar to Wren, but with high emphasis on tree-planting! Ecologi is big on reforestation, and other recent projects include access to clean cookstoves and providing renewable fuel to farmers. They do tree-planting gifts that would be an awesome option around holiday time.

NORI. A carbon-removal marketplace that connects its users to farmers, who submit plans for carbon removal and storage! This one has more of a businessy bent to it, but you can outright buy a tonne of CO2 storage in a transactional way.

To finish off with some good news: the US has joined China and Europe in hitting the 5% tipping point for electric car adoption, the costs of renewable energy have cratered, and China is set to hit its emissions peak earlier than anticipated (huge for the world's largest emitter).

Hang in there.

please feel free to share this post!

[therealvinelle]

I've always wondered this, but what do you think the Cullen's political viewpoints would be, given their individual backgrounds? if vampires don't change after they turn, then surely they would all be extremely racist (especially Jasper). would this not come up at some point? they aren't like the Volturi because the Volturi are too old to care, but the Cullens are young enough that they have been brought up with opinions on stuff like sexism, racism, homophobia and the like.

Oh fuck.

You get an early answer because otherwise I'll just chicken out and delete this one, pretend I never saw it.

UMMM.

Since I'm guessing you meant American political viewpoints, we need a disclaimer. I am not American, and not too knowledgeable about your politics. Not just in the sense that I don't follow the day-to-day drama, but as I am not an American citizen there are several things I don't know, can't know because I've never lived in your country and therefore can't know what the effects of living in a country ruled by American policies is like. What I do know is based off of the news in the foreign section, social media (by which I mean tumblr posts), and Trevor Noah's Daily Show.

I am an outsider looking in.

Which is really rather appropriate, since the Cullens are too.

The Cullens go to high school and college, Carlisle works, they pay taxes, they own real estate, and submerge themselves in American culture. Esme, Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, and Bella are young enough that this is in many ways their world, and apart from timeouts they've more or less spent their entire lives, human and vampire, integrated into American society.

Not fully integrated, mind you, they do what they need to to fit in and get to school or, in Carlisle’s case, to work. They go no further. No extra-curriculars for the kids, no book clubs for Esme, no game nights for Carlisle. They walk parallel to humans, not among us.

In addition to this they're obscenely rich, which puts them another thousand miles from the experiences of your average American. They won't deal with the health system, which means healthcare is a non-issue, they're not going to need welfare or other social programs, unemployment is another non-issue. Name your issue, and the Cullens don't have personal stake in it. Even the climate crisis won't be a problem for them the way it will for us.

What I'm trying to say is, American political issues are a concept to them, not a lived reality. Just like they are for me. So hey, you made a great choice of blog to ask.

I'll also add here that you say the Volturi are too old to care, and I agree- from an ancient's point of view, racism is a matter of "which ethnicity are we hating today?", and it all looks rather arbitrary after a while. Same with every other issue - after a while it all just blends together into "what are the humans fighting over today? Which Christian denomination is the correct one? Huh. Good for them, I guess."

I can't put it any better than this post did, really. The Volturi are real people, humans are nerds and tumblr having Loki discourse. Aro thinks it's delightful and knows entirely too much about Watergate (and let's be real, Loki discourse as well), but the point I wanted to get at is that politics really don't matter to vampires.

And I don't think they matter to the Cullens either.

So, moving on to the next point while regretting I didn't put headlines in this post, I'll just state that I don't think vampires' minds are frozen. Their brains are unable to develop further, and they can never forget anything, but... well, this isn't the post for that, but in order for this to be true of vampires they would barely be sentient. They would not be able to process new impressions, to learn new things, nor to have an independent thought process. Yes, we see vampires in-universe (namely, Edward, who romanticizes himself and vampires) believe they're frozen and can never change, but there is no indication that this is a widespread belief, or even true. Quite the contrary - Carlisle went from a preacher's son who wanted to burn all the demons to living in Demon Capital for decades and then becoming a doctor and making a whole family of demons. Clearly, the guy has had a change in attitude over the years. Jasper, in his years as a newborn army general, slowly grew disenchanted with his life and developed depression. James initially meant to kill Victoria and hunted her across the earth, then became fascinated and changed his mind about it.

Had these people been incapable of change, Carlisle would still be hating demons, Jasper would be in Maria's army, and James would still be hunting Victoria.

It goes to follow, then, that they are able to adapt to new things.

The question is, would they?

Here I finally answer your question.

So, we have these people who don't really have any kind of stake in politics, who keep up to date all the same (or are forcibly kept up to date because high school) and are generally opinionated people.

Where do they then fall, politically?

(And this is where you might want to stop reading, anon, because I'm about to eviscerate these people.)

Alice votes for whoever's gonna win. She also makes a fortune off of betting each election. Trump's 1 to 10 victory in 2016 was a great day to be Alice. MAGA!

The actual policies involved are completely irrelevant, she does this because it's fun. Election means she gets to throw parties. Color coded parties for the Republican and Democratic primaries, and US-themed parties for Election Night! (Foreigner moment right here: I at first wrote "Election wake" before realizing that's not what y'all murricans call it.)

Alice loves politics. Doesn't know the issues, but she sure loves politics.

Bella votes Democrat. She actually knows about the issues, and cares about them. This girl is a Democrat through and through.

Carlisle doesn't vote. I can't imagine it feels right. Outside of faked papers he's not a US citizen, this is meddling in human affairs that he knows don't concern him.

More, this guy has never lived in a democracy.

In life, Carlisle lived under an absolute monarchy that, upon civil war, became an absolute theocracy. From there he learned that vampires live under a total dictatorship.

For the first 150 years of his life, democracy was that funky thing the Athenians did in history books thousands of years ago, no more relevant to him than the Ancient Egyptian monarchy is to me. Then the Americans, and later other European countries started doing this.

