blake-allykat

[blake-allykat]

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL CHILD WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME? Because they're all I've been thinking about when I'm sad for the past few days. Their existence makes me less sad.

[blake-allykat]

Just wondering...do you think David thought-spoke privately with Visser Three in #48 and told him the Andalite Bandits were human and that's why he starts looking in #49? Because that's my headcanon

Oh man, I do NOT know what to make of #48, but I do like this take. If David dropped V3 that hint, and if V3 saw mecha-Rachel as a distorted but still human-looking morpher, I could get behind this.

And you're right that Visser Three is the barrier to figuring out the andalite bandits are human. As early as #4 the kids overhear Temrash 114 and Iniss 226 debating: "is Visser Three wrong? What if they're not Andalites at all?"/ ... "Visser Three wrong? Maybe. But I'm not the fool who's going to try and tell him." Heck, as early as #1 the yeerks are looking for "some kids who were shooting off fireworks in the construction site", and presumably they don't mean andalite kids. So like, clearly some of the controllers are at least open to the possibility of human morphers. The only thing stopping a full-scale human morpher search is Visser Three a) having TWO of the galaxy's biggest andalite supremacists in his brain, and b) having absolute power over the Earth invasion.

So I've always headcanoned that some technician controllers start looking for irrefutable proof of human morphers as early as Elfangor's death, and that it just takes them ~2.5 years to come up with something ironclad. Ax's presence may have slowed the process — he's obviously an andalite and not just someone in morph as Elfangor — and Tobias's ability to stay "in morph" for 2+ hours and to go directly from being "in morph" to a different morph almost certainly muddied the waters. But yeah, maybe it's not that the technicians finally persuaded Visser Three; maybe Crayak engineered it that way.

[blake-allykat]

do u ever get emotional about the fact that tchaikovsky, a gay man, wrote his Romeo and Juliet overture for his brother and his brother’s gay lover bc I sure as hell do

[blake-allykat]

Chinese weighlifter Li Wenwen successfully defended her title, winning the gold medal in the women's over 81kg category at the Paris Olympics on Sunday!

In her private life, the Li is actually a fan of traditional Chinese Hanfa.

(source)

(Saw this post on Facebook and loved it, and since Facebook always steals Tumblr posts, I figure I can do the reverse and steal this Facebook post)

[blake-allykat]

I love this fandom so much! 🤣

[blake-allykat]

[blake-allykat]

The first one is the distraction.

[blake-allykat]

[blake-allykat]

Three young barn owls standing in the stone quatrefoil of Christ Church, Fulmodeston.

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[blake-allykat]

Deadpool’s instructive video may save your testicles

[blake-allykat]

A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.

We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.

Most teachers perpetuate the “banking�� model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.

Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.

What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.

Some definitions:

Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.

Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.

Things we (scholars) DO know:

-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.

-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.

Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.

Maintaining the status quo? Nope.

Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.

If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.

They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.

And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.

For what?

It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.

WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.

We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.

The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?

Education is all about capitalism.

"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.

THAT is why modern education is a failure.

Its basic premise is monstrous.

"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"

Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.

[blake-allykat]

it really took a whole ass lawsuit for her to shut her fucking mouth

[blake-allykat]

Concept: Vampire character that represents strengthening ties to humanity and the natural world instead of dividing them

Vampire gets HEAVILY invested in eco conservation because they *can't* just shrug it off as the next generation's problems

A vampire that goes around eating oil tycoons and clear-cut logging CEOs and climate-denying politicians because their childhood village is a dirt pit now and the animals they saw growing up have become endangered

Immortal guys who anonymously donate huge sums of cash to wildlife preserves that oversee forests they used to hunt in

Fellow who, instead of succumbing to the boredom and waste of infinite time, has become feverishly obsessed with making sure this one specific species of snail will still be around in another hundred years

5000 year old woodsman who can still mimic the calls of extinct birds, who still remembers the mating calls of mammoths and wooly rhinos and wild horses

Ancient vampire who can still vaguely recall a cave somewhere with her whole family's hand prints in it, and not sure of it's precise location, keeps the whole area void of human activity so it doesn't become a tourist attraction

Vampire archeologist who digs up their old friend's remains and has the figure out how to prove, with evidence, how they know exactly who they were and what they looked like

Immortal anthropologist who reconstructs a face from a skull only to realize that they'd met them before a long, long time ago