OnBearFeet / Kat Beaufort

So if you're not feeling up to seizing the day, please know that no one is mad at you. As with Chada, we're just glad you're here with us.

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: finally my evil plan reachesss fruition Rowling: it'ss taken me yearss of careful planning but finally Rowling: finally!!! Rowling: finally we can defeat the sscourge of human rightsss

Rowling: firssst of all i'm not jusst going to sssue amnesty international for money Rowling: i alsso want an apology Kathleen Stock: a just request, dark lord Julie Bindel: no one has been more wronged than you, dark lord Maya Forstater: careful, dark lord! the other viziers plot against you

Rowling: i want you to find the guy who runs amnesssty international Rowling: mr amnessty or whatever hiss name isss Rowling: and bring him here Stock: i don't think its run by a guy called mr amnesty, dark lord Rowling: whatever, you know i don't keep up with thiss human rightsss sstuff

Rowling: i want to ssee amnessty destroyed Rowling: i want to ssee all the human rightss people humiliated, groveling in the mud Rowling: begging for my forgivenesss Rowling: right before the boot comess down on their throat Rowling: i am a beloved national treassssure and i demand my due!

Amnesty: the gender critical movement is fundamentally an anti-human rights movement Rowling: how dare you!!! don't you know how much money i have? Amnesty: Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it.

Rowling: finally, i will have my revenge! Rowling: you don't remember me do you, amnesty? Amnesty: uh Amnesty: of course i know you, you're JK Rowling, the famous transphobe Rowling: that's not all Rowling: look closer Amnesty: wait Amnesty: wait no Amnesty: it can't be!

Amnesty: you're that junior clerk temp receptionist apprentice part timer that we fired for writing fan fic on the clock! Rowling: HA HA HA YESSSS Rowling: AND I'M BACK! Stock, Bindel et al: She's back! Rowling: and I'm on the prowl Rowling: revenge would taste sso ssweet right now!

[many many years ago] Rowling: [writing] the best kind of wizard is a boy wizard Amnesty Supervisor: joanne do you have that memo about african genocide i asked for Rowling: not yet AS: ok well i need it soon AS: there's a bunch of genocides we need to deal with AS: i mean we're real behind on that

AS: look, i'm afraid we're going to have to let you go Rowling: WHAT!? AS: it's just that i don't believe that you're really taking these genocides seriously AS: since you started working here, we've become really backed up on genocides AS: like, we're never supposed to have this many happening

Rowling: you can't fire me! AS: we'll have some amnesty goons escort you to the door Rowling: jusst you wait! i might jusst be sssome nobody now, but sssomeday i'll be a beloved national treasure! Rowling: like jonathan king or jimmy sssavile!! Rowling: then you'll be sssssorry!!!

I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.

Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.

A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made. 

I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens. 

Which brings me to my wife. 

*pinches nose*

Fellas, is it cultural appropriation to inherit your family's culture but you don't pass the blood quantum test?

This reminded me of a post I saw about someone theorizing what MCU Morgan Stark's middle name was because we just knew her middle initial was "H" and they considered that the namesake might be Yinsen Ho but they didn't want to believe that because it would be, quote, "cultural appropriation".

Cultural appropriation. To name your child after someone you personally knew and was very important to you.

Don't you know it's unnatural for someone of a different race to be important to you? The races are not supposed to mix!

My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.

Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.

It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).

Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!

If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!

But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.

It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.

We need to bring back typing lessons to the curriculum. The kids will fly if you give them a tablet or smartphone but they have no clue on how to use a keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. If the senior PE class decides to be twats and pry up the keys and swap them round, I will still have 14/15 year olds unable to type because the keys are swapped. And I often don’t notice when helping them because I just.. touch type.

I legitimately broke a Higher Computing Science (so a 16 year old who had chosen to do computer stuff) by showing him how Ctrl+H let him find and replace because he’d made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time he’d spent trying to find all the incidences of a specific variable in his code and there I was showing him CTRL+F and all these things.

These kids might not pick a computer based subject after the age of 13 and half of them don’t understand file systems, version control, difference between cloud vs local storage, how to save, etc.

So many kids would just turn off the monitor and think that was the computer, usually leaving themselves logged in (to the point I locked the monitor power button and had multiple posters up reminding kids to press the spacebar on the keyboard to wake up the monitor first).

My school was unusual because we had computers but they had a room full of actual typewriters for the typing class. So I learned to properly touch type on a typewriter even though it was the 90s. I happened to get involved in an online RP chat at the time that was on a website where it didn’t load what everyone else was saying until you hit send on your text or refreshed the page. So I had some incentive to learn to type fast and I did. (Steelsings I miss you!)

I’m a teacher now and kids still marvel at my ability to look at them and have a conversation and type something else. I also regularly teach high school seniors how to use things like CTRL F. I have been saying for pretty much my whole career that we need to stop assuming kids are naturally good at tech (fuck you concept of digital natives) and go back to teaching this stuff. It’s not better with the ipad generation- it’s worse. They only understand apps and not real computers.

Also, for the person upthread who mentioned the letters being not in order - there’s a reason for that! They invented the QWERTY keyboard arrangement to slow typists down because people were going too fast for the machines. There were other keyboard arrangements (DVORAK for example) that people can actually type faster at once they learn them but qwerty has stuck.

Huh… apparently that’s a myth! It was designed to speed up typing? TIL

“Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[4]: 162  but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that to place often-used letter pairs farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands.”

And some of the other progressive greats? JFK, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt all came from long-established political dynasties

Change does not come from perfect individuals.

If you ask someone what they hate about Hilary Clinton and they don't jump to conspiracy theories or straight-up misogyny, chances are they'll mention something that would have worked to her advantage as president. She was deeply enmeshed in the political establishment? Yeah, that's exactly how she got shit done. Cozy with billionaires? That's how you fund things in the Second Gilded Age. She hung out with someone you don't like? Yeah, she hung out with everyone as part of getting shit done. Too chummy with Israel? Sure, just like every other candidate in 2016, usually because it opened doors to getting shit done. She sucks at email? Yeah, people experienced enough to run for president generally are on the older side, and a lot of older people suck at email, which is why they all have staff. Married to Bill Clinton? That's pretty much the only way women got into politics at the time she was coming up—marry a rising star. Didn't leave him over the cheating? I mean, it's not what I would have done, but she definitely proved she can continue working with assholes even after they've done something shitty, and guess what presidents need to do?

You don't have to like the people you vote for. You don't have to drink a beer with them. You definitely don't need to get them tattooed on your body—in fact, you probably shouldn't do that one. You are interviewing someone to work for you. As long as they can do the job and their personality doesn't get in the way of that, their personality doesn't MATTER.

Hilary Clinton would have been a competent, non-fascist president who did a better job than Donald Trump.

Joe Biden WAS a competent, non-fascist president who did a better job than Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris would have been a competent, non-fascist president who did a better job than Donald Trump.

I know they're not as exciting or sexy as Bernie. I am sorry that American politics sometimes expects voters to behave like adults. I didn't like any of these people either, but I voted for them because I believed that, out of the available options, they'd do the best job, and I'll take a competent asshole who's somewhat on my side over a raging fascist who wants to set me on fire.

I'm sorry those are the choices. I'm sorry that perfect is sometimes the enemy of good. I'm sorry that the progressives working their way up through the Democratic party will no longer be young and hot and on the cutting edge by the time they're ready to run for the highest offices.