Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.
I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.
It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.
It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.
They are not your enemy. They are victims.
They aren’t being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.
You being mean to some teenager isn’t sticking it to anyone, you’re doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.
PLEASE READ THIS.
Please read this.
Don’t do the church’s work for them.
If you’re kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.
They were such sweet kids, they’d turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I’m me, so, I fed them.
Then it was one of the wee ‘elder’s’ birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.
One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we’ll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they’re still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I’d.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.
The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he’s not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).
The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I’d get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.
I still think very fondly of that time.
Many of those boys still email me now and then.
Most of them aren’t Mormons anymore.
Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.
I was blacklisted, for kindness.
So there you go, if you don’t want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit
As an ex-Mormon myself, I agree with everything posted above. At church every week, I would hear story after story about people being persecuted for being Mormon, about how it’s such a trial and burden to be a member of the “one true church”. I would hear over and over how the original Mormons were forced to move across the US to Utah (so they could practice polygamy in peace, but they don’t tell you that part).
They form martyr complexes about being special but constantly persecuted by anyone not-Mormon. If your family is all Mormon, leaving is a HUGE deal and they will talk about it constantly and how they “hope you will return one day”.
Showing these kids kindness, ESPECIALLY if you are not Mormon yourself, will open their eyes to the fact that the world is not a terrible place outside the church. Many have doubts, but are scared that they will never be happy if they leave. By showing them that they can, it makes staying seem less like their only chance at happiness.
For that matter, this helps with every type of cult.
Cult, or even just environment that is unhealthy or actively teaches you to dislike others. You can have non-cult families that teach absolutely bonkers things to their kids.
On this day, 2 July 1848, enslaved people in St Croix (now the US Virgin Islands) rebelled, burned down plantations and besieged the town of Frederiksted. The Caribbean island was at that time a Danish colony, and it had been decreed that slavery would be abolished in 1859, but the enslaved workers refused to wait.
After revolutions in Europe led to turmoil in nearby Martinique and Guadeloupe, hundreds of rebels seized the moment and rose up. By the end of the day, only the local military garrison, Fort Frederiksværn, had not yet been overrun.
The following day, the governor general, Peter von Scholten arrived. Faced with demands from the enslaved people to immediately abolish slavery, or they would burn the town to the ground, he relented and shouted out: “Now you are free, you are hereby emancipated.”
Technically von Scholten had no authority to abolish slavery, and he was strongly criticised by enslavers and Danish authorities. But faced with a fait accompli, Denmark had no real choice but to accept the situation. The agreement achieved by the formerly enslaved people went even further than just immediate emancipation, as the order issued on the night of July 3 also applied to the Danish colonies of St Thomas and St John, and directed that the enslaved had the right to keep their current housing and provisions for three months, and that elderly and ill labourers had to be looked after by the former enslavers “until further determination”.
The old enslavers subsequently sued the Danish government demanding recompense for the loss of their “property”. Danish Parliament rejected their claim, on the grounds that “slavery [was] itself an institution in conflict with religion and justice”. But they did then agreed to pay a relatively low compensation figure of $50 per enslaved person.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9191/st-croix-enslaved-revolt
Pictured: St Thomas freedom statue https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=654237043416181&set=a.602588028581083&type=3
Twitter is shitting itself so I’m gonna try and be more consistent about art uploading here :3
This is my Warcraft main, Alistair Fireblood, who has time-walked from a doomed timeline to the ‘true’ timeway. He’s helping the Bronze Dragonflight look for solutions to Nozdormu’s fated demise. He’s hoping if they can subvert the aspect’s fate, he can save his own timeline.
People on here and Twitter are turning the term “refugee” into some sort of joke - so I’m just going to kindly ask everyone to stop tossing the term refugee around like it’s not an extremely politically charged term
- sincerely, someone who’s family are literally refugees
THEY PUT TEASER PICS UP ON FB AND THERE’S THIS PINK AND RED ONE THAT HAS THESE POOFY SLEEVES WHICH I WOULD NOT THINK I’D LIKE BUT I THINK I’M IN LOVE????
Anyway, the pics aren’t great as they’re taken from from somewhat far away but please know when there are better ones y'all will know asap.
anyways i know i’ve said it before but the funniest part of shao threatening to stab zeke over the record is that zeke doesn’t know anything about the get down yet or the context for why shao needs it so to him shao is just a reaaaaally die-hard misty holloway fan……..
Random Thought: I think part of why Osmosians being so very humanoid irks me (besides the obvious ‘does the world need more rubber forehead aliens, really?’) is because Lenopan exist.
