HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
Website idea: Writers of all nationalities give each other advice on how to name OCs from their native culture/language.
For example, a native English speaker can tell you that "Henry Edward" is kinda weird and evokes Tudor kings, and a native Chinese speaker can tell you that, I don't know, "mīmī" sounds cute but means titties.
Re: Chinese names, there is something cool people should know about, (maybe you already know):
Using this database, you can access the names and biographical information of real people across Chinese historical periods and dynasties. You can go on here and find the names (not just given names but courtesy names and other sorts of honorary aliases, depending on the period) of thousands of real individuals, though it's almost entirely men in the older dynasties. Very few women.
Need a character name for your Tang Dynasty official? Check out the CBDB and find a *literal Tang Dynasty official* to grab a name from!
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
Felicity’s story was set in the beginnings of the American Revolution, and addressed the conflict that she faced when her loved ones were split between patriots and loyalists. It also covered the effects of animal abuse, and forgiving those who are unforgivable.
Samantha’s stories centered around the growth of industrial America, women’s suffrage, child abuse, and corruption in places of power. Also, it emphasises how dramatically adoption into a caring family can turn a life around.
Kit’s story is one of my favorites. Her family is hit hard by the Great Depression, and they begin taking in boarders and raise chickens to help make ends meet. Her books include themes of poverty, police brutality, homelessness, prejudice, and the importance of unity in difficult times.
Molly’s father, a doctor, is drafted during the Second World War. Throughout her story, friends of hers suffer the loss of their husbands, sons, and brothers overseas. Her mother leaves the traditional housewife position and works full-time to help with the war effort. They also take in an English refugee child, who learns to open up after a life of traumatic experience.
American Girl stories have always featured the very harsh realities of America through the years. But they’re always presented honestly, yet in ways that kids can understand. They just go to show that you don’t have to live in a perfect time to be a real American girl.
Dont you fucking dare disrespect the American Girls in my house. ESPECIALLY Addy!! That was my first REAL contact with the horrors of slavery, as I read about her father being whipped and sold and her mother escaping with her to freedom, but also how freedom was still a struggle.
Don’t forget Kirsten, the Swedish immigrant who had to deal with balancing her own culture and learning the english language and customs of her classmates, or Kaya (full name Kaya'aton'my, or She Who Arranges Rocks) , the brave but careless girl from the Nez Perce tribe, or Josefina, the Mexican girl learning to be a healer.
And then there are the later dolls, that kids younger than me would have grown up with (I was just outgrowing American Girl as these came out), like Rebecca, the Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress in the budding film industry, or Julie, who fights against her school’s gender policy surrounding sports in the 70s, or Nanea, the Hawaiian girl whose father worked at Pearl Harbor.
These books, these characters, are fantastic pictures into life for girls in America throughout the years, they pull no punches with the horrors that these girls had to face in their different time periods, and in many cases I learned more history from these series than social studies at school. And that’s without even mentioning the “girl of the year” series where characters are created in the modern world to help girls deal with issues like friend problems, moving, or bullying. We do NOT disrespect American Girl in this house.
American Girl is probably going to be the only exposure young girls are going to get to history from a female perspective. This is actually kind of important considering that in history classes we dont really get that exposure. We dont hear about what women felt and endured during these time periods cause schools are too busy teaching us about what happened from the male perspective, which is not unimportant, but we need both. Girls need both.
These books were such a crucial part of my childhood and shaped my love of history, which still ensures today. These books can be a young girl’s first lessons in diversity and cultural awareness (hopefully burying that insensitive “we’re all Americans” tripe) and looking at history from more perspectives than just that taught in school. They also are an example of how women have ALWAYS been part of history, which some people would rather us not believe.
I think Kit and Kaya were the newest American Girls when I started “aging out” of the books, but hearing about some of these kinda makes me want to revisit them!
OP (of the tweet thread) was either a actively trying to start shit or is just a huge fucking moron. Probably both.
I’d like to point out that the company that makes American Girl dolls actually doesn’t skimp when doing their research and they don’t make the dolls with the intent to be offensive in any way:
And they departed from the norm in Kaya’s doll to fit her culture! The other dolls all show their teeth, and Kaya does not because that is considered rude in the Nez Perce culture!
