Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” – G. K. Chesterton
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)
Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around
Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram
in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine.
i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft
if your fictional discrimination is predicated on the marginalized community doing something to “deserve” its marginalization, you automatically fail any commentary on, or application of your story to, real-life oppression
“The Xingbarts started a war with us and now we Gurbits all hate them!” FAIL.
“Nurts are a legitimate, powerful threat if they aren’t denied basic rights!” FAIL.
“In the past, the Snorfals were our oppressors, so now we oppress them!” FAIL.
oppressors will certainly use any means at their disposal – including logic, science, religion, history, and philosophy – to justify oppression. “women are just physically incapable of learning, that’s why we can’t let them attend university!” “black people are divinely ordained by God to be our slaves!” “the jews control all the banks, that’s why we have to kill them!”
but it’s never real! it’s never actually valid! the whole point of oppression is that it’s completely arbitrary! there is no “reason” no matter how hard you try!
if you try to inject “grey areas” by making your fictional discrimination justified, you have fundamentally failed to understand how it works in real life
of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t have grey areas in your writing. there’s all sorts of actual grey areas in real life you can draw on: intracommunity issues, different ways the oppression is applied to different groups, internalized oppression, different philosophies within the group on the way to combat it
but none of those are “well actually oppression makes sense because reasons!”
“And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”
“Jesus, how can I avoid sin when all these hussies keep revealing the fact that they have bodies?!”
“Hmmm, tough call bro. Have you tried gouging out your eyes so you don’t have to see all those bodies anymore?”
“wut”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t you tell them to… stop dressing like that or something?”
“Don’t see why. It’s not their fault that the fact that they have bodies makes you a fucking sinful horndog. Gotta fix that problem yourself, buddy. Go on, blind yourself.”
“Uh….”
“Or learn to keep it in your g’damn pants no matter what they’re wearing.”
He goes on for like several examples too.
“How can I avoid like, an accidental slip of the hand when…they’re dressin like that?”
“Cut it off.”
“wut”
“Cut it off. Your hand. If it’s a problem, stop having a hand.”
Gather ‘round kids: I had a coworker mention to me this morning that it’s impossible to get grease stains out of fabric. As a former chemistry minor who worked two years under the table doing housekeeping and who generally tends to be a fucking disaster, I am here to tell everyone that it absolutely is not impossible, in case this is a widespread belief. Here are a few of my favorite cleaning stain removers that I always have at home.
Here are some options:
A Tide™ pen.
I’m a generic kinda lady. I hate promoting brands 99% of the time. BUT if you catch absolutely any kind of stain before it gets ground in, you can get most of it out with one of these babies. I’ve tested it on blood, chocolate, coffee, guacamole, pizza sauce, red wine on, on that one time i accidentally slopped some oil I was supposed to be using on antiques onto a fancy rug (also an antique but not the one I was gunning for). If you’re washing something delicate, pump it onto your finger a couple of times and gently rub it in. I’m not sure what they put in these things but I’m pretty sure it’s an arcane secret.
Dish soap
Granted, this is a little trickier for upholstery/carpet, but it can still be done using a rag, some water, and some patience. But for clothing, just pour some soap on the stain and rub it in under cold running water.
Absolutely any clear alcohol is your new best friend
You know the old “white wine to clean red” trick? Well, this is its updated sister I like to call “you, too, can use coconut rum to get red jello shot out of your nice white dress”. It’s a nice party trick. Straight vodka works even better. For every day situations involving any kind of alcohol-related spills (including markers)–and especially work situations–rubbing alcohol is ideal. To quote another adage, this one from every chemistry teacher you will ever meet, “like dissolves like.”
Hydrogen Peroxide
It can get blood out of absolutely anything, including your mattress. It reacts with the iron in hemoglobin, which breaks down the molecule, causing it to lose its red color. So make sure you’re not using a cast iron skillet to wash your period underwear in.
Vinegar
This will dissolve lime buildup overnight. Fill a bag, tie it around your showerhead, and presto. You can also use it to scrub the area around your sink and to break up any buildup in pipes. (Limeaway™ is for rich people.)
Baking soda
This is great if you have a pet or child who peed on the carpet. Just cover the area, wait until it dries, and vacuum it up. The longer you leave it, the better it will do at removing the smell. It’s also good removing mild odors from a small space, like a fridge or a laundry hamper.
Charcoal
This is your heavy duty odor killer. A little goes a long way. In chemistry, activated charcoal is used as a purifier in reactions, and in medicine, it can be used to treat mild poisoning/overdoses. In your car that smells like someone died because you forgot you had potatoes in the trunk for six months? All you need are regular old charcoal briquettes. Stick a couple handfuls in a flat box and the smell will be gone overnight. Guaranteed. For larger areas, just use more charcoal.
