song of wizardry

it’s love that makes people | space nerd professionally trying to make more people space nerds | short and tired | she/her

[songofwizardry]

new pinned post, hello folks!

i post a fairly chaotic mess of things—lots of fandom stuff, politics, complaints and/or celebrations about the universe, some teaching posts, emotional interludes about faith and community, everything goes. have some information, and links for people on mobile/on the dashboard view.

my political stuff is tagged #ukpol, #intl pol, or #uspol mainly, with often country-specific stuff tagged. i also use #east african pol occasionally and #current events more generally. if you're avoiding political posts, you are probably best off blocking all of those tags—i do my best to tag all my politics and current affairs posts with these.

on a similar note, posts about protesting, organising, trade unionism, etc are tagged #organising and sometimes general protest stuff gets tagged #acab

i tend to tag for common content warnings, but. particularly when i'm reblogging political stuff or sharing news links, not everything is warned (esp general violence, racism, etc.) if that's an issue, please do block or filter the politics tags

#home and neighbouring lands is my tag for stuff that’s about east africa and sometimes southern africa. whatever feels homely to me

anything queer gets tagged #queer shit, anything to do with Islam gets tagged #salmon’s muslim tag

posts on interacting with kids and young people get tagged #teaching and #parenting. my own posts complaining about how much marking I have to do also get tagged #teaching

i tag spoilers for currently-producing-content fandoms, more details are here (but it is generally common sense)

an (incomplete) list of my commonly used tags is here. it needs updating.

my writing masterlist is here. yes, i should write more often.

[loveridden1999]

top 3 hobbies for young adults:

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

3. agonizing over the present

[minotauri]

ocean sounds for those of you who need it

[sandersstudies]

My knowledge about child development versus the social pressure to not interfere with other people’s parenting fight daily

[sandersstudies]

Parent: *unintentionally escalates a child’s resistance so they fail to regulate the child, and hence become more embarrassed and upset and continue to escalate*

Me: and I will just. Um. Be normal about this. :)

[sandersstudies]

Oh and ESPECIALLY if you’re not a parent yourself. No matter how much time you’ve spent working with children or the amount of research you’ve done, if it’s not YOUR kid you couldn’t understand anything

[sandersstudies]

It’s not even “just” bad and abusive parents. It’s people who were raised that way and don’t know another way. Or they’ve been doing it so long they think it’s too late to change. Or they want to do better but have barriers to education and implementation. Or they’re trying traditional methods with a neurodivergent child. Or like a hundred other reasons.

[sandersstudies]

Okay so I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday and trying to be as fair as possible to these parents, because these are people in my extended village, and I’ve started thinking of some positive interactions/interventions I’ve had that aren’t “tell the parent they aren’t parenting correctly” (which we all know is unfair).

1. Care for the parent. If the parent is upset, they are likely going to upset the child, even if they don’t mean to. Give mom or dad a hug or some time to calm down before they have to jump into parenting again.

2. Related to part 1, offer to solve the problem without you ever disciplining the child. (It’s straight-up not my place to discipline children in front of their parents without explicit consent — only a few members of my village have told me that it’s acceptable for me to observe and correct their children.) This could be as simple as “hey it seems like the girls have a lot of energy right now, want me to watch them outside so they can run around while you finish what you’re doing?”

3. Talk to them in a calm moment if you see a pattern and see if they need long-term support. “Hey, I’ve noticed it’s really been a struggle for you to transition Della out of dance class and into the car. Is there anything I can do to help you and her with that transition? Does she need some extra time to pack her things or say goodbye to her friends?”

4. Relate to the child. Some people have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid, or they have a kid who is radically different from themselves. I was a kid who was often “naughty” myself and I remember my reasons (good AND bad) for behaving that way. Many parents genuinely don’t see the logic in children’s behavior and sometimes an outside adult who can say “hahaha I do that” is actually a weight off their minds.