It is absolutely true that these books covered the stuff in history that was absent from our history books. I still distinctly remember reading about Addy being forced to eat bugs she missed on tobacco plants, and that started me out from a different perspective and made it easier for me to know to reject the sanitized version of the slave trade we’re taught in school. And these books are targeted at ages 8+, which is a pretty critical time for developing your own thinking and morals.
when i was in 3rd grade i was reading the Meet Addy book at school & a couple boys made fun of me for reading a “doll book” - my teacher overheard & started reading Meet Addy to the class after every recess. everyone became extremely invested & by the end of the year we had read the entire collection of Addy books & did a presentation on the civil war at the end of the year that we all presented to the class one by one.
i think back on this & realize that as third graders we were talking about how awful slavery was & because we were simply innocent kids without any societal or institutional influence yet, all of us could kept saying “why would you treat a HUMAN like that ?!” this one girl for her birthday invited all of us for her party & she got the Addy doll - every single one of us (boys included) held her & was in awe of this doll - it was such a touching experience.
i went back home about a year ago & ran into my third grade teacher in the grocery store. she said that year opened up a whole new teaching structure for her. she now reads american girl stories to her students starting day one of class every day to calm them down after recess & she’ll get through maybe four or five sets of books a year. she has the dolls in the room with packets on information from the doll’s time period that her students can “check out” to take home for weekends to care for them.
we oftentimes overlook how powerful toys can be in influencing young children & american girl honestly knew that kids could read intense moments in history & synthesize the issues to learn how to be a better person. my grandma bought me my first doll, molly, when i was only six & the dolls became a huge part of my childhood. when i turned 21 a couple years ago - we were living in minneapolis - she took me to have lunch for my birthday at the american doll place in the mall of america & bought me the Addy doll for my birthday. it was such a powerful moment i hasn’t expected.
i’ve since gotten rid of majority of my childhood toys, but i still have every single one of my dolls & all the books that i plan on gifting to my future children.
I’m white and my first real introduction to slavery and the underground railroad was Addy. She was a young girl like me I could connect to and care about her story. American Girl does a great job of making history relevant to kids.
Also American Girl sells all sorts of books unrelated to the dolls. The Care and Keeping of You books were super important as I started puberty and were the most comprehensive, non judgemental account of what was going to happen.
They also have “the smart girls guide” series which covers topics like crushes, worry, middle school, drama and gossip, sports, friendship, the digital world, communication, money, confidence, etc.
I want to say I think there was an American Girl Doll magazine series that came out, but don’t quote me on that. there were lots of helpful girl guides that used the American girls as examples for doing good or learning lessons or trying to understand why girls did what they did
I learned a lot of my core beliefs from these girls.
I remember being very invested in Molly, Addy, and Kaya. Mostly cuz I look like Molly, and the other two had a lot of information on two of my favorite time periods. But I owe a lot of my personality to these lovvely girls
yo don’t forget my girl Caroline. Her father was captured by the British during the war of 1812 and she basically learned how to sail and rescued him herself.
I can confirm that they really do their research - during the creation of Caroline the company called a museum I was associated with and quizzed them extensively about what sort of food kids would have eaten at the turn of the 19th century.
When i was like ten I wrote a letter to the American Girl magazine saying that the girls in their magazine were all really skinny and it made me, a chonk, really sad because it was showing that I couldn’t wear any of the outfits they suggested, and I got a personal letter back from the editor apologizing for making me feel that way and saying they would work on that. Dunno if they actually did, i can’t remember, but they did promptly personally respond to a letter about something that was not exactly on the radar for girl’s media in fucking 2002. So there’s that.
I’m happy to report that the messages from American Girl have only gotten better in recent years.
These are from one of their latest books, A Smart Girl’s Guide to Body Image:
They got a lot of flak from conservative parents for this and they did. not. back. down.
Their newest historical doll, Claudie, is a black girl growing up in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her story is about Black artists thriving, and making a safe, beautiful place for themselves in a society that tries to reject them. It teaches about the NAACP’s protests against lynchings, in ways kids can understand, but there’s also so much Black joy and creativity showcased in her story.
Another historical doll, Melody, is growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement. She faces the struggles and triumphs of attending a newly integrated school, and learns about the bombing of a Black church in Alabama that killed four little girls her age. Her stories show how black people found support and community within the church, as well as music— she loves to sing! If you have a free hour, I highly recommend watching her special on Amazon (free with prime). It stars Caila Marsai Martin from Blackish and it will make you weep.
The girl of the year for 2022, Corinne, is Asian, and her story touches on the issues of anti-Asian hate in the wake of covid. When conservative parents threw a fit about this, American Girl went ahead and made the girl of the year for 2023 Asian, too.
Any of their dolls can be customized with assistive devices like hearing aids, service dogs, and wheelchairs. They also have bald dolls, to include stories about girls battling cancer or alopecia. And it’s not just girl dolls— they have boy dolls now, too! And dolls with no gender assigned to them! People complained that they couldn’t find any dolls in the Just Like Me line that looked like them, so they now give people the ability to create their own custom doll, with tons of different options.