Good for them.

There's this mistake often made by those who view history from a... for lack of a better term, a solipsistic standpoint. A belief that the present day is the culmination of all of history. “My society is the best society, the most reasonable society; all the others had it backwards. Thank god we’re living in this enlightened age!”

The faith in our current system of government is one such belief. We (pardon me if this doesn’t apply to everybody reading this post) have grown up in democracies, being told this is the ultimate form of rule, and perhaps that is true - but remember the kings who have told their subjects they had were divine and the best possible ruler based on that. Remember also that most modern democracies haven’t actually been democracies for very long at all, America is the longest standing at some 230 years (not long at all in the grand scope of things) and they have a fracturing two-party system to show for it.

Every society, ever, has been told they’re the greatest, and their system of government the most just. Democracy is only the latest hit.

This is relevant to Carlisle because he’s immortal and decidedly not modern. Democracy has not been installed in him the way it was the rest of the Cullens, Jasper included. To him- well, it’s just not his world. He has no stakes in our human politics, and as he is older than every current democracy and has seen quite a few of them fall, he’s not going to internalize the democratic form of rule the way a modern human has.

I think the concept of voting is foreign to him.

It requires a level of participation in human society that he’s simply not at. He does the bare minimum to appear human so he do the work he loves, but nothing more, and I find that telling.

As it is I think he'd be iffy about his family doing it. He won’t stop them, but in voting they’re... well it’s kind of cheating. They’re not really citizens, none of this will affect them, and by voting they’re drowning out the votes of real human voters. He does not approve.

Edward votes Democrat. He's... well he’s the kind of guy who will oil a girl’s bedroom window so he can more easily watch her sleep without being discovered, justifying it to himself as being okay because if she were to tell him to get lost he’d stop immediately. Same guy is so sure that he’d leave and never return again if she wanted him to, except this is the man who returned to Forks to hang around his singer, knowing there was a significant chance he might kill her. To say nothing of his Madonna/Whore complex, or of the fact that he tried to pimp out his wife twice, and was willing to forcibly abort her child.

This guy is very much in love with chivalry, with being an enlightened and feminist man who supports and respects women, while not understanding the entire point of feminism, which is female liberation.

He votes Democrat because he’s such an enlightened feminist who cares about women’s rights.

Emmett doesn’t care to vote, but if he has to he votes Republican. The guy is from the 1930′s, and has major would-be-the-uncle-who-cracks-racist-jokes-if-he-was-older vibes.

Esme doesn’t vote, that would require getting out of the house.

More, I just... can’t see it. I can’t see her being one to read up on politics and The Issues, period, but if she has to then I doubt she’d be able to decide.

Jasper doesn’t vote. Alice can have her fun, he does not care.

There’s also the whole can of worms regarding the last time he went to bat for American politics.

I imagine he stays out of this.

Renesmée doesn't vote. She has no stock in the human affairs. Who would she vote for, on what grounds? When Bella tries to pull her to the urns, she points out that she's three years old.

Rosalie, guys, I’m sorry, but that girl is definitely gonna vote Republican. Perhaps not right now as it’s become the Trump party of insanity, but the Mitt Romney type of Republicans? Oh yes.

And for the record, yes I imagine she does vote. To step back from politics would be another way she was relinquishing her humanity, and that’s not allowed to happen. So, yes, she goes to the urns, less for the sake of the politics involved and more because like this, she’s still a part of society in some way.

Now, onto why I think she’s Republican, I think it’s both fiscal and social.

This girl was the daughter of a banker who somehow profited off of the Depression, and who then became part of a family with no material needs that would soon become billionaires thanks to Alice. Poverty to Rosalie is a non-issue, as it is I imagine she views it as a much lesser issue than what she’s had to deal with. The humans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Rosalie’s infertility is forever.

Rosalie’s empathy is strongest when she’s able to project onto others, and she won’t be able to project onto the less fortunate at all.

Then there’s the fact that the Republican party is all about traditional family values, and pro-life.

Rosalie, a woman from the 1930′s who idolizes her human life and who‘d love nothing more than to get to live out this fantasy, is down for that. And as of Breaking Dawn she’s vocally pro-life, so there’s that.

This all being said I don’t think Rosalie cares to sit down and fully understand these politics she’s voting for, the possible impact they’ll have- that’s not important. What’s important is what voting does for her.

TL;DR: I bet anon regrets asking.

[khaotic-kitsunes]

Hm, how about canonverse Dabi with a fellow Villain Reader who's really sensitive to the cold bc of their water based Quirk?

Hi! Thank you for the ask, it was a lot of fun to write! Enjoy!

~Ki

"Dabi!" You protested, as he simply laughed at you and your suffering. You huffed, wrapping your arms around yourself.

He'd just stolen the only blanket you had. It was winter, and the weather had been getting colder by the day, which was very bad for you.

Today was the first day below freezing, and you were on the verge of doing the same. After all, your body was made up of almost entirely water, making you much more sensitive to the cold than your average person.

"Aw, come on, Doll." He teased you, still holding the blanket away from you. You stuck your tongue out at him. "Why are you so mad?"

"I'm fr-freezing!" You proclaimed, growing more frustrated and more cold. Of course, you'd been paired with the scarred villain since the weather turned, since theoretically, his fire would keep you safe and not completely useless. But it seemed that fate had other plans, and Dabi was feeling particularly obnoxious during this mission.

It was a simple scouting mission. Nothing too important or noteworthy... Maybe that was it...

"If you're just bored go burn down a building or something." You snapped, making another grab for the blanket, but you stumbled on your own feet, before you could even reach it.

"Woah, you're clumsier than I thought." He laughed, but when you didn't get up, wincing at your foot, he crouched down to help you.

