I just got husband to attach a round scrubby brush to the end of his power drill. This is the best thing we’ve ever done, omg I don’t have to apply pressure when scrubbing the bath tiles anymore it just whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirzip and everything is clean. SUCK ON THAT GROUT STAINS
as someone who loathes tub scrubbing, i consider this a signal boost-worthy post!
Wait, I need details, how is it attached? What kind of scrubby brush? Photos pls I need to implement this in my life, my grouting will thank you
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
you know fantasy dragon soulbonding fic i want more of that where the humans are the dragons, like, we’re huge, we’re old, we’re scrappy as hell, and if you are small and cute enough we would be delighted to carry you around on our back
holy shit that’f b amazing.
also imagine an alien being like
‘I THINK A HUMAN IMPRINTED ON ME THEY KEEP HANGING AROUND ME’
But imagine aliens that only form social bonds under very specific circumstances having to deal with humans though:
Like, they will bond with a group, and if they move they just bond with a new group while still talking to their old group. They will bond with other species. They encourage their children to practice bonding with inanimate objects. They can have more than one mate in their lifetime. Sometimes they have more than one mate simultaneously. Once they bond with you they’ll start trying to bring other humans they are bonded with to bond with you.
If you stand around them long enough they’ll probably just wander over and try to pat you, this is how they bond with other species. You may have accidentally bonded with a human without knowing it.
“Help the human in our party bonded with a grafknap and now they want to bring it with us”
“I don’t see what the problem is.”
“We’ve already got like five of them, and then there’s the orlaps and vanghus.”
“krrrk sor krrkr going thr krrk -bula spike krrk”
“Companion Mar, how do you sustain these high levels of interpersonal relation?” “Uh… hanging out, I guess.” “Hanging out of what, exactly?” “Sorry, that’s a human phrase used to describe spending leisure time in the general proximity of others for entertainment.” “But we are very far from your past companions, and yet you have continued to express interpersonal relation to them, in spite of the lack of proximity.” “Oh, well, I comm them now and then.” “Interesting. So you posit that physical proximity and verbal communication are key to this relational anomaly?” “I mean that’s part of it.” “… great Glarbnack, you’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” “Oh, come on, Kursp, we’ve been friends for ages, you know that!” “No! Stop! I can’t believe you would - oh, Glarb, what’s the word? - vefriendle me without even asking me first!” “Befriend. The word is befriend, Kursp.” “Ugh, humans! Well I know I can’t stop you but at least try not to emote all over the place.” “Sure thing, buddy.” [Enraged squeaking]
OMG THIS ONE IS FANTABULOUS
Humans.
Will.
Pet.
Anything.
Ok but what happens when humans are brought aboard an alien spacecraft to travel to the far side of the galaxy, and the ship stops to refuel on Planet Kro’Chenpotyl 6, and there are warnings all over the place to PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THE SPACE STATION and the humans are just like “why?” and the aliens are all “Captain Steve, have you never encountered a Horgler before?” “no, whats a horgler?” “They are very dangerous, Captain. Please do not leave the space station as they roam freely and we do not wish to communicate with your superiors anything about injuries to you or your crew.”
and then two hours later Captain Steve has a giant Horgler in tow and everyone else is just “!!!!!!!!” and Steve is just “yeah, this is my new pet. his name is Fluffy.”
Don’t tell your daughter that when a boy is mean or rude to her it’s because he has a crush on her. Don’t teach her that abuse is a sign of love.
My mom always taught me yell or fight back. Boys would be mean and I would yell back. I would get my ass pinched and I would smack them as hard as I could.
Who alway got in trouble? Me.
They would call my mother and she always came in and lectures my teachers and threatened to sue for making her miss work and treating me poorly.
She always taught my brothers to respect women. The only fights my brothers ever got in was defending women from someone else.
The school tried to call my father once instead of my mother on us. He came in in his full preacher outfit (being a preacher and all) and gave them an entire sermon on what would Jesus day of he was called in. They decided dealing with my mom was better.
I think my favorite story of this is when some kid snapped my bra and I turned around, didn’t even think about it, and punched that little motherfucker right in the nose.
So naturally, I end up in the principal’s office, refusing to apologize.
“He shouldn’t have put his hands on me and I wouldn’t have hit him!” That’s the only thing I was saying.
