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Because these girls deserve to have privacy and space to feel completely safe for themselves. Its such a small detail but qilfrey pointing out "this is space is yours and only yours" is so important as a guardian. (It also is an amazing way to show what qilfrey is actually like early on and his geniune care for his apprentices)

And thats the best part of the manga & anime, this consistent theme of respecting children and their autonomy (as well as what it means to be a mentor figure). Yes their twelve and a little ridiculous, but he always allows them to evolve by themselves. He let's them make mistakes and guides them while always letting them retain their own autonomy, personality and beliefs.

Shirahama gives these girls the dignity they deserve in a world where everything kids but especially young girls do gets infantalized, ridiculed and demeaned. Their problems are real and given depth.

They question the knights moralis and work to fix it (or find loop holes...) because they have qilfrey and olruggio who back them up and encourage them to have these big ideas and to go against the grain, because even if their twelve, they are people to be heard and respected. Their ideas are not automatically stupid and niave just because their kids.

Because the thing is, he isn’t perfect. He’s amazing, one of the best, if not the best teacher in Witch Hat, but even he has had his shortcomings when it comes to being supportive for kids.

And yes, I’m talking about (manga spoilers incoming)…

(Manga spoilers warning)

I wanted to add that even when its about the girls, qifrey sometimes has to be reminded that his priorities should be his apprentices, not chasing a potential lead to brimhats. He tries his best and improves as time goes on but he isnt perfect.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

this update fucking sucks. im not defending it. but tumblr is never going to roll back on it because it would cause a legal nightmare for them when theyre already losing money. the alternative here is that they make it so people in the uk and brazil just cannot access the website.

i think what would be more productive is instead spreading resources on how to protest governments against these laws, and to spread resources on how to get around it (e.g. trustworthy free vpns. i personally use the free version of proton vpn)

another thing to protest would be how it's being implemented in addition to tumblrs shitty system to flag mature content

something steam does to prove you're over 18 is allow you to add a credit card as a payment method (you don't have to buy anything with it, it just has to be saved to your account). this still sucks but, to me at least, it feels far more reasonable than giving your id.

demanding they go back on it just isnt reasonable. this is something beyond tumblr.

I was talking with a friend, and they noted how overall the story breaks the molds of the classic murder mystery, and while I agree to a certain point, I also feel like, despite the very obvious fictional locations and events and sci-fi/fantasy elements, that it feels way more real because of that. Disco Elysium is a very, very real game, that's the point. Real life lives by no tropes or archetypes, it's as wild and unpredictable as it gets, and Disco is also just that: unpredictable. In retrospect, it's a poor murder mystery by murder mystery standards because it's too real to be your standard run-of-the-mill murder mystery.

But the thing that's the most real to me, the one aspect of Disco that hits home the most is the setting: Revachol itself. A place with a Hell of a past, but no future, leading only to a perpetual present with no presence. A place once held in high regard, now forgotten by most of the world. A place where you don't choose to go to build a life for yourself, you go there because you have nowhere else to go. If you're born there, may God help you get out in one piece, you're going to need it. Trying to rebuild is a fool's errand; a sunk cost fallacy so obvious verbalizing it is redundant. It's a pit of quicksand, but when the rest of the world turns from you, any acceptance will suffice.

I was born in the Reading area of PA. My dad was born here, so was his dad and so forth. Reading is as Revachol as it gets. The moment I, taking the role as Lieutenant Double Yefreitor Harry DuBois, took a step outside the Whirling-in-Rags for the first time, I felt oddly at home, like despite me not knowing the layout of the streets, that I knew they were mine. That despite the people of Revachol being awful, instinctively I just knew they were my people and worth protecting. The game never told me to care for them, I just did. The omnipresence of 'Instrument of Surrender' during the day only added more to the tragedy that is Revachol, but I promise, should I gain the opportunity, I'd play it full blast on every speaker in Reading, and I promise you it'd fit like a glove nobody knew was missing. Everyone born here wants to leave; nobody can blame them. Everyone who stays here only does so because their options are too limited to go elsewhere.

I wonder what would happen if we had our own Harry DuBois. I feel as though that is the one key difference, and that may be the lynchpin of all the difference in the world. Maybe a Revachol needs a Harry the same way Gotham needs a Batman; the concepts of both are too broken and incomplete individually to separate. Perhaps we had our moment for a Harry, and he found his way out. Can't say I blame him. God knows I can't fit that bill. Maybe I'm way off base and we don't deserve a Harry DuBois; maybe we're too far gone. Maybe a Harry DuBois isn't enough anymore. I don't know. All I know is that we're still here, and we'll still be mostly forgotten by the world, but I think we've gotten used to it by now.

浅田 真央 Mao Asada (JPN)