Taina @thetainaship - Tumblr Blog

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simzart

Watching Together. 🫂

identitty-dickruption

no nuance. are you a plot guy or a characters guy

plot

characters

Voting ended onNov 20, 2024

#characters #but actually i'm more of a worldbuilding guy #i am willing to suffer through bad plot AND bad characters if the worldbuilding is cool enough

comingoutofthecauldron

stop telling your teenage daughters who say they don't want kids that they'll change their mind

weirdqueeraltkid-deactivated202

reblog the shit outta this

morriganwarrior

I haven't been a teenager in over a decade. Mind has yet to change on the subject.

At 14, I told my guidance counselor that I didn't want kids. He chuckled, patted me on the back, and informed me that when I got a little older, and I was with a guy, I would change my mind.

At 16, my grandmother nearly had a heart attack because of her three granddaughters, myself and the youngest agreed we didn't want to uave babies. Ever.

At 17, my father asked about my life plan. I told him: graduate high school, get my college degree, do some traveling and writing, go for this particular job I wanted, retired around X age, take month-long vacations to places I wanted to spend time in, etc. He asked, "What about a husband? Children? Normal things a girl is supposed to think about?" My response- a husband if a man came along that could share an adventure with me, kids were a No Go. He assured me I would 'grow up' qnd change my mind.

At 19, I shocked my former babysitter who had known me since I was a toddler, when I confirmed the rumour she'd heard that I didn't want kids. She patted my mom's arm and reassured her in a sweet voice that, "Don't worry, girls say a lot of silly things before they meet the right fella, and wise up. She'll give you grand babies"

At 22, I was talking to a college professor who chuckled at my making a comment about how, "thank goodness I'm never going to have to worry about juggling child rearing eith marriage, work, and life", then she realized I was serious. She asked if I was alright, thinking I could-not (not didn't-want) kids. I told her the truth, could have but didn't want to. She was aghast, then told me that I'd change my mind when my husband wanted some kids.

Well, I'm over 30, still have absolutely no desire to give birth, adopt, raise, or have much of anything to do with children. I don't hate children, I don't think people who have them are crazy (more power to you, to create and/or care for another person), and I don't think it's impossible to have a life AND have children. I recognized at an early age that I don't have that biological imperative to procreate, I don't have the patience to deal with children (something that has shown very little improvement as I've gotten older, in fact it might be getting worse), and I don't feel my life is incomplete without creating another life- I am good with living my own and doing my best to enrich the lives of those I care about (I try my best to be a good friend, to be a good sister, good daughter, good pet-owner, and a good person in general).

So please, please stop telling girls (or really kids at all, but especially girls) that they will change their minds. Please don't tell them that meeting 'the right guy' will make them suddenly feel broody, that their potential future husband's desire to have children will make her reconsider and see things his way. For one, a couple should have had that conversation and decided if it was a deal breaker, LONG before they got hitched. For another, it's her body that gets to grow and birth another human being- her husband's desire to be a father doesn't supercede her autonomy.

Please, let girls make their own choices? Girls are forced to mature too fast as it is and are bombarded from all sides with SHOULD (you SHOULD be a size 2, you SHOULD wear this dress, you SHOULD have a boyfriend to be a normal teen, you SHOULD always smile), they don't need another judgement from someone who hasn't walked a mile in their particular shoes. Respect teenage girls and their ability to look at the world, themselves, their situation, and their future, and make an important choice.

*gets off soap box, slides it back under the sofa, lets out a sigh*

Thanks for attending my TED talk. G'night.

diarythebookwyrm

Also, normalize your children saying they want kids and then changing their mind about it.

I was raised Mormon, so I was told that I wanted kids. Not I said I wanted them, I was told from the time I was eight that I wanted them. For a long time, I believed that I did want them.

Then my sister started having kids.

That was when I realized that, no, actually, I did not want them. I had been told for over twenty years of my life that I wanted kids. I saw my sister go through pregnancy and birth and realized that nope, I loved my niblings, but being a mom wasn't for me.

And that is totally valid!

alexaloraetheris

One of the things I was always told (if my desire for no kids was taken seriously) was "But what if your husband wants children?"

At first I said 'If he wants kids that badly he sure as hell wouldn't be marrying ME' but one day I blurted out 'then he can carry them himself' and my dad choked on his beer.

hyperlexichypatia

There is never a good reason to tell a young person (or anyone) "You'll change your mind."

Either they will or they won't. Your saying it won't make it so.

There are cases where someone says "I don't want to have kids" and then, at some later point in their life, decides, "Actually, you know what? Changed my mind. Having a kid around would be nice."

There are cases where someone says "I don't want to have kids" and they go to their grave never wavering in that decision.

There are cases where someone says "I do want to have kids," and then later decides "Actually? No thanks."

And what all these cases have in common is that they're that person's decision, not yours, and your input is not needed.

naamahdarling

I've known I didn't want kids since I was six. Several decades later, I haven't changed my mind. At this point, I kiiiiiinda doubt I ever will.