These people had the unfortunate luck of catching my dad at home, instead of my mom. So he comes fucking sauntering in there, like he’s Clint fucking Eastwood in some western movie and looks at me.
“Melissa, did you punch him?”
“Yes.” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he snapped my bra strap.”
And he turns his squinty eyed glare to the principal and says, “You’re telling me my daughter is in trouble because that squirrely looking kid put his hands on her and she chose to defend herself? That’s what you are saying to me.”
“Well, sir-” The man kind of stuttered because my dad is kind of intimidating in the quiet sort of way that kind of whispers in the back of your mind that this person could be dangerous. “Melissa did make it physical.”
“No. That kid put his hands on my daughter. Are you saying my daughter cannot defend herself when some boy decides to put hands on her? Is that what you are teaching my girl?”
I didn’t get suspended that day.
*slow clap for excellent parenting*
This is the parent I want to be omg
I went to a nun school.
The nuns there were like, so rad.
It was a party organized for the end of the school year, and I was helping in the kitchen to prepare stuff with a nun and a bunch of little girls. There was one of the girls’ little brother who was there.
There was a little girl who was carrying a bowl of tomato sauce and was going outside, but the boy was just in front of her and he slammed the door in her face. She dropped the bowl on the floor and got all messy.
So what happened?
The nun went outside, took the boy by the arm, and gave him an epic speech going around the lines of: “Would you treat the Virgin Mary like that, young man?” “Nnnnno…” “Then treat every girl like she’s the Virgin Mary.” Not only the boy had to apologize to the little girl, but he also had to clean up and he was put on kitchen duty for the rest of the day.
Then another day, in catechism class (I was a in a girls’ school, mind you), the nun was there telling us: “If a guy touches you in a way you don’t like, punch him in the face. It’s not a sin against charity. On the contrary, you’re being charitable by showing him he’s sinning by impurity and you’ll save him from going to hell.”
So I was at my desk during class looking like this:
Does it ever strike you that Cap 2 begins with a challenge from Batroc: who are you without the mask?
And the rest of the movie is literally Steve showing us? Who he is with, and without, the mask? The depths of his humanity? The breadth of his super soldier strength? The limits his body and soul meet time and again and then transcend?
Steve is more than the weapon he wields or the costume he wears. He’s more than the weapon he’s become. And in Cap 2, we begin to see that.
In Cap 3, we see his shield actually GET TAKEN AWAY. We rarely see him in his mask. If the shot of him HOLDING A HELICOPTER IN PLACE armed ONLY WITH HIS DESPERATION AND SUPER STRENGTH is any indication, we’ll see more of plain clothesed Steve, fighting massive battles in just very tight t shirts and an earnest expression.
In the end, Steve is my favorite because we see his humanity and struggle in everything he does. Even in his physical prowess–it’d be so easy to portray his feats of strength with a casualness meant to highlight just how powerful he is. Instead, you see him strain. You see his muscles bulge and his jaw grit and you see uncertainty and determination war on his face. You see him WIN against all odds, and the sheer impossibility of odds are what make the victory so breathtaking.
Behind and without the mask is Steve Rogers, not Captain America. Unluckily for Batroc, and other villains, that’s still a pretty f*cking amazing hero to contend with.
Steve Rogers isn’t a hero because he’s Captain America. Captain America is a hero because he’s Steve Rogers.
oh my word he was the gayest and his most notable male lovers were
Joshua Fry Speed
a bed salesman/ inn keeper
he and Lincoln met when he was 28 and Speed was around 22 b/c Abe was practicing law and he was poor so he had to rent out a room
when Lincoln couldn’t afford a room and bed Joshua was just like “why don’t you share my bed with me 😘”
they lived together for four whole years
also when Speed had to go back to Kentucky (they were in Illinois together at this point) Lincoln actually suffered what historians consider a nervous breakdown, he wrote in his diaries a lot about how depressed he was during this time
they still wrote each other letters though and remained friends until Lincoln died
David Derickson
the commanding officer of his guards while he was President
he even had his own special bed in the White House that they would share
they had their own getaway cottage on the outskirts of the White House’s borders I kid you not
ALSO
HE ACTUALLY LEGITIMATELY WORE LINCOLN’S NIGHT SHIRT OKAY
THEY WERE NOT SUBTLE
THOMAS CHAMBERLAIN HAD THE TEA ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP, HE WROTE IT ALL DOWN
this is an excellent time to talk about my home alone sequel idea
its 25 years later. a group of men track kevin down to an american-style suburban house deep in the jungles of cambodia. they stagger into his office, bruised and covered in feathers.
