#forward faith

[ncfcatalyst]

First Belonging Expo promotes Inclusion on Campus

Oct. 7 marked the day of the Student Activities & Campus Engagement (SAUCE) office’s first Belonging Expo, opening doors for students to engage with various affinity clubs and one another. Thesis student and Student Event Team (SET) Belonging Coordinator Celeste Kadzis has spent the past three years organizing similar, individual events encouraging campus-wide involvement and togetherness. “This…

[ae-cha08]

In the Bible, Joseph was betrayed and sold into slavery by his own brothers, then falsely accused and put in prison. He could have used excuse after excuse to be bitter and angry, but he had a "no excuses" mentality. He kept doing the right thing when the wrong thing was happening. And in the end, he came out vindicated, promoted, and in a place of influence and respect.

Let go of the hurts, offenses, and wounds of the past. Declare that they have no power over you. 💙

[petrichorthefox]

Seat above the rest, offered generously by the Merchant of the Stars

[vroomvroomvroommf]

he said Oscar 😔 not Osc or Osco… divorce???

JK MCLAREN 1-2 MF!!!!! Oscar 1st win!!!!!!

[blabbershere]

At some point you literally won't be able to shrink yourself back to fit in the old spaces even if you wanted to. Move forward, move on. Change.

— Anonymus

[rux363]

The time has come... to proudly share my contribution for this year's @kaishinbigbang!!

It has been amazing working with @instablamwriter - thank you so much for being such a supportive partner, time truly flied working with you!!

NOW GO GIVE THEM SOME LOVE IN:

this long night too shall pass

[jadecantcreate]

some drawings of my favorite guys!!!! i just think theyre neat. love to observe their shenanigans

[fallcolorspringrapid]

hi. if you like weirdly intense mentor-protégé relationships, War of Faith (追风者) might be for you.

the protégé: Wei Ruolai, a little potato, a poor, brilliant, idealistic boy whose n:o 1 ambition in life is to... work for advisor Shen Tunan of Central Bank. apparently. as his personal assistant.

"My life is not worth much anyway," Wei Ruolai says,

wow. ok.

and this is Shen Tunan, Wei Ruolai's boss and mentor. here he's looking at Wei Ruolai who has just said something very smart.

i'm going to eat that little potato for breakfast —Shen Tunan, probably.

people. these two have Chemistry. Shen Tunan keeps looking at Wei Ruolai like he can't quite believe his luck at having found such a sweet potato and can't make up his mind about which part to bite into first. and Wei Ruolai is just *incoherent noises* he's just so earnest. he's quiet and smart (and also very stupid) and tenacious and a tiny bit of a brat, and he lights up under Shen Tunan's attention.

Shen Tunan: "You spoke well earlier."

Wei Ruolai, having looked bashfully away:

ahem.

praise kink, anyone?

[spongebob-connoisseur]

Nosferatu watching Nosferatu 2024

[flickeringflame216]

blessings roll call! add on in the tags if you so wish <3

[dearjewels22]

ebb and flow.

let go of what needs to go... better awaits you.

Happy 1st day of Spring ☀️🌸🌱🪴🌻🌺🤗

[icouldhyperfixatehim]

happy to have an offgun sunday show back on the docket but i can already tell this series is going to put a bee in my bonnet every week about late stage capitalism foisting its cancer upon all workplace cultures and turning things like internships from learning and exploratory opportunities to build skills and discover interests in a field, to an expectation of free/low paid but inexplicably pre-skilled labour. do you think ye olde blacksmith's apprentice showed up to the first day of the apprenticeship and the blacksmith is like "what do you mean you don't know how to shoe a horse?? that's so basic" no. the expectation of apprenticeship is that a newborn emptyheaded youngin with a vague notion that metal is cool shows up, and is taught how to blacksmith. the expectation is not that the young savant of metalwork turns up with a list of horses already shoed, including One Very Special One in the Royal Stable, and god would you please please please allow me to debase myself for you, o blacksmith? my resumé is just like the journeyman's!! this workplace culture is a modern invention!! they used to teach you things at work!!

[breathing audibly] i just think entry level should mean entry level, and that as much effort goes into gathering experience that makes people competitively hire-able, ability, opportunity, and luck also play a role. it is lucky to know your passion early enough to be able to groom yourself to competitiveness in a sharky field of work, but a person should be able to turn up for entry level positions/interning with an unabashed "i know nothing" as long as it's followed with an "and i'm ready to learn" and it is in neoliberalism's favour to allow work environments to cut their costs by eschewing the responsibility to teach. to train the trainee.

[priestly-prince]

COMING SOON - SKETCHTEMBER!

SKETCHTEMBER APPROACHES!

So, this september, in an effort to raise funds for a "moving out of the house and getting married" savings account, I'm doing a sponsored sketch drive!

Here's how it works!

First thing's first, you send me a drawing request to my ask box. These requests can be as many as you like, of anything you like (though I will favour things from FAITH, Fallen Aces, Mandela Catalogue and D&D-esque stuff). I'll keep these as requests in a "suggestion box".

