i went into american public school for 6th grade and i pierced someone’s scrotum with a fencing foil that was missing the little rubber safety tip on the end by accident in gym and it was middle school so i was promptly nicknamed “The Nut Slayer” and i cried until my parents let me move back to europe and live with my grandparents
nutslayer is a powerful title
can you imagine a european person coming to your school for 1 year, stabbing you in the ball sac, then promptly fucking back off to europe immediately afterwards. can you imagine being the bloke with the stitch in their scrote because of some mysterious foreign spherepuncturer
I was doing my Master’s thesis on bullying until the topic triggered me back to my own childhood so badly I dropped out of that degree program. Let me share something I know.
We haven’t quite found anti-bullying programs that stop bullying once it’s started, but we canreduce the harm bullying does. Just a few small changes to classroom culture, like limiting children’s opportunities to exclude each other, or spending time talking about respectful communication, has visible changes. Yeah, there’s still a hierarchy of popularity, but kids at the bottom of the ladder go from having no friends on average to having one or two. And that’s enough to make or break a childhood. (Sources: onetwothreefourfive)
But here’s the other thing.
There is one major factor that mediates the link between childhood bullying and adult mental illnesses (predominantly depression, anxiety, and eating disorders). It’s self-blame.
What really damages children isn’t precisely being bullied; it’s believing that they deserve to be bullied. If children don’t blame themselves for being victims, they are much more resilient and experience fewer long-term negative consequences. (Sources: onetwothreefourfive)
Society blames children for their victimization by bullies all the time. It says, “There is something about you that causes people to bully you.“ Common responses to bullied kids are things like: “Don’t give them a reaction.” (They’re bullying you because you get upset.) “They’re just jealous.” (They’re bullying you because you do well.) “Let’s teach you some social skills.” (They’re bullying you because you act weird.)
If we can just change that one thing, we could prevent a lot of damage. What bullied kids desperately need at the very least is a caring community that says: You are not alone. It’s not your fault. What they’re doing is not okay.
Also extra horrible: if you get counseling for being bullied a lot of the time it is “identifying what rhing about you is causing people to bully you”. In other words, even the “help” you get us often blaming the victim for being bullied and framing is as your fault, even though ime even if you stop doing the thing you get bullied for the bullies won’t acknowledge it. I got bullied over stuff from third grade until I dropped out of school in 10th.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact sometimes bullying is things that end in ism and there is absolutely nothing you can do as you’re being blamed for your own marginalization.
Bullying is emotional abuse.
There is nothing that can ever make you deserve emotional abuse.
Telling people, directly or through your actions, that they’re at fault for being abused is, again, emotional abuse.
I hate the term “bullying” for this exactly reason.
“Stop bullying” programs don’t work because they treat “bullying” like its a unique, child-specific thing you grow out of once you reach the magic age of 18 and It Gets Better ™.
It’s not. It’s just a fancy word for abuse that people coined because they didn’t want to believe their precious little baby could abuse another child and everyone went along with it because NOBODY wants to believe a six year old can intentionally traumatize another six year old to the point where they want to take their own life. Its “just bullying.” It’s not abuse. Only adults can be abusers. Kids are bullies. And if a child DOES do something evil, they’re either mentally ill or an adult drove them to it. Children can’t be bad!
Except here in the land of reality, it doesn’t work that way. Being abused causes the same amount of trauma whether your abuser is 9 or 90. I don’t care if a child has the biggest, saddest sob story in the world, they don’t get to use that as an excuse to abuse other children. Adults don’t (or shouldn’t) get away with that, so neither should children.
If people really want to “fix” bullying, they need to ditch this useless term and start calling it what it is. Abuse. And then, start actually doing something about abuse besides gaslighting the victim and saying “well maybe the abuser had good reasons uwu”.
“If you get counseling for being bullied a lot of the time it is “identifying what rhing about you is causing people to bully you”
That’s literally how it was for me
My school literally told my mother that I should be removed from school until I could learn to be less of a disruptive influence.
The disruption I was causing was being bullied. Me being targeted by bullies was somehow my fault, my problem.They had me removed from classes rather than dealing with the bullies.
Naturally my mum told them to fuck off and had me put in a different school, because my mum doesn’t play those fucking games. Neither, fortunately, did the new school I was moved to.
That blame the victim was very explicitly taught to teachers in the ‘70′s and ‘80′s as the appropriate response and pretty much did horrific damage to my generation.
By the time I was learning to teach at the tail end of the ‘90′s it had been replaced with a target the instigator and the instigator’s… I’m going to use the word minions here, though they used kinder words in teacher college. That thing were they kick the back of the kid with the learning disabilities’ chair until ze explodes for the fun of seeing the kid explode and then get in trouble for it? I’d watch for that little asshole and come down like a ton of bricks on the bully first kick. I’d separate that kid from his or her sniggering friends, because they are supporting the bully in the assholery, and the bully would not only have me watching zim like a hawk for as many years as ze had me, I went around to all the teachers in the bullies pod with a list of assholery to look out for. Because, surprise! If you punish the bully hard and keep on that instead of punishing the victims? The bullying nearly disappears in your room. Not 100% but close.
