leonineus

[leonineus]

Every year I revisit this. Every year it's still just as funny.

Keep being you, @gallusrostromegalus .

The 1969 Easter Mass Incident

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention.  Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities.  This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

*

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.”  He waved.

*

The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them.  But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s.  He couldn’t NOT have communion.

“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts.  Jesus will understand.”

Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.

A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible.  It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.

They were a SPECTACULAR hit.  Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them.  Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of?  So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.

This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.

Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”

The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.

Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.

*

“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.

*

At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.”  Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.

“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.”  Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.

“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas.  Why not on easter?  Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone.  Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”

“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.

“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right?  Doesn’t look like much of anything, really.  Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.

What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”

He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.

“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off.  Just descend into his corpse like vultures.  I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.”  he nodded thoughtfully.  “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”

“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.

And so, the plan was hatched.  Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.

This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus.  Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?*  She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile.  He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.

“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?

“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man.  With all that entails.”  She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel.  “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”

Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action.  The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.

*

Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.

Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade.  Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.

Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses,  down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.

Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman.  Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.

However, two things happen that were not planned on

1. Dad misses.  In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship.  He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat.  Nobody notices this, however because

2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.  

Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab.  There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.

However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.

There was  a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that. 

Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:

“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”

…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness.  The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.

*

“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked.  I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.

“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”

“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.

*

As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”

“No.”  Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.

It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.

“No.  That’s crazy.”  She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.

“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.

“And you-  you didn’t…  Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?”  the archbishop demanded of my father.

“Do I look like I can jump that high?”  Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.

Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?

Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.

*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.

If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or subscribe on Patreon,  Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it!

[leonineus]

Now where's that post someone made about this... that Ubi could have chosen to just make Sokrates a generic AC background character but instead they decided to make him someone who wakes up and decides to bother Kassandra specifically...?

"It's a beautiful day in Athens, and you are a horrible little philosopher," indeed!

Least annoyed reaction to Sokrates

[leonineus]

Ahh, vindication is sweet. I hated that pairing so much.

reylos crying on twitter because Adam Driver explicitly confirmed that Bendemption was never originally in the plans for Kylo....this is justice for the last 8 years, actually

[leonineus]

ppl who are like “there’s no way sokka’s art skills would improve, he’s ontologically bad at art” ummmm. dude. you realize that this is the mary sue of hobbies, right? this guy could out-westley westley. he would develop an immunity to iocane powder in less than a week because he’s just that prodigious. he became a kyoshi warrior who could best their leader in a matter of hours, and this was the first time he had ever trained in his life with an actual teacher and opponent. he mastered the sword in one day, if we’re to take piandao’s word for it (and considering his name is literally sword, he is clearly an expert). sokka looked at the rough schematics for hot air balloons after the eminent inventor in the world had spent who knows how long not able to get his idea to actually work like “uhhh…. this may sound obvious, but have you tried a lid???” he has borderline supernatural aim with a boomerang. he was dropped into a haiku battle knowing nothing about the form, and not only beat the leader of ba sing se’s premier haiku club, but also chose, completely unnecessarily, to make each verse rhyme. if he actually sat down and practiced drawing, maybe with some instruction from a trained artist, or easier beginner’s materials than ink and a brush (you’ve all seen my art, and I still cannot paint with ink and a brush), I think sokka would easily be able to produce a work on par with (if not superior to) the mona lisa by the following morning.

[leonineus]

Adrien is the kind of dork I could see employing this misdirection.

[Texting]

Marinette: What's for dinner?

Adrien: Can't tell you. It's a soup-prise.

Marinette: Is it soup?

Adrien: I soup-pose it could be!

Marinette: Stop that.

Adrien: Stoup what?

Marinette: Saying soup puns.

Adrien: No.

Adrien: Soup.

Narrator: Dinner that night was tacos.

[leonineus]

[leonineus]

God this is glorious.

I have made an error.

My brother attends a fairly exclusive private boys school that is incredibly religious.

He is going on this weird, intense camp with them next week and all the families have been asked to write personal letters saying why they love them and why they are proud of them.

I told my mother I was just going to enclose a massive drawing of a penis and she absolutely forbid me from doing so.

Anyway so the third page of my letter is a massive veiny penis with ‘SORRY MUM’ written as if it’s ejaculate.

Other quotes from my letter include

- I’m sorry this is handwritten, our printer is fucked. It feels so archaic I might as well be writing this on a cave wall in my own blood. - I am so much better at Pokemon than you. Sorry this isn’t a reason I love you, I’m just really good at Pokemon.

- Thanks for putting up with me even when I come into your room at 3am, drunk and insisting you smell the bacon lipgloss I found.

- My favourite moments between us are the ones where we’re drenched in animal blood, performing the appropriate sacrifices to maintain our youth.

- I’m proud of how quickly you can shove broccoli stems up your nose to diffuse tension at the dinner table.

And so on. These letters were submitted to the school yesterday.

I have just found out they are proofread by the principal and the school’s church leaders, and then read aloud to all the boys on the camp.

A Father is going to read the phrase ‘Suck it bitch’, directed at my brother, in front of 50 other 17 year old boys, whilst on church camp.

