In which I rant again about how toys don’t change culture

And here’s the thing a bout body diversity in FASHION dolls:  Due to the importance of the clothing, a line of dolls pretty much needs to be the diversity–not have some of the dolls one shape and some of them another shape and some another shape still.  Creating Lammily doesn’t delete the entire existence of Barbie or Bratz.  Kids don’t keep their lines of dolls separate.  So, yes, create your line of dolls with a different shape, and create plenty of clothing for them to wear, but position them as the diversity, not as INSTEAD OF other dolls.

BUT

As consumers, don’t expect a single line of dolls to present noticeably different body shapes within that line, especially a brand-new line of dolls that has a high chance of failing.  Even in this age of computer aided design, creating all those different molds is expensive. (Once a line is established and successful, that excuse reason does get a lot weaker, and, yes, that’s directed at Mattel, and maybe even Hasbro as their turn to dolls deepens…but we all know Hasbro will only create different a body style if there’s a licensed character that demands it.)

but MOST OF ALL

DO NOT RELY ON TOYS TO CHANGE ATTITUDES.  THAT WON’T WORK.  SUCCESSFUL TOYS ARE REFLECTIONS OF SOCIETY, NOT CREATORS OF IT.  Successful toy companies create products that fill the ‘wants’ they already see as existing in the market.  Yes, sometimes, the market might not be aware of the fact that they ‘want’ the thing, but there are lots and lots of people whose life work is to figure out those ‘wants’ before anyone else does.  And even then, product lines from these huge companies can fail, which is a hurt on those companies, but it won’t put them out of business.  Can’t say the same for smaller companies. (Again, look at how Hasbro made the conscious decision to not release Rey toys until after the movie was out and they knew everyone would know she was an important character, not just some random girl that boys would have no reason to have an interest in–they made this decision probably close to a year ago, because they didn’t want to make toys that research very likely said no-one would want before the movie was released, because the availability of a female character in what’s considered a boy line does not mean boys will suddenly be OK with it.  That’s society and culture’s task to change.) ((OF COURSE I KNOW Star Wars is not a boy-exclusive thing.  Everyone on Tumblr knows it.  But, again, once you get out into the larger US society/culture…?  Not so much.  We all also know that even JJ Abrams thinks SW is a boy thing.  “Reality” and “societal/cultural expectations/portrayals” are certainly not the same things.))

Kids with diverse toys very probably have parents who already accept diversity and therefore are already raising their kids to seek it out.  Kids who become aware of a lack of diversity on their own are probably already too old to be the target market for toys–but they will be ready to introduce diversity to the younger children in their lives.  Toy companies won’t change what they offer until the market is demanding it, and the market won’t demand it until a lot more things change in this country.

Can we normalize doing nothing, please?

I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.

I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?

They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.

Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.

Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.

“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”

“But you could–”

“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”

It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.

Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.

Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.

If you’re running at 100% all the time with no time to recharge, then your battery is going to die spectacularly, and probably at the worst possible time.

Mood

Society is trying to burn us all out.  Tell society to fuck off.

Go take a fucking nap.  You’ve more than earned it and you deserve it.

We HAVE to recharge.  Our bodies, our minds, our everything requires it.  

My dad told me when I was young that the way to take a vacation is to work on something different and I thought, and still think, that that’s the most obscene idea anyone’s ever told me to my face.

the moon made me a goose and while many enjoy the honk I am sometimes afraid to honk too loudly or incorrectly

but as a goose I will honk to honor the moon

my name is on the door but I am just a goose, I'm not the boss

oh we won, this is gonna be a cinematic event

child handling for the childless nurse

My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old.  Here’s my impressions so far:

Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal.  Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.

Age 1 - 2: Hates you.  Hates you so much.  You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them.  There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.

Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe.  Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them.  Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.

Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually.  I did not realize kids were this cool.  Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn.  Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”

Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable.  Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other.  At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult.  Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers.  (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)

Age 15 - 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience.  Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care.  Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there.  At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny.  And they’ll want one.  Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.

This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing  kids of various ages

after a suicide attempt in 2016

excerpt from Cherry by Mary Karr, context being after a suicide attempt at age 13

Some context: Texas and Arkansas share a corner border. Now, Texas is FECKING HUGE and there are many, many parts of Texas that cannot visit Arkansas overnight, but there are parts where it’s no trouble at all.

However, those places of Texas that are close to Arkansas, do not include “close to Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

The closest Texas gets to Fort Smith is about 185 miles (about 300km), at “a little closer than Texarkana.” (Dallas, fwiw, is about 275 miles/450km from Fort Smith.)

So the dad in this story drove at least SEVEN HOURS round trip, to pick up a bushel of plums for his little girl, in the hope that some almost-out-of-season fruit would convince her to go on living.

Okay.

It’s bigger than this.

According to Wikipedia, the poet Mary Karr was born in 1955 and grew up in Groves, Texas and “lived there until she moved to Los Angeles in 1972.” So she would have been there when she was 13 and attempted suicide.

According to Google Maps, the shortest driving distance between Groves, TX and Fort Smith, AR is 439 miles (or 706 km for metric using folks).

That’s almost 8 hours of driving.

Almost 16 hours roundtrip.

(I assume he broke every speed limit he could.)

That’s how much this man loved his daughter.

May we all be worthy of such love.

May we all be capable of giving such love.

May we all have people in our lives with which we can share this love.

“You gotta complete the ‘convert to Catholicism’ level before you unlock the pussy dlc”

Source

Long over-due

queer in black & white

The judge concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.

This is genuinely HUGE.

