some blogs i follow: haha im getting really into this new topic lately so im gonna make a sideblog on it to keep my personal one organized and preserve the original content :^)
me, changing my url blog title and content to reflect my newest hyperfixation which has already shifted nine times from the subject matter 90% of my followers expected: what?
There was a bit on TV the other day about child carers and their ‘heroism’. And, I was a child carer, and…
It’s not heroic, guys. It’s very much not. You keep going because you love your parents, because you don’t want to see them in pain, but that much responsibility as a child can really mess you up. It’s not fair, it’s awful, it makes you feel like an ableist piece of shit when you want your own life as an adult, but…it’s what happened. Happens.
There’s nothing heroic going on when nobody involved (not the child, not the parent, nobody) has a choice, you know? What should happen is, there should be carers trained and paid by the government to step in in those situations, at no cost to the family. There should be free classes in schools that teach people how to care, how to use hoists etc. There should be less stigma around the ‘gross’ aspects of care, believe it or not, there really is no shame helping someone go to the bathroom and it’s horrible that we think there is. There should DEFINITELY be life-saving equipment, wheelchairs etc, provided to people for free, you know?
There’s a lot of ‘free’-dom going on there, which makes me realise that no, this stuff will not happen in my lifetime. But until it does happen, you don’t get to call my child self ‘heroic’. Society failed her and her family. It’ll keep failing people, too, until all the care systems we currently have are overhauled, until we stop sweeping disability under the rug.
the “raised in a jewish family” collection (incomplete, because i would have been here all day)
thank you for collecting some of these. it seems that the only thing that scares gentiles more than gefilte fish and jews in hollywood and finance, is unambiguously stating that someone is jewish on wikipedia.
Do they think if they flat out state someone is Jewish 3 times a Jew will magically appear alah beetlejuice /sarcasm/
little do they know that the actual summoning technique is just a juicy debate
I don’t know…I suspect that if I ever got a Wikipedia page it would end up taking the ‘family/parent/grandparent was Jewish’ route purely because my mother’s father (but not her mother) was Jewish AND she went to a Jewish school and was I think more or less raised Jewish BUT some stuff happened and when I was born I was raised pretty firmly Christian for a while THEN some more stuff happened and my family isn’t religious anymore and I never really was I think BUT my mum sometimes still describes herself as Jewish BUT whilst I am super proud of the snippets of my Jewish ancestors’ history that I do know I’m not sure if I could ever describe myself as Jewish out of fear of appropriating an identity I’m not entitled to.
So I usually go with ‘my mum/mum’s side of the family is Jewish’.
Because I feel like I have a lot of the first hand precedent experience that people are going through now when you see fans throwing tantrums and attacking others, creators and fellow fans alike, for the latest “abomination” to ruin something from their childhoods.
Back in 99 I was 15 and wound up falling in love with Star Wars all over again thanks to Episode 1. Everything up on the screen sang to me, not only on a level equal to what I’d grown up with on VHS but deeper– Naboo was like something out of a Disney storybook or a trip to the Cloisters blended with space opera sci fi; the Pod Race was the best scene from Ben Hur done at a sheer speed and scale of action I couldn’t have even found while playing Mario Kart; everything on Coruscant, from the grandeur of the Senate to thr stateliness of the Jedi Temple, was all kinds of art deco loveliness, like an apotheosis of New York City; and the Duel of the Fates combines all of the best things about the movie at once, it’s sheer imagination of design, the focus of its action, the heroism of the Jedi and the mystery of the Sith all in one package. The only real negative feeling I had when the movie was done was the nagging sensation that I liked it way better than anything in the OT, and with that an automatic obligation of low level guilt. But that was soon replaced by another negative feeling.
The scorn of my fellow fans.
It’s something I’d felt before, bit by bit. I fell in love with the movie Hook when it first came out– Peter Pan by way of Spielberg and Robin Williams, how could you do better? But then other kids in my 2nd grade class made fun of me for it, and I wound up “changing my mind” just to stop being mocked. Same thing happened when I liked Super Mario Bros. and didn’t even see Jurassic Park (I caught that on VHS and liked it), but by then I was sort of angry about the attacks. By the time I got to middle school and was bullied by macho freaks who thought anime was “gay”, I didn’t even know how to compute it all (they definitely weren’t watching the same anime I was).
