titsay
Today's Document
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Stranger Things
NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium
izzy's playlists!
Discoholic 🪩
$LAYYYTER
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cherry valley forever
Keni
Show & Tell
occasionally subtle
Acquired Stardust
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Andulka
Peter Solarz
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@impulsivelycontentious
"Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that --"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, it means they're getting worried they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh. I'm sure there are worse crimes --"
"But they starts with thinking about people like things..."
- Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
"the only difference between a cult and a religion is the scale"
NO. NO IT ISN'T. THIS IS WHAT THE CULTS WANT YOU TO THINK IT IS NOT TRUE. THERE ARE RELIGIONS THAT ARE NOT CULTS AND CULTS THAT ARE NOT RELIGIOUS AND YOU MUST LEARN THE DIFFERENCE
Tags by @gaytheist-dyke
i have zero empathy for little boys being misogynists. i was a kid too, but my focus was towards drawing and reading, not hating on minorities.
“they’re children!” so are the girls they terrorise
I have started calling it "monkey see monkey do misogyny" not because these little shits aren't a danger to other children but because I'm so sick of people reacting like "he's too young to truly MEAN it" and I don't care because I'm not worried about his immortal soul or whatever. I care about the girls who have to hear the exact same words in the exact same order as a grown man who hates them, in class. And then be expected to concentrate on long division.
"As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest."
- Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Ive worked in childcare for decades and all kids do shitty things routinely. I would be confident in saying that all kids say sexist shit.
Often they're trying to understand gender when they're little and they say shit like "only girls can play T ball, baseball is for boys". Like they will invent and test out a theory of gender. All kids are gonna display sexism because it's a huge part of their lives. Even if their home is extremely feminist and/or queer, they're still going to school where most of the girls are still frequently wearing pink sparkly dresses with long hair and most of the boys have to have short hair and never can wear pink sparkly dresses. Even a drag show does not have the same level of exaggerated gender presentation as a preschool.
(This is very Western, btw. In other cultures, boys can wear pink, all boy toddlers have long hair, etc. Like Chinese immigrants seeing a baby in pink ask if its a girl or boy, Indian parents have their young sons wear long hair, etc).
Gender is very weird to kids and it is taught. A preschooler in one home came back with a note that they misidentified a short haired character as being a woman - as it the child had mistaken blue for red or B for D.
Kids are smart but they don't* have experience in emotional regulation, dont have much education or life experience, and at younger ages often are operating more at an instictual level. Humans are animals, and little kids do sometimes act kinda like, say, your cat might. Like, they just knock something down to see what will happen. They're not thinking about it. Once they start being able to answer "why?" the answer, "I don't know" is often genuine.
So yea, they ARE children.
So you handle it like you handle everything with children.
A. Prevention. Read kids a lot of feminist books conservatives want banned. Take opportunities to teach as they come up. Teach consent. Teach kids their rights. Teach them media literacy and critical thinking. Model mutual respect with kids. Foster trust so the kid can come to you or another safe adult for support. Model, model, model active feminism in your own life as they watch and imitate your behavior.
B. Respond to incidents systematically;
(1) Address the victim first. Make sure they're ok.
(2) Help the victim advocate for themselves.
"Bobby, I heard you tell Sarah that girls cant play with dinosaurs. Sarah, tell Bobby how that made you feel."
(3) Talk about it in a brief, honest, age appropriate way.
"All toys are for all kids. It's not ok to tell girls they cant play with the same toys."
(4) Help the child who did something wrong learn consequences and atonement
"Bobby, when you hurt someone's feelings, you can ask if they are ok, and how you can make it better. You can say sorry and ask Sarah to play, or if she wants space... OK, Sarah says she wants space from you. Sometimes when you are not nice to people, they don't want to play with you. If you are nice to her, she will play with you later."
"Because you were not being fair in sharing the dinosaurs, you can be done with them for today. You can try again tomorrow."
Dont be cruel, but be firm. Bobby is probably gonna tantrum about that. And that's ok. It's part of the process. Help him learn he has to calm his own body down, because the consequence will hold.
