Ramblings of a Katya

Graphic designer, 30s, cisgender female

[darkmelaningirls-deactivated202]

How cute is this 😊😇

[foxofninetales]

In the coming days, we’re going to be seeing a lot of desaturated photos of exhausted refugees and bombed-out buildings, and it can be too easy to let that form the only image of a country and its people in your mind.  So this is a reminder:

Chaiwat Hanpitakpong  - Kyiv, Ukraine

Aleksandr Khomenko - Berdians'k, Zaporiz'ka oblast, Ukraine

Simon Hrozian  - Kyiv, Ukraine

Oleh Morhun  - Vorokhta, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine

Marjan Blan  - Kyiv, Ukraine

Rostislav Artov  - Kyiv, Ukraine

Rostyslav Savchyn - Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine

Ivan Serediuk - Lutsk, Volyn Oblast, Ukraine

Maksym Tymchyk  - Kyiv, Ukraine

Maksym Tymchyk - Kyiv, Ukraine

Andriyko Podilnyk  - Lviv, Ukraine

Kateryna - Kyiv, Ukraine

Shifan Hassan  - Kharkiv, Ukraine

Gleb Albovsky  - Dzembronya, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine

[writing-prompt-s]

There’s a serial killer in your town. Unfortunately for them you are a necromancer and you have fun driving that maniac insane.

[mayhemandmoonlight]

@townofcan Why would leave this masterpiece in the notes

[dinovelvet]

[time-and-water]

[Image description: A photograph of a small snowman on a wooden bench, playing a violin made out of a leaf, with its twig-eyes closed and its twig-mouth smiling.]

[team5ds]

hagpuhapghag atem you are not that tall get back down to yugi height

[lufdraws]

celebrating repost day w/ ygo gay stuff i still love

[positivity-in-pain]

[bastard-poopiepoopoo]

YES >:(

[xxgreendruidessxx]

Some days it’s definitely like that.

[roseticospacebae]

[systlin]

Me being traumatized and not wanting that to happen to other kids makes me a bad person now :)) I’m disgusting :)) and horrible :)) and it’s my fault that happened :)) and everybody hates me more now :)) cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.

You are not horrible. And I do not hate you. It is not your fault that it happened. But things that are marked as adult very clearly are not for kids, and if you read it anyway it is on the people who should have been supervising you and did not intervene, or, assuming that you were old enough to know what ‘adult content’ means and chose to engage with stuff produced by adult fans for adult fans, on you for ignoring the warnings.

If a ten year old child goes to a library right now, and walks to the romance section and pulls down a book, that child’s guardians are responsible for saying “Hey now that is not for you.” If that same child comes back at thirteen and, knowing there is content in that book that adults do not want them to read, furtively hides away from guardian’s eyes and reads it anyway, that is not the fault of the library for having that book, or the author for writing it.

I am very sorry you’ve been hurt. But adults are going to produce content for adults, and if you ignore the guidelines set in place to keep kids out of that content, then that’s not the fault of the adults who wrote the stuff.

[catsandwitchcraft]

I do not understand this new generation of kids doing the internet equivalent of going into a clearly marked strip club, showing a fake ID to the bouncer and then being shocked and appalled by it being full of adults and strippers.

[ruffboi-mags]

Well I had this whole paragraphs-long response I added, and you got it in like. A sentence.

like i get this argument, i really do, and there really is only so much content creators can do to try and stop children consuming content not suitable for them

BUT we cannot trust a thirteen year old to have the maturity and foresight to know what is and isn’t good for them. Yeah, their gaurdians should be the ones looking out for them and trying to stop them from getting hurt, but in your library analogy, when the library chooses to have that content it’s also somewhat responsible for restricting access to it - whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something - if you knowingly let unmonitored kids into your buisness, but especially if you encourage them like libraries do, you are responsible for their safety- it takes a village to raise a child and we are all responsible for their safety

that said it’s deffo not the authors responsibility, but the host, tumblr, ao3, where ever. they gotta do something

[joyfulldreams]

They literally already are. Rating and tagging everything as mature and clearly marking content is the barrier. This isn’t a movie theater or a library. None of those websites are KNOWINGLY allowing children into their business, because EVERYONE IS INVISIBLE.