You were cradling the foot that you'd tripped on, so he'd made to look at it. His eyes dulled, as he realized just what he'd done. You'd been complaining about the cold since you left the hideout, and Dabi was fed up with it...

"I didn't-" He breathed, unable to finish. He shook any hesitation from his mind, quickly wrapping you back up in the blanket, and picking you up. He was careful of your foot, which now had a thin layer of frost over it, which he could see at the ankle. He just now realized that your lips weren't soft or beautiful anymore, but cracked and as blue as his flames. Your ears and nose were also among the first to be affected by the cold. He didn't realize you had been serious.

He knew the consequences of quirks could be bad, but... He didn't realize it was this far out of your own control...

Water was by no means light, but Dabi couldn't be bothered to care. He heated up his own body, coddling you to your chest.

You squeaked, but couldn't resist the warmth of his body.

You sighed in relief, as your body began to warm back up. He took you into an alley, and gently set you down on some steps. He held his hand over your foot, a dull heat radiating from it.

He was silent. You stared at him, watching him, as the frost slowly melted again.

"Thank you." You said, when you'd regained all the feeling in your body.

"You didn't say you would actually freeze." He said, all too quietly.

"I was built for warmer climates." You shrugged. "I tried to get Shigaraki to pair you with Twice and Toga, this time, but-"

"I'll take care of it, next time." He interrupted you, looking into your eyes.

His eyes were so intense, as they always were. They were frigid and cold, and yet held fire in them... You'd often caught yourself staring into his eyes, but now, it seemed you couldn't pull your gaze away.

"Are you feeling better?" He asked, gently brushing his hands over your blanket, warming it up to combat the frigid air. Admittedly, Dabi had so much fire beneath skin designed to protect an ice quirk, he didn't really even start to feel the cold until most people began to hit frost bite.

You nodded. He picked you up again, despite your protests, withdrawing his heat when you tried to flail out of his grip. You gave up, and let him carry you.

You then noticed that he'd turned away from the target, headed back towards the base.

"What about the mission?"

"Hand job can suck it. You told him you'd be a liability and he didn't listen, he can take responsibility for this."

You blinked, sputtering, but no protests ever found their way to your lips.

You sighed, and allowed your head to fall on his chest, taking his his warmth.

Dabi smirked, softly, turning up the temperature, just a bit, to keep you closer to him... It was... nice.

He didn't want to admit it, and wouldn't out loud, but it had been a long time since someone had simply just been in his presence. There was no hurt, no yells, just the touch of another person.

How long had it been since he'd really embraced a person?

He tried not to think about it, but he couldn't help himself from walking a bit slower. Once you were back at base, with a heating unit, you would no longer need him... And he didn't want to expose you to the temperature any longer but... Well, he could keep the cold away, couldn't he?

So he could let himself touch you a little longer, right?

Alas, the base did eventually draw closer, and Dabi couldn't exactly turn around or go a different route. You would get suspicious.

He reluctantly opened the door. Everyone else was out on their own missions, too. He looked around. He'd only ever bothered to memorize his own room, and didn't know where yours was.

"Which way is your room, again?" There was no response. He looked down at you, but you were merely curled up into his chest, eyes closed, and breath soft and deep. A sliver of a smile and a sinking pit of anxiety crossed his being. You'd fallen asleep.

He sighed, muttering something or other about how troublesome you were, though he didn't believe in it, himself, and took you to his own room. He wasn't about to go searching though everyone's rooms for yours, the Gods only know what's in those.

He gently placed you in his bed, tucking you tightly in the covers. You whined slightly, when his warmth disappeared.

He figured you'd be fine, sitting on the edge of his bed, and reaching for his phone, but he felt you shift.

You'd rolled in your sleep, arm partially stretched out... For him, he realized.

Even at room temperature, it probably was still too cold. He sighed, moving the blankets, and slipping under with you.

He held you in his arms, letting his body do the rest. You sighed in content, curling back up into his chest.

Dabi tried not to think about how perfectly you fit in his arms, or about how your head was tucked just beneath his own, or about how you smelled like the sky just before it rained.

When you'd finally awoken, you were warm and well rested. You were in no hurry to open your eyes, until you felt something shift about you. You blinked open an eye, to see purple scarring. Both eyes opened wide, and you scrambled backwards.

This was not possible, as Dabi's arms were wrapped tightly around you. Feeling you struggling in his arms, Dabi was also awoken from the slumber he hadn't intended to fall into.

He blinked down at you, a sly smirk on his face. "Still cold, sweetcheeks?" He teased. Thought this might not have been the best first response, it was all Dabi, still tired, could come up with.

"Could you let me, go, please?" You asked. He shrugged, lifting the arm that was over you. You scrambled back.

The last thing you remembered was Dabi carrying you back to base.

"What happened?" You demanded. Dabi yawned before sitting up, in no hurry to explain himself.

"Well, let's see. You started turning into a popsicle, and I helped you warm up." You gave him a hard look. He chuckled, holding his hands up in defense. "You fell asleep on the way to base, and I couldn't be bothered to find your room. Not only did you proceed to steal all the blankets off my bed, you refused to let me go." He smirked at you. He didn’t reveal how good it made him feel or how it almost hurt when you’d pulled away from him so eagerly.

You flushed at his words. Dabi raised his hand to feel your cheek, making sure you weren't still cold. Despite his teasing actions and words, he was actually quite worried. You flushed deeper. Dabi dropped his hand. Embarrassment, not cold, then. Good.

He stood from the bed. "Well, I'm gonna go bother Handyman, stay here. Or not." He grabbed his jacket off his floor, tossing it at you. "Don't get cold, again." With that he left the room.

