#leave the world better than we found it

[ahmoseinarus]

An Unexpected Beacon...

So... interesting story... I struggled today. I really struggled, waking up and learning that enough people in my country really are that far gone that they would vote him back in to burn the whole world down. I struggled so badly that I was fighting urges to self-harm in ways I’ve not struggled with for over 15 years. Somehow, I managed to make it through the day.

Now, I try to move forward. What now?

One thought I had was, there is still some of 2024 left... some people have been "Doom Spending", apparently. Maybe I will, too. But in another way... I don't want to give his government my money, to do fuck-knows-what with it. So I started looking up 'what is the limit of charitable donations that you can write off on your taxes?' Ended up on the IRS website looking at different qualifying charities, and considering options.

Lo and Behold... after going down a rabbit hole, I found myself looking at the publicly available Tax Returns for one Critical Role Foundation... and, mildly curious, I started looking the documents over. ... and then, I saw this.

Thank you, Matt, Ashley, Liam, Taliesin, Travis, Marisha, Laura, Sam, Dani & everyone else at Critical Role & The Critical Role Foundation, for bringing me to tears tonight, and giving me that little spark of hope. Sometimes, YOU are OUR Beacon.

This gave me that little Mote of Possibility, that little light in the darkness, to give me just that little bit of hope that I so desperately needed.

I will be making a donation before the end of the year to the Critical Role Foundation.

[imminent-danger-came]

i don't know why people think the writers hate wukong so much. making a character flawed doesn't mean you don't like them and wukong getting yelled at twice isn't the writers putting their grievances in the characters' mouths

The news come in: writers have things happen in their stories

Tbh, the people who have that sort of take are probably just not writers, for the most part. Having characters make bad choices and face consequences for those choices is really fun! It's also just not indicative of how much you "like" that character.

And you know, Lmk is fundamentally about loving flawed people. That's it. That's the core theme. So it's like, of COURSE Wukong and everyone else are going to be flawed. That's why MK's so flawed, he's gotta realize he's worthy of love in spite of and with his mistakes (you know- his actual mistakes and flaws, not the fake ones from 4x01 lol). He's gotta accept the ways people hurt each other.

[felledbymortals]

( ❛ ╾ @thefearedsouls )

Rigby looked rougher than usual; a longer beard, a few new scars, aches in his bones and some wounds that needed healing. He was still him. That was understood in his heart as he heard the shouting of his name and the quick patter of two sets of tiny footsteps. He knelt to their level as the tiny prince and princess ran up to him. The force of two tiny bodies slamming into him made him groan in pain slightly but it told him one thing. He was home.

It had all been worth it. It was his end of a bargain that kept his family safe -- all of it. "Sorry I'm late." He chuckled and held them both into a hug. He looked up as he saw her and he gave her a tired smile. "Your grace." He nodded, moving to stand as the twins let go.

[shadowpeachyuri]

I think mk’s been hanging out with other mentors

i dont know what specifically this ask is in reference to but you're right anon. he probably has

[newdleboy]

@scumbag-the-hedgehog asked: ❛  where do you think you're going?  ❜

▬▬▬ ☁      Seriously? What was this guy's problem? The way he was being bothered, it felt kind of personal. MK didn't even know who this was. He wanted zero part of it though. So he tried to leave. That was never gonna work - He should know better. With a frustrated sigh, MK slumped && faced the other again.

                              ❝ Away from you! I don't know why you want to fight me so bad, but I'm really not interested! Leave me alone. ❞

[unlockthestars]

50 Dialogue Prompts // Accepting

@damnbrosius asked: “I’ve been waiting a long time.” Ambrosius to Aster. He's also lying, he was summoned as recently as a week ago, but lucky Aster for being the one to find the staff in the sand, right?

The fall of Atlas had displaced thousands of citizens. Some of them were handling things a lot better than others, and Aster knew he was going to have his work cut out for him. It was going to be a lot of long days and nights, talking through the trauma of what had happened, but right now, this was where he was most needed.

He was taking a little bit of a break after talking to a family who had had to evacuate after generations had lived in the kingdom, going back as far as when the Academy had been known as Alsius. It was all they had ever known, and all of them were having trouble adjusting.

Aster had listened, letting each family member (they'd requested to talk to him as a group) talk, express the complex emotions they were feeling about….everything. He'd recommended a few exercises, reassuring them that what they were feeling was perfectly natural, that they weren't broken; they were just going through a lot right now.

And they weren't the only ones. There were a lot of heightened emotions right now, and Aster needed to take a walk, to clear his head, so he could continue being of service.

He filled a canteen and slung it over his shoulder, walking the relatively short distance to where the portal had appeared in Vacuo. So many people had come here from Atlas and Mantle through that single portal…., and they would never be able to return home.

Aster surveyed the area, though there were few signs of the turmoil that had happened here only recently; the sands shifted quickly here, covering any trace that might have been left or uncovering previously hidden ruins seemingly at random.

He knows he's not going to find much out here, that he should head back to the city, to talk to more people. But as he turns to head back, something catches his eye, mostly buried in the sand. Aster heads towards what appears to be some sort of gem, glittering in the sand. Had someone dropped this after coming through the portal?

Intrigued, he quickly digs the gem out of the sand…, only to discover that it's attached to a staff, which started to glow the moment he touched it.

And then suddenly, floating before him is a tall, very muscular, very naked blue man who had just declared that he'd been waiting a long time.

