You all, fools: *getting tattoos based on the ancient tattoos they find on bog mummies and the other ancient dead that for all you know will bind you to a forgotten god that now by all rights has a claim on your life for better or for worse*
Me, and intellectual: *doesnt fucking do that*
A forgotten god cannot run my life any worse than I am currently running it myself.
I know that in Ancient Greece Athena wasn’t trying to protect Medusa by turning her into a monster and certainly wasn’t trying to help her by sending Perseus her way but guess what? This ain’t Ancient Greece, and during the several hundreds of years that story existed during that period it was retold and reinterpreted dozens upon dozens of times. If we modern readers wish to see it and reinterpret it as a goddess protecting Medusa we absolutely can. Stories and myths were never stagnant.
HELL YEAH, myth takes on new meaning depending on who reads it and retells it!! This is literally one of the primary functions of myth!! Myth is so rad!!
It’s sad that toxic game culture is so prevalent cuz like. As someone who has ended up in random matches with kids before, I can attest to how fucking easy it is to reverse and un-teach shitty attitudes in kids.
Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.
I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.
The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:
A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.
B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.
tl;dr: The kids are alright. Adults are shit heads.
I cant agree with this post more
I witnessed something similar with my younger brother (this was when he was In fifth grade so bear with me here) and his friends. The teacher assigned for them to build a somewhat accurate spanish mission in Minecraft because their school had gotten some iPads and she needed to assign them something other than a PowerPoint.
Now here’s the thing. Most of these boys, my brother included, have ADD/ADHD. About a week into the project all they had in their shared world was chaos. Somebody filled the place with tnt and lit it up. Holes everywhere. Whenever one would attempt to try and build something (mostly wood huts and not the actual project) it would be destroyed within minutes as the boys began to insult each other heavily and complain that the design was ugly.
I brought my own ipad with me and decided to sit with the boys while they continued their reign of terror. I joined the world and built a hallway out of brick at the very center of this war zone. Immediately one of them tried to destroy it under the impression that “it looks bad”.
“Well, what should I make it out of?”
“Diamond.”
The ten year old mind is a mystery to me…
Anyway, then I showed him some pictures similar to these:
I reasoned that it would be easier to sway this kid toward another pretty block than trying to get him to stick to the materials of the time, so I asked him if he would like to help me replace my brick design with quartz (eh, it’s white).
Bam! One of the ten year old anarchists is dutifully building me a glittering gem hallway for our insanely rich monks.
The other three are off somewhere still yelling at each other and setting off explosives, but we have something built. Much to my surprise the kid asked if he could build the church next because he “wanted to build the most important part”.
Here’s where I learned something important. I don’t have ADD or ADHD but as I said before my brother does. When he gets fixated on something, he’s really gets into it. Once a few minutes had passed and this kid already had four walls up I decided to grid up the entire mission. One gets the church, one gets the farm, etc.
After playing the game with them for an hour, I had a pretty good idea of where each kid should go.
Church kid, I found, was very particular about materials and shape(hence his hangup over the brick). I gave him free reign over the outer walls of the mission and showed him the reference pictures to get him started.
My brother liked the farms most (he was building dirt domes over the cows don’t ask me how I made this connection it just worked, okay), so he was in charge of building pens for the animals.
Another kid was, at first glance, very loud and bossy when it came to decorating (constantly said we were making chairs wrong). Turns out he likes interior design, like putting benches and beds in the little rooms, so his bossiness was just frustration with my brother’s artistic sense I guess.
Another was very good with placing trees and plants around the exterior (I guessed this because he covered the place in a ridiculous amount of trees and I asked him if he would like to know where they are supposed to go). He got to make a vineyard for us and organized how the crops should go.
So how did it turn out?
Actually very nice!!
So what did we learn? Kids actually like to play games and be praised for their creativity and intuition. If I had just told them to stop messing around rather than direct their attention to areas within their interests, they never would have gotten anything done.
After an hour of gaming they:
Mirrored my language; “thank you!”, “which part are you working on?”, “I like this block.”
Realized each other’s strengths; “hey [kid name] can you help me with the roof?” “How do you make the big trees [kid name]?”