You remained where you were, stunned. You hesitantly grabbed his jacket. You buried your face in it, unable to resist the draw of the cinnamon and bonfire smell you'd awoken to. You breathed in, despite the embarrassment

"It smells like him." You mumbled to yourself.

[boydykedoctor]

Okay genuine question I'm trying to understand the appeal of clauman bc I guess I kinda see it but feel like I'm missing something can u sell it to me pls

The Official Clauman Treatise

clauman (noun): the stranger things ship consisting of murray bauman and scott clarke

ugh okay there are two schools of thought we can take here which are characterized by complete irony vs. sincerity.

i. irony

clauman began as an ironic ship to make fun of the way fandom culture insists on cramming every character into a ship + the absolute most random/absurd pairing you can think of + that post going around that's like "i headcanon these characters as divorced" which led to my horrible brain saying "wouldn't it be funny if i created a headcanon that disgraced ex-journalist murray bauman and bubbly earth and biology middle school teacher mr. scott clarke once had a terrible, no good, very bad hookup at a science and technology convention in. uh. fuck. i don't know. indianapolis."

then, because it's been a long fucking time since season 3 dropped, i said, yeah. let's post about that nonsensical monstrosity as much as humanly possible until i can memeify it for me and a few mutuals.

examples of pieces from the ironic school of clauman:

the clauman moodboard

the clauman playlist

"ugh you know what we’ve already established in hawkinunsolved (gayeddiemunson) canon that murray is glasses 4 glasses which means either his hookup with mr clarke was pre-lasik or this all falls apart" (source)

ii. sincerity

now the problem with the ironic approach is that i can rationally explain it, as i just did up there ^ BUT the fun of clauman lies in its complete irrationality. if one were only to support clauman ironically, then it becomes too rational and is therefore no longer 1. completely absurd and 2. inflammatory.

as a side note, it is vital to clauman's continued existence that it is inflammatory. this boat is kept afloat by millie @robinsteve who is always and forever will be leading the anti-clauman charge. this is very important work she does for the cause of clauman because one cannot rebel without an establishment to rebel against (Big Mileven, Big Byeler, Big Jopper, Big The Other One).

SO if we're gonna keep this up, we have to also engage with clauman sincerely. this led to an era of me making posts such as the following:

"i do think i mighta Perceived clauman a little too strong by accident. the dynamic of dorky, incredibly earnest elementary school teacher and eccentric former-journalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist… just saying" (source)

"reason #46 to support clauman: it forces murray to have his own embarrassing drama that other people get to point out to him for once" (source)

"clauman could do when harry met sally" (source)

i am always threatening to write the ultimate clauman one-shot fic that cements their convention hook-up in the gayeddiemunson canon. there is no telling what this action would do to the current political climate and whether the fic would end up more on the ironic or sincere end of the spectrum. i imagine it will end up being a grotesque hybrid of the two.

iii. a meta layer

the extra meta layer of these two different schools being irony/sincerity also coincides with the two opposite attitudes of murray/mr. clarke so no matter how you choose to engage with the concept of clauman you are actively participating in reifying the clauman dynamic. i don't care if that last sentence doesn't make sense to anyone else because it makes sense to me.

iv. how to decide if clauman is right for you

i've taken the liberty of creating a helpful graph that can help the average stranger things fan locate their alignment. now, i wanted to create something that was a little bit complex because i am a nonbinary bi?sexual. this isn't a fucking kinsey scale, oh no. this is serious business.

for example, i would be in the top left quadrant, while millie would be in the top right. the majority of my mutuals fall into the bottom right quadrant, though some are closer to the bottom left depending on how funny my posts are.

thank you for coming to my tedtalk

[stufftippywrote]

infinities within infinities

"Don't get me wrong," Xie Lian says, "I'm really grateful for the donation, but I don't think it's right to name the library after me."

But the man in the three-piece suit seems insistent. "You're a groundbreaking force in the world of philosophy," he says ardently. "I've read your Man, Thrice Ascended at least ten times. What you have to say about the concept of self as the infinite is revolutionary." He grins. The leather of the eyepatch over his right eye gleams in the sunlight. "The least you deserve is to have libraries named after you."

Xie Lian looks him over. This Hua Cheng is known as a reclusive billionaire, but there’s nothing withdrawn about him now, as he surveys Xie Lian with a bright eye. Instead, he’s almost preternaturally relaxed, hands in his pockets, smiling as bright as if he’d captured the sun. Despite the money and the insistent words, there’s nothing intimidating about him.. Xie Lian rather likes him.

“Well, thank you, I suppose, Mr. Hua,” he says carefully. He still isn’t sure about the Xie Philosophy Library concept. He looks up at the building and tries to imagine his name on the placard; it just seems preposterous. The dreams of a very young graduate student who thought he could change the whole nature of philosophy. Now, a fool’s wish. That it would be granted so suddenly, and by the young man in front of him who can’t be out of his twenties? Unimaginable.

“No need to thank me,” Hua Cheng says, shaking his head. “The very least I could do. Do you need a ride anywhere, Professor?”

**

Hua Cheng’s car might as well be a spaceship for how much it sticks out among the dumpy minivans and compact cars that surround it in the parking lot. Black, sleek, and gleaming, it truly seems to have beamed here from some point in a glittering future. Hua Cheng unlocks it with the touch of a button, and then, with another, the passenger side door swings open of its own volition. Xie Lian peeks inside. The interior is black as well, but for some touches that stand out in burning crimson.

“Go on, Professor.” Hua Cheng is leaning on his side of the car, casting a sideways glance at him. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Xie Lian obeys, ducking his head to get in. “You really needn’t call me Professor,” he says as Hua Cheng joins him on the driver’s side.

“What should I call you, then?” Hua Cheng’s smile is devastatingly brilliant, and Xie Lian is glad he’s sitting, because his knees have just gone to jelly. “I could call you gege, if it’s not too informal.”