We were getting really good results in my district with a mixed approach with the things star-anise
was talking about, but also a district wide program that targeted the audience of the bullying. The research was showing that bullies, whether in schools or that adult asshole sexually harassing adult women on public transport, etc.. read silence as approval. So we taught the kids that if they felt comfortable saying something either against what the bully was saying or in defence of the person being harmed, that it was the strongest way to help. If they didn’t feel safe doing that, slip away and get an adult. If they didn’t feel safe doing that? Leave. Because standing and watching strengthens the harasser. on our end, we all made an effort to intervene every single time, and to model how to verbally push back against it, and to use things like classroom geography to prevent isolation and break up clusters of people encouraging each other in asshole behavior.
It helped. It helped so much. I’ve had the instigator’s sniggering sycophants decide they were tired of getting in trouble and it wasn’t worth it to support the bully. I’ve seen groups of girls descend like Amazons to stand up for a kid being picked on before I could cross the room. I’ve had a boy turn to another boy and back me up when I was confronting him on homophobia. I’ve seen two girls and a boy hold a quiet but firm intervention about a certain boy’s bigotry while they were working on a poster project together. I saw the Middle School with the worst school culture in the District turn around in the course of year because of concerted whole school efforts to break up cliques and intervene whenever they saw even the start of something maybe happening.
I’ve also seen it work with street harassment where we stood up for the person being harassed. I think it needs to happen in workplaces and anywhere this sort of thing goes down. We need to have each other’s back, whether adults or children are being harassed, there need to be consequences and intervention. What ever the age of the person doing the asshole thing, people need to not stay silent witnesses, because that will always be a form of approval.
It can change. It can get better, but that only happens if a critical mass of us decide to make it better.
Also? If your school isn’t proactively protecting your kid? Sue them. It’s how we got the rural district a little north of here to go from dangerous as anything for queer kids to the most safe for LGBTQIA+ kids of every stripe and in two decades the whole culture of the town is noticeably changed an improved because the kids we taught they way have kids of their own now.
the grass in the original shrek movie is not grass. its hair. they used hair textures for the grass bc the actual grass for some reason in their computer modelling programs would not behave like grass so they used hair textures colored green.
elvis presley was a registered DEA officer who asked nixon for the title and was awarded it.
What else?
the great escape artist houdini was living in a time period where mysticism, fortune telling, ouija boards, seances and etc were becoming very common place and trendy. and he fucking hated it so much. so much that he would go to seances in disguise and make some bullshit off the wall shit like “my son died last year can you let me talk to him” and the seance person would be like ‘THIS IS YOUR SON HELLO FATHER’ then he’d rip off his disguise and be like YOU FRAUD I HAVE NO CHILDREN.
He died on Halloween night in detroit and as far as i know every year they hold seances on halloween trying to get in contact with his spirit. If seances work i bet his ghost is just pissed off and not responding out of raw spite.
foxes cant snarl like dogs and wolves cus the muscles in their muzzle dont allowe it so they just drop their jaws and scream.
That last one is DANGEROUS. I do not need this much power.
^This
Ok, sorry, but I have to reblog this! Definitely trying out the cake mix one!
I’ve been doing the cake mix one for a while ( this post opened my eyes) they taste home made ! My husband is amazed ! I haven’t told him anything, just take the praise 😂
… I can make red velvet chocolate chip cookies?
Saving this list out.
Can confirm that the cakebox mix to cookies is dangerous knowledge
can confirm that the
cakebox mix to cookies is
dangerous knowledge
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
This is pretty simple. Authors get paid when you buy their books. If you don’t buy their books, they don’t get paid. They get paid a percentage of the price you pay for their books. If you buy highly discounted books (from amazon or B&N or Scholastic book fairs), they get paid a lot less. If you borrow a book from the library, they got paid for that one time (in the US), but at least they got that. If you read a book from a pirated site, they don’t get paid.
The problem I see is that most people don’t understand this very simple equation. They think that authors get paid by publishers just to be authors. Hint: we don’t. Authors don’t get paid to do book tours. Unless people buy their books. Authors don’t get paid by the government to be authors. Authors don’t get paid by Hollywood for their books unless they get a pittance if they’re actually given an option (1% of authors get books optioned, 1% of those get made into movies). If an author gets a movie made, they still make very little of that money, except for if books are purchased. If an author wins an award, most of the time, they make no money from that directly, only if more books are sold.
Are you starting to understand what my point is here?
