The referendum date is October 14th! So enrol to vote/update your details NOW fellow Aussie if you haven't so it's not just angry old boomers who watch Sky News voting and deciding the future of our constitution!

I could function in a society that had an actual nightlife that isn't synonymous with just clubbing. Where are the night markets what if I want to go to the library at midnight

Suggestions:

If you vote, please reblog. I need more fairy tales in my notes.

I should say that the autistic-coded sibling is generally the hero of the stories they're in. The (fae) Powers that Be have little patience with the neurotypical habit of trying to game the system by not saying exactly what they mean, and assuming the right of Privilege, because of Cleverness.

The rare Super Blue Moon will rise tomorrow, Wednesday, August 30. This will be the last Super Blue Moon until 2037.

But there will be a Moon Brothers Super Race in 2030

[Image description: a photo of the full moon, with a blue filter. description ends.]

BTW: a point of clarification: "Blue Moon" doesn't actually mean that the moon will appear blue to human eyes. It means the second full moon (which happens every ~29.53 days) in a single calendar month.

It happens relatively rarely, 'cause it's when an arbitrary thing we made up happens to line up with the real world. Hence the phrase "Once in a blue moon" -- I.e.: so infrequent, you shouldn't make your plans around it.

Which cantrip would you want the most for day to day life? Justify in reblogs. Bonus points if you use it for evil.

Prestidigitation is the most useful spell on any spell list, on a day to day basis.

Handy Household Magics FTW

Reach and grasp -- the ability to get a hold of anything I reach for (she who is constantly dropping things, and currently has to rely on badly-designed "reacher-grabbers" made for disabled people).

Would be great (Hard "maybe") if it also worked on intangible things.

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

Teen: *gets a job*

“I GOT THE JOB!”

Parents: Well, when I was your age, I already had 5 jobs and was supporting my family

Teen: *gets all A’s*

“I worked really hard!”

Parents: Well, of course you did, this is the expectation, not a celebration.

probably why so many teens take to social media where they can enthusiastically share their interests and achievements and get positive feedback that their parents never gave

A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

This hit hard

I remember once, when I was in my early 20s, I was an afternoon supervisor at my job, and I worked with mostly teenagers, and the one day this one kid, who was like 15, was bored so I suggested he could clean out the fridge. He did and when he was done I said he did a good job.

After that, this kid was cleaning out the fridge at least once a week, and I was like, “why are you always cleaning the fridge?” Like, I didn’t mind, but it seemed odd. And he said, “one time I cleaned the fridge and you said I did a good job. I wanted to make you proud of me again.”

Literally, I changed the entire way I interacted with teenagers after that. I actually got a package of glitter stars and I would stick them on their nametags when they did a good job, and they loved it.

My manager had commented on how hard these kids work and I said, “they’re starved for positive feedback. They go to school all day then come to work all evening and no one appreciates it because it’s expected of them, but they’re still kids. They need positive feedback from adults in their lives.”

Like, everyone likes feeling appreciated. Everyone likes being complimented and having their efforts be noticed. Another coworker (who was a mother of teenage children), hated that I did this, and said they were too old to be rewarded with stickers, but like… it wasn’t about the stickers. The stickers were just a symbol that their effort was noticed and appreciated. I was just lucky that I learned this at a time when I was still young enough to remember what it was like to be a teenager. I was only 2 years out of highschool at that point and highschool is fucking hard. People forget this as they get older, but ask anyone and almost no one would ever want to go back and do it again, but they expect kids to suck it up because they’re young so they should be able to do school full time, plus homework, and work, and maintain a healthy social life, and sleep, and spend time with family, and do chores and help out at home, and worry about college and relationships and everything else, and then just get shit on all the time and treated like they’re lazy and entitled. And then they wonder why teenagers are apathetic.

For a german exam I had to argue against an article that was essentially „kids these days, they don’t care about anything and are constantly on their phones“ and really it was the easiest essay I‘ve ever written.

Teens don’t talk to adults bc adults only ask „so, how‘s school“ to then interrupt them two sentences in. And because they can’t engage in a conversation about buying houses and working in a bank. I would’ve loved to talk about philosophy and politics and history with family the way I did with friends and in class but because I was young no one took what I had to say seriously.

And no, teens aren’t always on their phone. They’re on their phone when they’re bored. You think I‘m on social media when I‘m with my friends? When I‘m talking about something I‘m interested in?

Maybe the reason kids are so distant and always on their phone during family parties and the like is because you‘re failing to engage and include them.

Whoop there it is

When you respect kids, they really respond and learn from you. But if you treat kids like “theyre just a kid, what do they know??” then you’ll never find out.

