down below.

Sora Choi by Kove Lee for WOW Magazine Issue 5

‘germanic warrior with helmet’ - osmar schindler (1902)

The second best thing about erotic art is seeing people reject their initial reaction to it. The comments are full of people saying “oh my first thought was,” and, yeah, your first thought was right. The barbarian youth is sexually dominating the old Roman order. If you actually could get your mind out of the gutter you’d be the first animal to ever do so.

I’m legitimately wondering if there’s any reason a neovagina has to look especially realistic since it’s not like I’m gonna be seeing it all the time and genitals aren’t super aesthetic anyway so maybe I can get a discount if the doctor doesn’t have to like perfectly craft every fold of the vulva, like it’s not gonna be particularly deep or wide for me anyway, just gimme something that’s works and is easy to clean and knock a few bucks of the price, I’m not asking for Michaelangelo’s labia or anything y'know, I appreciate maybe the doctor won’t give me teeth or tentacles down there but at the same time I’m not going to get into a relationship with someone if they feel like they gotta conduct a 120 point snatchspection just to confirm my cunt meets the fuckability codes, I’m sure as shit not pushing babies out it and there’s no reason to overcomplicate taking a wee, so why not go for something a little more aerodynamic and low rez right?

this is the sort of post that terfs screen capture and go apeshit over

I don’t think Michaelangelo would be good at crafting vaginas anyway

You come in here, on the day of my cousin’s daughter’s aunt’s roommate’s best friend’s wedding, on this day you come to me and be funnier on my own post.

I haven’t seen anyone on tumblr talk or blog about this, so I decided to make a post. And I gotta say I wholeheartedly love this!!

Fuck you, Joanne! And fuck all TERFs!!

Everybody do this again challenge.

international friends: here’s the deal. South African scientists have been tracking the COVID genome and keeping an eye out for mutations. Most places in the world aren’t doing so. When we announce a new variant, it’s not necessarily from South Africa, we just publicised the fact that we detected it here. And yet, because we’re a country in the Global South, it doesn’t matter that our scientists are incredible and are doing the world a service by tracking and reporting these things, because our ordinary citizens are being blacklisted because of it and being prevented from entering other countries and placed on red lists for no reason 

For those who aren’t aware, this is exactly how the Spanish Flu came to be named the Spanish Flu. It didn’t originate in Spain. Spain was just the first country to acknowledge there was a global fucking pandemic and do something about it.

Idk who needs to hear this but your 20 Str 16 Con Barbarian is allowed to be fat.

Your High Charisma suave seductive bard is allowed to be fat.

Your nimble and quiet rogue is allowed to be fat.

Your warlock, with the powers of the nine hells at their fingertips, is allowed to be fat.

Fat people exist, and we’re plenty capable.

1) Andre the Giant

2) Jack Black

3) Mark Vorkosigan

4) Guillermo de la Cruz

do u ever remember all the horrible offensve things u said when u were like 15 and u literally feel ur soul detach and turn 2 dust 

your fave is problematic: yourself

Basically, yeah. That’s kind of the point – you always have to look back on yourself and be mortified and resolve to be better. Shit, the stuff I said just five YEARS ago (and I’m almost 33) makes me cringe like a motherfucker. Burn in mortification. Rise from the ashes and be better. Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of your life.

This is why purity culture doesn’t work!!! We’re all shit! We can all grow and do better!

also, whenever this kind of mortification is chewing on you, say to yourself–out loud, if you have to:

and would i do that AGAIN?

NO!

so it’s fine. lesson learned. i can move on to the next thing now.

pls love yourself and stop pre-ordering aaa games

this is a joke but people in the notes are missing the point, so id like to try to explain something… I’m in the games industry, i know a lot of people who worked/work in triple a company positions.

preordering a game does *not* say “i trust this dev and they deserve my money to use to make the game that much better”

what it says is “hey boardroom, i will throw money at anything with this logo, even before i know what the game is like”

that boardroom sees that trend. they see theyve made their money back within 2 months of the game being announced… so the next time a lead comes to them and says “we would like to make this game, heres a budget and a timeline” the execs say “well last time we gave you 100 bucks and a full month, but your fans dont really /care/ what game you make, as long as it has our brand. so heres 75 bucks and 3 weeks. make it marketable”

this means more “pre-order exclusives” like cosmetics or different art, filler stuff that a side team can pump out in hours. every store, every platform will have their own version.

pre-orders do nothing but incentivise the shitty money-sponge practices we all hate in games. the point of a pre-order used to be to ensure you got your physical copy, but with most games being digital license anyway, that worry is unrealistic.