(5) You keep reinforcing it because kids, especially young kids, often make the same mistakes over and over.
(6) Use positive reinforcement. "Bobby, I saw you shared the dinosaurs with Sarah today. Im really proud of you."
(eta: it's normal and good to praise kids for doing stuff they "should be doing anyway", especially if it's a positive change. It helps!)
This of course goes for Sarah too, "Sarah I saw you told Bobby that all toys are for everyone. I am really proud of you for standing up for yourself."
Kids do indeed kill frogs.
I've had a kid, a toddler, straight up learn about death because she killed the class pet. Chucked it at a wall. Bawled her little eyes out. Probably traumatized about it.
Ive seen kids bite each other very badly and shit like that too.
Kids kill frogs. Kids do fucked up things. It can have serious consequences.
And you still have to respond to them as children because that is just simply how it works.
If a kid straight up commits murder I believe they should still be treated like a kid.
It's my belief that childhood is truly THE time of life to set kids up not just to succeed but to be decent to each other. They're a lot more open to it and you can truly give them a good start in life, or turn them around if they're in a bad place.
I have a lot more hope for the kids I see today because a lot of parents and teachers are really treating kids a lot better and teaching better lessons than when I was a kid. Wish they were inheriting a better world.
btw apparently a lotta people reblogging this are TERFs demonizing little boys, and that tracks. Gender essentialism of that nature that holds all males as inherently predators from birth, treats boys as men, and yet doesnt address girls as truly equal human beings but as victims... often intersects with transphobia and racism.
A lot of minority children - Palestinians kids, Black American boys - are adultified and demonized to justify violence against them.
Note how I talked about ALL children having issues with sexism and ALL children being capable of wrongdoing and violence, and ALL children STILL BEING CHILDREN.
The fact is that girls and women perpetuate misogyny in very specific ways too, often against other girls and women who dont fit in. Girls who aren't femme enough, girls who aren't white, female athletes, fat girls, tall girls, queer girls, poor girls...
Girls can also be mean to boys and to non-binary kids. White girls can bully Black boys for example. White women can be very dangerous to Black men and boys.
White kids have to be actively taught anti-racism.
It is possible for a white left/lib family to never say racist stuff at home and even to say anti-racist stuff at home and for their kid to pick up racism from school/media/etc and the parents to have to correct it. Just as it is possible for kids of racist parents to learn anti-racism outside of the home (that was me!).
Treating any children as inherently "bad" is fucked up beyond belief to me and looking back on this post I felt I held back a little bit on saying that more clearly.
Adultism is also a dynamic of oppression and it is one of the worst ones. Children are one of the most vulnerable and most oppressed classes of people in the world. Look at the US president. Look at Palestine. Children are treated like cannon fodder, are enslaved, are horrifically abused, and treated with such contempt and disrespect.
You wanna teach kids to respect human rights? Part of that is treating kids with respect as human beings with rights. Part of that is not demonizing or dehumanizing children, ANY children.
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!
Love character relationships that can only be described as "whatever the fuck these two have going on"
Last part, I should also consider buying a ruler.
You know the feeling that you post too much of the same content that your getting a bit shy now?-
@grubus
mcmodernslopcore
Howdy, howdy, folks.
For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.
This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.
These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.
The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:
Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit, and that's with ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which, by the way, also makes it appear entirely not of this world. Were it not for the photos of the empty interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.
In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.
Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.
By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.
Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.
Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.
Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that it was an early harbinger of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this -- lying to impress -- it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.
It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!
Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendergrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.
Please, I'm very cold.
Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am in the process of moving house!)
GET. AI. OUT. OF. FANDOM. Stop making headcanons with it, stop making fanfic with it, stop making fanart with it. If I see one more "asking chatgpt *blank* about *character/characters in a fandom* I'm going to lose my goddamn mind. Use your own fucking brain, stop asking AI to do everything. You could even ask other real people what they think. Just. Stop. Using. AI. In. Creative. Spaces.
the cycle
Pt 1
I should probably like color this, next week 💜
Written by @grubus
Devotion
Saw this news and I had to make a rough sketch about it. 🥹 We humans always underestimate the empathy and care of other animals..
