I Have A Dragon!

Rose / 23 / She/Her / ENFJ & Sleepy

[daily-spooky]

[thememedaddy]

[fullofdelight]

Found this gem in the comments.

[hyperions-fate]

The advice to 'write what you know' is great if you want hundreds of books and articles each year about American creative writing graduates and their dull infatuations with their dull identities. It's the literary equivalent of a Tesco in Milton Keynes - harmful to your ecology of passions.

[notallmensheviks]

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.” - Joe Haldeman

[catasters]

[kaijuno]

[kaijuno]

[plaguedocboi]

Working at an aquarium will have you saying things like “this is my favorite scallop because he’s sassy”

[anotherscrappile]

Could we please see the sassy scallop? 👀

[plaguedocboi]

Yeah this is him (he made a child cry once by shooting water in their face)

[kaijuno]

[kaijuno]

[dharma-rust]

[everythingfox]

Definitely wants food

[angelicprzncess]

[karlovycross]

Summer Berry Mix 🍓🫐 ♡⊹˚₊

[shiny-eyed-corvid]

NYC street finds 3.27.24-3.31.24

favorites from this round: baby calico critter, spiky red creature my partner found for me, cat butt pin, fancy hairpin, and an angel/devil hello kitty croc charm ✨🐦‍⬛

[why-bless-your-heart]

Today I cried a little bit because I remembered that when Beethoven conducted his ninth symphony for the first time he got a standing ovation and one of the sopranos had to turn him around to see the audience. 

[why-bless-your-heart]

I have never recovered from this illustration by Scott Cameron for Barbara Nichol’s “Beethoven Lives Upstairs.”

[jame7t]

Dude my coworker left a scrumptious cookie unattended

[jame7t]

Uh, your honor? I scrumped it

[catchymemes]

[inqorporeal]

In the 80s and 90s, there was a massive child abduction scare. Parents were encouraged to keep a more personal eye on their kids, when before it had been considered fine to let them roam and play unsupervised; at the same time, teens wandering without an adult were increasingly seen by older adults as pests -- potential troublemakers and thieves ready to harass innocent passersby and local shops. Which, honestly, has historical precedent, but the Boomers didn't like Gen X doing unto them as they had done unto others in their day. Malls didn't really have security so much until the 2000s, when they started harassing and then later banning unaccompanied teens from the premises; it used to just be The Thing for parents to drop their kids off at the mall to spend weekend afternoons at the arcade and cinema with their friends.

Can't do that anymore.

90s kids had so, so much more freedom than kids now, and it's not a good change, at all.

[nitewrighter]

Okay, so this is a little fucked up, but actually missing kids weren't included in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) until 1982. Before this there was a large culture of shame and silence surrounding missing children, as police tended to mostly hand-wave away missing children as 'runaways' and making a big fuss about "Hey where the fuck is my kid" was met with "Well if you lost them, you're a shit parent, then." Even though, obviously, there was a much bigger culture of letting kids roam free back in the day. Basically this all changed with the disappearance of Etan Kalil Patz in 1979--this would be the first kid to be put on the sides of milk cartons like "Have you seen this kid!?!" And his parents actually launched this successful campaign of "Maybe law enforcement should actually give more of a shit when kids go missing" and also had a lot of public service announcement campaigns that included "It's 10 PM: Do you know where your children are?" and encouraging parents to have a yearly photo portrait of their child so that searchers have a reference for their appearance (this is before the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, mind you.) So like, when they actually started recording missing kids in the NCIC, it quickly became clear of "Oh, this is actually a huge problem, actually. A lot of fucking kids are going missing." Which is like.. that's kind of what happens when you have a vulnerable population running around loose, and then when something happens to them, the primary response to it is shaming their guardians.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if this was also influenced by the Satanic Panic, which also emerged around the early 1980's. Like, first you realize, "Hey, um... someone can just grab my 6 year old while he's walking to the bus stop for school" but THEN fucking Michelle Remembers drops and all of a sudden the entire nation is going, "Oh our kids are being kidnapped and abused by ritual Satanic Cults which are totally everywhere." (Spoiler alert: Ritual Satanic Cults were not, in fact, everywhere). But yeah. Basically you have this perfect storm of realizing you've kind of been chucking kids under the bus on a national level, but then! Oh!! There's no time to worry about kids' personhood! There's a new scary threat to our children!! Stop letting them play DnD at their friends' house! That's Satan!

The fact that television was now a much more available technology (According to census data 98% of homes in 1982 had a television) also helped bake this into the American psyche very very quickly.