Yes, some authors make money on the side doing school visits for children. A lot of them don’t even make that, especially in Utah, where local publishers are using school visits as a promotional opportunity and have nearly eliminated the market for paid visits from authors who AREN’T trying to push books on kids. (Yes, I have strong feelings about this.)
Yes, these days authors make money sometimes by being youtube celebrities (I can count on one hand the number of authors doing this). Yes, authors sometimes make money through Patreon, though this is pretty new and we’re still figuring it out. Think about this for a minute. Authors have to hustle to make money because actually writing books doesn’t pay them very much. What? Yeah, even NYT best-selling authors are not making enough to pay mortgages sometimes.
Lots of authors are offered lots of opportunities to write for “promotion.” We do need to promote ourselves if we’re going to stay in the game and keep getting contracts for new books. But promotion is pennies. I’m not trying to complain about my chosen profession. This part of it sucks, but there are other wonderful parts, clearly, or I wouldn’t stay. But if you want to help me out and thank me for any of my writing you’ve gotten to read for free, it’s really simple. Buy one of my books. And while you’re at it, buy a book from another author you love.
If you can’t afford to buy the book, get it from the library. As OP states, at least then there’s one sale. And if it’s there on the shelves, people who haven’t heard of the author might pick it up, and mention it to someone, and spread the word of mouth about it. And if the book gets borrowed a lot, then the library is much more likely to buy the next book the author writes.
In the UK, there’s something called Public Lending Rights, where an author gets about 8 pence per borrow of their books (it’s a little more complicated than that, because they sample from a subset of libraries, but that’s the basic idea). So if a hundred people borrowed my book over the course of a year, I would get about £8. That may not sound like much, but that’s kinda the point OP is making.
Authors aren’t making a lot of money, so every little bit helps. Piracy doesn’t help at all.
Don’t fucking pirate books.
A publishing deal is nothing like a recording contract or being on a TV show/in a movie.
IF am author is paid an advance by the publisher – and that is getting rarer and rarer – it is basically “back payment” for 2+ years of work to write the book, and the average advance is $5000. For two years of full-time work – so that’s about $1.00/hr if you imagine it as payment for a 40-hour work week. AND AUTHORS DO NOT START TO EARN ROYALTIES UNTIL THEY’VE EARNED OUT THEIR ADVANCE. That means paying the publisher back in full for that advance money.
So really, authors make nothing until they’ve sold at least ~1000 books.
Most bestsellers sell roughly 5000 books. So to sell 1000 books and earn out the advance is extremely rare and extremely difficult. Most authors never sell enough copies to start earning royalties per sale, or else it takes 5+ years… and that’s IF despite low sales the publisher keeps your book in print at all. Most won’t.
If an author has not earned out their advance the first 6 months, most publishers stop printing that book, and the author never makes anything from what has already been sold because it goes to paying the publisher back for that advance.
Also when we say authors earn money for each book sale: it’s about $0.60 per book.
Yes, you’re paying $17.99+ for a hardcover or $8.99 for a paperback or ebook, but that is NOT how much the author gets. So if you imagine that an author DOES become a bestseller – let’s say they sell those 5000 copies and earn out their advance, so they get to make some money on the remaining 4000 books sold – that’s still only another $2400. It has likely been an additional 2-5 years at this point since they sold the book to a publisher.
So for 4-7 years of full time work, an average author makes MAYBE $7500. IF they are extremely successful and lucky.
That’s less than a dollar an hour for almost a decade of work.
Do not pirate books.
SOURCE: I work for a publisher.
And this right here is why so many authors have jumped ship to self-publishing – because Amazon offers insanely high royalties in comparison to traditional publishing.
The trade off of course is visibility. It’s still super hard to get your book into bookstores, libraries etc. Its well-nigh impossible to gain entry to the writers associations (SFWA, HWA, etc) without huge sales numbers, and that in turn bars you from the running for most awards.
So writers are left making the shitty choice between making money and being taken seriously.
It’s a brutal world out there for writers, and it gets worse and worse as consumers devalue books and expect to read unlimited content for free.
No writing advice. Just generating awareness!
Indie author here. Yes, to all of this, plus a further note: according to James Moore and Christopher Golden, who I had the very good fortune to chat with at an author networking event, maybe – MAYBE three percent of all authors published by one of the “big five” publishers make a living doing nothing but writing novels. Almost every published author has a day job or several side gigs going on to help pay the bills. James works at Starbucks for extra income and because, quote, “I like having health insurance.”
They also both named the same indie author who regularly out-sells them both. They are well-established, trad-published, award-winning, best-selling Authors with a capital A but they move fewer books than E.J. Stevens, a young woman who self-publishes and has an uncanny knack for marketing.
One final caveat: sure, there are sites out there that’ll set you up with pirated e-books, but you know what? Most of those sites are actually lying in wait to sucker in cheap fuckers and load their computers up with malware. Why risk it, especially when e-books from indie authors typically run in the $3 to $4 range?