Baking soda is also good for stuff stuck on pots pans and your stove top. Add a little bit of water and elbow grease and it’s like magic
Baby shampoo will get oil stains out of clothing even if it’s been washed and dried several times. Shampoo is formulated to remove oil from organic stuff.
Fabric cleaning tips. good to know for sewers.
How about worn-in fast food grease? Does anyone have any tips for getting it out?
Soak in lemon juice and Dawn.
A thick paste of borax and water – about a 1:1 ratio – is great at loosening stains from light-coloured carpets, even if the stain has been allowed to set for several days first. I’ve found it to be especially effective against vomit stains, which is handy if you have pets who like to puke in out-of-the-way places that aren’t likely to be spotted right away.
(Some sources will say to use borax and vinegar instead of borax and water, but I haven’t found the vinegar to be necessary, and the acid can cause colour changes in some types of carpet; be sure to test first if you go that route.)
Once my friend Henry was accused of wearing wireless headphones by a substitute so she said for him to hand them over so he took them off and handed them to her. Then later on she asked him a question and he didn’t respond so she said it louder and he still didn’t respond. She asked why he was not responding and he said “I can’t understand you ma’am, you took my hearing aids.”
HOLY SHIT
one time we had a sub that was handing back papers and called my name. I asked if someone could grab it for me and she started mocking me for not even standing up. taunting me asking why I was not walking up to the front to get the paper myself.
my classmates went dead silent and after the sub’s laughter ended someone informed her that the wheelchair parked nearby belonged to me
My sister once had her insulin pump ripped off of her because her exam proctor (a sub) thought it was some cheating device. He soon figured out that it was, in fact, not, when the port on her side (the place the needle goes in) started bleeding through her shirt. Her pump started beeping frantically, because that’s what it does, and it was general chaos until my sister ripped what’s basically her pancreas out of his hands, told her friend “Let the next proctor know I’ll need extra time,” and walked out of the room towards the nurse.
Literally schools are shit with disabilities. In elementary school I was having a high blood sugar reaction(cold sweats to rapid passing in and out of consciousness, vomiting and finally leading to a massive seizure before you die) and I KNEW I had to go to the nurse cuz I was getting worse. Kept telling my teach I needed to go and he kept saying no till finally I felt myself about to throw up and I’m screaming LET ME GO (i was a little kid to me i couldnt do anything in an institution without an adults say so or id basically go to hell) and the bitch said SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH AND PAY ATTENTION TO THE LESSON where I proceeded to projectile vomit all over my desk and he jut kept going on with the lesson. Finally I just booked it out of the room but I was too far gone to even REMEMBER where the nurses office was let alone where the hell I was that my class literally just left and helped me to the nurses office. I immediately went to the hospital and officially died for 5 minutes before I was revived. I could have stayed dead all because some fuck twad thought his lesson was more important than a students life
After Columbine, a local school installed metal detectors and made everyone walk through them and put their bags on a table for a teacher to search.
A few days into the school year, a teacher ripped a boy’s insulin pump off him because she thought it was a weapon, despite he and his sister insisting it was an insulin pump and he needed it to live.
I don’t know how many of you are still in school but I have some valuable knowledge that might actually help with this problem! In the United States there’s this thing called a 504 Plan that you can get which basically gives you legal protection from disability/chronic illness discrimination in public schools.
Students can qualify for 504 plans if they have physical or mental impairments that affect or limit any of their abilities to:
walk, breathe, eat, or sleep;
communicate, see, hear, or speak;
read, concentrate, think, or learn;
stand, bend, lift, or work
Examples of accommodations in 504 plans include:
preferential seating,
extended time on tests and assignments,
reduced homework or classwork,
verbal, visual, or technology aids,
modified textbooks or audio-video materials,
behavior management support,
adjusted class schedules or grading,
verbal testing,
excused lateness, absence, or missed classwork
I’m a type one diabetic and my school nurse would do stuff like keep all my meds in a locked cabinet, not let me take my insulin or test my blood sugar unless she was watching me, and lie to my mother about me inducing low blood sugars in order to get out of class. She wouldn’t even let me keep glucagon (emergency sugar injection) on my person in case I passed out from low blood sugar.
So one day I casually mentioned all this to my endocrinologist and she was really mad. She was really angry at the school nurse for mistreating me like that and informed me of this thing called a 504 plan. A 504 plan protects students with disabilities and chronic illnesses from discrimination by outlining exactly what a student needs to meet their special needs. For me, this meant I had to be able to keep ahold of my own meds in case of emergency and keep track of my own glucose levels, that I would never be marked late for a class if I was busy treating a low, and I could pause the clock on a standardized test to check my blood sugar and treat it.
If you have a disability and you’re still attending public school, PLEASE read up on 504 plans because they saved me so much grief when I was still in school. It might help you too.
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