There is literally no way to effectively bar children from accessing content they shouldn’t have access to, that doesn’t involve gross invasions of privacy. You can ban all children from a website and that STILL won’t work because there is no actual way to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child. In a lot of cases the bare minimum you can do is just outright ASK if they are a child, but then they LIE and there is no way to STOP them from lying or even figuring out IF they are lying. Hell, not even outright banning all icky things will work, as Tumblr’s disastrous NSFW ban has shown us.

‘We all have a collective responsibility to protect children’ only goes so far. If all children are invisible and can be literally anywhere at any point, ‘collective responsibility’ ends up meaning ‘in your day to day life, you must always act under the assumption that there MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY be a child in the room’. We can’t help raise a child if we literally cannot see them and don’t even have any way of confirming their existence. And it is going too damn far to tell adults they are not allowed to do adult things with other adults because a child MIGHT POTENTIALLY be able to see them do it, even if they’re not supposed to, especially if they’re not supposed to. It’s also going too far to tell all websites that they are responsible for keeping track of legions of invisible, hypothetical, lying children.

All methods of reliably confirming people’s age online are immediately gross and dangerous invasions of privacy. All measures to try and prevent children from seeing things they shouldn’t are flimsy, at best. The MOST EFFECTIVE thing is the thing we are doing already: meticulously tagging and archiving content with extensive filters and multiple warnings, so that every potential viewer can make an informed decision about what they choose to look at.

Which means that, at the end of the day, dumb 13-year-olds and the few people in their lives who can see them as Not Invisible are going to have to take responsibility for themselves, and potentially each other.

[truxi-twice]

Hey so also, just to address part of what lnalovegd said, that thing about libraries being somewhat responsible for restricting access to certain materials…

No, actually.

That is the opposite of what libraries are supposed to do.

Public libraries do not–and CANNOT–restrict materials. At all. You hear every now and again of some that do. It is not a good road to go down. I live in a city with a lot of conservatives (the attempt at a drag queen storytime nearly got the library defunded by a lot). Whose judgement do you use? How do you determine that?

You could say “ratings” but honestly, that’s still not great, since LGBTQ things get rated higher than hetero things. Books don’t really have ratings, and they shouldn’t.

When I worked at the desk of the public library, one thing we HAD to practice was impartiality. It meant handing people hateful books like Anne Coulter’s drek without a side eye. It also meant that if a kid showed up at the desk with a library card and, say… Saw or the Godfather… well. I was going to check it out to them. That’s how public libraries run. Anyone can check out anything, and parental approval is not needed (for us. Parents might have other ideas. I still get mad remembering this woman who wouldn’t let her son check out Calvin & Hobbes or certain other books. But again, I did not say a word. Neutrality).

It’s crucial to a public library that we operate like that.

Libraries do not restrict material. We can organize it. Kids sections, teen sections, adult sections. But no librarian or library tech is going to monitor what children are checking out.

Yeah, kids won’t always know what they’re picking up. The first romance I ever picked up had sex and graphic medieval torture in it. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I stopped reading it. Then when the internet happened…hoo boy, you kids should have seen that wild west.

Comparatively now, I see folks really make every effort to use tags and warnings. Maybe you know what it means, maybe you don’t. But they’re there. They’re the best method we have for keeping content away from people who would be emotionally harmed by it, or who just plain don’t want to see it.

At the end of the day, if you’re old enough to go looking for content on your own, you’re going to have to accept that you might see things you don’t want to see. Yes, even as kids.

There are kid-friendly websites and forums where you can go if you don’t want to deal with that.

[glorious-spoon]

The fact that so many people just blithely go ‘oh, well of course libraries restrict what content they’ll allow minors to access and monitor what they check out and notify their guardians if they’re reading something (that the librarian deems) inappropriate’ always makes me want to scream.

[hawthornewhisperer]

Just to add on: a small town in Wisconsin went through this ~10 years ago, when local conservatives tried to get YA books with LGBT content moved to the adult section and labeled “sexually explicit” to try and deter children from accessing them. Librarians refused, and in retaliation the town council refused to renew the contracts of four library board members for supporting them. 

The books stayed where they were.

Librarians do NOT fuck around.

[legsdemandias]

Yeah, I just want to say as someone who works in a library, that it’s absolutely NOT my job to smack books out of kids hands? Sometime last year a 12 year old girl wanted to read YA books and her guardian was down for it so we handed her The Cruel Prince, Children of Blood and Bone, and Eragon (likes fantasy series) and like all of those contain content that I might cringe to give my own 12 year old niece–but dad was okay with it. She decided for herself that she wasn’t about that Cruel Prince vibes and put it down before it got to the sex and “adult man on teen girl” action–which has always been the goal.

