Everything about this is ill-advised

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

the idea that failure is an individual failing and not the oppressions of a broken system.

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

When I taught second grade, one of the options for students who had finished their work was to write a letter to the president. I would send all of the letters in a big envelope at the end of every month.

Watching my students get more and more frustrated with him (and concerned about his wellbeing) was not the result I'd hoped for when I came up with the idea, but it was kind of hilarious.

See, Obama had a standard packet with information and activities about his dog he'd send in response to letters from very young citizens...and of course his office sent one back to our class every single time we sent mail.

So eventually all of the letters looked something like this:

You should be extremely suspicious of any movement attempting to paint any part of society or history as simple. In any direction. For any reason.

They do also have eyes, and their vision is actually pretty acute. But their optic and mechanic sensory inputs aren't integrated together like electro-mechanic sense is. So they have these two fairly sophisticated sensory complexes that Barely talk to each other.

No wonder they try to bring the two inputs together in their environment then; picking things up and turning them around allows them to apply both their mechanical and optical senses to the object. They're just trying to make up for a deficiency of neural organisation.

Are you a Soldier? On a quest for justice or revenge? Ready to fight and flee and raise your weapons?

Are you a Seeker, searching for something lost? Something that needs to be found before it is too late.

Or are you a Schemer? Do you have a day job that needs work and night shifts that keep you up until dawn doing the hard work it takes to change fates?

Show me your results! I wanna seeeeeeee

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

Once again. I can understand the kneejerk impulse here, I do. It sucks to imagine, say, a creator scrolling online coming across some needlessly vitriolic post about something they worked on. But anyone is allowed to go "That's dickish" and move on, or people can engage with "I think this is oversimplified blah blah" if they want to but at the end of the day it isn't some kind of crime against the hobby or a fandom or even a singular person if someone just shoots off "This sucked I wasted my night" in their own accounts.

Like. A lot of people are trending towards thinking I'm talking about the importance of constructive criticism and like, sure, I think that is probably a more interesting avenue of analyzing something's flaws, but once again if you're not like, addressing an artist or interested in doing a deep dive that doesn't mean you're Not Allowed to be flippant or quick to judge. It's kind of startling how many times I've seen someone be like, "I can't stand this album" on their blogs, untagged, had that shit shared, only for it to come across someone's feed and for them to respond with "Why? What's wrong with it? People are allowed to like it, why are you being so negative, why are you tearing people down for no reason, this isn't even real critique," as though the intention in the first place ever was or ought to have been substantive critique in the first place.

Left anonymous because, I'm just gonna say it, sounds like you care. Regardless, I will help you out regardless.

Yes, a lot of life sucks here right now. But the general cultural vibe is one of earnesty and being there for each other. One lovely older white lady paid for my groceries the other day just because she wanted to. I was once crying my heart out at a grocery store and a man said he was gonna keep me in his prayers. Those people are as american as the voters who think my existence is a crime.

It is impossible to boil America down to being good or bad; it's a wonderful mess of contradictions of things that are great, and things that are terrible. We're the home of Star Wars, a franchise whose entire thesis is fighting back against fascism, and Star Trek, the birth of modern yaoi. But we're also the place that gave you scientology and billionaires. We're the country that voted for a guy who overturned our fundamental right to abortion, but we're also the country that fights like hell to keep that right in our state constitutions and will fully drop everything to get someone they know across state lines to get the medical procedure they need.

All of that is american. None of it cancels the other stuff out. Remember that the worst of us exists, but it is not all of us.

And if I had to distill America down to one sound, it would not be the braying voice of Velveeta Voldemort screaming about how much they hate windmills. It would be this: