JUDAS

Remy, the main character in Pixar's Ratatouille is a metaphor for the literally starving, poor artist, who feels resentment towards a capitalist society whilst trying to climb its ranks and escape poverty. My mind simply shall not be changed. In the film, Remy's family exist purely to survive, and his dad has evolved to ignore Remy's love of his art - cooking - and dismiss his passions because passions are for the rich. His father only starts to care about Remy's talents when they become economically viable, and therefore beneficial to their survival as the poor.                          Remy, the Rat. When you start to think of the rats as the poor, and the humans as the rich, it starts to make much more sense. Remy yearns for the human (rich) experience because they have the ability to create art and pursue their passions with no care for material expense or wasted time. This is true in our society. Whilst the...

Yesterday, on my regular post-school depressing Twitter scroll, I came across a repost of an article entitled "Mormons Aren't Nice People: a bitter victims [sic] deep dive into very old theology." Firstly - brushing past the fact that   victims  is misspelt because I'm not an educational classist - I'd like to point out how incredibly generalised this statement is, just in the title. This author, that's 'Sadie Lee' on Medium, isn't looking for a resolution, and place to unload, a resolution, or even an apology. She's looking for conflict. As a rather devoted agnostic, I'm not known for running to the rescue of horribly oppressed theists, but I will argue against the public slander of a really quite legitimate belief system.                                             The Book of Mormon. Ignoring the inflammatory title, and proceeding to the main bo...

Bimbos were a staple of 2000s tabloid gossip, with publications across the globe using the word to degrade and put down women like Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. In fact, a New York Post cover from the time has a picture of the three women as a backdrop to the text "Bimbo Summit."                                                  Aforementioned headline. Yeah, real mature. Since then, the word fell out of fashion, along with the noun bimbofication but it was defined loosely as something along the lines of: Bimbo: an attractive but unintelligent or frivolous young woman (frivolous here meaning not having any purpose or value.) Bimbofication: used by social media users to describe when somebody becomes more attractive, has a 'glow up' or becomes more sexualised. In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and ...

We've all wanted to  spill the tea   on our new   bae  or comment on how you can't stop   cheesin ' because of what your new   homie  said, even though it was so not   woke   and probably   cap  - but do we know where these words come from, and should we be using them at all? Much of the vocabulary we use and hear today has its roots in various oppressed subcultures, namely in African American spaces (especially by women,) and in spaces and media dominated by the LGBTQIA+ community. But with the rise of the digitization of these spaces through popular and social media, this language is spread through all social circles - circles that are ignorant of these terms' origins - and the line between subculture and mainstream is blurred by our new collective cultural consciousness on who can say what and why. The most prominent example of this is through the absorption of queer slang into our cultural knowledge thanks to pop...

My father owns a small cabin in the woods near our house. It's small, wooden, nestled in a small valley with a rippling stream. The cabin is stilted, sitting just up a small embankment facing the stream, which my father has reinforced with a small drystone wall on either side. On the other side of the bank is a steep hill, crawling with verdant trees and ferns. Sitting on the balcony that my father build all by himself, I can be one with the natural world, allowing all my superficial stresses and anxieties to melt away as the sound of rippling water, whistling birds, cracking logs on the fire, and the light patter of rain on the tin roof fills my ears. My dad built this whole oasis by himself, using only materials from the valley and unused items from the outside world. Inside the cabin, a rusty old furnace sits in the corner, and a tin chimney passes through the corrugated roof above. A small coffee maker sits on the shelf, its bottom blackened by soot from the fire. It sits next...

                                 Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sitting at my desk, checking emails, waiting for a pot noodle that just won't cool down fast enough, the faint sound of Lady Gaga's   Artpop  filling the air, I come across an email from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I signed up for their mailing list along with a couple others - The LDS, The Messianic Jews, and The Quakers. I just like to keep up with what the smaller denominations are doing. I think their whole sitch is really quite cute, and I love an underdog. I opened up this email from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and it had a link to an article on their website. It was really a very generic blog promotion email, that I doubt was even authored by a human, but I clicked on it anyway as the article's title hooked me, it was titled "Why Did the Holocaust Happen? Why Didn’t God Stop It?" I must admit, I wa...

So,  in the 17th Century, the Portuguese were really into God. This meant that people were also really into being buried at their local church, cathedral, or other Christian-flavored places of worship. Over time, these place's cemeteries became full of bodies, and most churches resorted to stuffing skeletons behind the walls, underneath the floorboards, or just deeper into the cemetery. This meant that after a while, Iberian churches were just absolutely full of bodies, which wasn't exactly sustainable. Skeletons aren't exactly known for being that decomposable, even if their flesh vanishes pretty quickly, which led to churches literally overflowing with bones. During times of disasters and plague, churches would have to bury thousands of bodies at once, which left little room for other bodies.                            An ossuary in Portugal. The solution for this, the Portuguese Catholic establi...