#Parent Tools

[blumoonfiction-blog]

Writing Wizard: A Fun Way to Learn Letter Tracing

Writing Wizard: A Fun Way to Learn Letter Tracing Writing Wizard is an interactive educational app designed to help children learn how to trace letters, numbers, and words while developing their writing and fine motor skills. This app is particularly effective for early learners and children who are just beginning their journey with writing. Recommended Reading and Writing Ages: Ages 3–6:…

[jezzzebel]

Just a small reminder (yes i know i said I'm tired of "friendly reminder" posts lol)

If you are a pagan/witch/whatever and have a pet that is sensitive to smoke, essential oils and stuff... No one owes you any kind of "pet safety PSA". Your pet is your responsibility and if you decided to buy a pet you should have researched how to take care of that pet. Which includes researching what herbs and oils are toxic to them.

In my opinion, it's very annoying to comment "beware if you have pets, don't burn incense around them 🥰" on a post of a random person sharing tips around incense and stuff. Like...

You ought to know what's toxic to your pets.

I won't give Svetlana and Lazar (my dogs) chocolate then blame user witchcraft-tips-advice-123 for not warning me. See how weird that sounds? How irresponsible that sounds?

You are free to disagree ofc but yeah.. keep it civil pls

[mousesqueaks]

lets hog Fan's puter

[danadiadea]

I didn't want to reblog the whole thing since it was a part of a really long thread in which I just disagreed with everyone, but this specific comparison is brought up sometimes, so I just wanted to ask DO YOU PEOPLE KNOW WHAT IS A MANIPULATION?????

Like didn't Moody/Barty pull that out so that Voldemort could ressurect and kill all those fucking kids?? He gave Neville the book so he'd tell Harry about gillyweed, which is stated in the books? And to keep his cover so that he can serve Voldemort? Isn't that... obvious?

Barty tortured Neville’s parents to insanity and led Harry to his potential death while Snape saved those fuckers and deeply cared for their safety. He saved Neville from the Carrows, sending him to Hagrid, but should've actually given him a book that would provide Neville with information that was supposed to eventually kill his classmate! Then he'd be the teacher of the year.

I bet that a guy who offers candy to a kid and asks them to come with him so he'd get them more is better, than a guy who shouts at the kid when they are playing near the road, because, well, the first one is nice and uses a kind voice and the second one is apparently a child abuser.

[moonshynecybin]

I love your same age au in every way but especially how it explores how Marc and vale reach different aspects of adulthood faster and how that colours their relationship. Like Marc close knit sheltered family vs child of divorce Valentino sparking gossip for days in small town Cervera by calling Marc’s mum by her first name instead of mrs marquez!! BUT at the same time serious and mature Marc being the breadwinner of the family at like age 15 vs vale free to piss off police and hit da club

All this to sayyy Marc puberty latebloomer?? I feel like it somehow still preserves the whole ingenue-dirtbag thing canon rosquez have going on. Like wyd when your established biggest rival/fellow prodigy/lowkey racing soulmate has wlf on his leathers and is doing an  impression of these girls begging him to sign their tits and you laugh because it’s vale and he’s wild but there’s a squirmy jealous longing twist in your gut because the tabloids love vale and let his lanky golden frame get away w anything but u could never risk that. And you’re STILL not taller despite drinking the juice your mama prepares you every morning but your voice has suddenly dropped an octave and your jawline is sharper and your aunts are calling you handsome now, not cute. And sitting in his motorhome (which is just his, no extra beds for his father and brother) you can’t stop staring at his adams apple as he talks and wondering how his newly grown in stubble would feel against your still smooth cheek. Yknow????

screammmm i LOVE this ask so smart… yeah it’s vale keeping tabs on marc for yearsss visiting his house as gunshy codependent frenemies and feeling weird about it but also not consciously regarding him as a sexual prospect bc marc was like. pimply and had a bad haircut and looked like he was twelve for a hot fucking minute and they’re both teen boys in the 90s so it’s simply not an emotion he will allow himself to feel. no way. BUTTT then suddenly marc is 18 and still has a baby face, but it’s a baby face with cheekbones ! and girls are paying attention to him. and he’s paying attention to girls. and then marc sends it too hot up the inside of him one weekend and smiles all huge at him on the podium and vale starts sweating in his little robin hood teen pop idol outfit or what the fuck ever… like look at their teen years marc gets his face all at once and vale retains teen androgyny for a few years in ways marc simply cannot access (they are. 15, 16, 17, 18 here)

and then the weird moments that they hang out like cats in each other’s motorhome in between sessions trying to figure each other out (vale) and trying to get the other to visit their house (marc) and talking about racing (both) take a distinctly illicit vibe turn. not doing anything maybe but. thinking about it.