He’s teasing -- at least, Xie Lian thinks he’s teasing -- but honestly the word comes out of his mouth more naturally than professor, and Xie Lian likes the sound of it better. “Gege is fine,” he says lightly.

“But in return,” Hua Cheng says, starting up the car, “you have to call me San Lang.”

“Why?” There’s something buzzing in Xie Lian’s brain now about the concept of naming, what we call ourselves versus what others call us, but he shunts it aside.

“Why do you think?” The car pulls out of its space, and a low rumble echoes in Xie Lian’s gut as it starts to navigate the parking lot. Hua Cheng is glancing at him between peeks in the rearview mirror. “You know what they say about us billionaires, we’re eccentric. Humor me.”

“Very well, San Lang,” Xie Lian replies, and he likes the sound of that, too.

It’s ten minutes of buzzing around the downtown streets before Xie Lian realizes he never gave a destination. “San Lang,” he says carefully, “where are we going?”

“Here and there,” Hua Cheng says. “I want to pick your brain about Man, Thrice Ascended.”

“Oh.” Xie Lian is flattered, and honestly the concept of riding around aimlessly in this sleek machine appeals to him. “Go right ahead, then.”

“To tell you the truth,” Hua Cheng says, “I have trouble wrapping my head around the concept of the self as infinite. Unless you believe in a higher power, the concept of self seems painfully finite to me, as it only exists between birth and death. Isn’t that a pretty limited span?”

“Only temporally,” Xie Lian replies. “Did you know that there are 22 million seconds in the average lifetime?”

“22 million is a lot, but it’s not infinity,” Hua Cheng counters.

“Ah, but a second isn’t instantaneous. Seconds take time. If you’ve ever tried to hold a plank for more than a minute, you know that well.” And he really does look like the type who could hold it. If not for two. “The unit of time I’d rather use is the moment.”

Hua Cheng glances at him. The car pulls onto the highway. “The moment?” he asks, gently spurring Xie Lian forward.

“Exactly,” Xie Lian says. “The moment is instantaneous. Maybe there are hundreds of millions of moments in the span of a single second of time. Maybe more than that. We can conceptualize, then, that each second of a lifetime contains within it infinite moments, and each lifetime 22 million infinities.”

“But a moment is hardly an appreciable measure of time,” Hua Cheng says. “How many moments can we experience as moments with our limited consciousness? The moments experienced are still finite to the mind of the human who tries to count them. Even if you count as fast as you can, you can’t count to 100 within the space of a single second, much less infinity.”

“You’re asking good questions,” Xie Lian comments.

Hua Cheng glows a little. “I told you, I’ve read the book a thousand times.”

“Well, if you did read the book, then you know that our concept of moments here is merely a framework.” They’re driving along the coast now, the bay blue and the sun starting its daily fizzle from yellow to red. “The infinities that truly populate the self are not of time, but of possibility.”

“Infinite choice in each moment.” Hua Cheng nods. “Explain it to me one more time, please, won’t you, gege?”

There’s a little plaintive moan in his voice - just a sliver of an entreaty - and it gives Xie Lian the goosebumps. Here is someone who’s truly appreciating his work, and he’s pleasant to look at and his voice is pleasant to the ear, and Xie Lian is reeling with how much good sensation is rolling into him with every second of this drive. It’s like the best of good dreams, and he doesn’t want to think of it ending.

“In any moment -- and I do mean moment, with our earlier definition,” he says, “I could lean to the left. I could lean to the right. I could blink. I could lean to the left but just a little bit harder. I could think of the color red. I could think of the color blue. I could speak. I could stay silent. I could open the door and throw myself out of this car, if I wanted.”

“Please don’t,” Hua Cheng interjects, sounding a little unnerved.

“It’s just a possibility,” Xie Lian reminds him. “There are, essentially, an infinite number of things I could do with each moment of my life. Each of them takes some time, but the process of choosing is instantaneous. So you have infinite possibilities in every single moment of infinite moments.”

“Not infinite possibilities," counters Hua Cheng. "What you decide to do in one moment, as you said, takes time. The time it takes to perform that action necessarily negates the infinite nature of the next moment. You can’t make certain decisions while performing other actions.”

“Your possibilities are still infinite in each moment,” Xie Lian argues. “Just because some actions can’t be taken doesn’t mean there aren’t still infinite possibilities open to you. Think of numbers. An infinite number of numbers end in the digit 4. It’s still an infinite set, even though numbers that end in the digit 5 aren’t included.”

Hua Cheng frowns. “Perhaps my limited mind isn’t fully able to capture it,” he says after a time. “You’re very impressive, gege.”

Heat blooms in Xie Lian’s cheeks. “Thus,” he says, “we have the three ascensions. When the mind is able to grasp the concept of infinity within limited time, it ascends once. The second ascension comes when one accepts that infinite actions can be performed within that limited time. And the third ascension…”

“...is when the mind grasps that the possibilities are infinite for each of an infinite number of moments,” Hua Cheng fills in. “Infinities within infinities, all within the self.”

They’ve pulled off to a scenic outlook point on the bay. Hua Cheng eases the car into one of three parking spots and turns off the engine. He turns to Xie Lian. “Gege always explains it so well,” he says brightly. “Thank you for indulging me.”

Xie Lian can feel the flush creeping into his cheeks. He looks away. “You’re welcome.”

Another beep, and the car’s doors are opening again. Hua Cheng gets up, rounds the car to Xie Lian’s side, and holds out his hand.

They stand for a time side by side, watching the reddening sun dip its toes into the rippling water of the bay. There’s a strange peace to standing here, Xie Lian thinks, with this person he barely knows but is so ardent about his work. I’m safe. I’m appreciated. The sureness of that is unexpected but so, so welcome. Xie Lian thinks back, trying to remember the last time he felt that way. He can’t recall.