So now when I see old school Ghostbusters fans waging genuinely shocking sexist, racist and homophobic tirades against the new movie and the people who like it, I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. This is the fandom experience I’ve grown up with after all, one that took the divisions already existing of what franchises you liked best or what game systems you played and split into even more and more factions, like a fertilized egg undergoing cellular division. The generations who couldn’t accept Trek and Star Wars side by side or Zelda and Doom on the same level are the ones who encouraged OT fans attacking anyone who grew up with the Prequels and tried to convince them to “change their minds”, and they’re the same ones now who can’t accept a remake to a 32 year old film to include women and modern comedy sensibilities without igniting a new GamerGate out of pure spite. I don’t even really care about this new movie, and find the corporate politics behind it suspicious at best, but goddamnit, if people are enjoying it the least you can do is try to be polite about your disagreement.
Paul Feig and George Lucas mightve ruined your childhoods, guys. But you know what? You guys helped ruin MINE. Please don’t do the same for anyone else.
I have such fond memories of TPM, all mixed up with my favourite memories of childhood and summer holidays and endless sunshine. 1999 was awful for 12-year-me in many ways, but it was also sort of myformativeyear (probably because of the awfulness), and discovering Star Wars was a small but important part of that. When I hear the usual crowd of fanboys and comedians 15 years older than me yelling the usual angry junk about how The Phantom Menace ruined their childhoods, I keep thinking, you were doing that 17 years ago when I was the one supposed to be the target audience! At least your childhoods were over before they were ruined!
It kind of really confuses me when Barbie commercials have little girls dressing them up and brushing their hair Like no Barbie is not about fashion. Barbie is about collecting as many dolls as you can get your grubby 7 year old hands on and dominating the living room with your expansive empire of plastic women. Barbie is about creating intricate social structures and spicy inter-family conflicts between town house residents. Barbie is about formulating complex back stories for tortured Ken dolls with emotional scars. It’s about creating near-sadistic dramatic plot twists that split up marriages and cause that one Barbie you really dislike to be ceremoniously tossed down the stairs in order to be offed by the jealous ex-wife of Ken #4.
Yes, but how do you make it into a marketable commercial that won’t freak parents and caregivers out?
I’ve always had the impression that advertisers don’t really understand how girls play with their toys.
When I played with Barbies I had this thing called “The Dead Pit” which was a purple bratz laundry hamper. So whenever a Barbie got killed off she would go in there. And what I would do was I would carry her to the dead pit while singing the dead pit song. The dead pit song was just saying “The dead pit” over and over again in different tones. Anyway, once I finally reached the pit I would announce “(name) has died.” And drop her in. I would wait a few moments. Then, I would violently shake the hamper while shrieking, pretending to be the tortured souls of dead barbies from the underworld. I thought it was hilarious.
God I loved Barbies as a kid. I had about three of them I think? (Plus a few more non-Barbie knockoff dolls). Whoever my favourite Barbie was that day, it was her job to save Ken from various damsel-in-distress situations, like “falling in the river” (being pushed off the sofa). I miss ‘em
When I was 15-17 and hanging out on LiveJournal (the primary social media hangout for a lot of people back then, like Tumblr is now) there was this huge ‘hating kids’ movement. Or it felt huge to me I suppose, being a child and all. Fifteen is still a child, I’m quite sure of it.
There were a lot of blogs dedicated to hating children and most of them consisted of classist little parables about overweight mothers and their ugly kids holding up the lines in Walmart. There were worse, too. There was one particularly memorable one where some grown adults threw a temper tantrum having seen a stranger’s child win a Harry Potter costume contest over them. (It’s probably still festering away on the Internet somewhere.) I remember all this stuff like it was yesterday, it’s weird. People much older than me threw around phrases like “breeder” (for the mothers) and “crotch-turd” (for the kids). There used to be a poster at my high school advertising – I don’t know – better teacher-student relations? – that listed all the harmless phrases children were likely to be called, ‘sprog’ and ‘kiddie’, that sort of thing. I mentally added ‘crotch-turd’ to it every time I walked past. Fifteen is still a child!
Someone made a post about a bumper sticker they saw that read “My kid has more chromosomes than your kid”. Referencing Down Syndrome. “It’s called a poison womb, sweetie :)” the poster wrote, luxuriating in their privileges. “I don’t think I want kids,” I wrote in my childhood journal. “What’s the point of having a kid if it’s just gonna be hated from the day it’s born?”
Hurricane Katrina came in 2005. I was an ocean away and Britain doesn’t really have hurricanes, I’d never have to face something like that. There was an article going around about a pregnant nurse who had stayed at the New Orleans children’s hospital to help the sick and dying children there whilst the hurricane raged. If she was one of the thousand-strong death toll I didn’t know. “It means less pregnant mothers and babiez to deal with in the long run ;)” said some nameless commenter on one of my dashboards, out loud, publicly, proudly. I want to say I hope they never faced something like that. But I’m not sure I’m that charitable.
Fifteen is still a child! Seventeen is still a child! You deserve(d) so much better!