“you’re a hard man to find mccalister”
“not hard enough”
jump cut. a military officer is talking to a cia spook.
“you don’t understand. he’s the best. i saw him take apart a taliban kill team with nothing but the contents of a hardware store and a box of toy cars.”
cut to afgan desert. adult kevin in modern military gear presses a detonator. several cuts show a rube goldburg device launching paint cans into startled assassins via planks of wood.
cut back to dark office.
“he’s dangerous. unstable.” the spook says
intercut of a man trying to sneak up on maccalister when he steps on a rollar skate and falls down some stairs. there’s punji stakes at the bottom.
“that’s why he’s the best.”
lights cigar
cut back to officer talking to kevin
“your country needs you.”
“i needed my country, and it wasn’t there for me. why should i be there for her?”
cut to shady military black ops in the jungle, vietnam war style. kevin, in tiger strip special
forces camo, watches a helicopter take off and fly away. cut to inside.
the team, weary, sits in dejected silence, when one of them suddenly
bolts upright.
“MACCALISTER!”
cut back
“we need you for one last job. we’ve assembled an elite team.”
zoom on kevin’s face
“no. i work… alone.”
HOME ALONE 3
cut to man strapped to chair in dark room. kevin is in the background, fetching something. he circles around him, rubbing his hands together.
“you’re going to tell me what i want to know.”
“fuck you.” the man spits.
kevin claps his hands to either side of the man’s face. He screams.
COMING THIS CHRISTMAS
kevin watches a city burn. a man points a gun at the back of his head.
“no fancy traps to protect you here. what you got to say to that, maccalister?”
kevin whirls, disarms him, and kicks him off a balcony.
For @littlestartopaz (who requested it) and @twistedangelsays (who wanted to read it). Chat Noir/Ladybug with G from this post, Chat says the line
(“Don’t you ever do that again!”)
All right yeah, look, I really like reveal fics and I really like pain, so this is the product of that. Also, these two kids need to get their shit together and cuddle and care about each other and stuff. I am a simple woman with simple needs. AND this is your friendly reminder that I am taking prompts and there’s a masterlist of ships/fandoms on my blog! Hit me up!
“This
guy needs to chill out,” Chat Noir said, shooting a smirk at Ladybug to see her
nose crinkle up. Her look of fond
distaste was the highlight of his day, every day, the kind of friendly teasing Adrien
had always wished for as a little boy.
The only thing better was when she actually shot a joke back at him,
leaving a warm weight in his chest and a smile on his face.
“That
wasn’t even clever, Chat,” she said, spinning her yoyo and letting it fly at
the shell of ice between them and the rest of the world. He spun his baton overhand and slammed it
into the crack she had left, and as he pulled back the yoyo lashed out again.
“So
you think my puns are usually clever?” he asked, grinning, and hit the ice
again. “You know, I could have us out of
here–”
Let’s play a game. Type the following words into your tags box, then post the first automatic tag that comes up. you, also, what, when, why, how, look, because, never
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
WOW.
I deeply, deeply regret my time counting calories and points.
haters can say what they want about the 4th of july but i just witnessed two dudes- one dressed as abe lincoln and the other as benjamin franklin- passionately making out on the balcony while fireworks went off behind them and half of the party, for some reason, gathered around them and chanted “USA! USA!” for like five solid minutes
Since Charles Lee is played as a pretty young guy in Hamilton, I’m not sure how many people are aware of the full context and hilarity of Laurens’s roast of Lee at Lee’s court-martial
Laurens was a 23-year-old aide-de-camp when he testified at the court-martial. Charles Lee was 46 and a general. Lee was twice Laurens’s age and outranked him, but Laurens had no reservations about completely dragging him.
You could get yourself cloned and use the clone if you ever needed any organ transplants, limbs, etc. You’d technically be allowing yourself to be ‘recycled’ and would probably live for much longer than the average life span. Since highschool, I’ve been obsessed with cloning and the whole idea of it - I remember the sheep that got cloned (Dolly) and ever since, I’ve been intrigued. But then creationists would come along. “CLONES DON’T HAVE SOULS”.
