Just Another Girl

Golden Girls was more progressive decades ago than half of America now.

[ID: Screenshot of an anon ask that reads: wtf do you mean 'these are all genuine.' End ID]

I redid this older comic I made for my storytelling class based on this post. Have some cute wlw love in your day.

It’s hard, if I had more free time I could make it so pretty, this is what I could throw together for the assignment.

lmao

this is crazy

Yeah that’s her.

I want to be her

this person married a branch of bananas

This is actually dangerous and neglectful bad parenting. 

Babies cannot stop eating, so the risk of overeating and vomiting is much higher for them, even when closely monitored (when I was a baby even if my mom fed me for 10 minutes it was too much and I would vomit as a result). This baby will keep eating until they vomit, and she is on her back with a bottle in her mouth, so she can’t even vomit properly and will run a much higher risk of asphyxiating. 

If my spouse did this I would seriously reconsider the marriage. And I wouldn’t leave them alone with the baby or any babies after them (actually I wouldn’t have any more children with them unless it was adopting an older child that did not need help eating) until they were old enough to communicate their needs and had the ability to eat unassisted (so basically elementary school). 

Don’t do this. You are putting your child at risk. 

-FemaleWarrior 

“My husband is a horrible neglectful father putting our baby’s life at risk because he can’t be bothered to feed them for once, hahaha!”

Things like this are genuinely terrifying

damn straight ppl are scary 

Bottle feeding infants have no choice but to swallow to protect their airways. Bottles drip, sucking is a reflex. And they have no choice but to swallow the formula milk, and then there’s more.

A newborn or young infant can be forced to drink far more than their tiny stomach can hold. Cue the puking.

Never prop bottles. Pay attention to baby’s cues. Look up paced bottle feeding. Respect natural feeding rhythms.

It’s why medical professionals now recommend paced feeding (to prevent over feeding, vomiting and in the case of combination feeding - breast refusal).

http://www.peelregion.ca/parenting/feeding-baby/paced.asp

I should note, generally breastfed babies have more control. They have to be latched and suckling to trigger the milk ejection reflex. In cases of oversupply ( yes this is a thing, I had it) babies will release the breast spluttering and choking and often clamp down to stop the flow (as painful as it sounds).

Related risk: Leaving a bottle unattended in a baby’s mouth for long enough can give the infant ‘bottle mouth’ if they have even the beginnings of cut teeth. Do Not Do This.

As a longtime parenting educator, can confirm, do not ever. 

Also, a lot of the health benefits of breastfeeding aren’t actually about the milk—they’re about the positive physical and emotional effects of skin-to-skin contact. Babies need physical touch, and lots of it, for their autonomic nervous system to release the hormones that allow them to grow and thrive.

Being held by another human and soothed by the rhythm of their breath, heartbeat, and movement is essential to creating future emotional stability and mental health. It isn’t important to be The Mother or even the one who’s lactating to provide that kind of closeness—you just have to put in the work and hold the damn baby.

Boys almost never get taught the basics of childcare the way girls do, and we think it’s adorable when men don’t know what they’re doing with their infant children. But it’s harmful to the babies, robs those men of positive relationships with their kids, and is preventable with education.

(I’m AFAB and was never taught anything about babies either.)

I mean, most people aren’t. We have a general cultural illiteracy about early childhood development. It’s incredibly rare to find, for example, jurisdictions where public schools offer courses in childcare the same way they might offer Spanish or Art. You’re just supposed to “pick it up” (usually by being a young woman in a family with babies and getting tasked with childcare, which is happening less and less these days).

(And when schools say they’re teaching “what it’s like to be a parent” they’re usually not teaching useful parenting skills, just trying to scare kids into not having sex.)

But for what routes there are, most boys are totally excluded–many girls begin babysitting strangers’ children to earn an extra income as young as ten, a practice which boys have typically been considered too dangerous to participate in. When public schools do teach classes about childcare, they’re generally aimed at teen moms, not all students in general. A lot of parent education and bonding programs are specifically aimed at “moms” and act like cats with boots on when dads show up. 

This is something I care about a lot because I care about preventing child abuse, and the no 1 way to do that is to educate parents about basic child care, like “It’s not good to just prop a baby up with a bottle all the time” or “Yes they WILL scream for no fucking reason for the first three months, learn to live with it” or “3-to-5-year-olds don’t lie to your face because they’re bad kids, they’re just learning how reality works”. 

These are the kind of things a lot of parents simply don’t know, because nobody tells them and trying to look for good parenting advice on your own today is like walking with pizza into a room that’s on fire. But men, especially, are put at a disadvantage when it comes to learning them.

If you want to have kids, please make sure you and your partner(s) learn about having kids first, so you’re not trying to wade through figuring out what is bad advice and misinformation after your child is already here and benefitting (or not) from you knowing those things.

The distinctive and memorable Thailand-only covers for the Harry Potter novels.

finally some book covers that don’t just spoil the ending for first time readers.

#Quarantine feels

you can’t knock me down

every day i am percieved™️

There is a reason for this though!

