chatgpt is a threat to the symbiotic relationship between fanfic writers and their betas. we are losing our traditions. eradicate the soulless machine and ask your friend who has a full time job and 3 kids to annotate your omegaverse fanfiction like any other responsible adult.
I miss when ads were a single click and then they’re gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesn’t even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.
I hate advertising. I hate that you can’t do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that there’s nothing I can do about it.
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
I want you to understand this. I NEED you to understand this. My mother read me the hobbit as bedtime story, and I started pushing myself to read before pre-school so I could in fact read the hobbit for myself instead of having to wait for bedtime.
I didn't do so right away but jesus wept I PUSHED myself to learn to read SPECIFICALLY so I could read The Hobbit! It is, in fact, a children's story! And children only see page count as 'there is a lot of this fun story to read!'
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
Reading is in the trenches because why did my 9 yr old nephew look at the word "jealous" and said "jewish"? And when asked why he mistaken it as such he said they both started with a "J". It's like his brain is doing autofill. No matter how many time I try to tell him slow down and sound out the words he just won't.
--
TRAP CARD ACTIVATED
No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.
This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".
This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.
Intervene now, anon, or he's never going to read well.
I remember one of my grade school teachers discussing with my mother the differences between me and my sister at learning to read, and he described me as a "sight reader from the start"... which is to say, an acknowledgement that most people do not do that and it's not reasonable to expect that of the majority of kids, who really do need the phonics and the "sound things out."
Generally speaking if a kid has arrived at school not knowing how to read already, they're not going to do well with sight reading and need phonics. The few kids who develop The Reading in the way the whole language people think they should do it before they hit school.
So true. I know a retired teacher who bawwws and tries to contradict me when I rant about whole language at our knitting meetup. She's all "different kids need different approaches!" and "I saw it work!"...
But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.
As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.
I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.
It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.
It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.
But I could not learn to read.
I was a couple years younger than this nephew, but not that much younger. It's not too late. Now is the perfect time for some tutoring. If you can afford it, get a pro. If you can't, do your best. But you've got to do something.
The four cueing systems if whole language reading education are a band-aid method used by severely dyslexic people. When people's dyslexia is so bad that they simply cannot learn to read effectively, tricks like cueing allow them to function well enough in society to get by. They do NOT teach proper literacy.
This system was popularised by a guy who is obviously dyslexic, refuses to acknowledge that when asked, and essentially decided that everyone else must be like him and therefore the system that helped him get by was a substitute for real literacy since it was so much faster and more achievable for him to learn to "read" this way than phonically. It's kind of like if somebody without hands was learning to sew, found it incredibly frustrating to do without hands, so they started putting their creations together entirely with fabric glue which they found easier to apply... and told everyone how much easier it was so all the schools got rid of needles and thread and sewing machines and everyone was taught to "sew" using fabric glue only and then wondered why their clothing kept falling apart on their bodies.
Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
The long-lost remains of King Alfred the Great have been found buried under a car park, investigators claim.
Alfred died in 899, and his bones were repeatedly moved. He was buried in Winchester Cathedral until 1110, when his remains were moved to Winchester's Hyde Abbey, where they were interred before the high altar between the bodies of his wife and son.
The abbey was demolished after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and the place was left in ruins.
In 1866, during construction of a workhouse on the site, the English antiquarian John Mellor excavated the area, found what he thought were Alfred's bones and had them reburied at nearby St. Bartholemew’s Church.
But in 2013, when archaeologists exhumed and carbon-dated the bones from St. Bartholomew’s churchyard, they proved to date from over 200 years after Alfred’s death - sparking Graham's interest and search.
He said: "Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s. So, I decided to discover what happened to them.
"The quest has taken me 13 years.”
About the Disability Pride Flag
(its design & meaning)
Because:
A) I see it around the Internet where the proportions are off, and I think people are copy/pasting from different thumbnail images that come up in search results, and not clicking through to get the original. It's not a big deal, but it causes a hiccup in my brain whenever I see it.
and
B) There's been some discussion in the Disability Community here on Tumblr on what the precise symbolism should be, and it's changed a bit and gotten complicated. So I want to simplify and broaden it, so it can be explained to curious Normate folk -- without going into a 15 minute explanation of social constructs.