I think the ethical issue is that cloning creates a sentient being. Yes, creationists are typically a pain in the ass, but the more important argument against using a clone of yourself to enhance your lifespan regards the ethics of creating a sentient being and then killing/maiming that being for your own well-being.
How does everyone know about this book and I’ve never heard of it???
I know it was required reading at some schools (not mine, I stole it from my best friend’s backpack because I was bored and he was busy and blew through it in a couple hours) so maybe that? Honestly I’m not sure why it got so popular–or rather so well-known. It was an interesting book, but not really my thing.
Why is Thomas Jefferson getting a ton of heat lately? He's my problematic fav
i mean, lately, it’s presumably because the hit broadway musical hamilton is out there reminding everyone that tjeff was The Worst. but i’m gonna take this opportunity to give you a run-down of every historic reason why tjeff was The Worst
i could end the list at “slave owner”
furthermore, he was even more racist than most 18th century racists. i don’t have the time or energy to list all the racists things he did, but there are a lot, just google it
like when his pal tadeusz kosciuszko died he stipulated that the money from his american estate should be used to free and educate jefferson’s slaves and in response he was like. “i can’t read suddenly. i don’t know”
he was a huge hypocrite who claimed to support the ~small independent farmers when the only interests he really cared about looking out for were - you guessed it - the interests of wealthy plantation owners, which is probably his biggest contribution to the legacy of american politics tbh
also, remember how he wrote the declaration of independence - including the original draft where he waxed philosophical about how slavery is an abomination - even though #1-3
sally hemings
he had no idea how the economy works. a good deal of his political career was spent arguing with the federalists about why taxes are bad and banks are scary. one time he tried to ban exports, like, entirely, because he just didn’t foresee any negative consequences to that brilliant idea, apparently
he was a generally obnoxious person who not only spewed baseless accusations against his enemies every time he was challenged on all his horrible ideology, but he didn’t even have the balls to do it himself, he usually employed a whole gang of followers to do his public shit-talking for him
he actually kept a burn book where he collected rumors about people he didn’t like. i wish i was making this up lmao this actually happened!!!
a big fan of indian removal and/or forced assimilation
there’s gotta be a lot else i’m forgetting right now, i’m just thinking off the top of my head
basically he sat around at monticello spinning around in his swivel chair while his slave-concubine brought him bowl after bowl of mac and cheese, meditating on liberty and equality with so much moral myopia he could’ve been the antihero protagonist of an amc prestige drama
i’m too tired to source any of this hate right now but i can and will elaborate if anyone deems it necessary
I saw a post that was like “mutuals =/= friends” like whoa okay I always thought of mutuals as low key friends but that’s fine let’s make people more insecure of their relationships than they already are
Bruhs, if we are mutuals you are 100% at least low-key level friend to me.
“Do you have that book?” a patron asks. You reply, “I’m sorry, could you be more specific?” “The book,” is the only answer you get. This happens with three more patrons today. “I’m sorry,” you say to them all, “I don’t know what book you’re talking about.” The book. The book. The Book. Should you know The Book? Should you have The Book?
An elderly couple comes in every morning for the newspaper. Nobody remembers a time that they didn’t. They have always been elderly. There’s a faint foul smell in the library when they’re in.
There is a branch on the system map that you’ve never heard anyone talk about. You’ve never seen books with their branch sticker come in and you’ve never sent books to them. You asked a co-worker about it once, but they just smiled and asked how much shelf reading you got done that day. You tried to find it once, but kept finding yourself in the same grocery store parking lot over and over.
You weed for hours. There are no fewer books on the shelves. You weed for days. There is still no room for the new books that have come in. You weed for months. You feel like you’ve withdrawn a lot of these books already. You know you threw this stained, tattered, moldy copy of Bleak House in recycling a while ago. You weed for years. You weed forever.
(You never weed books on witchcraft. In fact, you put ten brand new ones on the shelf yesterday. They have already disappeared.)
One day the elderly couple doesn’t come in. The library has a much fouler smell that usual during the time they’re regularly in.
You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8. You loved that book as a child, and it looks like the same edition. You open it to check the publishing date and there is your name and childhood phone number written in purple crayola marker in your 8-year-old self’s handwriting. You did not grow up around here. Your family is not close.