[leonineus]

I love this headcanon and I want to see it in Horizon 3 so badly.

discord was discussing a HZ3 headcanon/AU concept (which I believe @finrays started off) where instead of trying to catch up to Aloy's 14 years of experience as a hunter and all-around apex jock, Beta comes to rely more on her own resourcefulness and technical know-how and becomes known for her overridden machine companions (many of whom she's attached to and goes through the effort of upkeeping through repairs and bulking them up with her own tech, and they all have names because she's That kinda gal)

and I basically have not known peace since, because I was already working on a post-Singularity design for her and this just got my 'inventor-type blorbo' gears a-rattling somethin' fierce by giving me a direction to point it towards aklsdfjlksdf

[leonineus]

There were a lot of valid and amusingly-presented points in this but all I can picture is the bit from "If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device" where he finds out that the Tau don't fight in melee and goes on a lengthy rant about it.

This week: Archery, and why I do not respect it. As with the handheld weapons post I will reiterate that debate will not only be discouraged but actively punished via combat.

Long long ago we had a simple means of settling our disputes - grab a large item and beat the fuck out of each other with it. This started with the humble rock, then a club, a primitive axe or hammer, then not so primitive axes and hammers, then swords, maces, flails, spears, battlehammers, nunchucks, just about anything really.

Two parties with a score to settle would square up and beat the shit out of each other until one or more could no longer continue due to death, dismemberment or similar impairment. This method of conflict resolution was also a great means of procuring food from larger animals in our territory, specifically by using those weapons to turn them into food. Strength matched strength, skill decided the fate of a warrior, and then some pussy invented archery.

Don’t get me wrong, I know projectiles have always been a part of our repertoire, before we used a stone to bash we probably tried to chuck it as well. If you can chuck something at someone and do some damage then fair play to you, that’s a spur of the moment gamble that could have panned out really badly and you’re lucky it didn’t.

Archery, however, is the conscious decision to remove yourself from the battle as much as possible while taking potshots like a dick and acting like you’re contributing.

Picture this, you spend years training for war, mastering the sword, spear, and axe, riding day and night to practice horseback fighting, training to be strong enough to run in your armour and fight like a demon. You pull up to the battlefield ready to bring pride to your homeland, and then THUNK. Some prick a quarter mile away and his buddies decided to just launch a bunch of pointy sticks up into the sky like Retro Lawn Darts and played a numbers game as to who would hit you.

I ask you, how is that fair? How can you face your ancestors in the next life and tell them, “Well I honestly have no clue how well I was going to do because someone rolled a D20 and sniped me before I could do any damage.” Answer: it’s not fair at all! It’s the equivalent of playing Mortal Kombat 9 with your girlfriends roommate who always picks Noob Saibot and always spams his teleporting move which is basically impossible to block, and she acts like it’s a mistake but really, who makes a mistake the exact same way 30 times in a row? Who I ask you? Her, and archers.

And yeah, fine, it looks coooool or whatever when you see an archer nail a sick shot because it’s a sKiLl tHeY’Ve MasTeRed but all they’ve mastered is being a top tier shitter and ruin everyone else’s fun time on the battlefield.

“But Mr Orc!,” you’ll whinge, “orcs use bows too! I’ve seen it!” And you’re right, some do. The term for them is Cowards. You’d think when Bolg struck Kili with a morgul shaft I was cheering him on wouldn’t you? Nope. Kili, unlike Bolg, actually had some balls and was tearing it up with a sword and dropping bodies like a clumsy mortician. Bolg only solidified his cringe status by wussing out and shooting him rather than run up on him with a blade.

You owe your opponents a fair shot in equal combat, and if you think it’s acceptable to half ass it by shooting at them from out of stabbing range you have all the honour of a Republican. Archers are guys who sleep with socks on, enjoy pineapple pizza, say shit like, “You’ve got a case of the Mondays!”, repost art and crop out the artists name, restart a game when they’re losing, and generally they chew with their mouths open and wear crocs. These are objective facts and not up for debate.

Remember, if you rock a quiver, I’m stealing your liver.

Until next time Brethren.

[leonineus]

this is the cutest bunny i have ever seen in my entire life i think i'm about to kill myself

[leonineus]

It brings me absolutely no lack of satisfaction that after just short of two games' worth of Sylens being a smug condescending prick to Aloy and to everyone else about how he's so smart and he's the only person who can do anything right and all that, Aloy's choice of methods to bring him to heel and make him pay attention to her for once was to systematically obliterate his entire plan beyond all possible hope of recovery in one move.

"Do you have any idea what you've just done?" to me feels like the Sylens-speak equivalent of him just saying "WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FUCK, ALOY?!"

#horizon forbidden west #hfw #spoilers

[leonineus]

The noise I made when this happened in the episode was about as far from human as my vocal cords can muster, I swear.

My shipper heart is acting up. And this is the big one!

YOU HEAR THAT, ELIZABETH?! I’M COMING TO JOIN YA, HONEY!

#i will go down with this ship #luckily the canon is on my side here #no sinking today except by disney

[leonineus]

[leonineus]

the cyerce elegans sea slug srsly has no business looking this ethereal

[leonineus]

I fell into the ”weirdly specific dragon t-shirt print” rabbit hole on Pinterest…

And to be very real here!

Kaiba owns all of these shirts unironically.

He thinks it’s a true fashion statement.

[leonineus]

Best friends

(via)

[leonineus]

don’t trust him