really like this reply i came across. skill issue. stop consuming media and start engaging with it. really good sentence.

THE OFFICE 3.10 A Benihana Christmas

My 5 year plan is to keep buying $8 frozen coffees until I die of preventable illness

Buddy that thing doesn't even look like it knows where it parked its flying saucer

I can clearly remember the moment I first realised my mother and I were living on completely different planes of existence. I was 7 years old and I came home from my school's first track and field day having placed second or third in every event. the teachers had been making jokes all afternoon about how many times they had to call my name. my friends thought I was cool as shit. my enemies thought I was cool as shit too, come to think of it. I was proud as hell. so I get home with the entire front of my shirt covered in ribbons like I was a military dictator who'd awarded himself every medal, I walk into the kitchen and tell my mum all about my day, and she goes "oh, that must be disappointing not getting any firsts." and I'm like no?? first of all the first place ribbons are red and I don't like red. second of all look at me. there's literally nowhere left on my body for accolades. I am fucking Jacked of All Trades. how could this possibly be a disappointment.

"Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?"

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.

Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.

Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.

“200 notes”

[SpongeBob Narrator voice] Ten Years Later

this is my favourite post ever

it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

I'd say that rejecting biological determinism in favor of space gas determinism isn't the slay the astrology queers think it is but if I'm being completely honest I fear that many members of our community haven't even really rejected biological determinism so much as sprinkled a layer of glitter on it

yes that's how confirmation bias works

People get their panties up in a twist about astrology because they think it’s people shoving themselves into boxes that are not pre-existing.

Most people who like astrology like it because it reflects things about themselves that they relate to that they have difficulty vocalizing themselves. And things like doing a chart reading can allow you to gaze deeply into yourself

yes that's how confirmation bias works

#wait wasn't that also OP?#is this the third such post now?#we shouldn't be pissing on the poor at all#“ok so we should only piss on the poor a little when there's no toilets free”

It's more than three. I've lost count but this is at least the fourth.

#hi op of the Taylor Swift isn't bisexual there are many bisexual pop girlies post

OP what wizard did you cut off in traffic to get cursed like this

Crazy shit goes down in South America

we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.

if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane

briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.

In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.

Ronald Wimberly's comic essay, Lighten Up, stays evergreen

i think it's actually really horrifying and detrimental that it's considered socially unacceptable to tell parents when they are making mistakes while raising their kids

"don't tell me how to raise my kids" is seen as a good defense and it's so disturbing to me.

children are not your property that you can do whatever you like with.

giving birth or impregnating someone or adopting doesn't give you some inherent wisdom that means you can never fuck up.

and you shouldn't have the right to abuse or neglect or misinform a child just because you have legal guardianship of them.

they deserve to have others speak up on their behalf. i don't care if it hurts your ego.

the vast majority of the time, it is all about ego and control btw.

a staggering amount of parents view their children as their property and see advice as someone trying to take away their "deserved" control.

a ton of them are more concerned with being perceived as a good parent over actually being one.

fundamentally awful shit like corporal punishment, anti vaxxing, poor homeschooling, parentification, child stars, kids being kicked out of their homes or forced into cults... all of that is possible because:

so much of the world's suffering is caused by this shit it's crazy.

“These new shows are just too expensive to make!” cry the people in charge of the choices that make shows too expensive to make

I watched a bts clip on ST: Picard about how expensive things were and that’s why we get such short seasons now then the next clip was about how the starship prop models were plated in real gold.

Okay so step one: don’t plate props in actual gold. This will save at least several dollars.

Grandma poison water SNAPPED