Geekster Rebranded

George, adult, 18+ blog, not safe for anyone cause I don't tag shit

[toshio]

[shamebats]

Imo the best type of system for children to grow up in would be one that assumes the birth parents/primary guardians won't do shit and takes care of every aspect of childcare that's essential for their wellbeing and development, collectively.

[shamebats]

But I'm just a guy who only learned how to brush his teeth properly and got glasses as a child because we had both a dentist and a doctor come to school on a regular basis. The dentist would have us all stand in a circle with our little toothbrushes and show us how to brush and correct our technique. The doctors would give us general health assessments and then have the teachers contact our patents and essentially peer pressure them into getting us any health intervention we needed. My parents only reluctantly got me glasses because they knew the teachers would judge them if they kept seeing me sit in the very front row and still squint to see the chalkboard. So I'm biased.

[shamebats]

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

If I could improve anything about that system, I'd take it even further and make it so kids could see a doctor and get meds, treatments, therapy, tests, disability aids etc. without having to rely on their parents as well. I shouldn't have had to put up with being bullied and guilt-tripped about the family finances and the time investment needed to take me to the optometrist every time I needed new glasses.

[shamebats]

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

So I have to wonder: what did they actually contribute to our upbringing? Like they didn't teach us shit and mostly they just endangered our mental and physical health — but hey, at least they gave me cPTSD! That took some work too.

[anarchistmemedistro]

see also family abolition, and youth liberation .

[applefae]

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

Assume some parents will fail. Build social infrastructure that is designed to support failed kids rather than punish would-be parents.

[queer-riot-dragon]

Parents do not have to be neglectful to fail!

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

The best thing is to support the children and give them the tools they need to succeed even if the parents are already giving them those tools. Because you can never learn something too much.

[lessproblematical]

Also sometimes parents become disabled or die and family can't always be counted on, and sometimes there isn't other family

[the-punforgiven]

[wizardarchetypes]

i know it's been said on here and said again but people do so desperately need to genuinely do intentional work to build distress tolerance and start figuring out how to recognize the differences between danger, discomfort, and when a situation that is merely uncomfortable is triggering an emotional flashback in your bodies because it resembles a past situation that actually was dangerous which makes it difficult to realize/believe that this moment is merely uncomfortable.

[wizardarchetypes]

i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

i understand that. but that's not what i asked.

[wizardarchetypes]

"i shouldn't have to experience that."

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we doing something. that we are in fact making a choice to cause a scene, out of malice.

[daily-op-ed]

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games (Diomedéa, 2026)

NEW GAME - halca (Ending 1)

[moofahdrome]

the most burnt out girl in the world would like to remind you that she's actually really lazy compared to the people around her and she could probably use some extra work to keep her honest

[notahorseindisguise]

WOAH just saw spiderman eating pizza on a roof

[notahorseindisguise]

oh shit he ate the whole thing . he just like me frfr

[notahorseindisguise]

spiderman just left the pizza box on the roof but then came back a minute later and clearly felt bad for littering so now hes swinging through downtown holding an empty pizza box

[notahorseindisguise]

hes hit a street light

[notahorseindisguise]

he's swinging away now clearly very embarrassed and he thinks nobody saw it. i saw you spiderman

[nycswebhead]

fuck

[gatheringbones]

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

[s1ck0]

Juliette Brocal

[funstyle]

Was just having a discussion with my fiance that taco bell should change their slogan to "it's gonna be okay" or at the very least shorten "live más" to "live". just feels like thats what we need from them

[funstyle]

They should change it to "live por favor" and when they hand you your order you hold hands for a moment and look in each others eyes

[bunnygirlbree]

30+ year old trans women my beloved

Everyone say thank you 30+ year old trans women

[shithowdy]

how to find birds in your area

1: figure out the stinkiest place in a 10 mile radius

2: go there

[shithowdy]

national parks and wildlife refuges are a trick to lure people away from the real habitats: landfills, wastewater treatment facilities, and retention ponds behind county jails

[leebrontide]

A week or two ago I was in the car with my 7 year old and she saw one of the few surviving Red Lobsters and asked if we could get cheddar biscuits. Because Red Lobster cheddar biscuits are amazing.

But the problem is that I can't walk into a Red Lobster because if I do that I will stop breathing. It's not a fun spot for the shellfish allergic (Yes, Jamie from my books gets that from me).

So I told her we could, if she would take some cash into the restaurant, wait her turn to talk to the hostess, ask politely, pay, and bring them out to me. She considered this, but she already orders for herself in restaurants, goes up to ask for shop restroom keys herself, etc. She's polite and calm and it's fine. So she decided that this was a manageable stretch, and agreed.

And lo, we had cheddar biscuits and they were awesome.

And I keep thinking about how we did this all the time in the 80s and 90s and then everybody went nuts for stranger danger and true crime podcasts and we just...stopped.

You know what's great about teaching young kids how to do shit like this? No sense of cringe, and if they fuck up they come right back to their parents, and also people give young kids grace if they stumble a bit.

Instead, I'm seeing people to wait till their kids are teenagers to expect them to be able to do things independently. Teenagers! Who are famously terrified of social fuckups, who get no grace from anybody, and who rarely want to go to an adult if things go wrong!

That's utterly backwards!

Not only do we need to trust teens to do more independently, but that starts with letting young kids do things more independently. So they learn early on that trying and failing is ok and they can just try again. So they can learn skills when they're young and shameless.

standard disclaimer not all kids not all families you know the drill please do not be obnoxious pretending I said you piss on the poor.

[rioblitzle]

i go to the shop and I ask if they have any raspberries. they say no, they used to sell raspberries, but they haven't had any in stock in the last 15 years. I ask if there's somewhere else I can go to buy raspberries. They say no, with confidence and pride, they're the only shop around who has ever sold or will ever sell raspberries. Other shops might sell other fruit, sure, but they have a monopoly on all raspberries forever. I ask if they're possibly planning on them selling them again in future? they say they can't tell me that.

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

someone comes up behind us. It's the shop manager, President of Nintendo Shuntaro Furukawa. he hatefully throws a bob-omb that blows up and kills both of us instantly for stealing 200 trillion dollars worth of potential Raspberry Shop That Doesn't Do Raspberries Anymore profits that they weren't making and then he turns around to the camera with a big thumbs up and says don't do piracy or something ok please

[exeggcute]

one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.

and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week... for twenty or thirty years... and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can't stop thinking about it. it's indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

[exeggcute]

can you imagine.

[bisexualshakespeare]

[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy-- there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]

[cleverlittlefox]

[cleverlittlefox]

[cleverlittlefox]

[ashes2caches]

the trans girl who’s always scared is wearing a really cute outfit that’s a little outside of her comfort zone right now. you have to tell her that she’s pretty or she’ll explode.

[rongzhi]

Problem solving

English added by me :)