You are good at something, stop lying to yourself. You’re good at breaking down comic book plots, cooking ramen perfectly, making your friends happy, knowing the time without looking at a clock, getting the perfect ending at RPG’s, or figuring out the twist ending to movies. Don’t let society tell you your talents are meaningless because they don’t serve an economical purpose. Your talents reflect your interests and passions, and what’s important to you is important.
Dat Lass: Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions...
Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions are so incredibly adept at making their belief system intrinsic to the core identity of their followers. THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THAT. It’s that whole Dunbar’s number/monkeysphere thing (“god knows and loves you personally! He…
See, it’s hard for someone like me (left by my Catholic/agnostic(?) parents to decide for myself, starting to decide around the age of 10 that it was all rubbish) to understand just how badly this sort of thing can affect people and how hard it is to work through and adjust to not having that support structure behind you any more, propping up your life and entire world-view. Plus religion is not a very major thing in this country, more a sort of annoyingly discordant background hum that you can mostly ignore. But I know that it’s a very different situation in North America.
I’m glad that you managed to sort it out for yourself in the end.
Thanks Taly. <3
Canada is actually far less religious than the rest of North America (only about half of us believe in god and way less than that are a part of any organized religion [Canadians aren’t very nationalistic but we are definitely brought together in a mutual pride that we are less fundamentalist and more liberal/socialist than our neighbors to the south]), but I was raised in a brand of Christianity that teeters juuust on the boundary between progressive and fundamentalist. My religion shaped every part of me. It was a pretty slow journey from theism to deism to agnosticism to atheism.
And you’re so right about religion being a support structure. Without it I was afraid shit would just fall apart and man, what do you even build on the spot that used to be your whole life? even if that life was full of helplessness and guilt and shame and never enough faith to trowel over the important questions it couldn’t answer? and then it was a lot of painful work to dismantle it and after that there were some really fun existential crises because I thought the alternative to believing in god was believing in nothing.
But of course, that was silly: I believe in logic and science and love and compassion and responsibility and sincerity.
And obviously I’d be kidding myself if I said I have it all figured out because man look around the universe is infinitely vast but that’s ok now because I get to choose my own standards of measurement. Now I get to decide what’s important in my life. I can say “fuck destiny” and take shit into my own hands. I can live as large or as small as I want to. I get to choose what the answer to the open question that is my brief existence is.
The Saddest Thought I Ever Thoughted
Blue Sky the podfic comes out and everyone is happy. It’s amazing and you feel so connected to these characters and yes especially to the people that made it too because we are all in this fandom together and over the time we have spent in it (long or short) we feel like these people have enriched our lives. You listen to it once, twice, three times… you were on your 46th listen through when your mp3 died. You knew you would never forget.
Fast forward thirty years maybe forty. Your scouring through old boxes or maybe going through the attic; trying to sort out your mementos and cleaning out all this stuff to make room for the other things you have collected over time. And then you find it. Maybe it’s a poster or something you drew. maybe it’s the podfic itself burnt on a CD (do people even use these anymore?) and you pause for a second. It was so long ago you had forgotten, but now it’s in your hand and you wonder…
What ever happened to these people? What happened to Waffles, Taly or Harry? Marsh, NQN, Bay and the rest?
Are they married? Are they working? Have they gone on to do other bright and brilliant things or (that little niggling thing you don’t want to think so you think it very quietly) are any of them dead?
And your sad because you don’t know. And your sad because you didn’t mean to forget. That night, if you did indeed find that CD, you listen to it (thank God I kept that out of date CD player I was going to turf). The thing skips from time to time, but it’s overall in good condition and when you hear those voices speaking to you from across all those years, stretching back to a time when Tumblr was a pretty new thing and so were you, you can’t help but remember how excited you were; how enthusiastic you were. And maybe you find that love again. The only thing that can be certain is that sometime during that night you fell asleep with a smile on your face despite the way you had cried.
WOW feelings attack
Game of Thrones pairs Season 2.
this art work is so perfect
I just went aAooWOAOW at Ygritte and Poor Pretty Jon Snow
Game of Ships.
Real mad at GRRM for making me ship such fucked-up relationships.
Some quick n’ dirty color beats to try and figure out what the oracle turret’s shadows might look like when it’s talking to Wheatley. These will hopefully be part of a future project having to do with this scene.
CAN’T WAIT FOR SAID PROJECT. These colours are fantastic.
A shark gives a diver a high-five. Eli Martinez was interacting with the lemon shark in the balmy waters off the coast of The Bahamas. Eli, who works as the editor of Shark Diving magazine, said: “This particular shark I had encountered before. She is very laid-back so I knew if I held my hand out she would come over. At first she was swimming straight towards me, but I didn’t expect her to turn at the last moment. She tapped my palm with her fin like we were high-five-ing.” Picture: CATERS NEWS