5. Relate to the parent. And also, sometimes they just need you to be a wall for them to complain at. If they are really frustrated, it’s better they get it out of their system in a reasonable conversation with you than to snap at their kids later. Parenting IS hard — I haven’t done it myself but I’ve watched others do it long enough to glean.

[if-not-now-tell-me-when]

As an early childhood educator, all of this!!!! All of it. We are all unlearning so much toxic shit from our own childhoods, and from society at large. The majority of parents care so much, and they want to do the best for their children. They just are often lacking the tools, both parenting tools and tools to process their own childhood traumas.

Framing the conversation in terms of collaborative problem-solving helps them to feel heard, and (hopefully) lowers their sense of being judged. I often start these conversations with "I notice" or "I wonder" statements. "I notice morning drop-off has been very hard for Timmy." And then give them space to share their thoughts and feelings without my butting in or interrupting. And, as a bonus, having these conversations framed as collaborative problem-solving moments models for the parent how to have these same conversations with their child!

[sandersstudies]

I love this addition! It takes a village, and I might not be your kids' parent but I'm part of their/your village (relative, teacher, director, etc.) and there are problems we can solve together! <3

[sentient-tent]

This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes

[sentient-tent]

reblog to feed her notes

[elodieunderglass]

How is she doing this

[drtrinitysantos]

sdxfcgvzdxfcgvhzdxfcgvhbjnkmlcgvhbjnk science

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

#the reason that lab safety regulations are the way they are is because literally all chemists are like this #as in 100% of them #no exceptions (via @prokopetz)

[vinceaddams]

My uncle has a chemistry book from 1847 and it has a similarly entertaining observation about "fulminating powder".

"When a quantity of this mixture is placed on a shovel, and heated gradually, until the sulphur begins to inflame, it explodes, giving a loud and stunning report, and leaving the ears hardly in a state to hear any thing more for hours, or if the quantity be considerable, even for days. Not more than 15 or 20 grains of this powder should be exploded at once, unless in the open air."

(Looks like the Internet Archive also has a copy, from 1842!)

[dingusandpingus]

romance is a scam invented by dan and phil to sell more nordvpn subscriptions

[astrangertomykin]

My medieval servant boy has gone missing. I’ll just use Google to see if I can find him.

[astrangertomykin]

Oh bother.

[dggeoff-deactivated20161128]

im deleting this fucking website

[best-chance-deactivated20161213]

It took me a minute

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

Gotdamn I haven’t seen this post in almost a decade

[artisheaven]

Ocean waves made of maps by Matthew Cusick

[cr-summer-wildflowers]

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[cr-summer-wildflowers]

11.5 hours remaining!

[redstonedust]

welcome to my epic fantasy world. we have many developed fantasy kingdoms with 2000 years of rich lore and history. and to the south you can see the evil sand people and to the east theres japanchina.

[mizuthe-cat]

don’t ask chatgpt I can lie to you for free

[sailermoon]

this is how new yorkers @ mamdani

[sailermoon]

[hiddenemberinmybooty]

[mosslingg]

My liege im sorry to break it to you but your advisor that's actually evil and wants you dead turned out to be straight. I know you really wanted to have an enemies to lovers situation with him. Yeah I'm afraid the poisoning didn't hold any romantic intent behind it. The king of the enemy kingdom is bisexual though, I could send him a letter? Yes, I'll make sure to include multiple threats of homoerotic nature. You will have your toxic yaoi, my liege

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[pensivegladiola]

Don’t make me point to the Omar Sakar poem

[manuciruja]

[literary-illuminati]

It's very #problematic of me I'm sure but if they must do either I really desperately prefer authors coming up with fancy always-italicized elf words for being gay or trans than having preindustrial warrior aristocrats and barely-socialized monsters have a vocabulary that casually includes 'demisexual' and 'enby'.

This is only slightly a principled stance (queernorm fantasy worlds are very obviously not trying to have any sort of realistic political economy of gender, which I only slightly judge them for), mostly just painful aesthetic mismatch.

[nine-hyacinth]

imo people who read and genuinely enjoy self-help books and not other types of book / fiction books are not ensouled. they do not have an internal world