As a Disneyland Cast Member, I’ll add my own experience onto this –

Very frequently, when I first speak to a child while I’m at work, they’ll kind of withdraw and act uncomfortable and shy. Their parents will then rather frequently tell them to not be shy and try to coax them to talk to me – whenever that happens, I always, without fail, politely dissuade the parents from pressuring them.

“I’m a stranger,” I’ll tell the kid’s parents. “I don’t blame them for not talking to me – if they were anywhere else, they’d have the right idea, to not immediately trust me.”

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen that same kid – simply after hearing their initial reaction being validated, instead of reproached – immediately open up to me after that. I also cannot tell you how many times that child and I would go on to start a friggin’ marathon conversation, and I got to hear all about how great their day was or what their favorite Disney movies were or what rides they liked and didn’t like or how much they like a certain Disney character or song…all from me validating that initial feeling and showing genuine interest in what they had to say.

This isn’t just young children, either. I will always remember being positioned outside the Animation Academy one day and starting up a conversation with a young lady, perhaps 12 or 13, who joined the line with her father a full 25 minutes before the class was supposed to start. Now keep in mind, we do a drawing class every 30 minutes: there was no one else in line at that point, and no one else joined the girl and her father in line for a full fifteen minutes. So I could tell pretty quickly that this girl was very emotionally invested in getting a good spot for the drawing class: a conclusion all the more bolstered by the fact that she had a notebook under her arm. I asked her if she was an artist – she said yes, but seemed uncomfortable at the question, so I skipped even asking her if I could see her work, instead admitting that I myself wasn’t very good at art, but that I’m trying to get better and that I love the history of Disney animation. On the screens around us was video footage of different Disney concept art and animation reels, so I pointed one of them out (for Snow White) and asked if she knew the story behind the making of the movie. Upon confirming that she didn’t, I proceeded to get down on the floor so I could sit next to her and her father and dramatically tell the whole story of how “Uncle Walt” created the first full-length animated motion picture, even though everyone and their mother thought he was an idiot for even trying, and how the film ended up becoming the first Hollywood blockbuster. After the story was over, the girl’s father said that his daughter really wanted to be an animator when she grew up, and she finally felt comfortable enough to open her notebook and show me some of her artwork. It was wonderful! Every sketch had such character and you could tell how much work she put into it! And I could tell how much telling her that – and sharing that moment with her, where we got to connect over something we both really enjoyed – had meant. And after the class was over, she sought me out to show me what she and her father had drawn – and sure enough, hers was great! (Her father’s was too, really. XD)

People, kids and teens included, love sharing what they love and how they feel with others. You just have to give them the chance to show it.

A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!

-~-

I feel like I am obliged to add one more thing: don’t ever think that the kids won’t feel your unspoken judgements cause they do!

I felt always like a ‘problem’ in my family, until I was about sixteen, I got this teacher who was litterally the first to tell I was worthy. He changed my life up till this day.

Also how do grown ups imagine how ‘we’ will ever learn to engage in conversations with adults properly if you don’t teach us?

This post is

Everything

I told one of my new coworkers (who is 26) that he was doing really well and that I was proud of him and his progress. I thought he was going to start crying for how quietly he said “really?”. 

Positive feedback makes the biggest difference to everything.

I used to have a coworker who only spoke Burmese. She knew a few words in English, but literally it was like “hey Susu, can you clean the cooler for me?” “Yes yes, I clean, I clean.” She’d moved to the US in her late 30s and never really got the hang of English. (I don’t say this to make fun of her. She was a refugee fleeing a brutal and bloody war in Myanmar and her broken English was a sign of deep determination and tragedy. I say it because the language barrier, and the extent of it, is important to what happened next.)

She was shy, and kind of withdrawn, and extremely slow—it took this woman an hour to do a sink of dishes that took me 30 minutes and I was considered not particularly fast—but she was absolutely dogged. She would do her job and get it done.

So this one day I realized we had all kinds of “hey, great job!” cards on our little recognition board thing for almost the whole crew, but none for Susu, because “she won’t understand anyway.” So I threw a couple of simple sentences into a translation app and spent like half an hour very painstakingly drawing these sentences in Burmese characters (and drawing is really what it was—I felt like I was four years old and holding a pencil for the first time again) and gave her the card. She kind of glanced and it and went “oh thank you” and then did this massive double-take and raised it in front of her face and read it, and read it again, and then just about hollered “OH THANK YOU THANK YOU” and I showed her where she could pin it on the recognition board if she wanted. She chose to take it home instead, which, totally fair.

All it said was “thank you for your hard work, you’re very reliable.”

