Mythical, Chimerical and Purely Hypothetical

a) i forgot how fun this is

b) it's really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just "hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!" bc i'm an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i'm just so excited for their ideas!!!

c) little boys write cool stuff like "what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?"

teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they're puppeted by society in real life. they'll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn't go away.

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

One of my friends in high school changed his named as soon as he turned 18, so that the ethnic name his family gave him was finally the name reflected on all of his paperwork. He told me that he understood why his parents had given him an “English” name, but that he felt that if he needed to assimilate in order to succeed, then that was a type of success that he didn’t want.

When I was on my way home from the courthouse after changing my own name, I got into a conversation with my rideshare driver, who was extremely interested once I told him what I was in court for, and wanted to know how I’d done it, how much it cost, was it difficult, etc. It turned out that his girlfriend had chosen the name “Yo-yo” when she came to the United States, unaware of how rare that was as a name, and that she was frequently made fun of because of it. Neither one of them had realized that a name change was so easy, and he told me he was excited to let her know that she had options.

There was an intern at a summer job I had once, who changed her name to be the same name, but a different spelling. She said that she had no idea why her parents had spelled her name so oddly to begin with, and suspected that it was just an honest mistake either by them or by some nurse, but it had been a headache for her entire life, and it was a huge relief to not need to be correcting people’s spelling on important documents anymore.

One of my exes legally changed his name to have an exclamation point, because he liked to sign his name with an exclamation point.

How to View Protests like an Organizer by Tim Hjersted

I nannied for a three year old who overnight became deeply scared of owls. We're not sure why. We're not sure she'd even ever seen a real owl. The "owls" that she described did not seem to be based on real birds. Her parents and grandmother, very diligent and reasonable people, spent a week trying to convince her that owls weren't scary and there were no owls in the house because that's not what owls did.

On the first round of "no but if I go to bed there will be owls" I calmly informed her that there were not and never would be any owls in this house because I was there and the owls were afraid of me. And not only were the owls afraid of me when I was there, but I also had the ability to make secret signs that the bad owls would see to let them know that I came to this house every day and if I found bad owls anywhere near here they were In Trouble. So she didn't need to worry about any owls.

She turned this over for a few minutes and then we went and she had nap time.

(She did come back a few days later to say but I meant magic owls, and I said I know, I was also talking about the magic owls, obviously as you have since learned from the Kratt brothers, real owls are just kind of silly birds that puke up mice pellets. She remained satisfied.)

Over the next little while she would occasionally reassert what I had told her about owls being scared of me, and at one point she also added the extra detail that while I could beat up the owls[subtext: magic monsters], she would beat up the bees[again subtext: magic monsters, not the real bees]. I agreed that this was likely so.

A year later she informed me that she had been very silly when she was "little" and scared of owls, but owls were just birds.

I've had similar experiences with other kids and other "irrational" fears and in the end I believe what it comes down to is that when you are Smol, the world is fuckin' scary, and what is really important and really valuable is knowing that when Something Scary Happens, the grownup who is your caregiver will deal with it. That they understand that it is scary - they're not ignoring the danger and thus making it more dangerous, they're not trying to convince you that the danger doesn't exist[1] and so putting you in this place where you don't know whether to trust your own intuitions, all the rest of those things. They're just confirming: if there are Bad Owls, that's still not a problem, because I know how to deal with Bad Owls.

Now obviously yes you also watch nature documentaries or go to the stand with the raptor education stuff with them or whatever else so that they get an idea of what real owls actually are; or in other cases you can ask curious questions about the rest of the fear of, I dunno, under the bed, and see if there's actually something that can be done about it (maybe there's a weird echo in their room that makes it sound like noise is coming from under the bed - you'd be amazed).

But to start with, you go: the monster under the bed isn't a problem, because I am much stronger than the monster under the bed, and I am better at magic, and I have dealt with it.

If you can add, apropos of the post, useful real world details like this one - "not only that did you know that a skeleton would be very weak, because it is just bones and doesn't have any muscles, so because I have muscles I can smash it to bits" - or whatever, that's even better!

This is also actually a very similar process to how CBT is supposed to work for actual reasonable fears that are nevertheless out of proportion or otherwise fucking you over and making you unable to function (because there is literally no bad situation that is not made worse by anxiety attacks, frozen cognition, brain-skips, memory fog, and other distortions of disordered anxiety): okay fine, even if thing is real, what is in your power to do about it, what steps can you actually take, and where do you go with them from here, even if they are small and not overwhelming/going to fix everything, because no matter what the problem is, being frozen in terror of it is always going to be the least useful or effective option. (Even if you do decide you're totally helpless then you might as well go do something fun, because your angst isn't helping either, you know?)

Just altered for Smol Child Brains, and the fact that the most important thing for a Smol Child Brain is to know that whatever happens, your grownup will deal with it.[2]

[1] like yes, the danger doesn't exist, but these are Small Children and the world is very big and complicated and it might exist and it feels emotionally logical for it to exist so even if it really doesn't, it still feels pretty gaslighty when the grownups tell you that it doesn't but you're still sitting there Feeling Afraid about it.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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it's really interesting looking back at both iterations of the story and how stratt and grace's rapport hinges on unrequitedness. there's obviously the karaoke scene in the movie acting as grace's bid for human connection vs stratt's necessary refusal in order to do her job. the book rarely if ever interrogates stratt's interpersonal relationships in the project and how her sense of duty and utilitarianism extends to them (well, aside from grace. more on that in a sec). She's a History major and an administrator and She Loves Humanity, but it's a characteristic that when analyzed deeper rings pretty hollow (possibly because the author thinks social analysis/critique in science fiction is stupid and thus doesn't exactly have much to say about People like someone in the humanities would. SAD!) so that's an addition to her character from the movie that i'm deeply pleased about. what i don't like as much is that the bid for connection starts from grace.

because book stratt and grace? the one sidedness of their rapport is the driving emotional conflict of the entire pre-launch plotline—and of grace's character development throughout the whole book.

like most scientists on the team, grace was brought onto the project by force, but he's the only one who fulfilled his purpose, was allowed to return to his own life, and then came back of his own volition, out of a sense of personal duty and responsibility. which is the reason stratt takes him back on! and why she begins to rely on him more and more, as an administrator, as a mediator, as a scientist, as an advisor. she has all the more reason to do that when she discovers he's coma resistant, but she was already doing all that baby!

grace spends the rest of their relationship half-assing that sense of responsibility. one thing i adore about book phm is how merciless it is with grace's "modesty" "insecurity" and "social anxiety". children are easy to dote on. they're not stupid, obviously, but on an interpersonal level they're not your equal, they have no way to actually demand accountability from you and call your ass out. he doesn't actually think he's a failure, he's not blind he should know damn well he's not like the other scientists. "science lapdog", "ooo i'm just a little guy cmonnnn i'm just a middle school teacher", he downplays his own importance because if he genuinely grappled with the level of responsibility she holds him to towards the people in the project he'd run like a fucking dog.