An Essay Of Thoughts

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

Like not in a "I don't want my kids to read XYZ book" but in a "Are they actually capable of understanding and processing the material in the book properly."

Teenagers are not mentally adults. They will not be able to comprehend certain things because those are things that come with age, and life experience.

If you are willing to help guide a teenager through adult materials up to and including when to recognize when you should stop reading a book, then feel free to show whatever feel is going to help the child.

If you aren't willing to do this and just chuck a bunch of books at a teenager, then you're just setting them up for failure.

I wasn’t even talking about teens! I was talking about elementary age kids reading sexual content not adolescents encountering new or difficult concepts! Jesus Christ! I think it’s genuinely worse than the moms for liberty style censorship to censor materials simple because an adult has made the call about what they might find easy enough to understand! How is a teenager supposed to gain wisdom and experiences if a bunch adult busy-bodies prevent them from exercising their own judgement about what they want to learn? At what point is someone who’s old enough to drive, have sex and be sentenced to life in prison also allowed to pick their own reading material? How is a person going to be able to understand or absorb ideas if they never get challenging practice?

This means that I was reading adult sci fi at age 9 or 10. I was reading Spider Robinson's Lady Sally's House (Lady Sally McGee is a madame and her House is a brothel) books at age 11, which prepared me for when I was 13 and read them again and had a Reaction. It meant that I knew what bisexuality was, and that it was ok and fine (despite my extremely conservative surroundings), and that I could look at that description and have a Reaction and then think about a cute boy and go, Oh, I'm bisexual, that's cool then. Which means that I didn't have a fucking breakdown when I was 16 and fell in love with my best friend. All I did was get scared about if my best friend loved me back and if my dad was going to kick me out. (Best friend did love me back, dad did not kick me out. Senior year of high school, when I was out in the 90s in Central Florida, was a whole new kind of hell, but thanks to my friends I came through it without getting gay bashed even once. Just, you know, got sexually harassed by a dean and got a death threat from a Klansman kid at school. It was fine.)

If my parents had stopped me from reading those books when I was "too young", my life would have been much poorer, and not just in that way. I learned sex positivity, sex worker positivity, fat positivity, kink positivity, trans positivity, and more from those books, all two of them. From its sibling series, the Callahan's Place books (Callahan is Lady Sally's husband and owns a bar, and I read these even earlier), I learned about how loving and being honest and kind with your friends can save the world, and until that day comes, you can make terrible puns and tell tall tales and play music and drink, and that doing those things with your friends is practice for saving the world. Is what lets you save the world with them. It was MLP:FIM for horny barflies in the 1970s. And let me tell you, it was amazing to a 9 or 10 year old me.

There are, of course, many things wrong with these books and their followups (the Mary's Place books and The Place books). Because Spider wrote them in the 1970s and 1980s. And he wrote that first story in the first book, "The Guy With the Eyes", to get out of the sewer. Literally. He was, at the time, more socially conscious than your average cis white guy. But he's not perfect, and his books aren't perfect, and also the language and the landscape changed a lot in those decades. Some of the words he used then are Bad now, but were Correct then. He did a pretty good job, though.

Those books taught me things I needed to know when I was "too young" to read them, and they kept me from killing myself when I was severely depressed and read them over and over, and they are goddamn good books. Maybe some kids would've been upset or even traumatized by them. Certainly most kids would not have bothered reading them. I did, and they saved me so many times over.

When I was 10-ish, I brought Stephen King's Firefly home from the library. My mom had a brief AUGH moment, asked to look the book over before I read it (literally the first and last time), and I got it back in my pile a few days later. I don't think I made it past page three, because I really don't like King.

(Ironically, the books that probably did the weirdest shit to my developing understanding of sex and relationships were the Lioness Quartet and Wild Magic books by Tamora Pierce- books that were firmly in the appropriately young adult age range, but featured young female leads getting into questionable relationships with their teachers and much older men.)

When I was 15, I borrowed one of my mom's romance novels, where the lead had a history of being abused. She asked if I had any questions or concerns about what was in it, and she was kind of surprised when I said no, but it was really remarkably tame about sexual assault compared to some of the non-Xanth Piers Anthony I'd read by then.