Aster's eyes widen, and he almost drops the staff he'd found, but something tells him to hold onto it.

His tail twitches, angled slightly upward, but otherwise very still. "I'm…..sorry to have kept you waiting," is all Aster can think to reply.

[charlies-corner-of-hell]

ERM REBLOGGING FOR PREV TAGS!!

when I have to take 5x as long to spam the moots with evil boops:

[maaarine]

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

[syncopatedid]

I feel like the reason why Gojo wasn't given an indulgent extra chapter for us the characters to mourn his passing is that the body count of this series is so high it's a slippery slope to even start. Also, sorcerers dying on the job has become so normalized to the point where I don't think people in their line of work can even process their grief the same way as normies anymore (or have the time to).

[some-assholes-familiar]

Can we talk about the fact that so many people in older generations kind of have this habit of just expecting children to magically manifest the skills they themselves were taught how to do? and then shaming them for not knowing how to do the same things they should have been teaching their children?

Like, as I’m entering the adult world I’m learning more and more about necessary faulting skills I should have but don’t because no one ever taught me, and when I ask for help or don’t know how to do something like, say, oiling my car or navigating university systems (seriously, I still barely understand what the hell the credit system is) i just get a bunch of the older adults in my life laughing at how our generation doesn’t even know how to do the basics.

And it’s like, yeah, we’ve got google to help us in a pinch theoretically, but my little brother doesn’t know how to scrub a pan (despite literally teaching himself how to cook and make paper sculptures on his own) and he just gets called stupid for not doing it right when no one ever taught him what the hell brushes he was supposed to use.

There’s this whole game of parents telling their children to do a task they’ve spent years doing every day as second nature, because they’ve forgotten that they had to learn how to do it in the first place.

It’s like yelling at a baby for not being able to walk. Sure almost everyone we know does it every day without thinking, but none of that changes the fact that right now, the baby doesn’t know how!

I don’t know, I’ve been sitting on this thought for a while, but the amount of frustration I get from encountering a new problem I’ve never seen before, and asking someone for help only for them to either a) do it for me or b) tell me to figure it out on my own and then get angry when I don’t do it their way… it weighs on you. Especially when you know this is a skill that will help you and are more than willing to learn.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just one more thing for me to get pissed at boomers at. They complain so much about kids not knowing how to do stuff for themselves into adulthood when they were the ones who never bothered to teach them how.

[angstandhappiness]

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

There is no "after the revolution." No "ideal world." I don't care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.

And don't get me wrong, I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.

I feel like it's very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there's an "after it's all over" when we don't have to worry about it anymore.

We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[imminent-danger-came]

was rewatching season 3, and noticed something that definitely doesn't actually mean anything, but made me pause for a second

at the end of the specials when Wukong apologizes to MK for being a bad mentor, MK never actually accepts the apology. he makes a joke about being able to just get another bowl of noodles and when Wukong explains his apology more, says he knows and plays dumb to lighten the mood, but he never actually accepts his actual apology

I'm probably thinking too hard about something that's just a silly joke but still

Oh, I think that moment was intended to highlight MK's traits rather than just be a "silly joke".

MK has a habit of wanting to move on and pretend every thing is fine. He doesn't want to think about the things that are messy and grey and complicated. He doesn't want to think about Wukong's flaws or any of the ways Wukong has hurt him, he just wants to go back to things being simple and easy, without working through anything. (Think like, 4x01 and 4x02 where MK keeps insisting he's alright, 4x05 where he says "Monkey king will explain how he's definitely not my dad and that everything is fine", or even 4x12 with "Kick this can down the ol' half marathon"/"So they can never make us live our nightmares again!")

MK during s2 feels so abandoned by Wukong, then brushing past his emotions the moment he realizes Wukong "had a good reason" for leaving. Which, Wukong did have a good reason, but his methods were less than ideal, and there are undoubtedly complicated feelings that came from that. Those two just like, fucking SUCK at communicating with each other.

And, it's definitely not all on Wukong, not by a long shot. But the thing is, MK can't acknowledge or talk about his feelings with Wukong, because that would require him to admit that Wukong hurt him in the first place. So I interpret the 3x14 Apology scene as MK not wanting to accept an apology, because what is Monkey King apologizing for? Nothing happened! Everything's fine! When that's just not true.

[felledbymortals]

( ❛ ╾ @thefearedsouls )

"Good morrow, your majesty." Arachne looked up from where she sat on the floor with the twins. "How was your rest?" She asked with a smile. Nearby was Ellis standing guard so she could entertain the children so their mother could get some much earned sleep. "Do you care to join us? I was showing them a few notes- they both seem to have a musical inclination already."

[aria0fgold]

Been thinking bout caiowe and ngl no matter how I try to spin and shake them I don't think they fit at all with the vibes of Sirius' Heart so alas! My reign of angst terror has been put to a halt and ended with jokid.

[newdleboy]

@falsementor asked: Suddenly and without warning, Macaque leans out of the kid's shadow with a dramatic flicker of the light and a laugh, and a shower of authentic hard candies. Boo! Happy maybe sorta not exactly Halloween, Mk!

▬▬▬ ☁      A startled shout escaped MK's mouth. Dang it - every time! One would think that MK would be used to the jumpscares by now, but no! Macaque got him every time.

                              ❝ Oh come on! IT'S NOT EVEN HALLOWEEN ANYMORE! WHY IS IT ALWAYS ME? ❞