Today, RCI and the Returning Service Members – U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs are releasing Prepared Caregivers: A Toolkit for Caregivers of Veterans for Disaster Preparedness, a guide to help caregivers of Veterans prepare for disasters, including environmental catastrophes and pandemics. To read the toolkit and learn more, please visit rosalynncarter.org/emergency-preparedness/.
there's just... there is no reason to make yet another cop show in this day and age. copaganda is not only bullshit, it is a failure of imagination.
you want to watch brooding characters with dark pasts investigate crimes in an official capacity? just use private detectives (cops have a miserable solve rate anyway). want eccentric geniuses & their sidekicks solving mysteries? i present you with armchair detectives & neighborhood busybodies. oh, you're craving a workplace comedy-drama starring overworked protagonists doing their heartfelt best to resolve community conflicts? social worker office sitcom! bitch this is ACHIEVABLE
Every time LDS kids come to my neighborhood I am so so nice to them. I hope they remember the blue haired lady who was kind, when people try to convince them the outside world is bad and scary. (Also they are always so young! I want to feed them cookies and give them Diana Wynne Jones books or something)
Thank you! Honestly, this sort of kindness can go a really long way, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.
LDS children and missionaries (and the majority of the latter are barely of age) are often the people who interact the most with non-Mormons on a daily basis, and thus are kind of the "face" of the Church to non-Mormons a lot of the time. As a result, they're frequently the ones who actually experience the brunt of antagonism towards the Church, which only reinforces the distrust they've already been taught to feel towards the rest of the world.
It's not that the Church doesn't deserve this antagonism, but a lot of people seem to take this enormous pride in showing up Mormon teenagers who have spent most of their lives under intense social pressure, instruction, expectation, and close observation from both their peers and from older authorities in the Church (it largely operates on seniority, so young unmarried people in particular tend to have very little power within its hierarchies). Being "owned" for clout by non-Mormons doesn't prove anything to most of them except that their leaders and parents are right and they can't trust people outside the Church.
The fact that the Church usually does provide a tightly-knit community, a distinct and familiar culture, and a well-developed infrastructure for supporting its members' needs as long as they do [xyz] means that there can be very concrete benefits to staying in the Church, staying closeted, whatever. So if, additionally, a Mormon kid has every reason to think that nobody outside the Church is going to extend compassion or kindness towards them, that the rest of the world really is as hostile and dangerous as they've been told, the stakes for leaving are all the higher, despite the costs of staying.
So people from "outside" who disrupt this narrative of a hostile, threatening world that cannot conceivably understand their experiences or perspectives can be really important. It's important for them to know that there are communities and reliable support systems outside the Church, that leaving the Church does not have to mean being a pariah in every context, that there are concrete resources outside the Church, that compassion and decency in ordinary day-to-day life is not the province of any particular religion or sect and can be found anywhere. This kind of information can be really important evidence for people to have when they are deciding how much they're willing to risk losing.
So yeah, all of this is to say that you're doing a good thing that may well provide a lifeline for very vulnerable people, even if you don't personally see results at the time.
i hope my misadventures aren't dissuading anyone from making their own website as a patreon alternative, when i first did this back in 2016/2017 it was actually pretty painless so most of the issues i am having right now are based on the fact that i already have a site with content and members that i don't want to lose or fuck over
more specifically i originally set it up with a service that did most of the hard stuff for me, which meant that when they changed from a free service that took a cut to a paid service that still took a cut it really fucked me
if i'd done just a teeeeensy bit more work in the beginning i would be doing much less work right now, which is the actual lesson you should be taking away from my Agonies
I hadn't drawn Bernadette (left) with her wife Calina (right) yet bc borzoi snoots were A Struggle, but finally ITYOOL 2024 I have made things right in my world
I don't think people are honestly taking into consideration the fact that shitty/overwhelming work conditions DO impact relationships outside of the work environment. I haven't, until more recently, especially pertaining to my own work conditions.
Imagine working and socializing with customers and co-workers for 8+ hours a day, and all the good and shitty things that come with it...to then come home and do more work, and trying to socialize with friends/partners after all that.
Yeah, be for real. Cut yourself some slack. If you're friends with people with this sort of work-life? Cut them some slack (that isn't to excuse poor treatment of others, mind you)
I love how the church kinda treats tanguish like the community cat that just vibes and get really worried when he vanishes they love their gargoyle
To use a cut quote from a cut chapter: "It's a church. They keep track of their regular visitors, especially the ones that never come inside.”
They worry! I feel like the Order or Remembrance would, even more so than others, just because it's their job to remember. I imagine there was a bit of panic when the anonymous Gargoyle vanished, and everyone collectively realized they'd never asked his name, or managed to corner him long enough to invite him inside.
Honestly the next chapter or so is really scratching an itch for me, as far as church communities go. It's been a hot minute since I was last at a church that I really connected with a church [I live in a very conservative area and the churches here aren't very friendly to my current views] but when I was a kid, the sense of community that came with church was very nice. People genuinely cared if members of the congregation, even ones who didn't come often, disappeared for prolonged periods of time. I haven't been to my childhood church in over 10 years, but sometimes when members see me around town, they still run up and talk to me and ask me how I've been.
Sit down listen-
Modern au Codywan of firefighter Cody and nurse Obi Wan but they are both single parents and actually Obi Wan has a secret previous life and its just that I'm doing that hurray
usually i put all my art fight pieces in one post at the end of the month but i'm happy with this one and i'm going to make more that i'm happy with so we're giving them their own posts this year. character is yaroslav by @leatherdaddymoominpappa and lyrics are from "on the rob" by cheap dirty horse
(via Trump Reportedly Said ‘No One Wants to See’ Wounded Vets)
At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.
It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)
donny has some real serious issues with disadvantaged people...
Made the discovery today that I am deeply and spiritually uncomfortable with the idea of getting married anywhere but in a DMV, as God and Moist von Lipwig intended