So I'm making a fresh post right now to put all that stuff together.
I'm gonna leave the detailed description of the flag design's proportions just in the alt text (so that people with screen readers know what they are, without having to listen to it twice)
The width of each colored stripe is proportional to the overall width of the flag, but I decided to leave the general proportions of the flag flexible (so it's easier for people to make one based on what materials they can find -- just in case there's a need for a protest sign for a pop-up rally).
The Meaning (Short Version -- what to tell someone who asks while you're waiting for the elevator)
6 colors represent how the Disability Community is Global
The 5 colors in the middle represent how diverse that community is
The black is inspired by pirate flags: rage at injustice, fighting back
The stripes are diagonal to represent cutting through barriers.
The in-depth reasons behind the meaning (Long Version -- If you actually want a 15+ minute discussion of social constructs and history)
The flag has all 6 'standard' colors recognized in international flags, to represent how the Disability Community is bound together by their varied, but shared, experiences, rather than geographical or political affiliation (borrowing that symbolism from Olympic Flag, which represents the global community of athletes -- also bound together by their shared experiences and aspirations).
The five colors cutting across the center of the flag represent the diversity of the Disabled Community, both in terms of physical conditions and in terms of the social-political-economic ways by which disability is understood in society. (No longer trying to assign a specific meaning to any of the individual colors)
The stripes begin centered in the top corner because that's where the "canton" of a flag is, and in flag code, that's the place of highest honor; this is where the stars are in the U.S flag, and also the stars in the flag for the People's Republic of China, and the Union Jack in Australia's flag. It cuts all the way to the end that flies in the wind to show our striving for freedom.
The field is black because Pirates!, yes. But it's also in recognition of the Black Triangle Badge (link goes to Wikipedia), which the Nazis used to mark out a wide range of people in their concentration camps, including the Disabled, that they considered "asocial." And it's in solidarity with the UK-based Black Triangle Campaign (link goes to deathbywelfare.org, from 2010), protesting cuts to disability benefits, and reclassifying disabled people "fit for work."
Reblogging the poll for more visibility, and also to reply to these Quoted tags:
#I am of the opinion that *all* disabilities don't get enough recognition as-is
[...]
#I say this as a person who can be fully able-passing (for short amounts of time)
@strangestructures made similar points in (excellent) replies to this post, especially how any disability can be made "invisible" depending on what resources a person has access to, or the context of what they're doing and when.
Back when I was still in the first stages of designing a disability pride flag (when I was still focused on the cursed zigzag design), and I was still thinking of representation in terms of different medical conditions, I only had four stripes, and someone asked me to add a fifth, for invisible disabilities.
At first, I just stuck that stripe (originally a unique purple, which was hard even for me to reproduce consistently) on top of the other stripes. But after changing it to white, and mucking around with the design, I decided to move it to the center of the design, because Invisibility is at the Center of all Disability.
Cannot stand the trend of censoring any and all words that describe concepts that might make you go :( especially when the censoring is done in that quarter-assed way that's just 'did a lil scribble over a vowel so you know that I know this word describes a no-no."
I'm not even going to be vague about what sparked this. Do not fucking censor the word 'stole.' I'm at my fucking limit.
there is no downside to voting for Count Binface. its not taking away from other candidates bcos they aren't any and the more votes he gets the stupider Farage looks.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.
Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:
(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)
Anyway, in brief:
Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances
He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election
He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion
His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.
the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.
and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.
I've seen some people saying he would have to give up his title but it would seem that is no longer the case as of 1999; so, no, he can keep his ceremonial bin if he wishes.
Important to note also that Count Binface is the alter ego of comedian & political satirist Jon Harvey who seems to be an intelligent individual with reasonable politics. As I said no real downside.
there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll - step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
To clarify for those who don't know, "free the nipple" isn't about going braless, it's about going topless
No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to
It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!
And the fact that not wearing a bra is so discouraged and stigmatized that people think the movement was about being able to go braless under your shirt in public rather than about being able to not wear a shirt at all says a lot about how far we've backslid in the past decade
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