Yellowjackets — 1x05, Blood Hive

DERRY GIRLS

I really can't get over Twitter people being like 'it's time to bring back tumblr' as if it were dead.

Like opening their long abandoned dumpster and finding a vast racoon society thriving.

sharp objects s01e01

Adam Scott and Aubrey Plaza at SDCC

7/20/17

Mahershala Ali photographed by Peggy Sirota for GQ 

He converted to Islam in 1999, after attending a mosque with his future wife. His faith, he says, has helped him become a better actor: “It benefits me from the standpoint of really creating empathy for these characters that I try to embody, other human beings with issues as deep and personal as my own. Because of Islam, I am acutely aware that I am a work in progress.” The daily practice of the religion, he says, “puts a healthy pressure on you to be your best self, beginning with your own spirit and how that feeds into your actions.”

I’m my own person, capable of making my own decisions, and I decided to humiliate you both.

Long read ahoy.

I’m reading lots of posts from non-NI friends about recent political events, and their shock upon discovering the DUP. I will say this: after years of British politics, the British media, the British journalistic scene ignoring the politics of NI - save just to write about The Troubles, not modern day issues - there is a certain wry irony to the DUP taking centre stage.

Where have you all been for years, when we tried to point out about the Executive here was constantly on the brink of collapse because the parties of extremes clashed? Where have you been, when the DUP walked out of the Executive after the revelation the IRA was still active? Where have you been, when the DUP abused the petition of concern mechanism to block marriage equality? Where have you been, when the DUP oversaw the RHI crisis, when Arlene Foster refused to temporarily stand down for an inquiry? Where have you been, when the last Executive failed to pass a Programme for Government, a Budget, or a Brexit plan? Where have you been, when we kept trying to say how Brexit would affect NI terribly, and when we voted to Remain and continually spoke against the imposition of a border? Where have you been, when the Executive collapsed, Sinn Féin quit attending the Assembly and its Committees this year, and we were plunged into a snap Assembly election? Where have you been, when the talks to form a new Executive collapsed, and when the British SoS for NI tasked with chairing the talks kept damaging relations through trampling over legacy issues by expressing his belief that British military personnel should not face prosecution for actions during The Troubles? Where have you been, when the British PM called a snap GE in the middle of our talks, which flared up old tensions and provoked polarisation and entrenched divisions? Where have you been when our hospitals and schools and charities face funding cuts, because there was no Budget?

Where have you been at all? Suddenly providing hot takes on the DUP and our politics after a day of google searches whilst we have grown up under their policies? This election result might make people across the water feel queasy that you will have a coalition of Tories and DUP. We have no devolved government still, and when talks resume to form that government, the parties of extremes will each feel they have a full hand to play.

The DUP propping up the Conservative government is dire. It’s tramping over the Good Friday Agreement. But should the talks to save power-sharing fail, we could face the imposition of direct rule in NI by the same government - and the DUP.

# she ended the journalist