Hello, stranger!

I just don't think we ever wrapped up the Clown Sightings of 2016 in a satisfactory way.

At Costco there were two butch ladies in their 60’s arguing about which couch to get and one of them said a certain option wouldn’t fit through the doorway at which point they BOTH immediately whipped out tape measures. Glorious.

Once when I was in the grocery store, an elderly woman looking at baking pans asked me if I had a tape measure on me. I asked her no, why do you ask? And she said "I just need to measure this pan and you looked like someone who would have a tape measure." I bought a keychain tape measure later that day and have carried it with me ever since.

Discworld Heritage Post

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

Because Catholicism and by extension Christianity are so big and normal I don't think a lot of people consider how strange the Vatican is just conceptually. Like yeah in the capital of a long-dead empire there's an opulent temple district that acts as it's own sovereign nation, still speaking the dead language of that empire for their rituals, ruled by a prophet-king chosen by a secret conclave of the high priesthood. Yeah his followers eat a lot of fish in the spring.

@entities-of-posts if you haven’t done this one yet, the desolation

Seconded

im so sick of having to defend homeschooling to people. imagine if every time you brought up your childhood you had to defend everything you did from ages 3-18 to people

when u tell a homeschooled person that you don't think homeschooling can adequately educate or socialize a child you're telling them that you find them uneducated and antisocial. and you know what? you might not even know when you're doing this to someone.

rates of abuse for homeschoolers and public school children are more or less the same and that doesn't even include all the children who are abused by their teachers, coaches, school doctors, etc. the school is a hotbed of abuse as is the home and it doesn't help to sanctify either.

the number of homeschool jokes i've seen about being stupid and socially inept is crazy... and usually they just end up mocking people with intellectual disabilities/autism, which are... big reasons people choose to homeschool in the first place. because shockingly it's not great to be intellectually disabled or autistic in public school.

people will eagerly acknowledge how traumatic and unnatural the social and educational structures of public school can be. and yet when homeschoolers enter the public school system and struggle, it's proof of how homeschooling failed them, not of how insane it is to enter the rigid and confusing public school social dynamic for the first time, and how bizarre it is to go from a personalized to incredibly generalized educational setup.

im not anti public school! i think public school is a great option for most people! i think it has flaws but i think every educational system has flaws! i think homeschooling should have more legal guardrails! etc. etc. etc.! but the comfort some people have with passing blanket judgements on highly variable educational systems when they have little to no interaction with the community and culture surrounding that lifestyle is insane to me.

reaches a point where i have to start listing test scores to convince people homeschooling didn't make a total fool of me and then they go "well standardized tests don't even measure intelligence" and i'm like ok will there ever be any way for me to prove to you that i'm not stupid? or will you just go through life with this view unchallenged?

god i know it's stupid to be mad at people for passing blanket judgements when i'm thriving in my career and education and no amount of judgement can take that from me... but god i can't stand it sometimes. please stay off reddit y'all or you'll post 8 page rants on tumblr about it.

ok im normal again

Do you have a source for the claims that abuse rates are the same between homeschooling and public schooling? I'm not disagreeing with you! I've just always been told the opposite is true, and I'd like more info on it.

its actually very inconclusive both the only concrete data gathered has been by admittedly biased sources. but in extreme cases of abuse/torture/death, a frequent recurring pattern is that the children are pulled out of school very shortly before the primary incident (i.e., after repeated reports by mandated reporters at school have failed to render any change), which makes it look like a majority of extreme abuse cases happen in homeschool families, when in fact these are public school families who pulled their kids out of school very shortly before torturing or killing their child (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213425001103). families that cps was already monitoring and failing to intervene with. as far as it can be told, there's no clear link between homeschooling and increased rates of abuse (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582159.2022.2108879#abstract), which some claim is due to lack of contact with mandated reporters (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213425001103), but almost every homeschool family i knew outsourced at least some of their education or extracurricular to an external teacher/summer camp counselor/etc. which means we still came in contact with many mandated reporters. in general as rates of homeschooling across the country have increased, abuse and abuse-related deaths have decreased (https://www.cwla.org/national-data-shows-decline-in-child-abuse-and-neglect/).

Oh that actually makes so much sense! Thank you for explaining this. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this with nuance instead of dropping the links.

A problem with the whole Important Queer Media™ discourse is that a lot of folks don't seem to be able to parse "Important" as anything other than a moral judgment, and it's really not. Art is a dialogue. All works are in conversation with other works, and sometimes, works that have merit are deeply in conversation with works that suck. Acting like we can't talk about the latter at all is essentially demanding that we imagine an alternative universe in which those works weren't part of the conversation, yet somehow we ended up in the same place – and while alt-history may be a fun intellectual exercise, it's not a great critical lens.