However when you wait for reviews, what you show that boardroom is “what we put out actually matters. if we make a shit game, we get shit sales. when we only give a team 2 weeks and a fiver we get shit reviews.”

so… love yourself, stop pre-ordering triple a games.

It definitely wasn’t a joke and this is a very good addition to my post, thank you!! You explained really well what I didn’t feel like doing with my one sentence post 🙏

I think it’s possible to take spiritual comfort in the knowledge that life on Earth will continue to evolve long after humans go extinct, and to accept that we are obligated to maintain a nurturing relationship with the planet.

Yes, the world changes, and yes I find thought that strange new ecosystems will invent themselves around the shape of the future to be soothing, but the complacency I see about anthropogenic degradation infuriates me. We might get out food from the grocery store but that does not remove us from the natural world or make us any less beholden to delicate relationships between organisms and the more we allow things to fall apart the more potential futures slip away from us.

La Collectionneuse (1967) dir. Éric Rohmer

no one ever talks about gimli being not even slightly tempted by the ring. motherfucker had no hesitation just walked up with his axe and immediately tried to wreck it. obviously that didn’t work but like, the ring had zero visible effect on him. amazing… gold sickness in the line of durin WHOMST?? not in gimli son of gloin

He wasn’t going to let himself be embarrassed in front of all these fucking ELVES

The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero. 

Reminder of where comics got their start

scooby doo taught us that the real monster was daphne for keeping a smooth talking limp wrist twunk like fred in a straight relationship when he was born to cruise literally designed to suck and fuck

it was the 60s and she was helping him stay safe by agreeing to be his beard. daphne is an ally and probably a lesbian

Queer is such a good word, I love it so much. I love being queer, I love being around other queer people, I love queerness in general it's all wonderful.

The radfems are not happy about this one lmaoo

My mom was a fourth grade teacher, which meant that she did multi-subject education. And she used to do what she called the NFL Project. The NFL Project was when students were randomly assigned NFL teams.

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

People joke (haha, it's funny, it's a joke, right?) about American education being used to prepare students to be good employees instead of to be critical thinkers or independent people, but legitimately it seems like NCLB directly incentivized "students sit quietly in a box filling out bubble sheets and have no unsupervised or creative work time."

A bit more detail, since folks are discussing it:

My mom would check in with kids a couple times a week to see what their progress was looking like, and had hard deadlines for things like mailing letters. There was work that COULD be done at home, but the whole project could be completed in the classroom during class time if the student needed to; many of my mom's students over the years dealt with insecure housing and no internet access so she didn't give assignments that required dedicated workspace at home or that needed more research than a student could reasonably complete in the computer lab during scheduled lab time at school.

(I say 'research project' but these were fourth graders, it was looking at the team's page then the city and state websites for each team and maybe wikipedia for the city/state - it was teaching the concept of research, it wasn't arduous research)

The kids collected an information packet early in the project that was basically a worksheet where they could keep track of stats and could fill in info about the states/cities/teams; they kept these in a folder where they could also keep print-outs of research from the library or clippings from the sports pages my mom brought in.

Because they had these packets, they could work on the project at their desks, so they'd have a couple scheduled 20-minute blocks for the project twice a week outside of the check-ins, and if they finished other work early they were allowed to choose between working on their project, free reading, or writing or drawing quietly at their desks.

The project had minimum requirements:

Some kids DID hate football, but football was a fairly minimal part of the project. Some kids also hated making graphs and some kids hated writing letters and some kids hated learning about the states. The kids didn't need to know the roster or watch the games - a lot of kids didn't have TVs or access to games - football was an entry point, not the purpose of the research. The reason it was NFL-based was because the NFL season was spinning up as school started and because there were about as many NFL teams as there were students in the class (32, but the district wouldn't allow anyone to have the Raiders, so 31 and the kids would get 30 of them and my mom would take the other 1 and track them).

Like, there was one kid who went Ape Shit when she discovered that the Minnesota state flower is the Showy Lady's Slipper and she made as much of her project as she possibly could about orchids. She did this beautiful illustration of the flower for her visual aid for the presentation and that's what went up on the board for her. She didn't care about the Vikings, she got REALLY interested in flowers.

There was a kid whose biggest chunk of the report was about the gold rush. One kid dove into research about pirates. But also a lot of kids did like sports and would do a lot of research on the actual team.

There are few people in the notes going "lol, i would have failed that project i hate sports" and I actually think that's a HUGE part of the problem that I'm commenting on here and why I think that losing projects like this is an issue.