At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.
The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.
It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.
The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.
This map required:
North and South Vietnam in it
All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated
Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)
Has Laos and Cambodia in it
Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it
So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'
I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.
Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.
The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.
The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc
At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"
My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond
good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map
of course, like anybody else would, the first thing i did upon getting my time machine was go back in time and kill hitler when he was just a child. but when i came back a cursory google search revealed that there was some other charismatic guy called jan krupp who staged a coup and took control of germany leading to ww2. so naturally i went back in time and killed him before he could grow up and commit genocide. but i soon discovered that he'd been replaced by another guy. so i continued on this path of killing and tbh i'm not sure how many german babies i've killed at this point and it's a little hard to find old german newspaper clippings from the ww2 period anymore because they underwent a population collapse around the turn of the 20th century. best i can tell it's this weird german serial killer they called "jack-of-the-cradle" who kept killing newborns. but googling "world war 2" doesn't come up with any results so really i think all i need to do is stop this jack guy and then that'll be mission accomplished
i think there is a phenomenon where sometimes a trans person will go “hmm. i am treated as a man when it is convenient for others, and a woman when it is convenient for others, and often as a freakish third thing excluded from the advantages of both. surely, because of the gender binary, the Other Type of trans person experiences the opposite: they reap the benefits of maleness and femaleness at once.” like babes no they can do it twice
This applies to a bunch of other subgroups of the queer community too. Asexuals are made to feel like freaks for not being sexual enough by the same society that makes everyone else feel like freaks for being too sexual. Lesbians feel pressured to be bi even while bi women feel like they'd be more accepted if they were lesbian. Butches, femmes, and wlw who are neither are all made to feel like they're doing it wrong. PLUS unique facets of shittiness for every shade of non binary PLUS different attitudes towards mlm and wlw PLUS divisions within mlm spaces etc etc etc. And these frictions and differing needs and experiences are absolutely worth discussing, but every time we decide the problem is just that Those Other Queers have it easy we are making the actual problem worse.
Hilariously, it also happens within the asexual community as a function of even smaller identity microcosms; I grew up watching waves of this crash back and forth on AVEN back in the day.
Babes. They can always do it twice.
one thing you need to know about 2014. is that what does the fox say was playing pretty much everywhere you went. and everybody was just relieved it wasn't blurred lines
I canot stress enough that those were the only 2 songs in 2014
FAKE THIS SONG ISN'T REAL THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN HOW DARE YOU
one thing you need to know about 2014. is that what does the fox say was playing pretty much everywhere you went. and everybody was just relieved it wasn't blurred lines
I canot stress enough that those were the only 2 songs in 2014
People shit on homeschooled kids a lot for not being “socialized” but I will say one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of healthy homeschool families is that their kids are better at interacting with people much older and younger than them because their day isn’t composed of following one or two adults in authority with a bunch of people born within 12 months of them.
I’m running mics for a children’s performance and here’s a pattern I see.
Public school kids who don’t know me: Hello Authority Figure I have arrived for my microphone. 🫡Thank you, goodbye.
Homeschooled kids who don’t know me: Hello my Professional Peer, how are you today? How long have you been doing this kind of work? That’s interesting. Can I ask you a couple questions about the sound board? I’m 9. Would you like to hear a fact about bugs? Okay thank you goodbye.
A grade-school homeschooled child (~9) recognized me at a public event, came up and greeted me like a peer, and shared pleasantries. She was excellent at turn-taking and intuiting how to continue the conversation either by asking me a question, or by adding something of her own to the conversation.
Kids of a similar age and familiarity with me who attend public school usually do NOT approach me like this. They may greet me or ask a single question — they are still polite and cheerful children — but they do NOT carry conversation like this. It’s usually a brief exchange and then they say “okay… bye!” Their conversational skills only begin to progress around middle school age.
Hey remember when we were at school and teachers would tell us off for talking because we weren't at school to socialize we were at school to learn.
