shinyemptyhead

shinyemptyhead

120p

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7 years ago @ The Toast - Two Medieval Monks Inv... · 0 replies · +1 points

The Two Monks have changed my art gallery mentality forever.

7 years ago @ The Toast - How To Politely Declin... · 0 replies · +13 points

According to legend Saint Olga of Kiev had a slightly more subtle approach: Trick the Byzantine emperor into adopting you as his god-daughter, then point out this makes marriage impossible.

(Sadly this probably isn't true, as he was already married - in fact, she took his wife's name as her baptismal name.)

8 years ago @ The Toast - Ayn Rand's Firefly... · 0 replies · +16 points

Though I guess this could also be read as a direct response to Atlas Shrugged, so YMMV.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Ayn Rand's Firefly... · 2 replies · +35 points

Ayn Rand's Doctor Who has already been written, and it's Doctor Who.

“And when this war is over, when you have the homeland free from humans, what do you think it’s going to be like? Do you know? Have you thought about it? Have you given it any consideration? Because you’re very close to getting what you want. What’s it going to be like? Paint me a picture! Are you going to live in houses? Do you want people to go to work? Will there be holidays? Oh! Will there be music?! Do you think people will be allowed to play violins? Who will make the violins? Well? Oh… you don’t actually know, do you? Because, just like every other tantruming child in history, Bonnie, you don’t actually know what you want! So, let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours: when you’ve killed all the ‘bad guys’, and it’s all ‘perfect’ and ‘just’ and ‘fair’, when you have finally got it exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you? The troublemakers. How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?”

8 years ago @ The Toast - Charlotte Brontë's Mo... · 0 replies · +32 points

That's not entirely accurate. Catholics believe in salvation through grace and works - that is, it's not enough to just believe in God. You have to also do good works and live a decent life. (That did get perverted in the pre-Reformation period with indulgences etc, but so it goes.) You do still have to have the belief/grace part as well though. (This all gets into Calvinistic predestination arguments, as so much Catholic/Protestant theological argument tends to.)

This led to the opposite confusion for me (raised in Ireland as a Catholic) from what most people in this thread are saying. When my American friends described someone as "very Christian", I thought they meant she did an awful lot of charity work. It turned out they meant she prayed a lot and strongly disapproved of Dungeons and Dragons.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +1 points

The smoothest single-malt whisky I've encountered is AnCnoc. It's a good present to buy for someone who doesn't drink whisky much but likes having some on special occasions.

8 years ago @ The Toast - \"Face Like A Farmer\"... · 1 reply · +17 points

I love Brosnan's deal that he made with the studio back in the 90s - for every blockbuster he did for them, they would fund a small independent film based in ireland for him to star in. (Such as "The Nephew, or "Evelyn".)

8 years ago @ The Toast - Unsolicited Advice For... · 0 replies · +20 points

Agreed. I've been attending a night class on Henry VIII for the last few weeks (the zeitgeist is real!), and the lecturer's take is that Catherine had two main reasons for defying Henry on this:
- They had got a papal declaration when they got married that said that it wasn't incest, and she was hard-core Catholic enough to refuse to believe the Pope was infallible when speaking ex officio, and
- She didn't want Mary to have the taint of being "a child of incest". Which Mary was able to fight free of anyway, partially because Jane Seymour (who was the same age as Mary) utterly adored her and persuaded Henry and her to reconcile. Which says an awful lot about how much people liked Jane Seymour.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Auto Draft · 0 replies · +11 points

The Northern Ireland assembly actually voted in equal marriage today - a historic first!
...then it immediately got vetoed by the biggest party in the assembly (the Christian fundamentalist and extremely right wing Democratic Unionist Party) in an abuse of a process designed to prevent sectarian abuses of one community by the other.

Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Scenes From Glenga... · 1 reply · +40 points

A. B. C. Always. Be. Cloistered.