what a beautiful mess this is

make religion sexy again

church - fall out boy

bedroom hymns - florence + the machine

false god - taylor swift

mary on a cross - ghost

moments silence - hozier

religion - lana del ray

holy ghost - børns

And politicians on all sides are furious and talking about how this does not happen in a democracy and this is some kind of nonsense that we would think is terrible in any other nation.

Meanwhile average Australians are having to grapple with the fact that we don't know much about our political system as we frantically google "ok but what IS a "minister of resources"" and "what do ministers in Australia do?" "What is the Westminster system?" And "if we become a Republic can we have political names and positions that I understand and make sense?"

We will always miss you king. Goodluck on your new quest. 👑🐷😭

curesarcoma.org/donate

Like really bad.

Like, putting aside the whole toy seller thing, half of his story quest is just him having a crisis and everyone except the traveler somehow believing him. Or being too afraid to question him.

Then we meet him in Inazuma and Paimon literally lies to cover his ass. And he almost blows it bc he’s so confused and was about to just tell the truth.

And almost every conversation with him is just him being slightly too genuine holy shit.

Like, should you be telling us that the Fatui lack info on certain adepti? Or that Dottore has secret murder robot lairs? Or that Signora’s a bitch? Or literally the entire plan with Osial and the gnosis after spending like half an hour trying not to kill us?

Respectfully, I don’t think you’re supposed to predicate a fight with “I don’t want to kill/hurt you” and give us the opportunity to walk away and tell the enemy government what’s happening.

And again, MAYBE DON’T TELL THE GIRL YOU JUST MET THAT IT’S ONLY FAIR SHE KNOWS YOU ALMOST DROWNED HER CITY!!

This. This is why no one tells you things, buddy.

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

Amelia and Marina from World Flipper are going to super hell together for lesbian crimes!!!

merperson: what's a gender

marine scientist: like, are you a man or a woman?

merperson: i'm merfolk

marine scientist: no, like, what's in your pants?

Merfolk: oh man, there are a lot of women here. Haha don’t worry guys, I got this :) *changes into a man to keep a balance because that’s culturally polite for merfolk*

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.