If you're a freak like me, wave your flag

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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

I had almost the exact opposite experience that olderthannetfic did. I was homeschooled and my mom was trying to teach me to read the phonics way. I could read really simple, intuitive words, but hit a block when it came to progressing beyond the Dick and Jane level.

English phonetics are pretty inconsistent because it's actually four other languages in a trench coat, plus we had the great vowel shift. Not that anyone explained that to me at the time. English spelling grinds my gears a lot less now that I understand that history.

But at the time I would get so confused and frustrated over things like C sounding like K sometimes and S other times, the random silent K at the beginning of some words, etc. This issue never seems to get brought up in discussions about how phonics is clearly superior. Maybe I had more problems than average with inconsistencies due to autism, but I can't imagine that I'm the only kid who had issues with this.

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

When we talk about kink, a lot of the time people treat safe words as if they are exclusively an expression of an absolute limit. A firm proclamation that the scene is too rough, the pain too much, the situation too extreme, and that the entire thing needs to stop. Safeword use in such situations is obviously essential and mandatory in order to bring the scene or sensation to an end and ensure the safety of all participants. This is not, however, the only time a safeword should be used.

They can be used to express when someone is at their limit. They can mean the scene needs to end completely because the sub can't take it anymore at all. But they don't have to mean that. Safewords should be used to pause or stop the scene and break character for any reason. You can also use your safeword to pause and discuss a limit, communicate that something is or isn't working for you, ensure that everything is going to plan, take a water break, go get a toy from the other room, check with your partner about something, pause to change your laundry, or do absolutely anything else out of character related to your scene.

This is why a lot of people use green/yellow/red.

Green - continue

Yellow - pause and make a change (this can be anything from "slow down a little bit" to "I need something different but want to keep going")

Red - I need this situation to be over and for us to get right into aftercare.

What a lot of people seem to miss is that in this framework yellow is also a safeword.

All of this is ignoring the additional dimension that Dominants also need to safeword!! It's completely normal and if you're doing a lot of BDSM it should happen in your daily kink life often. Real life is not a romance novel.