I’m not claiming American Girl as a company is perfect, but I am saying they’re important. Girl perspectives, girl stories, and girl communities are IMPORTANT. If there are kids in your life who would benefit from these stories, or if you’d like to read them yourself, you can find any American Girl book for pretty much dirt cheap on eBay, and libraries usually stock tons of them!
AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”
When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly
we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.
when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.
the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.
my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.
when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.
and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.
in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.
I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.
In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.
By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?
I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.
I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.
Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.
That’s my grandparents’ number when I was growing up.
You’ll notice it only has seven digits. If they were still alive, that phone line still in service, that number still wouldn’t reach them. It’s not long enough. But I remember tapping it in and the sound it made so clearly I could still hum it back to you today. I remember when it sounded just a teensy bit wrong and I was very confused, and when a man I didn’t know picked up I said “um, is my Grampa there?” and he said “who’s your Grampa?” and by some hilarious coincidence, 898-5204 was the number for my Grampa’s job.
My brain still expects Queen songs to skip when I’m listening on Spotify because I grew up with a scratched and damaged CD and I still know where all the glitches were and if you ask me how to fix a video game my first thought is “blow on it” and to this day I can fix a snapped VHS for you (and when did they stop being “tapes” and become “VHS” and when did all our VCRs morph into VHS players?) if you can give a bright light, a razorblade, and some scotch tape, and if the internet disappeared tomorrow I’d go get a phone book and look up my state rep in the blue pages to complain.
My niblings go to the bathroom differently than me when watching TV. I always go where the commercial break is (or would have been, if I’m watching an anime or old show on streaming). They go between episodes and I had to explain to them what a “commercial break” was because neither of them has ever lived in a world where you couldn’t just skip the ads. We’re twenty years apart and also centuries. The younger one wanted to play Roblox with me when I went to visit and as we worked our way through this absolutely hellish puzzle it occurred to me that when I was growing up it was considered revolutionary if you could make your game look 3D because all the systems were still actually 2D, and this puzzle was so fiendish—to me, not to her, she breezed through it like it was nothing—because it was the other way around, 3D masquerading as 2D. I remembered my mom struggling with the N64 and giving it up as a bad job while eight-year-old me quickly adapted and I wonder if me jumping from MarioKart to Roblox is what it was like for her, jumping to MarioKart from Pong.
The kids all have Tamagotchis again now, but HitClips have come and gone and so have iPods. In my first classroom we had maps of the Soviet Union because there was a waiting list for new supplies that said “Russian Federation” instead, and today there are “smart whiteboards” where you can interact with a projector like it’s a computer and get up-to-the-minute information. Is this why my teenage coworkers look at me weird when I say “blackboard chalk”? Did a decade and a half really change that much? Even the internet I knew growing up, the weird and wild and wonderful and new thing everyone was losing their minds over, is like a lost country under the desert. If I say “I was on a mailing list for a Geocities fanfiction webring,” that probably sounds like straight Babylonian to almost anyone on this site younger than me. Whenever I talk about my early internet days I have to explain COPPA wasn’t in effect yet and that’s how I was doing all this stuff at eleven years old without lying about my age. Sometimes when I see somebody blow a red light I’ll yell “the river is too deep for your oxen to ford, motherfucker” and wonder if any version of that game even still exists.
We have crossed a bridge of time, and when we set foot on wires and silicon cables the builders of that brave new world set fire to the wooden structure behind us.
love characters who are like "this is how the world works. this is how it has to be (because if i'm wrong i have to face what i've done // if i'm wrong i have to face whats been done to me) "
In the spring of 1897, Will and Jack's parents took a long-planned trip to Europe.
A transatlantic crossing in 1897 was a very different experience than it would be even five years later. The first Marconi wireless system was not installed on a ship until 1900 so, for Will's parents in 1897, this meant 7 to 10 days of complete communication blackout. A week or more on a 500ft boat in the middle of the Atlantic, with no way to call for help or contact your loved ones if something went wrong.
Living in an age where you can watch a family member's flight take off 5,000 miles away in real time on your handheld supercomputer - that sort of isolation is difficult to even fathom.
Needless to say, a message confirming to your loved ones that you had arrived safely would be a top priority for most people once you found yourself on solid ground again. And being that it could easily take another week or so for a letter to make its way back to the US (or 17 days in the case of the first letter Will's dad sent from Gibraltar), the ability to communicate almost instantly by wired telegraph was the obvious choice. However it came at a (literal) price.
International telegrams were expensive. Really, really expensive.
Telegraphers charged by the word and the cost varied significantly based on the destination of the message - as the rates below (from March 1897) show...