“It’s beautiful,” he murmurs. Cars thunder past on the road behind them.

“This is one of my favorite spots,” Hua Cheng says. “I’m always taken by the vastness of the ocean here. It seems so full.” He gestures down to where the water buffets the base of the cliffs below them. “Like it’s a moment from overflowing.”

Xie Lian ponders this. “I’ve never thought of the ocean as full or not,” he says. “The implication being that no more water can be added; that it’s complete as is, existing within its bounds.”

“It’s a philosophical puzzle, isn’t it?” says Hua Cheng lightly. “Of course, climate change is solving it as we speak. Rising sea levels and all. It seems the ocean has the potential to be boundless, even as we denote lines between sea and shore.”

“And the question then becomes, how accurately can we draw those lines? And is it human folly to even attempt to do so?”

“Of course,” Hua Cheng says, “none of these problems has practical application.”

Xie Lian laughs. “Most of philosophy has no practical application. That’s why it’s philosophy.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Hua Cheng replies. “Your philosophy has had effects on my psychology, at the very least. To think of myself as infinite has changed the way I look at the world.”

“And how does it look?” Xie Lian inquires, tilting his head.

Hua Cheng gazes at him, then turns back to face the sea. “Boundless,” he says.

Xie Lian nods. The wind whips past them, whispering coldly against his cheeks and ears. He shudders.

Without a word, Hua Cheng removes his long coat and drapes it over Xie Lian’s shoulders. The coat is warm with his body heat, and all that heat seeps into Xie Lian in a rush. He draws in a breath. When Hua Cheng’s fingers touch his neck to adjust the collar, he wants to shiver again, this time not from the cold.

“Gege.” Hua Cheng’s honey-rich, low voice touches his ear like the strains of a cello. “Would you let me take you someplace nice?”

Xie Lian looks out at the darkening bay. He thinks of the view from his office window, the wall of an adjoining brick building. He could go back there, write and read until the early morning hours. Perhaps he would sleep on the cot he’s laid out in there. Staring at the mottled ceiling, contemplating eternity.

Or he could go with Hua Cheng, who is holding out his hand, looking hopeful.

Xie Lian takes it.

They drive for another 10 minutes along the coast, then take an exit into an area filled with green fields. Huge houses dot the landscape -- this is the domain of the super-rich, Xie Lian thinks, because these fields aren’t used for farming. They’re simply green as far as the eye can see, well-manicured, sometimes interrupted by copses of grand old trees with outstretched branches. Some of the houses are surrounded by lush flower gardens. It’s not an area Xie Lian’s ever been too, nor does it seem like the kind of place he would want to live. But it’s fascinating just to see it for the first time.

Hua Cheng pulls down a narrow road, then turns onto another. Xie Lian squints as he makes out something odd on the horizon. Whatever it is, it’s silver, and a cluster of buildings sit low and flat around it. When wide concrete paths start to interrupt the endless greenery, he realizes what he’s looking at.

“I thought,” he says gingerly, “when you said someplace nice, you meant a fancy restaurant.”

“We can go to a restaurant,” Hua Cheng answers airily. He pulls the car into the yard, and they park. Holding Xie Lian’s fingers loosely, he leads him along the paths toward the airfield. The private jet sits on the runway like a horse at the gate, already humming. A movable staircase leads up to the main entrance. A number of people are working around it. One of them sees the pair approaching and offers Hua Cheng a bow.

“How soon can we be ready?” Hua Cheng asks him.

“Twenty minutes,” the man says. “We’ve been prepping since we got your text.”

Xie Lian wonders when Hua Cheng had managed to text them. “This is your plane?” A silly question; Hua Cheng nods easily, as though everyone has a private airfield with a jet ready to go at any moment. “Where are you taking me?”

Hua Cheng meets his gaze with a smile. “Where would you like to go? Tokyo? Hong Kong? Thailand is stunning this time of year.”

“San Lang,” Xie Lian starts, his heart pounding. Hua Cheng smiles that much more widely at the sound of the name. “Isn’t this a little…”

“Much?” Hua Cheng finishes for him. “Not at all. Not for gege.” He lays a hand on the small of Xie Lian’s back -- Xie Lian gasps at the touch -- and ushers him forward until they are both standing at the bottom of that staircase, the airplane’s door a wide unblinking eye at the top. Hua Cheng bows and makes a gesture with his hand toward the staircase -- after you.

Xie Lian’s brain rockets into high gear. He has brought nothing with him but his briefcase, and even that is still in the car. No one knows where he is or where he’s going. He’s traveled a little in life -- nothing too far from home -- but this would be a trip like no other, totally unplanned and utterly irresponsible. Every ounce of common sense in his brain is urging him to shake his head politely and back away.

But this man. This fascinating man, who is offering him the world. For every voice inside Xie Lian that says no, there’s a current of pulsing blood in his veins whispering yes, yes.

“I’m not sure,” he begins, tentatively.

“Gege,” Hua Cheng murmurs, “You speak of self as containing an infinity of possibilities for every moment of life. But the paradox of infinity is that some infinities are larger than others. At this moment, you have more possibilities than ever before. Given those infinite possibilities, at this moment, what will you choose?”

He’s right. The possibilities facing him right now are truly endless. And hidden in Hua Cheng’s words, there is a challenge -- do you dare? And Xie Lian finds, to his surprise, that he does. He not only dares, he wants. To see this through, to learn more about this man, to take a crazy chance. His heart is pounding with the force of his desire. And once, just once in his studious, conservative life, he listens to it.

He smiles at Hua Cheng, lifts one hand to the railing of the staircase, and begins to ascend.