But like OP says: it did not kill me. It was fine. And also, I have been an archaeology nerd for most of my life and, for all its flaws, Auel's stories did have a LOT that served to humanise neanderthals and cro magnon both, and to ground the fictional societies of the stories in something real and understandable. It talks in depth about how animals were hunted and their bodies processed. How leather was made, how foraging was done, what herbs were used for what medicinal properties. Things we've learned from ethnography and experimental archaeology and help us to understand the societies of early humans - and to understand that they were people, just like us.

There's plenty of stuff I think I was probably "too young" to read or which impacted me negatively or which just confused me but (Dragonriders of Pern, Twilight, and my first forays into Discworld respectively), but at the same time: I'm still alive. I have had time to process these things. I have gone back to some of these with a more critical eye (Pern, Twilight) or with more understanding and enjoyment (Discworld) since! I have also thrown books across the room when they annoyed me or upset me.

(Most notably: I threw Cursed Child across the room for probably obvious reasons, and I threw a book with an archaeologist protagonist across the room because in the prologue she's excavating an infant skeleton and sexes it! Which you Cannot Do. The bones aren't formed for that yet. Not til after puberty. And even THEN you can get it wrong. Bodies are weird.)

Anyway: my point is: sometimes you may be "too young" for certain aspects of certain stories. Which is why you can skip ahead or put the book down or, if it upsets or annoys you, you can throw the book across the room and decide not to read any more of it! But at the end of the day, reading a book isn't going to kill you. It may give you some weird ideas, but that's why you learn introspection and critical thinking: so you can pick those things apart.

Because who else in Regency England was wearing plain, unadorned silk wedding dresses? The religious group known as the Quakers, that's who.

On the left we have fictitious Penelope Featherington, about to become Penelope Bridgerton. On the right we have a real wedding dress worn by a Quaker woman, Lydia Poultney, in 1809. While made of a sumptuous fabric, it is unadorned - a specific religious statement for a Quaker.

Pen's hair clip and hem ruffles here edge away from pure plainness, but are not out of place for plainer Quaker dresses in the 19th century- they'd often have some hem folding or subdued ruffling. And Colin's looking very plain from the side!

Revolting little machine I hope someone guy fawkeses you too.

the writers keep saying that lestat has a good memory, lestat remembers events in much greater detail than louis, but lestat is still an unreliable narrator. and i think just like with his music, the all components are there, but what's missing is the purpose and understanding.

for example, louis is the opposite, he always tries to see a big picture and dig into the meaning of things before he can even remember everything (something that daniel even caught him doing in s2e5). and it's definitely a very believable character trait for a huge bookworm he is. but lestat's life is drowned in the noise of details he refuses to give meaning to. the lack of reflection is what bringing him down, constantly, and this is how his art ends up being too.

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

Vintage runway Lanvin turquoise enamel knotted snake Medusa necklace.

I know how it sounds, but like, bear with me.

I (28/F/former paladin), had been travelling with a cursed greatsword (Immeasurable/F/Sword) and was really into her for a long time. When we first met she told me she was the disembodied spirit of an ancient warlord and beamed images of a beautiful raven haired warrior in gorgeous blackened Gothic armor into my mind, she told me it was her true form and I was super into it so I forsook my paladin oath and we started hooking up

Early on in our relationship she was really supportive when I started to transition, telling me she was "nearing her apotheosis" as well. I didn't think much of it at the time, and dutifully listened to her when she told me to travel the kingdom and assemble the ritual objects for her ascension. There was a team of adventurers that tried to stop us and she told me to kill them but one of them was my former best friend Sir Roderick The Bold (25/M/Paladin) so I refused and only incapacitated them. She didn't like that and we had a huge fight about it after we'd left

Long story short after I'd done the ritual and assembled the artifacts she revealed her true form was a ruse and she was actually just a mass of tentacles and eyes (which I don't mean to yuck anybody's yum mentioning, it's just that tentacles don't really appeal to me lol)

She said she was going to consume the world, "starting with you" and that I had "outlived my usefulness". I felt really shocked and betrayed and helped the adventuring party that was following us around to defeat her and seal her back in the sword (which I left there), but I feel really bad about it