My mom tried really, really, really hard to create opportunities for her students to succeed. I think that most good teachers do that. Most good teachers don't ever want to give a student a failing grade, so they do what they can to teach to all different kinds of learning styles and interests and literacy levels and math competencies.

Standardized tests don't do that.

My mom could tell you which of her students struggled with reading comprehension, which ones had a lot of trouble with English but could get their work done with time and support, and which students were simply Spanish speakers who could not read English because they had moved to the United States three months before the school year started and needed information translated. She could pair up bilingual students with different levels of English acquisition, and she made sure that she could explain at least the basic instructions of her assignments in Spanish.

Standardized tests don't do that.

I can't tell you how frustrated she used to get that she had so many students who were good math students who would score low on the math tests because they were word problems written in English.

BMI is supposed to be a statistical tool that is used to determine the average height to weight ratio of a population, nothing more. Just a tool that is used to report a population average. BMI becomes a problem when it is used to judge whether individuals are likely to become ill, because that's not a thing that BMI can do.

Standardized tests kind of make sense as a statistical tool to measure the average skills of a particular grade level in the district, but they are SHITTY at measuring individual competencies beyond test-taking ability. And when your goal is to improve the average score, the way to do that (theoretically) is to improve students' test-taking abilities by giving them practice tests and by teaching them how to take tests, not by pairing them up with a desk buddy who can help them read the word problems.

Like.

Most of the (elementary) teachers I know consider it a pretty big personal failing on their part if they have failing students. A lot of teachers are invested in helping students succeed and will do A LOT to accommodate their students' varying skill levels and interests to get them up to grade level *for the sake of the student* and not for the test. They WANT students to stay with their peer group, the DO NOT want to hold students back and they understand how stigmatizing that can be but they ALSO know that advancing a student who is far below grade level in reading will not help them be at the next grade level in reading.

They've got nine months. The teachers and the students have nine months together, and that's not a lot of time for one teacher to make sure that thirty kids are on the same page, and it's worse when you have constant benchmarks and have the students spend time writing down what standard they're supposed to be applying instead of giving them more exposure to and assistance with the subjects they need help in.

God, teaching the STUDENTS to identify the standards they were working towards seems like such a ridiculous waste, like, "here, learn this keyword pattern matching that will apply nowhere else in your life ever but that the teacher needs you to do so they can check the box that the district is forcing them to check."

And I know teachers aren't perfect and I know a lot of teachers are shitty and I know that sometimes kids DO actually do better when it's a relatively unbiased test that allows them to advance to the next grade instead of the assessment of a teacher who might genuinely be a shithead who wants to hold kids back because they're a racist piece of shit.

It's complicated! You can't just say "trust teacher assessments of student learning achievements" because people are sometimes terrible and a lot of teachers are actually terrible! But determining academic success or student skill level purely based on tests is Fucked and *CUTTING SCHOOL FUNDING* based on tests and graduation rates as your only performance metrics is Extra Fucked and incentivizes teaching to the test and advancing students who may not actually be at grade level because holding students back reflects poorly on the district and there are a whole lot of people in the notes going "That's Why I'm Going To Homeschool" and if you think that I don't want oversight for homeschooling you are WRONG because homeschooling in the US is frequently VERY FUCKING BAD and children actually SHOULD have regular interactions with non-family adults and SHOULD have some form of transcript filed with a local school district so that they aren't wholly reliant on their parents for every single thing about their identity and education when they turn eighteen and maybe want to leave that homeschooled household and yes I actually am a supporter of the concept of no grades, no homework education but I don't know that it can work at scale and basically what I'm saying is that location based taxes for education funds are bullshit and also a pretty big source of this problem, fuck it, everything goes into one pot and every school gets paid out based on the number of students I am now the dictator of schools and I am redistributing Orange County's tax money to Palmdale this is a self-perpetuating problem that just gets worse wealthy people move to wealthy districts so their kids can go to better schools that are paid for from their local taxes and the rich districts keep getting better and living there keeps getting more expensive and the poor districts keep getting worse and living there ALSO keeps getting more expensive and I am fucking DONE why in the name of FUCK did we spend the last twenty years fiddle fucking around and wasting trillions of goddamned dollars killing civilians in the middle east and cutting funding to arts programs and home ec I am going to se everything on fucking FIRE.

©东予薏米  jade rabbits making mooncakes for mid-autumn festival

some jerk on SA said that toby fox just has 'inborn talent' and that if you aren't a born maestro there's no point doing anything which like is already a stupid idea but huge lmao at feeling dwarfed by the unrivalled artistic genius of the guy who wrote the baby is you