Everything changed after that. She started using her limited English more, picking up new words here and there (rather amusingly, ours was a multilingual kitchen but she didn’t know which words belonged to which language, and you really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny Burmese woman slap a fryer and say “Oy vay this thing, yeah! Pendejo!” I mean yes, completely valid emotion about that fucking fryer, but when this is how you’re discovering she’s picked up both Spanish and Yiddish and thinks both of them are English, lemme tell you, that sure is an Emotion), enthusiastically participating in things.

She was in her forties.

Nobody but her children had spoken a word to her in Burmese since she left home.

People just want to be known. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

See that other post I reblogged about autistic people communicating.

It's a human thing. Communication goes both ways.

TIL The Double Empathy Problem theory suggests social difficulties experienced by autistic people when interacting with non-autistic people are due to reciprocal differences, not an inherent deficiency, most autistic people are able to display good social reciprocity with most other autistic people

via reddit.com

okay but the BEST part of the first study discussed (conducted by an autistic person!) Is that it shows that while easy, calm, mutual communication and social interaction is often more natural between two autistic people than it is between an autistic person and a non-autistic person, it is ALSO like this when an autistic person encounters a non-autistic person who imitates the autistic individual’s behaviours- neurotypical parents copying autistic children’s play, for example, apparently receive more positive engagement from their child- which is SERIOUSLY FUCKING IMPORTANT and VERY VERY GOOD because it is, once again, scientific evidence that bullshit like aversion therapy and enforced conformance and FUCKING “quiet hands” aren’t “”“”“solutions to the autism problem”“”“” and that “”“”“problems”“”“ with autism don’t stem from BEING autistic, but rather, from how NON AUSTISTIC PEOPLE TREAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE.

IE, once again, there is nothing bad or wrong about being autistic

I don’t “suffer from autism.” I “suffer” from neurotypicals.

Sartre was right.

British government put radioactive salt on chapati that they fed to Punjabi mothers in Oxfordshire in the 1970s

What in the fuck

[Image ID: A series of tweets from Dr Louise Raw @LouiseRawAuthor. The tweets read, 'You can't believe how kind the British are. Every morning, a van pulls up outside your house in Coventry. A friendly man brings you a freshly-baked flatbread to eat. It's just for you, not anyone else in your family. Every afternoon he comes back to make sure you've eaten it.

It's to improve your health, because you went to your GP with migraines. He said it could be anaemia, & these special chapatis will help you. You're grateful: you haven't been here long, & really appreciate your new country looking after you. Eventually another van comes.

It takes you, young Punjabi mum Pritam Kour, to what you're told is a hospital, supposedly to see if this new health food is helping. They never tell you the strange building is actually the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. There they put you in a machine 'like a box'. You hear a clicking noise. Then they take you home. You don't speak much English but you express your gratitude again. All this just to help you. It's wonderful. That was in 1969. In the 1990s, local reporter Sukhbender Singh, gets wind of a story.

Filmmaker @John Brownlow can't believe what he uncovers. It has to be exposed. Pritam & 20 other Punjabi women had been fed RADIOACTIVE SALTS in those chapatis: never told, let alone asked. The illegal experiment was conducted by the MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (MRC).' Four images are included: a picture of chapatis, a picture of a woman who is presumably Pritam Kour, a black and white picture of three scientists using some sort of equipment, and an illustration of a hand reaching towards a chapati. /End ID]

requested by anonymous:

RATING: PARTIALLY RELIABLE

Firstly, a quick assessment of the sources available here. The article above is from India Today, which is rated as Mixed for factual reporting according to MBFC due to multiple failed fact checks. Furthermore, the India Today article mostly cites a documentary (Deadly Experiments), which you can watch here on youtube.

Documentaries are not a reliable source, as there is no code of ethics, and they are not obligated to keep things factual.

Source: 'It’s not just that the definition of “documentary” itself is mutable: unlike other journalistic and quasi-journalistic forms, no code of ethics has ever been agreed upon by practitioners of the art, and what rules of thumb there are tend to be temporary, controversial and broken as soon as they are made.'

As this research happened in 1969 (according to the India Times article and the documentary - the caption to the tweets claim the 1970's), it has not been easy to find a lot of reliable information on this. However, after much searching, I did find the published paper in question!

The paper is entitled Absorption of Iron from Chapatti Made from Wheat Flour. It is not about the study of radiation, as implied by the tweets, but in fact was studying anaemia and whether supplementing food with iron salts could help iron absorption in South-Asian diets.