I understand skepticism when somebody says at the age of 6 that they don't want kids. I even understand a certain amount of skepticism when teenagers say it, or people in the early twenties.

What I don't understand is letting that skepticism make you into an asshole. Be silently skeptical all you want, maybe you'll wind up being proven right, but don't fucking make that the other person's problem. Leave it alone.

No person who says that they don't want kids has ever had their mind changed by another person self-righteously proclaiming that they're just being silly and don't actually know how they feel, or by constant needling, or by histrionics over not being "given" grandbabies.

Also, we shouldn't be fucking trying to change people's minds in the first place! Leave people alone!

feefal

Star baby✨

jurispotence

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

#...which last two Earthsea books though #Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind?#Tehanu is the clearest example of what Dickinson mentions #...Tehanu and The Other Wind?

3000s

hire me for just whatever

3000s

[fills out a job application] i can do whatever and am good at anything, my biggest weakness is i love too much

scrupulosity-comics

title of this is just ‘lesbian sex’

localpubliclibrary

I’m literally so so incredibly good at being cozy and in bed covered in blankets and I recieve no recognition for it 😔

synchodai

Female Power Romantasy novels can be indulgent as they like with giving the MC all the powers and hottest love interests and overcomplicated backstories, and I will cheer that on. Yes, there is a place for this! I see your vision, girl!

But the moment it starts talking about blood purity, her divine right to rule, and how ubermensch her babies will be with the man with the equally super special bloodline? You're doing girlboss eugenics at that point.

synchodai

This blew up, so let me explain.

"Specialina has rare squirrel blood passed down from the time a secret ancestor married a squirrel god. This gives her super powers to climb trees and find nuts!" 👍👍👍 Inheritable traits are a thing after all.

"Because Specialina has rare squirrel blood, she is entitled to rule over the rodent kingdom, and if she is kept from her rightful throne bestowed by her ancestry, the vile rat people will continue to corrupt the land." ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Oops, no one is entitled to rule over others, especially through genetics. And think about why a certain group of people is your designated "evil" race.

"Specialina's love interest is McBroody, a man with rare rabbit powers. With both squirrel blood who have domain over the skies and rabbit blood who have domain over the land, their children will have domain over everything and become the most powerful beings on earth who will bring the kingdom eternal balance, thus the evil rat people do everything to keep these two apart." 🛑🛑🛑 STOP. DO NOT PASS GO. THINK ABOUT WHY THE HAPPY ENDING OF YOUR FEMALE POWER FANTASY IS HAVING GENETICALLY SUPERIOR BABIES.

jdragsky

i find it so interesting how people act like "critically examining a piece of media" is the opposite of "enjoying that piece of media." rip to you but i actually find it really enjoyable and compelling to dissect and think through the art i engage with

qilingxiong

watched the stalks of a lavender bush by the bus stop dip and sway from the sheer amount of fat little bumblebees on it and you know what. some things in this world are good

yekkes

The only thing that has ever improved my mental health in any measurable capacity is making more friends. That's literally it

thejhambs

The way isolation plays on your psyche, and the way that a solid support system can improve your life is insane. One of the worst things that we did as a society is removing most avenues to find this kind of thing, and the over reliance on the idea of getting better on your own

yekkes

!!!

yekkes

#definitely for sure this #but like housing and a reliable income also helped very very noticeably

myblog-mp3

ok so "friends don't look at friends that way" is some bullshit. I love my friends sm I want to have friends that I look at work the most intense love possible. Love doesn't have to be romantic to count. All love is valid. Love for your friends for your family for partners for siblings for motherfucking anyone. Your love is valid and I love you <33

woodsdyke

having viral posts is all fun and games until you have clowns in your mentions being like "well, op, i bet you also didn't know THIS" [haughtily explains something i absolutely would and do know] like add whatever to my posts that you think is informative just don't direct it at ME! i know! i just didn't include it in the post i made in 20 seconds because i didn't think 30,000 of you would see it!

woodsdyke

i love these tags. WHAT was your viral post i need to know so badly.

strangehorse

some of our collective suffering

zooophagous

I had a tattoo client ask if I ever used AI to design tattoos for me. Man I spent the better part of a decade doing shitty bit work as a graphic designer and now that I have the space to do whatever I want, I'm gonna let the computer generate random garbage for me? What next should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?

zooophagous

I feel like people get so hung up on the results of a thing that they don't appreciate that the process of making it is, actually, enjoyable.

It's like if you have a friend who likes to bake, asking if they'd like to just buy cupcakes from the store instead of making them. The end result of the cupcake is secondary to the joy you get from having made cupcakes.

Art isn't a slog or a chore or something I want to avoid. Art is fun. It's rewarding. It feels good to do it. You may as well be asking me if I want the AI to watch television for me, it doesn't make any sense, I'm not participating and would gain nothing from it.