[nerdygaymormon]

uhhhh david have you gotten the liahona yet bc idk how to feel about an article i found in there yesterday. it was pretty comforting and basic, but did use ssa the whole time. BUT the youth one was pretty crappy, it used ssa to the max and gave no real hope, was pretty bland and annoying about oh itll be find just believe and jesus and get hatecrimed <3 i would like to hear your thoughts on it, its the first time ive seen any queer topics in church magazines

Thanks for bringing these to my attention.

"Same-sex attraction" (SSA) is the preferred term of Church leaders. They say it's a way of not making it your identity, that this isn't part of who I am but rather is something I'm dealing with. In other words, people "have" same-sex attraction, not that they "are" gay or lesbian or bi.

There have been a few leaks from behind-the-scenes where the apostles say they use "same-sex attraction" because it's the term that people like least. People like it less that same-gender attraction or gay/lesbian. SSA includes the word "sex" and I guess the idea is it gets people to think of sexual acts and feel queasy.

SSA is the term normally used in Church magazines because they follow the lead of the First Presidency and apostles.

There's 3 items in the Church magazines this month about queer people! That's a lot for one month.

————————————————————

The first is a bishop talking about how to understand and include LGBT people at church. After becoming bishop, 3 sets of parents contacted him distressed that their child is gay or transgender (I note that the parents used "gay." He also mentions contacting someone who 'identifies as gay").

His first recommendation is to follow the living apostles. (which explains why the bishop uses "SSA" even though everyone else around him used "gay"). It's a good idea for a local leader to find what the current leaders are saying because it's changed. He also says to read the Church's websites titled “Same-Sex Attraction” and “Transgender.” He provides two lovely quotes from those pages about diversity at church and being loving to people who are different.

His second recommendation is to not be afraid to talk to people who identify as gay, but instead try to have love for them and then let the Spirit guide you in what to say. We're just people, it shouldn't be scary to talk to us, that shows how different he thinks we are from the other people he interacts with in his ward.

The bishop's third suggestion is to speak to people who are familiar with LGBT "issues," share your testimony, and apologize for hurtful things you say. His list of people to contact for help understanding was a little disheartening because he starts with his stake leaders, ward leaders, other bishops, and so on, actual queer people were the last people on his list.

He continues by saying to pull aside members who are saying homophobic or transphobic things and give them some personal guidance, don't share private information that a member shares with the bishop, and just because someone has these "attractions" doesn't mean they're acting on them, and if they aren't "acting" on them then you can let them have a calling.

I have a few comments about the last few things. If no one corrects the homophobic/transphobic comments in public but instead privately suggests the person do better, every one who heard those comments thinks they stand unchallenged. The atmosphere created by the comments is unchanged. Especially if the bishop was present to hear those words, if they go uncontested then people think this is what is acceptable.

You'd think bishops know not to share private information a member shares with them. I've been around long enough to know that when a bishop is unsure what to do, he starts contacting his network (stake presidency, other bishops) asking for advice. Some bishops are discreet when doing this and others name the individuals.

While it seems basic, I recently had a counselor in a bishopric who didn't think gay people could get a temple recommend, that there's a zero-tolerance policy. That is an attitude that is outdated by a couple of decades, but it shows that people need to learn that simply existing as a gay or trans person doesn't automatically mean we are committing great sins.

I do find it interesting there appears to have been quite a few queer individuals in his ward, at least 4 or 5, and reading between the lines it seems they all stopped attending.

The bishop's heart is in the right place. I get he's following the Church leaders and that limits some of what he can do for queer people in his ward. I think his perspective primarily is of making the parents feel more welcome in the ward and not ostracized for having queer kids.

————————————————————

The second article in the Liahona is written by a person with same-sex attraction and his work to overcome the shame he felt.

It's a much better article than the one written by the bishop. This person shares about the shame they felt at having gay feelings and working with a therapist to overcome that shame. He shares 3 lessons that helped him with this process.

1) God and Jesus love and accept him as he is. This is a message that doesn't often get conveyed to queer members and it's important they know this.

2) The Atonement of Jesus Christ offers healing. At first he was wanting the Atonement to cure him of being gay, but instead it helped him be healed of the shame he felt. I hear so many members who think the Atonement can change us from gay to straight, and that's not true. I'm glad he made this distinction. Our Heavenly Parents don't view being gay or trans as something that needs to be cured. I wish that message was taught more openly in the Church.

3) Build deeper connections and show compassion. Loneliness and feeling like you don't belong at church are two of the most troubling aspects an LGBTQ+ person has to deal with if they are active in the LDS Church. Developing close friendships will help with that. Also, queer people tend to be more compassionate than the average person and I believe it's because of the experiences we had to deal with of living in a heteronormative world that isn't made for us.

He includes a few useful tips at the end on how to engage with queer people.

All in all, a much better story than the one written by the bishop. He shared part of how it feels to be a gay member of this church, the idea that he should be ashamed for who he is, that being gay isn’t a burden, that he doesn't fit in.

I appreciated he said this is part of his layers of identity and at the core of his identity is that we're children of heavenly parents. That's more nuanced than the apostles who reject being gay has anything to do with identity and our only identity should be a child of God.

————————————————————

The final story is from For the Strength of Youth. This piece seems like it's written by a queer person, but it's anonymous and given as general advice to show that people with same-sex attraction belong at church.

This article makes 3 main points. The first is that God loves you. That's true, although accompanying quotes to back up this principle aren't specifically about queer people.

The second point is "you belong." All sorts of people attend church, and God is no respecter of persons. Then they have a quote from Elder L. Whitney Clayton that people with same-sex attraction are welcome to come to church. To me, he's an odd choice to give this message as he led the Church's fight in California on Prop 8 to make gay marriage illegal again. Words aren't enough. Saying I'm welcome is not the same as making a welcoming climate.