Source: 'In many countries in which iron deficiency is a serious problem, cereals are eaten as foods such as chapatti or tortillas, which are made from an unfermented dough. The following study was conducted, therefore, to estimate the availability of naturally occurring wheat iron and of an iron salt added as a supplement to flour from chapatti made from white flour, and from chapatti made from wholemeal flour.'

The chapatis were supplemented with small amounts of iron salt (ferric ammonium citrate), to see whether this could help with low blood iron levels/iron deficiency anaemia. Radioactive isotopes were used - however, this is not as alarming as the tweets suggest. It is common practice to use radioactive isotopes in medicine as a tracer, and this practice is not considered harmful or dangerous.

Source: 'Nuclear medicine uses radioactive isotopes in a variety of ways. One of the more common uses is as a tracer in which a radioisotope, such as technetium-99m, is taken orally or is injected or is inhaled into the body. The radioisotope then circulates through the body or is taken up only by certain tissues. Its distribution can be tracked according to the radiation it gives off. [...] Radioisotopes typically have short half-lives and typically decay before their emitted radioactivity can cause damage to the patient’s body.'

Whether the participants of the study gave informed consent is not something I am able to fully assess. One of the participants, Pritam Kaur, claimed that she was not told about the iron salts/radioactive tracer, whilst a spokesperson for the MRC has denied this, and claimed that a translator was always present to ensure informed consent was given.

Overall, it does not seem that this research was definitely 'illegal' as the tweets claim. The major concern is whether the study was properly explained to the participants, allowing them to give informed consent.

The actual methodology and purpose of the study are common and considered to meet ethics standards, unlike other historical medical experiments. (For example, the British Military of Defence's unethical testing of nerve gas, or the infamous Tuskegee Syphillis Study, which secretly prevented African American men with syphillis from accessing treatment so that they could study untreated syphillis.)

In summary, the tweets do not accurately portray the study. Whilst there is a real concern regarding whether the participants fully understood what they were consenting to, and therefore able to give informed consent, the study was researching iron absorption, not the effects of radioactivity. Radioactive isotopes are not considered dangerous when used as tracers. Whilst unethical and harmful experimentation on racial minorities has historically occurred, this specific instance was not likely to have caused the participants any physical harm.

Thank you for the transcript.

And thank you for the fact-checking.

Everyone who reblogged this and said something like, "These are all so good!" Or, "I can't choose!" - you have extended my life by at least fifteen seconds. Each.

I also love it when people say what dynamic they chose, and which characters (fanfic or original) fit it.

I chose "All Share; maybe fall in love" 'cause that's my queerplatonic ideal. But all of these are more refreshing than the usual "love triangle" tropes.

(I should note that I misread "Codependent" as "Competent" more than once)

Quoted tag:

Yes. Good. "You have exactly one (1) redeeming value: Your taste in Spouses."`

I fully realise this blog's readership is exactly the wrong audience for this sort of advice, but I'm annoyed enough that I don't care: the reason you consistently dodge directly into the very projectiles you're trying to avoid is because you're looking at them. You reflexively move toward wherever your gaze is fixed. Don't look at the projectile – look at the gap or safe space you need to reach to avoid it.

This was actually advice my mother gave me.

Not in terms of avoiding projectiles in a game (at least, I hope, if you're trying to avoid projectiles, it's in a game), but in terms of a physically disabled kid trying to climb the stairs, or get up off the floor:

"Look where you want to go."

hello 🐙

[video description: a six-second loop of a person waving to an octopus in an aquarium tank. After the person stops waving, the octopus waves one of their tentacles in a similar manner. description ends]

I've heard it said (from more than one interviewed marine biologist) that the only reason octopuses don't dominate the planet with their intelligence is because they die after reproducing once. So they don't pass on what they've learned to the next generation.

And that if, instead, they lived to 80 years, like we do, then we'd be the ones in the terrariums.

Thanks for all of the recent feedback around Community Labels being incorrectly applied to content. In particular, we appreciate the input we’ve received from the LGBTQIA+ community and understand the frustrations from folks who felt that their content was unfairly labeled. When we realized this was happening, we immediately investigated and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

The LGBTQIA+ community makes up about a quarter of the Tumblr community. It is important for us to support all Tumblr users, especially those whose safe spaces are under threat in certain parts of the world.

As you know, alongside of the rollout of Community Labels we also expanded the types of content allowed on Tumblr as a way to welcome more creativity, art, and self-expression. Our goals remain the same today. Human error happens and we apologize to anyone who has been impacted by these mistakes.

We are working to better understand what happened and will follow up with more information soon.

[Image description: Tumblr tags: #you can remember this because gender has a g for ground #and sexual has an s for seiling. description ends]