You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a book with a photo used as a bookmark. You take it out to let the patron know they left it in there next time they come in. The photo is of a child at the beach and you would swear that it was a picture of you, but you have no memory of that swimsuit and no memory of that beach. The patron does not return.
You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a book written in a language you can’t identify. You pass it around to your coworkers, and none of them know either. You upload a picture of the cover to reverse google image search and there are no matches. You open the book to double check for copyright information and you don’t know how you missed it until now but there is your your name and childhood phone number written in purple crayola marker in your 8-year-old self’s handwriting.
“Do you have that book?” a patron asks. You reply, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what book you’re talking about,” even though this time you get the nagging feeling that you do.
When the Ninth Doctor first asked Rose to travel through time with him and refused, the Doctor accepted that and moved on. He traveled through space and time, saving the universe, all lonely for years thinking “I wish Rose could have been here.” Eventually, he goes back to a few seconds after he left Rose and says “By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?”
Rose never knew how long the Doctor waited for her.
I think this makes sense. In the episode Rose you see all those photos of Nine at the assassination of Kennedy and at the Titanic (on his own). But also in that episode he’s checking his reflection in the mirror like he’s seeing it for the first time, so he can’t have been long regenerated. So maybe he does all that stuff in the time before he comes back and says “Did I mention, it also travels in time?”
which makes that line even more powerful because this time he would really want her to say yes, because he knows what it’s like without her.
What’s interesting are the events the Doctor (theoretically) chose to visit during that time between when Rose (theoretically) first said no, and when he returned to extend the invitation a second time. Nine was photographed/drawn near the Titanic, Krakatoa, and the Kennedy assassination. All horrible catastrophes with tragic loss of life, all catastrophes that caused profound change in human history, catastrophes that (if Pompeii and Bowie Base One are anything to go by), would likely qualify as fixed points in time.
This leads me to believe that the Doctor was nearly in the throes a Time Lord Victorious breakdown as a result of the Time War and Rose’s rejection. He was dancing around the edges of these fixed points, likely looking for a way to save lives and prove to himself that he wasn’t a vile person. To prove to himself he could make a difference.
To prove to himself that he’s worthy of having someone brave and clever like Rose as a companion.
And Nine (obviously) doesn’t save Kennedy’s life or stop the eruption of Krakatoa, but in the episode “Rose” we find out he DOES save one family originally scheduled to travel on the Titanic by convincing them to delay their trip. A small measure of redemption.
Enough so that the Doctor summons the courage to return to that dark London sidewalk and casually lean out the door of his TARDIS like no time had passed at all, like he hadn’t been scrabbling in the wake of Rose’s rejection. And then he said the words he’d practiced alone in his console room dozens of times, with the exact amount of calculated swagger he’d rehearsed: “By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?”
You could get yourself cloned and use the clone if you ever needed any organ transplants, limbs, etc. You’d technically be allowing yourself to be ‘recycled’ and would probably live for much longer than the average life span. Since highschool, I’ve been obsessed with cloning and the whole idea of it - I remember the sheep that got cloned (Dolly) and ever since, I’ve been intrigued. But then creationists would come along. “CLONES DON’T HAVE SOULS”.
I think the ethical issue is that cloning creates a sentient being. Yes, creationists are typically a pain in the ass, but the more important argument against using a clone of yourself to enhance your lifespan regards the ethics of creating a sentient being and then killing/maiming that being for your own well-being.
There’s a novel to this effect. It’s called The House of the Scorpion, I read it when I was like eight, and it really fucked me up. But it was memorable (obviously) and well-executed.
With some characters I’m like:Hell, yeah, I’ll multiship the hell out of you with anyone who’s good enough for you and love all these ships like babies and be overwhelmed by so many feels!
but with some characters I’m totally like:You have ONE soulmate and ONE ONLY and ONLY THEY ARE GOOD FOR YOU and no one else is ever going to deserve you and make you happy and any other ship is a big big NOTP, because JUST NO.
what kind of relationship do you think finn and leia would have
look
Let’s say you are a General. You were a great number of things before, but you are a General now and it suits you better than all the rest put together, it fits you like a second skin and fills the hollows where people/planet/father/mother/husband/son/brother/republic should be. And let’s add that you are a good General; decisive, even-handed, capable of managing the day-to-day operational work as much as engineering strokes of tactical genius. Some of your advisers wish you would cry more public, show a softer, more maternal side, but you are fresh out of softness. It’s scar tissue now.