What you guys then do, is send me over a Ko-fi donation to my fundraiser, and I'll pick my favourite request from the list. OR, if you have a specific thing you'd like to see, simply add a note to the donation, and I'll pick it for you.

After that, if there are any sketches that you'd like to see as finished pieces, you can donate to have it upgraded to a full colour image (prices will vary).

The aim of Sketchtember is to be a kind of "pay it forward" type scheme, where people who wouldn't normally be able to get commissions, can instead have the possibility to have it crowdfunded by the community, for much cheaper prices than usual.

[corpish]

.

[anghraine]

Speaking of GW1 and GW2 ... I've had plenty of complaints over the years about how GW2 has chosen to handle and retcon human-centric GW1 lore, the framing of the human gods, etc. That said, I've recently been appreciating that GW2 has retained a particular element of GW1's treatment of humanity and their gods that I've always really liked.

Humans in the GW universe are not really generic everymen, as humans so often are in fantasy settings. Nor are they so wildly varying and unpredictable that there's no sense of humanity having its own distinct flavor like the other playable species do. In many ways, they occupy a vaguely "elvish" position in the world—they've been on this world for a very long time and used to be a major power, or rather, made up many major powers with various warring factions that sometimes found common cause.

But in more recent eras, many of the ancient human civilizations have dwindled and/or suffered various atrocities and/or lost their minds. And culturally, humans tend to have a strong affinity for the mystical and even more for the divinely mystical, which their political power in previous eras was directly tied to. The vast majority of humans in this world are faithful worshippers of a human pantheon of six gods (formerly five).

Not all humans are magical or religious, to be sure, but a lot of them are, to the point that this seems their most distinctive cultural quality. Minor NPCs tend to have background dialogue invoking the gods ("By the Six!"), or referencing one of the gods (often but not only the goddess Dwayna, leader of the Six). The main human NPC of the core game, Logan Thackeray, continually references the gods, as do most of his military fellows.

Most interestingly, though, if you choose to play a human, you will automatically be a devout adherent of the faith of the Six regardless of any other choices you make. In addition, human PCs are blessed by one specific god among the Six whom you choose at character creation.

This mostly has minor flavor effects in practice. A priest of the god you chose permanently hangs out in your home district, and sometimes other priests of your god can perceive some mark of their deity's favor when they look at you.

Howeverrrrr, when I say "their deity," I don't mean that they exclusively worship the god they've dedicated their lives to, or that "your god"—the god whose favor you enjoy as a human PC—is your god in any remotely monotheistic way. Humans faithful to the Six are faithful to all the Six until one of the gods falls to evil. And when that god becomes the villain of the second GW2 expansion, various human NPCs are shown going through a crisis of the soul regardless of whether he was their particular patron or not. Having a more specific personal tie to one of the gods, or being particularly blessed by one of them, or being specifically devoted to a life of service to one of them, does not in any way prevent humans from devotion to the rest of the pantheon.

Mechanically, this means that no matter which deity you choose as your particular patron, your human PC starts the game with the ability to pray to Dwayna, goddess of life and air and healing. When you pray to her, a blue image of Dwayna materializes, heals you, and vanishes. As you level up, your human-based skills will extend to prayers to the other gods.

Praying to Lyssa, goddess of illusion/chaos magic and water and beauty, confounds foes by inflicting random conditions on them and random blessings on you. Praying to Kormir, goddess of spirit, order, and truth, will free you from negative effects like immobilization. The final prayer you can use, iirc, and the most powerful, is the prayer to Balthazar, the god of fire and war who ends up going super evil. If you're playing a fragile class like an elementalist or mesmer, praying to him is actually great, because he blesses you with two fierce hounds made of flame who fight alongside you and soak up damage. (Praying to Balthazar does feel a lot weirder in retrospect, I'll admit.)

In any case, the point is that you can pray to ANY human god and receive a brief visitation from that god, because the entire human pantheon are your gods even if you're only special to one of them. A similar dynamic is at work for NPCs as well. A recurring NPC in the core GW2 story, for instance, is Rhie, a priestess of Grenth, god of cold, darkness, judgment, and death (he's not evil, just goth). Even by priest of Grenth standards, Rhie is greatly favored by him, and as a result is able to perform powerful rituals dealing with the boundaries between life and death. But there's no expectation that this means she should abjure the other gods in any way, and she certainly does not (in fact, she provides a Human Religion 101 rundown about the gods in general in her first appearance in the human storyline).

And it's so common in fantasy, I feel, that polytheistic cultures are conceptualized as giving adherents a wider choice of gods to be the one they actually worship for real, often with the implication that worshipping one god in the pantheon naturally translates into hostility or apathy towards other gods in the same pantheon. And so I do enjoy playing a religiously devout character who has a special patron deity blessing her and who is emphatically polytheistic throughout her entire original storyline.

[lifefactz]

💯