The Babe With The Power

it’s a shitpost farm. you’re gonna see shitposts outside. avatar art by zazrichor, header art by sathynae! they/them/theirs

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

[aetherograph]

Oh! Then I know the EXACT person you should be mad at! Michael O'Rielly! He's the one that gutted the Children's Programming Rules, which covered internet as well as television.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

HELLO?

[aetherograph]

#so the death of the Saturday morning cartoon is THIS motherfuckers fault?????

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

And a side note: Things like KOSA and SCREEN and all those other censorship bills that use "think of the children" are not going to protect children at all; if you want to protect kids online, there is already a way to do that it's called the Kid Vid Rules and the FCC is the one that can update and change them to keep up with the times! It doesn't need a congress vote, it already got voted on in 1990!

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[kinuko]

[realest-slenderman]

please

[sourdough-seal]

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

[orbitalmirror]

"how did you get into writing" girl i've been tormented by the visions since i was eight years old

[cheaphalloweencostume]

yesterday my grandma found a penny on the floor and said to my grandpa “there’s that penny again, pa!” and i absolutely lost my mind because i couldn’t shelve the thought of a single panel Far Side comic of two old people on the front porch in the middle of nowhere and a giant penny angrily and inexplicably rolling through the wastes

“there’s that penny again, pa!”

[secreteggplantbaby]

[cheaphalloweencostume]

this is hands down my single favorite post ive ever made that got notes

[morgannalefey]

I sincerely hope that the OP realizes that gramma was very likely quoting that cartoon.

[cheaphalloweencostume]

the cartoon that was drawn and posted based on my post? probably not, but i guess we can never know

[tall]

[ordr]

Thanks for sexualizing peoples trauma fuckhead

anytime

[gattobamboom]

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[rudjedet]

And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.

They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?

I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.

AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and to make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.

[lesbianshepard]

on my "don't walk to metlife" post I kept seeing people say that drivers would "bergentruck" pedestrians on the turnpike and it turns out that that's a reference to an Undertale meme where a character purposefully runs over people, but the portion of the jersey turnpike that goes to metlife is bergen county, and I had just instantly accepted that there was a term specifically referring to jersey drivers from there. I didn't even question it. Neither would you, if you had ever driven there.

[lesbianshepard]

posters: if you try to walk on the jersey turnpike they will bergentruck you without hesitation.

me, unfamiliar with undertale memes, but familiar with driving through north jersey: fuckin yeah they will.

[bbnotumbl]

🫰💖

[unusual]

[ryan-sometimes]

I think it's so funny how we bred JOBS into dogs. I have two shih tzus and they were bred to be lap dogs. All they care about is looking cute and cuddling with people. Meanwhile my grandma has a border collie and that dog needs to feel so useful all the time, he acts like he will pass away if he doesn't have a job to do constantly

[halomancer]

On one hand this is extremely fucking funny, but on the other hand, it really boggles my mind how many people punish their dogs for just… doing the thing they were bred to do.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Like Jesus Christ, if you can’t provide an environment where your dog can’t fulfill its literal life purpose, maybe?? Don’t get that dog??? And if you do, maybe know the breed characteristics so you can redirect those traits into more constructive outlets????

[lemonsharks]

Both your most common doodle's parts (labra and golden) want to hunt and retrieve water birds so the best suggestion I can give y'all is congratulations on your new duck hunting hobby.

[safetytank]

#people will overlook the perfect breeds to suit their needs based on just their looks#and get a work dog because it looks cool

[queerb]

tags from @gnarlystarships because YEAH

[maggiedeshiboux]

@gallusrostromegalus

[gallusrostromegalus]

Any time someone sees Herschel and says "AWWW I want a Corgi <3" (because he is Very Cute (TM)), I immediately reply: "Do not get a Corgi unless you have a job for it to do. They were bred to bully livestock across the hills of Wales. This is basically a Border Collie that knows he is cute enough to get away with murder. If you get one and it doesn't have a job, it will apply its livestock-bullying instincts to YOU. Herschel's job specifically is to help manage my crippling ADHD, because I don't have a bull for him to micromanage." This gets me odd looks at the home depot but it does get the point across.

[agnesmontague]

you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?

Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.

[nihilistic-body]

[were---ralph]

tuo sllup dneirfyob flowerew ym nehW

[psych-is-the-name]

TAHW ruoy

[fireflylies]

yM

flowereW

dneirfyoB

[micajestr]

??thgir taht gnidaer I ma ,yrros m'I

[canlsterofsoda]

YM

[official-pinterest]

?dehsurc gnitteg nolemretaw eht erongi annog tsuj er'ew oS

[psych-is-the-name]

nolemretaW

[infinite-archive]

[kiwi]

anybody else feel that being human is like being a long-time syndicated cartoon character watching the world get more complex while your own design stays the same until youre incongruous with the reality around you??

[same-pic-rick-roll]

Do you ever see a complicated meme that expresses a very specific feeling, and while you wouldn’t have said it that way, it instantly resonates with you?