Libraries want children and adults to monitor their own consumption of materials, children with the guidance of their parents until they can make that decision for themselves. 

“whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something”

^^^^ This?? does not exist. Especially not the bolded part. There’s actually more monitoring in children’s areas for children’s books that are made for children than there is in the adult section. We barely watch those books and if a 8 year old wants to read The Shining? Holla. Mom signed off on his card, she better be watching. 

This scene here with Matilda could never have happened if Libraries required matilda to have a “rated access” on certain books. Charles Dickens, at the lowest, is usually sorted into YA. Remember, Matilda is going into kindergarten.

[annissamazing]

I was ten or eleven when I started pulling books off the romance novel shelves. My dad saw, took me aside, and told me the books had some parts that might make me uncomfortable, and if I was uncomfortable, that it was ok to skip a few pages and get back to the story.

He didn’t bar me from reading or censor my chosen content; he gave me the tools to make my own decisions.

[nonasuch]

When I was ten or eleven, I read all of my dad’s Stephen King and John Grisham books, because they were books and they were in my house and I’d run out of new things to read. 

Were they appropriate for me? No. 

Should my parents have noticed me reading them, and stopped me? Probably!

Is that the fault of anyone outside my house? also no.

The thing is, a couple of years later when I started reading fanfic, I knew, from that experience, that I did not want to read fiction with a lot of violence or explicit sex, so I avoided fic labeled as such and back-buttoned out of a lot of stories as soon as the kissing started.

[kangofu-cb]

My 12 year old is a voracious reader. We talk about book series she’s interested in. Sometimes I google the ones I’m not too sure about and sometimes I know them already - but I’ve never outright told her she couldn’t read a specific book or series of books. We talk about the content and why I think it might not be age appropriate (she reads at college level) but she gets to make those decisions for herself.

This year she discovered ao3 (please god don’t let her find me I’d never recover from the embarrassment and neither would she) and we talked about what the ratings and warning tags were about and for. I don’t police her reading but I give her the tools and information to make informed and (I hope) good choices.

As a parent that’s my real job. To provide tools and guidance, not police her content consumption or hide things from her.

Don’t make fandom censorship about “but think of the childrenz” becayse that’s not what it is. It’s not really about children - it’s about virtue signaling.

Parenting is about thinking about the kids; fandom is about making content you enjoy creating and enjoying the content that’s been created. Properly tagged fanfiction is probably safer for kids in that regard than wandering unaccompanied around the library and picking up, for example, Clan of the Cave Bear which triggered me so hard (at 11) that I’ve never fully recovered.

[darthstitch]

I think the best takeaway here is that we have to give kids the tools and information and TEACH them to think critically. Get them to question stuff, to internalize, to discuss and learn and grow.

I was a Catholic school kid, but we were surprisingly liberal in the things they had us watch, read and discuss. We went to see politically charged plays, read books with definite adult content for class - the sex bits and cusswords always left us howling with laughter, and our library even had occult related books. We wrote about these experiences and talked about them in class.

I learned how to curate and decide for MYSELF, at an early age, which stuff I was ready to handle and which stuff I wasn’t. I could then return to these things once I was ready and see them with new eyes.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

my first exposure to a graphic sex scene, when i started reading fanfic at around 11 or 12, actually happened because i didn’t know what “NC-17″ meant and i thought it was a lower rating than “R”. 

if i’d had ao3 back then, with it’s very clear rating system and the tagging system that usually displays all sexual acts contained within the fic, i never would have accidentally exposed myself to content way above my age level.

you can’t stop kids from being curious and sneaking looks at things they’re too young for, but you can arm them with information so they know what they’re getting into with fanfic. 

ps: while i also don’t hate the anon, it’s important to note that their message was very emotionally manipulative. when someone criticizes you, it’s not acceptable to respond with “so i’m a disgusting monster and everything is my fault.” i’m sorry for your trauma and pain, but if you do this, you are being manipulative and you need to learn how to deal with conflict and criticism like an adult.

[lesbiantahani]

Jenny Slate, Stage Fright (2019)

[ryebreadgf]

Ugly, Bitter, and True by Suzanne Rivecca

[homemade-ghosts]

John Mulaney on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2020)

[eugeniedanglars]

“Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves” by David Wong

[seravph]

letters from Medea, salma deera

[everythingfox]

“A bit of sax only for you”

(via)

[viralfrog]

[scaredykyleisgonnagosoon]

So I was taught a lesson in how to get rid of a migraine in 30 seconds and omfg listen my migraines don’t go away ever but I was shown what part of my body to touch and like???????????????