So sending the short message "Arrived safely. At Grand Plaza Hotel, Rome. Will write soon." back to the US would run you $3.80 ($147.18 adjusted for inflation). And Europe was on the lowest end of the cost spectrum...
Sending a telegram from the US to Brisbane, Australia in March 1897 was $2.62 per word (roughly $100 in 2025).
Fortunately there was a rather clever way to lower the cost of cable communication ...
On May 18th, 1897 (the travelers had departed on the 7th), Will's grandmother received the long awaited message from Will's parents in Europe. It consisted of a single word - misentry.
"A few minute before my arrival this telegram came from Mother.
"Cable received seven thirty. Misentry. All well here."
That mean that the cable came at 7:30 this morning & Misentry signifies "Arrived safely, pleasant passage. Alice ill part of the time." and we agreed that that should imply your father was not ill."
Will's family had sat down before his parents departed and created their own version of what was generally known as a "commercial code" - assigning individual words to convey a list of much longer pre-arranged messages.
The prohibitive cost of long-distance telegraphy was such an issue in the increasingly globalized world of the late-19th century, that pretty much every trade and industry soon developed their own complex system of one word codes.
Many period travel guides contain travel-specific codes in the back. This one is from Cassell's Complete Pocket-Guide to Europe, published in 1890 and included unclaimed words for travelers to assign their own meanings to.
Quite a few ambitious attempts were made to create a universal code for cable communication but, rather than one unified code coming out on top, this seems to have only resulted in multiple competing universal codes.
You can peruse some of these online, such as "the ABC Universal commercial code", originally designed for merchants and businessmen in the 1870s, on archive.org.
It contains almost 13,000 single word codes ranging from the very practical - "waybill - delayed by bad weather" - to the slightly less so - "apricot - captain arrested for smuggling".
Just in case you end up in any weird mercantile time-travel incidents or want to leave cryptic messages in the comment section.
I'm so glad to see AO3 making it absolutely clear that none of these things are allowed to even be HINTED at.
Here's some of the language from the new post about AO3's police on commercial promotion:
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There is a wide variety of things that are not allowed under AO3's non-commercialization rules.
Any other language which one might interpret as requesting or having requested financial contributions, whether for yourself or others. This covers indirect references, euphemisms, or other language intended to get around the TOS. Some examples of this include:
Thanks for the coffee!
My ☕ username is the same as my username here
This chapter is brought to you by my patrons
You know where to find me if you want early or bonus chapters
Check out my Twitter to learn how you can donate to me since I'm not allowed to discuss it here
If you want to hear more about my ideas, talk about fandom, or find more of my stuff for a coin, visit my Tumblr
Solicitation is not allowed, whether it's for yourself or on behalf of someone else.
Here's the crazy thing, folks. You *can* day things like "My Tumblr is [username], come over and scream into the void about these blorbos with me!" And then plaster your kofi all over your Tumblr. You can say "Thanks to [someone] for suggesting this fic! I listen to people's suggestions all the time on Tumblr!" for literally any reason someone told you to write a fic.
It's not hard to filter out the things you shouldn't say based on environment. Back when I was in high school you'd hear about all the fun someone had that weekend, but they wouldn't say there was drinking and weed and throwing firecrackers into a campfire where a teacher or parent could hear them.
The reason we're not allowed to post monetary links or use any language alluding to it on AO3 is for our protection. If a copyright holder wants to sue a fan writer for making money or demand their work be taken down as "property" of the copyright holder, AO3's lawyers need to be able to defend us by saying money isn't being made and not perjuring themselves.
It's a LEGAL issue. AO3 has no issues with writers earning money. Just not directly via their platform. Not enough people seem to understand this. There's a very long history of copyright holders throwing their weight around and taking a hatchet to fandom spaces using legal backing, and we're trying to avoid that.
It's more than that though. It's not just about protecting their asses, legally. It's also about the principles and values upon which AO3 was built.
AO3 came out of an exlicitly anti-monetization fan culture. You will hear the founders of AO3 use the term "gift economy" a lot if you follow any of their socials, which is another way of saying "mutual aid economy."
AO3 is a non-profit organization built and coded and maintained by volunteer labor and charitable donations.
Understand that when you try to use the AO3 platform to monetize, you are not just monetizing your own labor as a fan creator. You are also monetizing the volunteer labor of everyone who built that platform.
And they will tell you that they are NOT OKAY with you exploiting THEIR LABOR, THEIR HOURS UPON HOURS OF CODING AND TAG WRANGLING AND ORGANIZING AND FUNDRAISING, for your personal gain.
Stop trying to sell books in the middle of a library.
OP, this is genuinely a masterpiece, three poems in one, moving and well craft. Please tell me you have submitted it to at least some poetry contests, and if not, please do so.
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
