Panda Escapades

And then you actually look onto the research.

Kids do not generally hate learning or school. Quite the opposite. Children tend to enjoy learning and are naturally curious. It is exactly the fact that they are forced into school and into the rigid structure of it that often punishes curiosity but also is hostile towards the differences inherent in people, that kids hate it.

Kids do not naturally hate medical care. While medical care is scary at times, the fear usually comes from medical care scenarios being defined by adults overriding a child's agency, not explaining things to him, and otherwise being abusive, that makes children afraid of medical procedures. Additionally the way a lot of medical procedures go hand in hand with denying a child's reality ("Look, it is not that bad") tends to be traumatizing to children.

There have been studies done in this. If you explain a child - even a toddler - what you do and why, children will generally be a lot more okay with stuff like needles and simple procedures, and will even agree to necessary surgical interventions.

If you create a learning environment that allows more for self-directed learning, and involves less specific testing, most kids actually will enjoy learning.

For example, a couple years ago, while learning Spanish, I encountered the word for a store, "la tienda." I thought "huh, that's a lot like tener (tiene) - the word for store in Spanish literally corresponds to 'to have/keep'. How interesting!"

You might be new around here, or you might have been following me for a while, but either way, hello. I’m Rowan. Here’s a short (re)introduction!

I’m an artist living in a small town in the UK. I’ve always lived in close proximity to nature, so it’s not surprising that this is a major influence on my work.

So are the stories that I grew up loving (and very much continue to), in books and in games, whether based in fantasy, science fiction or a reflection of our real world. 

Over the years I’ve worked with a wide range of media. I went to art school and focused on video and installation art. Since then I’ve spent most of my time with digital and traditional media of various kinds, but I have a particular love for printmaking, the influence of which finds its way into my digital style too.

In recent years I also became obsessed with designing patterns, which I’ve long had an interest in (mostly through wearing them). Somehow it had never occurred to me that I could actually learn to make them, and since then I've had a great time exploring all the things they can be applied to... (you can find some of them in my shop).

My hobbies are also mostly creative too, including writing, photography, music production and most recently ceramics.

A lot of what I do is created with a desire to share something about my experiences with others, to communicate a feeling, an idea or a place. Sometimes those places are the ones I walk through every day. Sometimes they are places that exist only in my head. Either way, I want to share them and connect with people through doing so. I want my online presence to be about my art, so at times I can shy away from talking about myself, but I’m realising it’s ever more important to do so and is a part of making those connections.

Most of the subjects I choose are natural, and I’ve been an artist all my life working with lots of traditional media, but technology has always played a huge part in that, too. It’s also impossible to create art about nature without also thinking about humanity and the impact that we have on it. How our technological lives coexist alongside it, for better or for worse. I’ve been thinking about how I want to continue combining these things both in the art that I make and also in how I present it.

Social media can be a bane to us sometimes but one thing is certain - I’m really grateful that so many people from around the world have seen and appreciated my work, and connected with it in their own ways. 

They thought it was a sci-fi game but they also thought the monsters were going to be zombies.

Over a period of 2 hours they then proceeded to make EVERY Aliens movie cliche "mistake" known to man. Because at the time they all made sense.

The characters in a story don't know they're in a story or what kind of story it is.

"in the age of no body shaming, there is still one thing you're allowed to body shame apparently, and that is men with small dicks. Greta Thunberg was arguing on Twitter with a guy called Andrew Tate, who is on house arrest in Romania, for sex trafficking. Do you know what she said? 'you have small dick energy'. She could have said 'Andrew, you're on house arrest, in Romania, for sex trafficking' but apparently on the list of crimes that rates below having a small dick."