Shoujo Sparkles

Belle INFP/Taurus my text posts are tagged: belle.txt art blog: torrent-empress

[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.

[pocket-deer-belly]

i'm also really annoyed at how often i say fatphobia and people respond with body image issues. no, it's not always body image issues. fatphobia is a system of dehumanization.

[bigmouthlass]

Our terrible habit of making everything about individual experiences, rather than culture-wide prejudices and the systemic bullshit that develops from those prejudices.

Put another way, how I feel about my body personally is private-- the problem is that medical support equipment like compression wear, wheelchairs, and diagnostic scanners cannot accomodate fat bodies, which shortens lifespans and lowers quality of life for thousands of people.

[mini-wrants]

Kind of tone deaf to say “I don’t know why these super strict laws exist to protect wild animals in the United States I didn’t ask for this” when cattle ranchers are successfully pressuring Trump into removing Bison from federal lands as we speak.

We can argue about raising Bison for human consumption instead of cows on federal land all we want, but by all accounts we are missing like 25+ million bison because of their wholesale slaughter over the past few hundred years. They do serve an important ecological function.

You…don’t know why laws exist…to stop people from killing eagles and wolves and bison and coyotes and turtles in the United States?

[mini-wrants]

I’m listening to these podcasts about how private homeowners/landowners can do more to make their lawns better for native wildlife, and one new thing I’d never heard until recently before was plant a bunch of local berry producing bushes. So much is about planting flowers for caterpillars to munch on for birds to eat, or flowers for pollinators.

So why berry producing bushes? Because we killed off bears.

Bears used to eat huge amounts of berries and fish, shit out the seeds, and spread berries around the US just like birds do. Except we killed like 99% of the bears, and we’re doing our best to exterminate the birds as well.

Who thinks of a bear as a creature that distributes seeds (and also technically fertilizer from eating hundreds of pounds of fish a year and then pooping farther inland).

Stupid shit you don’t think about, like missing bears roaming around the whole US, have changed our environment in ways we’re still figuring out.

[mini-wrants]

It’s one thing to not know why a law exists. Totally fair. We should question why something was written.

But it’s another thing entirely to assume a law was written specifically for you as an individual, and if the law isn’t serving you right here right now, then the law is stupid.

[torrentempress]

Anyways here's my horny Astarion priest AU no i don't have religious trauma. but there is a fic attached if you wanna read it.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[rennerei]

Melinoë ♨️ Nemesis

[triangleguy]

[fullmetalfisting]

I read that now when they build high schools here in America, they’re using the architecture to make a school shooting harder. Like they’re designing hallways to curve so an active shooter would have a shorter line of sight. It’s really great that they’re doing that. I wish there was some other way to prevent school shootings but alas, alack, etc.

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

The linked article

[lastweekseyeliner]

so ive worked in childcare for a bit now. during the pandemic, the place i worked started a day program for kids whose parents needed to return to work. turns out the school district uses memorization and cueing, and when combined with online learning that read all the instructions to them, overwhelmingly the kids aged 5-9 just... couldnt read.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if you are a parent or teacher or childcare worker, PLEASE check to see what your kid is being taught. ask to see examples of lesson materials. raise concerns about the importance of phonics over any other reading strategy. join the pta, go to school board meetings, send emails- just make sure your kid is actually learning to read.

[malnedott]

art by nell brinkley

[jolenegifs]

LARA for KATSEYE, Gap 'Better in Denim'

[sancteye]

entwined

[roocharfferarts]

artfight but make it pink!

dandelion for @anneimator

aleta for @torrentempress

[torrentempress]

I missed my man

[dippingbirdfursona]

Is anyone else getting ads on..... How to kill the monkey King?

[dippingbirdfursona]

[memingursa-deactivated20250625]

Italian Nirvana

[boiledegghole]

bringing this over from twitter bc this person literally gets it. watching su for the first time i was literally shocked by how wonderfully toxic the yuri was there. thank you women 🙏

[iguessweallcrazyithinktho]

[spacemancharisma]

[isuggestlandback]

I have a suggestion