Were able to articulate exactly what they did or didn’t like without using force; “that looks good!”, “how about we put it there?”, “I don’t like that block, how about this one?”
On the plus side, since we moved the game file to my device for safekeeping, I now have a cute little souvenir of the time I played Minecraft with four ten year olds.
This is a really long post, but it’s super important. In games like Fortnite where you’ll find lots of kids, it’s important (if you can) to steer them away from toxicity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into kids who talk like toxic adults and the act of just being nice to them completely turns them around.
The Addams family was, in fact, both magical and supernatural for its depiction of a healthy, loving, supportive, and fun married m/f couple.
This is now officially an Addams family appreciation post
In order to depict such purity and love in a m/f relationship, one must first set the foundation that these people are odd and not the norm. (per media standards)
They cared about their children, their children’s interests, and wanted the kids to always be true to themselves. How peculiar!
Gomez and Morticia never showed negative jealousy towards each other’s past love interests. Even going to far as complimenting them for being special to their true love. How bizarre!
They could forgive almost any character flaw in a friend or relative. The only thing that could not be forgiven was betrayals and pastels. Weird amirite?
Morticia is a woman’s woman. She allies herself with other women instead of competing with them. She even seeks to understand women different from herself and her beliefs. Strange.
Gomez wants Morticia to have whatever Morticia wants. He doesn’t give her permission, he actively supports her and motivates her. Fa-reaky.
I seem to recall once reading a review that said that Gomez and Morticia were the only couple on television in the 1960s whom you could actually imagine producing children.
I think we really need to reaffirm now that no amount of homophobia can be acceptable in our culture. There is no such this as harmless or victimless homophobia. All homophobia contributes to violence against us. You can not “disagree” with lgbt people’s “lifestyles” without supporting the rhetoric and legislation that puts us in very real danger.
Homophobia isn’t that black and white though. You can hate the sin and still love the sinner.
OK, as a queer person who grew up in a genuinely loving, caring, utterly wonderful, and still deeply homophobic Church, let me try to fill in what you’re not understanding about this whole “Love the sinner” deal.
When we refer to people like you as “Homophobic” I want to be clear what we’re saying here. This is not a judgment of your intent. We are not describing you as a hateful person, as an aggressive or violent person. But we are saying that your actions and your attitudes participate in and reinforce a system of rhetoric that encourages violence against LGBT people, and, far, far more importantly, that forces millions of LGBT people to live in shame.
That’s really what this comes down to. Not hate. Not violence. Shame.
Consider the point purely theologically. Jesus tells us that to desire a sinful thing is as bad as to act on that desire. My lusting after another mans wife is as bad as actually sleeping with her. My genuine desire to hurt someone is as bad as actually hurting them.
So when you tell me that loving another man is a sin, you’re not just talking about physical acts of intimacy. You don’t get to draw the line there. You don’t get to pretend that I can be bisexual so long as I never actually physically act on it (which is already a terrible burden to place on someone). You’re saying that every time I look at a guy and imagine how soft his lips would be, or think about how beautiful his eyes are, I am sinning. I am a sinner every time a dude walks past me with a tight sweater on that shows of his arms. Every time he has nice hair or a nice smile.
My love, according to you, is a sin. That is the burden you are forcing people to live under. That burden forced me so deep into the closet that I didn’t even know I was there. It forced me to repress every genuine feeling of sexual attraction for other men, and to live for years with those feelings straining to get out, whilst I struggled with the constant guilt and shame that came from having those thoughts.
And I am one of the lucky ones, because I’m alive to have this conversation. Because for many, many LGBT people that guilt and shame manifests as self-harm, substance abuse, low esteem that leads them into abusive relationships, and very often suicide.
You tell yourself that you’re one of the good ones because you don’t hate us. You only hate what we “do”. But what we “do” is living. It’s being alive and whole and a part of this world, and if you genuinely believe that we can’t have that then you might as well put the gun to our heads and pull the trigger. Because you’re already doing that, you just don’t have the guts to admit it.
and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
big.
In costa rica theres a single corn stalk thats grown 45 feet. it has it’s own greenhouse!
rip tumblr 