The third point is that God will help you. They include a quote from Laura F. who experiences same-sex attraction. She writes about prayer, scripture study, temple and church attendance. However, she also says she doesn't know what her life will look like in 20 years, she seems to be leaving open the possibility her journey with God will lead her to romance and out of the church. I thought that was very honest and important.

————————————————————

I found it noteworthy that nowhere in these 3 articles does it say being alone and celibate is good and what God wants.

I appreciate the idea that we can make our local congregations less homophobic/transphobic. The suggestions from the bishops shows that the bar is pretty low and it doesn't take much to make an improvement from how things are now.

The voices of the two gay members was important, what they shared was useful but nuanced, didn't make commitments to staying in the church long-term or testify that what the church requires is what God wants for them.

Even so, it's clear the publisher is very careful. They use "same-sex attraction" so often, I think readers would be surprised the preferred term of most same-sex attracted people would be gay, bi or lesbian. While they addressed some things, like homophobic/transphobic comments, feeling shame & not fitting in, I think they largely skated past the things that make queer people decide that this church isn't for them.

There's a part of me that says I'm glad we're having this conversation in the Church magazines, but another part that says this is too sanitized and doesn't get at the heart of things. These are very hopeful messages that make it seem that queer people could easily choose to stay in church if a few adjustments were made and if they only understood God loves them, which avoids the "doctrine" that excludes queer people from the highest blessings and joys and makes us essentially second-class citizens in the kingdom of God, at least according to our church.

[rjzimmerman]

The people who participate in this annual event (called “The Grind”) in the Faroe Islands, including the men and women who slaughter the dolphins, are mother fucking barbarians who cannot be allowed to do this again. In previous posts in previous years, I have avoided posting the videos of this event, because it’s extraordinarily disturbing to watch these assholes do what they do. But this year, I’m posting it, because I’m livid.

You are warned; the video is graphic, so if watching dolphins being slaughtered, including being sliced while alive and stuck helpless on the beach, then avoid this video. If you don’t want to watch the video or are hesitating, maybe the photo above will convince you not to. The red water along the immediate shore is dolphin blood mixing with the sea, next to the carcasses. If this photo offends you, stay away from the video.

Here’s a link to the blog of the Sea Shepherd, telling us about this event, including its history, purpose and the intense negative reactions resulting from this year’s event.

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

The slaughter of a record 1,428 dolphins in the Faroe Islands is prompting outrage from environmental organizations and even local residents.

Sea Shepherd announced that the killings took place the night of Sunday, September 12 and amounted to the largest single hunt of whales or dolphins in Faroese history.

"For such a hunt to take place in 2021 in a very wealthy European island community just 230 miles from the UK with no need or use for such a vast quantity of contaminated meat is outrageous,"

The incident is part of a Faroe Islands tradition known as the Grind, in which marine mammals, particularly whales, are hunted, BBC News explained. Supporters say it is sustainable and an important part of the cultural heritage of the autonomous Danish territory. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that it is unnecessarily cruel to the animals hunted.

Sunday's hunt, however, was exceptional for several reasons. Faroese marine biologist Bjarni Mikkelsen agreed with Sea Shepherd that it was a record hunt. The previous record was set in 1940, when 1,200 animals were killed. In general, government figures say that an average of 600 pilot whales a year are caught, but the number of dolphins is usually much lower. It stood at 35 in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

By contrast, Sunday's hunt saw a pod of nearly 1,500 white-sided dolphins driven by motor boats and jet skis for several hours into Skálabotnur beach, where every one of them was killed, Sea Shepherd reported.

Locals told Sea Shepherd that the incident violated Grind laws in three ways:

It was not called by the properly authorized Grind foreman.

Several of the hunters involved did not have a license, which means they were not trained in how to properly kill the animals.

Several of the dolphins were run over by motorboats, leading to a slow and painful death.

Why am I posting this and using ugly obscene language? I’m angry. This thing called “The Grind” represents precisely the sort of outrageous behavior that has gotten us into this biodiversity and climate mess in the first place. Why have we allowed this to continue? Oh, because it’s a tradition, we’re told, and we have to tolerate local customs, we’re told, and we should get off our high urban, liberal horses, we’re told. No, not anymore. I’m tired of seeing photos and reading stories about coyote killing contests and piles of dead coyotes, dead wolves, dead elephants with their tusks cut off, dead rhinos missing their horns, dead baby grizzly bears, dead big cats who are dead because some rich fucking Texas oil man likes to go on safaris in his $10,000 safari costume with his laser beam focused hunting rifle, tired of dead whales being hauled to shore by fishermen and onto careless big ships because they were run over.

While we’re talking about dolphin slaughter, let’s go halfway around the globe from the Faroe Islands to Taiji, in Japan, where the annual Taiji dolphin slaughter started on September 1. While the number of dead animals isn’t as gruesome as the Faroe Island numbers, the event is the same: slaughter, but with the added joy of knowing some of the dolphins are not slaughtered but sold to zoos and roadside seaquariums to live out the rest of their lives in space that, to the dolphin, is the equivalent of a small bathtub or toilet bowl. Here’s the link to the website of Ric O’Barry’s Dolphin Project, which informs us about this event. (The event was the subject of the documentary, “The Cove.” The link is to the trailer.) Quote from the Dolphin Project website:

“The unnecessary and barbaric annual Taiji dolphin slaughter has begun once again. I woke up this morning to learn a pod of dolphins has already been driven into the killing Cove. So when does this end? How does it end? I’m of the opinion it will end when the good people of Japan rise up against it. And that’s starting to happen. Our work, and yours is about supporting that effort. You can help by participating in Dolphin Defender Month. Check it out. Choose your level of involvement and take action.” ~ Ric O’Barry, Founder/Director of Dolphin Project.

And an infographic: