Long Live Your Queen (me)

“You can’t outright ask someone if they have a car or have kids. That’s technically illegal. But you need to know because sometimes they can be deal breakers. You can just say ‘Do you have reliable transportation?’ and ‘Do you have any current circumstances that could impede you from being successful at work?’

To which the last one most people fumble and would say, “Well I have kids, so sometimes they could get sick. But that’s not often.” But then your potential employer could mark it down on your interview notes nonetheless.

I thought that maybe it was just my own employer. But now I noticed that I am asked both of these almost every time I interview for a job.

Try to focus on your actions rather than your traits:

E.g. “I’m sorry I keep ghosting you, I’m shit at friendships” –> “I’m sorry I keep ghosting you, I’m really struggling to keep up with my friends right now”

Then, if you can, turn the conversation back to the other person - you’re apologising because their feelings matter to you, so show that.

E.g. “I don’t mean to - our friendship means a lit to me, and I know it must make it seem like I don’t care.”

This gives the other person an opportunity to express their own experience so you can talk it over more if they want to, without skipping ahead to reassuring you that the relationship isn’t broken.

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

Whereas the reality is far more like

When I was studying at BeiDa literally only people whose families were from Beijing knew that “something” had happened at Tiananmen.

You know what you get when you search for “the June Fourth Incident” (aka the Tiananmen Massacre) on the Chinese internet?

You get this:

The entirety of Weibo. 600 million active users. And there is nothing.

On Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, you get a jumble of random unrelated crap:

(The scene with blood is a photo from a Baghdad market.)

Literally nowhere can you find this image:

To even show my roommates this picture, I had to get a VPN to get through the Great Firewall of China. And one of them frankly told me she was pretty sure it was Western propaganda hoax and that the event had not occurred.

And it happened at Tiananmen fucking Square! That is the stage for political symbolism! Imagine if the U.S. government used Black Hawk helicopters to kill hundreds of protestors who’d been inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and Americans couldn’t even google it. And the consequences have been with China ever since. Not just the politics, but even the physical space: they put you through TSA-level security now before you can even step out onto the Square because they need to control speech acts on that symbolic stage.

The protestors wanted freedom of speech. And even the fact that they spoke up has been obliterated from history.

By contrast, the American government lets you google every single one of those American incidents. I have heard Neil Young’s “Ohio” at the fucking grocery store. We are all here talking about these events! We don’t even need to come up with coded alternatives!

Tiananmen should be remembered as a reference point of state violence. The subsequent blackout censorship is a direct result of the threat of state violence backed up with tanks. Until people are afraid to mention Ferguson on social media for fear of getting harmonised, I don’t see why we need to belittle the heroism of Chinese students and workers by making false comparisons.

The idea that any of the instances of state violence listed there are meaningfully comparable to the Tiananmen Square protests and resulting massacre is USAmerican exceptionalism at its finest. Surely the most important examples of state repression must be USAmerican, right? I mean, everything else is, so why wouldn’t it be! China can’t have ever done anything orders of magnitude worse than the US to protesters, because if you dared to admit that it had, then you’d also have to admit that maybe there are literally any Chinese protesters in history who are worth caring about as much as you care about protestors in the US. You’d have to admit that not every struggle or act of resistance centers the West.

People in the notes: So you hate moms??? You’re ableist?? You think we should go back to the Dark Ages?? (My personal favorite because it makes no sense) you’re poor shaming??

Everyone knows who the iPad kids are

I've seen it all from kids who don't know how to use scissors, and can't perform the motions right compared to other kids in that age group, to kids who can't write the alphabet or spell their names (the older ones)

And one of the most startling thing I encountered was every now and then we have a country day, where we choose a country, color in the country's flag in the colors and watch a little film about said country.

And I was overseeing the coloring, and one boy just refusing to color

It happens, stubbornness, bad days, 'just don't wanna' s happen, but I sit with him and continue to try and encourage him and figure out why he doesn't want to

And he keeps saying he doesn't know how to color

And I'm like ??? Just pick up the pencil and put it on the paper buddy, cmon

So I'm showing him how, and he refuses to try over and over

So then I try like, coloring while guiding his hand, and again this is a flag were coloring it's a giant rectangle, not much precision is needed

And I realize while I'm helping him, literally moving his hand to color for him, he's CLEARLY never colored before. He's 4, there is no excuse for this when kids start coloring at like, 2 maybe younger.

By 4-5 kids can generally color inside the lines well enough and draw recognizable figures like people and landscapes and pets

Eventually he got into it, understood how to do it and requested to continue on by himself, which was great! I told him I was proud of him and we continued on with our day but it absolutely shocked me that these iPad kids are so beyond stunted like jesus

He didn't know how to grip a pencil, he didn't know the wrist movements and motions, he didn't understand the pressure control, he had no control over where or how he was coloring like, these kids NEED TO learn these things it's STARTLING how many kids don't have these milestones and are just not developing these fine motor skills

Ask any kindergarten attendant and they'll tell you the same thing-

The best thing you can do for a kid is buy them a shitton of construction paper, decorative child-safe scissors, and coloring books

Please please please kids need to cut paper up and color. It helps them develop so many fine motor skils

Toys, on the other hand, belong to the child. A specifically nasty parent may say otherwise, but children experience toys as their own. As stated above, anything can become a toy in a pinch, beyond the parents' control. Even if we just discuss electronic toys there's a serious difference in dynamic between "my son's gameboy" and "my son's iPad."

Even if we aren't talking about 'motor skills' and 'imagination', replacing toys with an ipad definitely sounds bad for kids because it pretty much eliminates the agency of 'my things!' and changes it to 'thing my mom lets me have/use!'

And compared to a desktop computer and even to a laptop, an iPad is REALLY easy to revoke, you don't even need to say 'no more computer time!' You can simply take it away, physically. It's hard to take EVERY TOY away from a kid unless you go to extremes.

And also, an iPad is a computer that doesn't teach any computer skills while using it.

Yes, fuck those ugly ass cyber trucks but FUCK that Space Center.

Starship genuine danger to the people who live here. It's to the point many of the people here when they heard the explosion joked that it was probably another one of Elon's rockets.

This is a horrifying pattern we are becoming numb to, we hear about a planned test launch and brace ourselves for more debris.

Several of Musk's attempts at rockets, especially after the deregulation, have resulted in catastrophic explosions. Want the list? Here are a few!!

December 9th, 2020- Starship serial No. 8, or SN8. Exploded upon landing.

February 2, 2021- Starship SN9. Exploded upon landing.

March 3rd. 2021- Starship SN10. Landed in one piece. Fire at the skirt caused an explosion.

April 20, 2023- Starship. Exploded once more. Debris scattered in Port Isabell.

March 6, 2025- Flight 8. Spun out of control and exploded in a mass of fireballs. Planes had to be grounded due to the mass explosion and the debris are stills scattered in the ocean.

And now we have the most recent and the worse one yet.

June 18-19, 2025- Starship 36 during a GROUND test caused a mass explosion, the looming mushroom cloud causing locals in Cameron to believed they had been bombed.

The loser describes this it as a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" instead of what they are: fiery failures locals have to deal with as a result.

Pretty much everyone locally knows Elon Musk and his negative impact on our home, people who have had the unfortunate curse to have worked with him and the center call it Cultish, 8 members of his staff who spoke out against his behavior and sexual harassment were all fired.

Its a well known fact he hates the people here, and he goes out of his way to find employees who are not from this area and move them down here.

Musk has tried to encourage even more white people to come down to South Texas and live in his "Starship City". An attempt to gentrify and push out local citizens.

Rebekah Hinojosa, a local Activist with Another Gulf Is Possible, even had her home unlawfully entered by police after an alleged graffiti on a mural he commisioned (which didn't even obscure the mural).

This article is a good read on everything Musk has done to South Texas

I am TIRED of this going unnoticed and unheard of the People of The Valley. I need you to stop laughing and start taking this seriously.

If you want to read more on all the insane shit this man has done to South Texas here are a few more Articles I would Recommend