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate--neurochemical signaling (I hope I'm using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)...people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady "return on investment"--and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don't have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual "low batteries" in that regard.

that doesn't mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value--only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low "upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers--they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that--combined with the shorter average length of fics--means that fan fics very quickly start "rewarding" the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that's not a bad thing! and maybe it's something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I'm glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love--the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail.

I will reblog this every time.

Literally this.

Getting dirty, asking questions, being unapologetically enthusiastic about things, going overboard on projects. These are a few of my favorite things.

This is so heartbreaking, but so true. 

And it’s even more heartbreaking when you see the transition and how performative it is.

I was a camp counselor at a science/nature camp when I was 16, for a bunch of 10 and 11 yr old girls. And one day while we were waiting around for the naturalist to come get us to go on the day’s hike, the boys cabin we were grouped with was exploring the area and overturned a log and found a salamander. One of the boys picked it up and they brought it over.

My girls all went “ewww, gross, keep it away!”

…right up until I said “whoa, cool, can I see it?”

This boy handed me the salamander and all of a sudden my girls were clustering around. They wanted to hold it. They were asking questions about it. They had stories of other times they’d seen a lizard or caught a frog or something. A couple of them went with some of the boys to look under another log and see if they could find another one.

All they had needed was permission to be curious, to show interest instead of disgust. And as soon as someone they were looking to for cues on “how to be a girl” showed interest, as soon as they didn’t feel like they had to perform socially-acceptable girliness and pretend to be grossed out in order to gain adult approval, all that natural curiosity and the fascination most kids have for the natural world just came bubbling right up.

As a female engineer, I have to reblog this.

🖤STEM🖤

The U.S. in a gif series.

Pls keep reblogging this till this become a classic tumblr post , because it needs to be

Fuck it, hate to go all “Chris Pratt Defense Squad”, but I gotta debunk this shit real quick.

The claim that Chris Pratt is homophobic comes from the fact that Elliot Page accused him of attending an anti-LGBT church. Pratt issued a statement to the contrary, but of course, Page’s claim was still widely believed anyway, because the opinion of an LGBT person who doesn’t attend the church in question obviously carries more weight than that of a person who actually does attend.

Here’s the thing, if you actually look into it, the connection between the church Chris Pratt attends and homophobia is tenuous at best. Pratt attends Zoe Church, which was founded by Chad Veach, a former pastor of Hillsong Church who left the organization in 2014. The founder of Hillsong Church, Brian Houston, spoke out against gay marriage a year later. Veach, to my knowledge, has not spoken up about his views on gay marriage in any way, neither before or after the controversy broke. To date, no evidence has been presented that he shares Houston’s views.

So, in other words, it’s guilt by association. Pratt attends a church that has a vague connection to a church with anti-LGBT views, so therefore, Pratt must be anti-LGBT. Never mind that at the time of the initial controversy, he stated the following:  

“We need less hate in this world, not more. I am a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgment of their fellow man.”

As for the claim that he’s a Trump supporter, or a Republican in general, the entire basis for this claim is that he didn’t attend a virtual Biden rally in 2020 with some of his MCU castmates. The assumption, therefore, is that he must support Trump, and refused to attend. However, at the time the rally was held, Pratt was out of the country, in a completely different timezone, because he was filming for Jurassic World: Dominion, so even if he had been invited (which he wasn’t), he wouldn’t have been able to attend.

Never mind that he stated in 2017 that he doesn’t feel represented by either side of the political spectrum, and supported Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. He couldn’t attend a Biden rally, and he’s a “known homophobe”, so therefore he must support Trump.

I don’t suppose we can just stop blindly accepting this narrative as fact now?

Am I the only that thinks Bucky is going to be the more lighthearted one of the two in the Falcon and Winter Soldier series, cause bro:

Sam looks so annoyed in every scene with Bucky. In this gif, he’s stressed, the “I left my oven on and I’m pretty sure that’s my building burning in the distance” kind of stressed and BUCKY LOOKS LIKE AN ACQUAINTANCE HAPPILY JOGGING ALONG AS UNWELCOME MORAL SUPPORT AND IT SEEMS TO BE CONSISTENT WITH THEM. Even when they’re fighting Peter, Bucky doesn’t grow more frustrated he’s kind of just like, “Damn,” and Sam is like, “mOTHERFUC-”

These situations are among the worst Sam has ever been in.

Bucky? Shit, any day Nazis are not electrocuting him is a fucking great day.

also, i assume that bucky isnt actually supersoldier running. because he is keeping pace with his new friend sam

sam: oh god gonna save the world oh fuck

bucky: out for a pleasant jog, might shoot some bad guys, who knows

Sam: How the fuck aren’t you stressed right now

Bucky: You have no idea how low my bar is for a good day

Sam is hearing the Law & Order theme

Bucky is hearing the Andy Griffith theme

SLYTHERIN: “For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.” –Joan D. Vinge (The Snow Queen)

SLYTHERIN: “Repeat nothing – absolutely nothing – that is told you in confidence. There is no such thing as telling just one person.” –Lois Wyse (The Six-Figure Woman)

This is so relatable, I’m dying.

LOUDER FOR THOSE IN THE BACK

the hardest thing to realize is that you were replaceable in someone’s life who was irreplaceable in yours

If just one person would stay, but everyone leaves eventually.