✧*

☀️Prayers of hope, tears of gold☀️

Duke when I hit him with the ‘growing up black so there’s casual Christianity throughout your life like saying grace and praying for safe travels’ beam💔. And his parents aren’t getting better so he tries something familiar to him, praying in the morning light so maybe whoever’s listening will see how good he is💔💔. My grandma would have me pray with her at night when I was little. Even though I’m not religious, when life gets hard enough and it feels like nothing else is working, I find myself praying just in case. I wanted it to look like Doug and Elaine’s hands were supporting him as well.

Spin the wheel to find out your weakness!

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

In the US, there is no meaningful legal definition for educational/academic neglect in any of the 50 states or federally. What this means is that a child can be "homeschooled" and exclusively be taught how to cook and clean, reach the age of 18 being unable to read, write, or count, and this alone is not considered neglect. That 18yo, should they even have the knowledge that suing exists, has no legal grounds to sue their parents for denying them an education.

In over 40 US states, a convicted child abuser can homeschool their children. So someone who has done time for child abuse and somehow regains access to their child(ren) can decide upon returning home that they want to "homeschool" their kids. Those children are now locked in a home with their abuser where nobody can see them.

There are no welfare checks.

There are no routine assessments.

There aren't even databases — state or federal — keeping track of how many homeschooled kids there actually are.

Meaning a child can be locked in their home for their entire life with their convicted abuser, learn absolutely nothing, never go to the doctor, and so long as that child is fed, clothed, and the abuse isn't physical or sexual, that child has almost no chance of rescue and no legal ground to seek restitution if/when they escape.

The only way homeschooled children get rescued is if they're beaten, starved, or physically neglected and they're able to get the right person to see that. Otherwise? They have to wait until someone finds out they were murdered as a result of their parents "homeschooling".

And feral homeschool parents love to jump down my throat about this, and then get even more pissed when I tell them I'm a homeschool alumni.

Because I know it's not all homeschoolers. But even one is too many, and the lack of protections should scare everyone. If you're a good homeschool parent, nothing will change. If not, you deserve whatever comes your way as a result of adequate oversight.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

The woman’s white ass racist neighbors got so offended, they went and “did something about it.”

🤮

From the FBI Freedom of Information Act public vault:

I would say that recreating the characterisation, mood and general vibes of an existing work of fiction is in fact a skill in and of itself that's acquired via practice. A common compliment delivered to fanfiction writers is how well they have captured the spirit of the original work. Inexperienced fanfiction writers fail to do this.

When creating an original character you can, ultimately, say anything about them and now it's canon bcos you created them and you said so. conversely, well, if you are covering a well known song and start playing the wrong notes people will notice immediately.

In addition: a lot of fanfiction, IMO, is in actuality a form of metafictional literary analysis. a story where two characters sit down and talk about their feelings about a canonical event? literary analysis, which is of course a skill. Sometimes fanfiction is bad bcos the writer is not good at interpreting texts.

and i thought this was a really strange thing to say because that's the easy part. like???

most people have lots of ideas; most people who want to write have more. it's very common to get 30-60% of the way into a piece of fiction and realize that you now have to stop inventing and start pulling-together, and you don't know how. which is why there are so many published novels out there that are really interesting and then the resolution is sort of awkwardly bullshitted.

the fact that fanfiction lets you skip the alternately overly-seductive and grunt-labor elements of 'making everything up' leaves you free to really engage with subtleties of craft and writing skills it's hard to get frequent practice in on with original projects, because you have to get the work so close to completion before you can even start that bit.

writing is not a single skill, it's several dozen. they don't all improve from the same types of practice.