Because we have two species of shapeshifters, both of whom have that trait as a major one- and a defining one in the case of Kevin specifically- but while one looks the part the other very much doesn’t.
And, thinking about it, that’s really the problem with the Osmosians’ design, isn’t it? It doesn’t really convey anything about them. You look at OG!Lepidopterrans and you can guess whatever their power is is going to be gross. You look at Tetramand and know that they’re super strong. Kinecelerans look fast, Argit and Pierce’s species is covered with the quills they shoot, Galvan’s have large heads relative to their body to represent their intelligence. With their amorphous bodies, nobody is going to be surprised when you say Lenopans’ big power is shapeshifting. Even Anodites, who are basically just glowy people, the glowiness is representative of their energy-being status and related powers.
But what the fuck do you get from Osmosians? It’s a tall guy with horns. How does that say ‘absorption powers’? How does that say ‘shapeshifters’? It doesn’t. Unlike the majority of the designs in the show you don’t get any idea of what they are or what they do based on their design, and unlike the other species for whom this is the case their design isn’t unique. They don’t mess with proportion or shape or coloration or anything, they’re just humans but with horns.
And you can’t even say that they had to design them like that due to Kevin, because we already have Alan over there also being a shapeshifter and switching between his species’ shapes at will.
Even if you try to go the ‘subspecies’ route, it doesn’t make sense because then there would probably be even less of a difference, and anyway that shit was pulled out of nowhere and mentioned maybe once, if you take the one line in that manner.
I’m sitting here, very much not an artist or a designer, trying to think of how I would change the design to be more fitting (in contrast to my BABO stuff, which is full speculative biology and so too much work for an actual in-show design process)…
I think maybe I’d go with a few base traits for the species (keep the horns maybe, or a general shape, maybe the long canines nix gives them) and then differing designs for each built off of that base. Reflect their absorption and shapeshifting in sort’ve an Eevee-like manner, with individuals’ appearances differing based on their own experiences.
Kevin, being half-human and having spent most of his life around humans, looks the most humanoid of the lot, but maybe scraping off polish shows his nails are metal. His teeth are too sharp. Grab a thing from a fic I read like a decade ago, where he starts sparking if he gets wet. Has short quills in his hair after so long around Argit, etc.
Devin, who lives among humans but I’ve always written as not really using his powers much, is so used to using a humanoid shape that he’s fairly humanoid in his default look, but still very much Osmosian and probably the closest to ‘base’ Ossy we get to see.
Aggregor, the eldest of the lot who’s been doing a load of traveling, is still clearly working off the Ossy base but has several permanent non-flesh features and traits from various species he’s dealt with over the years. The most alien-looking of the lot.
This would also build off the fact that Kevin keeps going chimera (despite the fact we know that’s not the default response to him absorbing the Omnitrix because it’s not what happened the first time) and Aggregor’s shapeshifting to use the powers of species he’s absorbed from, by making this sort’ve chimerism a species trait.
The sort’ve trait that can be reflected in a unique, informative design.
[ID: A concept art page of a naked centaur with Black features on its human half. In the upper left corner are two drawings of the centaur’s face in ¾ths view facing left. The first one is colored in the second is slightly smaller and just simplified line art. In the second face the centaur’s horns are longer. Most of the page is taken up by the centaur standing in profile facing right.
The centaur has dark brown skin, dark brown hair, brown eyes, and curly hair done in the style of an undercut with the uncut hair pulled into a small pony tail tied back with a teal hair tie. The centaur’s lower body has light brown short fur with a white underbelly and legs. The wing membrane that stretches from its elbows on its front legs to the hip of its hind legs is teal. His hooves, claws, and spurs are grey. He has a long dark brown stripe on his side, his tail is dark brown, and he has short stripes on his lower legs.
The centaur is very skinny with visible ribs and a high tuck to its waist. In the first face drawing the centaur is wearing teal eye shadow, a spot of teal lipstick on his lower lip, and is wearing a teal choker. /End ID]
A simple reference page for my centaur oc, Aziz Zurizi of Neupe. The skinny gay dragon riding contortionist soldier. He wears make up to make himself look prettier and partially to distract folks away from how thin he is. He wasn’t as skinny before he whent off to war in the north against the invading sirens but after loosing his dragon and getting bit by a magic valravn he’s lost some weight and his metabolism is fast enough that he can’t easily regain it.
He befriended Dakari when he returned back to the Neupe herd over their shared love of dragons. Dakari enjoys his company and frequently shares his food with Aziz. Aziz was the one to discover his sister’s murder plot for Dakari while hiding in the halfling servant tunnels overhearing her whole plan.