The fact that judges are consistently making decisions that legitimize non-nuclear family units is a big deal and I….genuinely didn’t think I would see this day come.

i can’t decide if this is the single coolest girl in the world for making danger her middle name or the silliest for not seeing the raw power of “millipede danger” which is the greatest name i have ever heard

I think it would be funny to write something with an intense, romantic and at least mildly homoerotic nemesis/rivalry relationship between one heroic character and one villain - not necessarily the story's main protagonist and main villain either, but they're definitely the hero and villain of Their Own Story. And it's the whole continental breakast of hatred so intense it borders on lust, them attacking each others' other enemies, even their own allies, because Only I Can Kill You, and as much as they hate each other, they have a grudging respect for each other as an enemy who's willing to play by the rules of their combat-based relationship.

And the funny part is that literally none of the other characters save for these two understand what the fuck their thing is. Nobody else gets it, what the deal of having a favourite rival/mortal enemy even is, why not just kill them on the first shot when you've got the opportunity and their guard is down. And both the hero and the villain here are shocked and disgusted by the idea. Absolutely not, there are standards and boundaries. Like yeah I was about to pull all his teeth out with pliers last week but you do not interrupt a man on his wedding day.

Whatever the ever-loving fuck these two have going on, the only thing that anyone else understands about it is that those two are the only ones who get each other. And they seem to be having fun.

god i just. i want so badly to do like, interviews about people's lives, not like celebrity vibes, more oral histories? 😭😭 that shit is so compelling to me and i just. aaaah. esp older queer ppl i just!! its about the deep connection w other ppl

the thing about conversation is. sometimes you don't know how you feel about a thing until someone asks you. sometimes you don't know you're not alone until someone tells you. human connection! aaaah!

There’s a prof named Amy Tooth-Murphy, at Royal Holloway University of London, who specializes in queer oral history; I bet you’d like her work. https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/amy-tooth-murphy

people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat

german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans

Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn’t even gone extinct yet: Oh hey I can use these two obelisks to calculate the earth’s entire circumference based on the length of their shadows and the Earth’s curvature. Neat.

Erastothenes was born in 276 BCE.

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

And as I’ve pointed out previously, the Coriolis effect was known even earlier than that, although it may not have become important to gunnery.

I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/science/woolly-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html “ In fact, the Wrangel mammoth’s genome carried so many detrimental mutations that the population had suffered a “genomic meltdown,” according to Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley. Analyzing the Swedish team’s mammoth data at the gene level, they found that many genes had accumulated mutations that would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete, making the proteins useless, they report Thursday in PLOS Genetics. “ That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes. Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer, sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every complex species uses it. Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the Wrangel beasties. Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…

What …the fuck?

That went off the rails so suddenly like I thought I was just gonna learn something cool about mammoths and then WHOA.

I scrolled past this thinking “the earth is round, yes, something, something, mammoths…’ 

But the second time it came past I saw 

And I think I got whiplash from that pivot. I also laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe. 

I’m????

Point and laugh at the MRA, kids. 

How … does he think … mammoths reproduced …

Never mind, not sure I want to know.

reblog to support Mammoth Feminism,

ignore for G E N O M I C M E L T D O W N

I here af for my Feminist Mammoth ladies, bring the species back!

DOWN WITH GENOMIC MELTDOWN

I… what exactly is combining ovaries supposed to achieve? 400 lazy feminist babies at the same time?

Shhhh…you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

FEMINISM KILLED THE MAMMOTHS

I feel like we’re getting away from the main point here, which is that the world is flat

the world is only flat because it was trampled by feminist mammoths

reblog if you support your army of genetically-melted feminist mammoths that trampled the earth flat

Don’t anybody tell this guy about that species of lizard where there are only females it might break him

My head hurts after reading that. 

I’m sending this post to @wehuntedthemammoth

Why would you hurt me like this?

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god. 

I reblogged this before but I have to do so again because of the above takedown with its glorious insults. Also, it’s always fun to point and laugh at MRAs.

I am in awe.

“Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!” and “you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge” are honestly awe-inspiring and I’m fucking blessed I read them today

This is beautiful

It’s been long enough since I last saw this post that I’d nearly forgotten and it still fucking hit me like a goddamn freight train.

Fucking poetry there, Shakespeare would be hard pressed to improve upon these lines.

@shitpostsampler The snailsucking jellyfish fellator quote is golden.

Are we just going to ignore “a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish”?

‘oh hey that’s funny :D man, flat-earth sure is one of the stranger conspiracy theories isn’t it. ooh who was Eratosthenes? i should look him up! and now we’re talking about mammoths,  cool , i love mam

“a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish”

now this… this is a post on tumblr dot com

i’m still sad Eratosthenes missed out on the mammoths by like >< much

I clicked "For You" and Tumblr suggested I should see an image it had already blocked.

This seems... Less than useful

Posts that would be found on the Sunnydale High meme account, in roughly chronological order:

I made all my phone calls and emails today and it feels so weird to not have them hanging over me any more

Quick warning if you do this they will email you back and you have to do more emails

Also nothing will ever be funnier than the whole Leverage crew spending the first episode whining about how they work alone and this is a one-time thing ONLY and they DON’T work in a team EVER and then like two days later Nate tries to get rid of them and every single one of them is like “why are you trying to tear this family apart :(”

Hang on the season 2 premiere might have it beat

Nate: Why the fuck are you all in my house?

The entire rest of the crew: Our house :)

This isn’t even an exaggeration, they straight up just break into his house and start remodeling

The Leverage crew: *disperses at the end of The Nigerian Job*

[literally 5 seconds after they all walk offscreen]

almost peed my pants today when my bf told me about this dude in his hometown who dressed up like ryan gosling in Drive every day (including driving gloves) but did not own a car. bf was like “yeah we called him Walk”