"Why not make female heroes more feminine so girls know you don't have to be masculine to save the world" is misguided. The target audience of heroic adventure genre is not children who actually save the world in a literal sense, it's children who want a cathartic outlet for the struggles and injustice they face. And one of the most common types of injustice that many girls and children assumed to be girls are subjected to is forced feminization.

skyler white: youre a drug dealer and youve been lying to and gaslighting me this whole time about what you've been doing. i think you are an active danger to myself and this household but you refuse to move out of the house or let me receive a divorce. what do you have to say for yourself?

walt:

media literacy includes understanding why a media product was made, to whom it's being sold, and the assumed preferences of its marketing demographic. narrative is not produced or sold in a vacuum.

i love this tweet

The reactionary backlash to media analysis is a natural part of the wider "fascists hate anything intellectual" phenomenon, btw.

Wanting you to ignore the politics of Star Wars comes from the same exact place that wants you to substitute the germ theory of disease with the 'sickness comes from failure to be a good christian and most people who claim to be sick are just faking anyway' myth.

To take a quote from Dan Olson:

"that's right, your majesty! You are in dire need of a new freezer... Do not concern yourself with the large cardboard container in which it shall be delivered! Just let your lowly advisor take care of that..."

Aborted Descartes voice: I would've thought...if I was.

"This child is never a bother! This child is so low maintenance!"

When I was a kid, I once walked around an entire mall with gum in my mouth that had almost immediately turned to liquid for some reason. I didn't want to bother anyone to find a trashcan.

When I was a kid, I once ate a reheated frozen meal still partially frozen because I didn't want to bother anyone to use the microwave again.

You see a "low maintenance" child and I see a child too afraid to ask for their needs to be met.

I do want to clarify that in my particular case, I just had one of the worst anxiety disorders a child could have and no one knew. This wasn't due to my parents ever acting as if I were a burden or making me think they'd be upset by these things.

I didn't specify that in the original post because I know that very much isn't the case for many children. For a lot of them, they are acting this way out of a genuine and valid fear of the consequences.

Regardless of the why of it, there are children out there touted as perfect kids and the reason they're so "perfect" is that they are afraid to admit to not being perfect. And honestly being constantly called perfect makes it so much fucking worse.

So yeah. Whatever the reason, my heart goes out to all my fellow "well behaved" kids. You and I deserved to not be perfect. We deserved to be heard and have our needs met.

So parents out there... Make sure your kids are actually okay. Check in with them. Make them feel safe. Make sure they know that they will be loved even if they cause you inconveniences.

Shout out to kids that had the opposite experience.

Shout out to the kids who were high maintenance. Shout out to the kids that were told they were hard to love. That were told they were too needy. That were told they were too much.

You deserved to have your needs met without criticism. You deserved a family that loved and supported you unconditionally.

We all deserved better, whether we made ourselves smaller for the sake of others or were told we were too big and too much trouble. I hope that those of us who decide to raise kids can take those lessons and make sure the new generation has it just a little bit better than we did. 💖

And shout out to those of us who were somehow both. You deserve love too.

A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

Reblog if you are daunted by the complexities and unknowns

in the chillest possible way,

late night reminder to self: your depressive episode will not last forever. it will have an end. tonight will not be the end of you.

Hey guess what i saw this a few days ago when i was in an absolutely scary slump and then i spoke to my counsellors and did what they told me to do and now i feel so much better. So this is true. Reblogging for more good luck

why is this so beautiful in like a space way

I love thinking I'm a hater and then meeting a real hater and going wow that does not look fun actually. Going back to my lukewarm hater ways. Performative haterdom. I couldn't name five hater bands.

moments of peace

once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!

My favourite example of this comes from English vs. Icelandic. Consider the words cat and kit, they both have the c/k sound, it's the same sound.

Except, it isn't actually? The sound in kit is aspirated, like, slightly breathier, almost like there's a little wheezy H following it. We can if we repeat the words to ourselves, hear and feel it (n.b. if you're in public you will look like an absolute lunatic doing so of course), but we don't actually categorise them as separate sounds so we don't hear them as such. In English, those are allophones, technically different sounds that are considered to be one sound/interchangeable in a language.

In Icelandic these are distinct phonemes though, there are words where the sole difference in pronunciation is between k and k(h). There are words in Icelandic that sound wholly different to an Icelandic speaker, that are homophones to an English speaker.

On the other side of that, in Japanese r and l are allophones of a single phoneme, Japanese people are saying both sounds, but they're just like...that's one sound though. Even experienced English speaking Japanese people who've learnt to pronounce r and l in the right places struggle to actually hear them as different sounds in speech. And interestingly, if you fully isolate the sounds they can easily tell the difference, but you put it into speech and the brain goes "nope, same sound actually".

So basically, Japanese: "Hi Rucy" English: "It's Lucy, not Rucy." Japanese: ??? English: "Anyway, let me introduce you to Kat" Icelandic: "It's Kat, not Kat" English: ???