I want to make this absolutely clear to kids: children didn't used to be stuck inside the house like you are today. There used to be public places you could hang out. It used to be fairly safe to walk around because trucks weren't designed to kill children. You didn't need a car to go anywhere so kids without a license weren't trapped. There weren't 24/7 cable news networks constantly scaring parents with anecdotes even as crime was at all time lows and the biggest danger comes from adults kids know not strangers.

It's easy to ignore old people talking about "the good ol' days" because a lot of the people saying that shit are racist assholes, but the way society treats kids today really is objectively worse than how kids used to be treated. You deserve better, and you should know that better things are possible. We just need to kill the suburbs and for-profit news.

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I could go for a bike ride or walk with my sister or friends and we could leave after breakfast and not come back until dinner and our parents weren't worried. We lived on the edge of town, so we could turn left into the woods or turn right and go downtown or go straight and go to a friend's house in the neighborhood. I went to a park or the community pool or went out for ice cream alone from a young age.

I also regularly walked to and from school alone from as young as first grade (so, about age 6). And I'm not saying I walked three miles uphill in snow both ways, but I checked a map and it was over half a mile and crossed at least one street that people drive pretty fast on. And that was normal.

All the same for the ‘60s.

I think it wasn’t till I was 10ish, but I used to cross several major roads on my bike to get to the library, a mile-ish away. I was able to walk the mile to the local bank that had my savings account by myself. The grocery store was also on the way to the library and I would go get a gallon of milk on my own many times. There wasn’t really a park or playground nearby (or at least that was more interesting than playing in the woods), but we had a big back yard that backed up onto even more forest and we wandered around back there by ourselves all the time, playing in the creek, climbing logs, all the good shit. We went down the street to our friends houses by ourselves. There was a lot of freedom to leave the house alone in the 90s.

Who would like to add to a running list about things tumblr should change (and which are most important?)

It has four total questions, has short explanations of why the questions are there, is open response (so you are not trapped by the options I choose/think of), can be taken by anyone regardless of whether they will be participating in the blackout, and does not collect emails. All results will be published.

Reblogs for more data are greatly appreciated <3

Final (?) reblog of this, in light of the WIP announcement about upcoming updates. see current results here

Some shots of greater yellow lady’s slipper orchids from a hike on 6/2/23.

I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

Keep reading

I was not built for this (getting out of bed)

neither was i built for this (going to bed at a reasonable hour)

90% of my day is spent in bed but damn if that 10% is not in the middle of the night.

i am a firm supporter of changing your name to whatever you want regardless of your gender. if a woman wants to go by matt then matt she shall be. godspeed

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

Ask a community organiser: can you organise with Fran Drescher as president of SAG-AFTRA even though she's an antivaxxer? On broad based organising versus issue based organising.

Friendly reminder that unions are more effective at reducing workplace inequality than any corporate sensitivity training program.

07/17/23 // i need my golden crown of sorrow / my bloody sword to swing

PANIC IN SAN DIEGO AS COMIC-CON ATTENDEES MAY BE FORCED TO TALK ABOUT COMICS

“For example: A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love
(via queenofattolia)

it fucken WIMDY (part 3)