#important things

27... 45... 52...

im so disgusted by one of the interactions i just had with one of them. the 27 year old, he said he was messaging a 13 YEAR OLD GIRL. he said he was gonna blackmail her into having ... intimate relations with her DOG, then said i was "much cuter than her." da fawk?? when he reached out to ME, he immediately listed out prices for the nsfw pictures/videos/video calls he wanted. he was getting nsfw pics and videos from literal CHILDREN.

i blocked him because he said he was going to send me the videos of her and i didnt want to have csam on these messages and it just felt gross. if he was so willing to send them to me, just imagine who else he's sending those vids to. imagine how many disgusting, horrid, evil men have this girl - this young vulnerable girl - on their laptops. it makes me sick to think about it.

how can you have it in your soul to even THINK about doing something like that? and i feel so bad for the girl. i wish her the best, i wish her health and safety and that she realizes she's getting manipulated and leaves asap. and i hope that disgusting man dies in a ditch

i wish i had gotten his username so y'all could mass report him or something, but since i didnt, PLEASE stay safe. untitled blogs are usually the unsafest ones to talk to

The largest study ever of 77 deceased male ice hockey players by the Boston University CTE Center found that the odds of having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) increased by 34% each year played, and 18 of 19 National Hockey League players had CTE.

from this article

[L]egends of the game whose lives were impacted by [CTE] that started degenerating their brain from all those hits they took playing ice hockey, many of them in NHL rinks. When you first denied that your game caused CTE, there wasn't much research on CTE. I'll acknowledge that. But since then, we have now shown that worldwide, this disease affects fewer than 1% of the population. But for professional hockey players, it's more than 90%.

Dr. Chris Nowinski: NHL must acknowledge CTE in hockey

Regarding neuropathological findings, CTE was present in 21 of 31 (68%) brains of former rugby players examined, a majority of whom (13/21; 62%) played solely at amateur level.

from this study

Epidemiological studies have shown that elite rugby players are at greater risk of neurodegenerative disease in later life, with post-mortem studies conducted in ex-players demonstrating the presence of neuropathologies related to repetitive head impacts, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy ... In summary, former elite rugby players in mid-life had significant symptom burden, especially those self-reporting more concussions.

https://chuffed.org/project/153965-urgent-appeal-kidney-failure-and-autism-threatens-farah

I'm sorry to hear that. :(

The decadents, however, were not just provocateurs. Their revolt against Victorian society’s deadening enslavement to usefulness, materialism and conventionality put forward a positive philosophy of life, a certain way of thinking about pleasure. Against their era’s obsession with use-value and profit, the decadents insisted that pleasure was, or ought to be, “useless”, enjoyed for its own sake in life’s passing moments. “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,” intoned the essayist Walter Pater, one of the guiding lights of English decadence, in his masterpiece The Renaissance. A reclusive Oxford don, Pater was said to have once stopped High Street traffic to stroke a cat. Why? For the sensation of fur beneath his fingers. The virtue of decadent pleasure is that it is useless, an end in itself.

The fixations of fin-de-siècle [linked to wikipedia] decadence that inspired Oscar Wilde and company are still with us, but in shrivelled, technologically mediated forms. GLP-1s turn the delights of eating into a problem to be managed. Anti-ageing remedies and “looksmaxxing” turn decadence’s preoccupation with self-styling into a (literally painful) form of self-optimisation. AI restages decadence’s love of artifice by outsourcing human thinking to a chatty, eager-to-please machine butler.

The problem with contemporary culture isn’t that we’re too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence – luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display – but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure. The result is a culture in which pleasure is subordinated to programs of optimisation and replaced at scale by numbing algorithmic stimulation and promises of instant gratification. Whether you’re after goods, food, art or ideas, you can get more, faster, now.

But quantity and speed can’t make up for the paradox at the heart of today’s decadence: the fact that it’s often “meh” and oddly joyless.

Quit looking at me

Nothing starts the way it finishes.

Nothing that matters, anyway.

The important things in life start off unimpressive, unnoticed, unimportant. And then slowly grow and change – almost imperceptibly at times.

We love the idea of the quick fix, the flash of inspiration, the overnight success.

But reality is more like the old quote (one that’s been attributed to Jeff Bezos, Tom Clancy, and a dozen other people) – “overnight success takes about 10 years.” At least.

That’s how life really works. And that’s the principle that Jesus is showing us in today’s Gospel.

It’s a truth that’s easy to see. And hard to live with.

Especially when it comes to the things that really matter to us. Whether we’re trying to improve our health, battle an addiction, build a relationship, get out of debt, or just trying to be better human beings.

It’s not going to happen overnight. It takes time.

And that gets frustrating. Because it’s more than just slow going.

For most of us, it’s not a straight line, a steady rise over time. More like two steps forward-one step back. On a good day.

The point of Jesus’ parables about the mustard seed and the yeast? That God knows this about us.

God knows that we’re not always going to get it right. That sometimes we get stuck. Sometimes we head off in the wrong direction.

And even if we are headed in the right direction, sometimes it looks like nothing is happening.

God knows this about us. All of it.

But there’s something that you and I need to know about God.

God loves you enough to wait for you. And God loves you too much to let you to struggle alone.

It’s why God will always help you pick up the pieces and try again. If you’ll let Him.

If you’ve ever wondered why the Sacrament of Reconciliation is infinitely repeatable, this is why.

Even if you’ve lost track of it all. Even if it looks like nothing will ever change. Even if you’ve given up – on you, on God, or both.

God is calling you to start again. With Him.

Because God knows that the important things in life start off unimpressive, unnoticed, unimportant.

And God loves you too much to give up on you.