More importantly, your soldiers love you. (Well, not you, very few of them know you, you have lost most of the people who knew you—but they love the princess or the senator or the general, and that’s close enough.) They love you even though you use them, use them like starfighter parts, like numbers on a datapad, and smash them against the bulwark of the Darkness. They love you for it. This is called loyalty. You wish you did not elicit so very much of it.
But still, you are a General, and you recognize your like when he walks onto a Resistance base.
He is young, and his world is narrow, still—a jedi, a flyboy, a ship, a whole mess of intangible loss and an inviolable sense of what is Right. But Generals have come from less. (You would know.) The first week he is out of the medbay, you stick him in Intelligence, just to see what he can do without a blaster in his hand. Generals generally only carry one at their hip. (You do not carry a blaster at all.)
It only takes him fourteen months to work his way up to a seat at the leadership briefing. The only other person to climb the chain of command that quickly was Luke Skywalker, and that was largely honorary; between the Death Star and the lightsaber, Luke had been the recipient of a lot of honor.
You make a mental note to have your moofmilker brother check Finn for Force sensitivity if—when—he returns.
“Lieutenant Finn,” you greet the other general on his first day in the command center. He salutes like a wet dream, all grace and pinpoint precision. You wonder if he had to readjust his automatic responses with the biotech spine; you can’t tell. “Tell me, what on earth took you so long?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he says, falling back into ‘at ease’ with that same terrible grace. His smile is like a blaster-shot. “Had to prove myself first.”
Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
ExR for the ship And the AU is from a post you previously reblogged: "Everybody in the world has a superpower that compliments their soulmates superpower. When together, both their powers increase in strength exponentially. You have the most useless power ever, when one day……" Go forth and write me more ExR
Everyone look at how awesome my platonic soul mate is, she sends me fun prompts when I’m bored. My concept of ‘complementary’ powers might be a little weird but whatever! We’re going with it. To the shock of no one, this got out of hand.
Grantaire
has the most useless power ever. Ever.
He’s confirmed this with everyone he knows.
It’s not nifty as
hell, like Eponine’s talent for making tiny storms between her palms—if she
ever meets her soulmate, that’s going to be awesome. It’s not even one of those powers that seems
useless or trivial in the moment but will obviously turn into something amazing
when the person meets their soulmate.
Like Joly, for example. The
ability to cure headaches and hangovers?
Not very impressive, although eminently useful. Flash forward, enter Bousset and Musichetta
and one skin-to-skin touch, and boom, one fully-fledged healer, on a silver
platter.
And then there’s
Grantaire. Who can make pictures
move. As long as he’s the one holding
the pen. What the hell is that?
I wasn’t even surprised to find out that the old ladies in Fury Road did their own wildly dangerous stunts because honestly most of the old men I know are like “I just want to wear high-waisted trousers and take a nap" but most of the old ladies I know are like “I’M NINETY THREE YEARS OLD HERE COMES THE HURRICANE”
It’s been a long goddamn week but I spent my whole day writing fanfic and I can see a fireworks show FROM MY BED IN MY DORM ROOM. They’re close enough that I can see the whole thing and just far enough away that I’m not going deaf. Like, I’m comfy, I’m warm, I have my computer and my writing and my Tumblr, and I have fireworks, this is an okay day.
if Broadway doesn’t want bootlegs floating around then they need to get their act together and make legal recordings. you can say all you want that theater is meant to be enjoyed live, but the fact of the matter is not everybody can get to NYC to go to a Broadway show. not everybody can afford to take the time off of work and buy a plane ticket to NYC and buy a night in a hotel AND get the ticket to the show. people want to see the shows, that’s why there’s a bootleg market in the first place, but it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone has the time, money, and ability to make it out to the one place in the world to see something on Broadway, especially if it’s a limited engagement. so record that shit, slap some subtitles on it, and sell it so we can buy it legally.
Reblogging this every time I see it. Copyright is important for creators but it should not support cultural elitism. Affordability and accessibility of cultural content is key unless we want to live in a very divided society.