It’s witchcraft????????? Like I would be burned at the stake if I lived in ye olde days knowing that information?????

What the fuck??????

[countrygirlil2015]

Spill it! Lol….Hooooowwwww?? Had migraines since age 9….😓😓😓

[scaredykyleisgonnagosoon]

Its called the T4 push, but I literally can’t find the info online????? I guess I’m not searching good enough? These medical fuckers are holdin out on us lol.

It’s best to have someone do this for you while you stand up and relax your muscles as best you can, but if you’re alone, a tennis ball and a flat surface will probably work. Alternatively you can lie on the edge of a bed at the pressure point. (But no really do try to find someone to do it for you)

Find the area in your spine between either the first, second, third, or fourth vertebrae. It should be sore and uncomfortable to press down on, so look for the one that’s most painful, and press down with as much pressure as you can on that area for 30 seconds.

Realize that 80% of your pain has magically disappeared and keep the info secret if you live in a small puritan town, lest you be tried for witchcraft.

If you don’t have to worry about being burned or hanged, then share the info with your migraine suffering friends.

[systlin]

As someone who wrote a 10k word paper on pressure points for a high belt ranking test in her martial arts class, I can tell you that you just found a pressure point used in acupressure and acupuncture to relieve pain, particularly that in the head. :)

[arirashkae]

Hand to god we discovered this by accident when my husband was rubbing my neck and I nearly collapsed it felt so good

[blame-my-muses]

This post was sent by literal angels??? I’ve had a persistent low-level headache for nearly 24hrs and now it’s gone??? In 30 seconds? What gods did you sacrifice to for this information!?!?

[river-rider-with-cats-deactivat]

As a medical massage therapist, I thought I would give my two cents.

This is good for tension migranes and normal migraines, but actually pretty useless for sinus migraines. It’ll help for a hot second, but quickly come back. (These are usually the migraines behind your eyes, in your ears, and behind your forehead. Sometimes it can feel like jaw pain or TMJ) for sinus migraines, behind the ear in a divot. Press down firmly and pull towards your collarbone. That’ll drain your sinuses. Also, pressing around the eye socket on the cheekbones help. There is also a little triangle up away from the eye in the eyebrow bone. Press and hold pretty hard and that’ll relieve that behind the forehead pain. Also, ear pulling is great to help move sinuses around.

Don’t forget the temples too! Press firmly and hold. Open and close your jaw while holding your temples. It’ll feel weird, but it’ll help with jaw pain. It’ll work a similar way if you hold the jaw joint under your cheekbone.

And never underestimate the power of a foot massage!! Give minutes can be all the difference!! Our feet are our base. If they hurt even a little, somewhere else in your body will hurt. Treat your feet and sinuses kindly!

[thenudewitchofthenorth]

As a lifelong sufferer from frequent migraines I will reblog this everytime I see it, for myself and my fellow sufferers!!

[jaubaius]

[mikkeneko]

i figured this was some sort of flex about the driver’s precision to not hit the cup, and it was that i guess? but also so much more

[the-prophet-mich]

I’m over here chanting Crush the cup! Crush the cup! And was thoroughly disappointed

[princessesfanarts]

Jasmine Princess Disney portrait - Naomi Scott by TinyTruc

[catchymemes]

[peneigh-dzredfohl]

Can everyone who reads this PLEASE reblog it?!?!?  Libraries literally saved my life as a child!

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

Our library also has quarterly books sales of almost free books!! For 5$USD we get in a day early and can buy as many as we want. Anyone else has to wait and there is a limit for the first 2 days.

[stevviefox]

Also many, many libraries have inter library loan(it may be called something different). This means if they don’t have the item you want, they can get it for you. This may include photocopy/pdf of articles. This can also include along with books and DVDs, microfilm/fiche which is also a huge resource. Check around for libraries that are listed as depositories if you want to look at government documents.

Remember that many colleges and universities have open stacks for the public. You will likely have to pay a membership fee but you will get to stuff.

[psi1998]

I love the library ☺

[icycove]

The library was one of my favorite places to go as a kid and I still live to go and just. Sit and read. Or do homework. The university I’m at has a massive 8-story one I love to just wonder around in~ Great places

[funtoban-blog]

[lifeasillustrated]

Save for phone wallpapers :)