PLUS you also have such a good point about marc as this comparatively more shy and serious and small kinda kid bc of his late blooomer status in relation to vale as well… vale spinning like a mirrorball doing fun little pranks and getting all this attention while marc is a little less of a natural at that sort of thing (he GETS THERE but i think in lots of ways vale is a roadmap lol and baby vale wouldn’t be into the joint thing in this regard so. he has to figure it out a little bit by himself)… idk like it’s interesting to think about marc as an athlete existing in the time of those crazy tobacco money ragers and all that jazz because i think they’re both like to party (obviously…) but the vibes of those parties are perhaps a leedle different a to me (babynflames brought up marc HATING ibiza recently while vale was like. probably sucking off sete gibernau in a club bathroom in ibiza semi regularly for a couple of years there in the early aughts. there’s also i think some generational stuff here, not just their raw personallities etc) but of course the FUN route on this highway is to think of vale as a somewhat horrendous influence wrt to marc who is. maybe wrestling with what it means to have valentino as his biggest competitor and also to want to be the person he’s sucking off in club bathrooms in ibiza. and they’re like 19/20 at this point and trying to kill each other every other weekend and no one has the emotional articulation skills or bravery to break the sexual tension equilibrium so i could conceive of a scenario where marc gets invited on a group clubbing vacay of vale’s and then has to see him making out with a different (dark hair, dark eyed, spanish) girl across the club for multiple days (while hyperaware of where marc is at all times) and that’s part of why marc hates ibiza… but then eventually the girl notices and re-enacts the movie challengers with them because it’s WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH and it’s not gay if it’s in a threeway

[blenselche]

I was going to use these in a lyric comic to Sugar Bee talking about Firnn being sent on a quest to the mainland while the kids are passed around between Minerva, Bubbs/Marcy and Simon. (got burnt out on it though ghghghg)

Your father will make it home you'll see. I'll travel those mountains and sail across those seas just to be with you. I know it's hard because I'm gone, but you have to promise that you will stay strong and always be good tillers for grammom/your god moms/Simon I swear I'll see you soon. I swear to dog I'll see you soon.

[gods-favorite-autistic]

Au where Baron isn’t actually a creation of Cassandra and is actually the creation of some other world endangering threat that the bad kids have to face off in their senior year when it starts making little tormentors for the rest of the bad kids

[seeking-for-rtrt]

canto 7 spoilers

[nuvemzinhacorderosa]

Daphne "helping" her brother with his new crush.

[murderless-crows]

i don't know if i like Shiva having another biokid tbh

I'd rather Tenjin were Carolyn's kid, but that is impossible bc she was (presumably) dead by the time Tenjin was born. Could it be that he is Shiva's and Bronze Tiger's kid as in "they both raised him"? We've seen Shiva take a more mentoring (though not particularly motherly, and good for her) role with other kids, it could be something like that? maybe Tenjin was raised in relative isolation to protect him from cape bullshit and Shiva was the only other adult he had apart from Bronze Tiger, even if it was sporadic at best

anyways, I'll wait to see where this goes. I'd enjoy seeing Cass in a reluctant sibling relationship, even though I'd love to see someone develop the sibling relationships she already has (with Duke, Damian and Tim especially)

Perhaps it will be good for her to have family outside of Gotham and the mess that is the batfam tho lmao. Maybe having a more civilian brother could open new possibilities for her. She's ultimately quite kind and can't help caring for others, so it's very probable she'll end up liking the guy, even if their relationship is complicated.

Also, I like seeing Cass with extrovert and loud people. I think she likes that type of person, too. It might be fun

[10thmusemoon]

Do I think Shen Jiu or Yue Qingyuan actually want to be parents? No not really. Do I think they want to be tied to each other in a tangible and undeniable way? Absolutely.

[cyle]

still confused how to make any of these LLMs useful to me.

while my daughter was napping, i downloaded lm studio and got a dozen of the most popular open source LLMs running on my PC, and they work great with very low latency, but i can't come up with anything to do with them but make boring toy scripts to do stupid shit.

as a test, i fed deepseek r1, llama 3.2, and mistral-small a big spreadsheet of data we've been collecting about my newborn daughter (all of this locally, not transmitting anything off my computer, because i don't want anybody with that data except, y'know, doctors) to see how it compared with several real doctors' advice and prognoses. all of the LLMs suggestions were between generically correct and hilariously wrong. alarmingly wrong in some cases, but usually ending with the suggestion to "consult a medical professional" -- yeah, duh. pretty much no better than old school unreliable WebMD.

then i tried doing some prompt engineering to punch up some of my writing, and everything ended up sounding like it was written by an LLM. i don't get why anybody wants this. i can tell that LLM feel, and i think a lot of people can now, given the horrible sales emails i get every day that sound like they were "punched up" by an LLM. it's got a stink to it. maybe we'll all get used to it; i bet most non-tech people have no clue.

i may write a small script to try to tag some of my blogs' posts for me, because i'm really bad at doing so, but i have very little faith in the open source vision LLMs' ability to classify images. it'll probably not work how i hope. that still feels like something you gotta pay for to get good results.

all of this keeps making me think of ffmpeg. a super cool, tiny, useful program that is very extensible and great at performing a certain task: transcoding media. it used to be horribly annoying to transcode media, and then ffmpeg came along and made it all stupidly simple overnight, but nobody noticed. there was no industry bubble around it.

LLMs feel like they're competing for a space that ubiquitous and useful that we'll take for granted today like ffmpeg. they just haven't fully grasped and appreciated that smallness yet. there isn't money to be made here.

[aroacewxs]

how old is rui in this card actually. who's giving the baby a power drill and pliers

do you think papashiro sat his son down and taught him how to use a power drill at the ripe age of 5 that's why it comes with his bright toybox and he can use it with no parental supervision

[physalian]

The Hero with Dead Parents is not Cliché, it’s Necessary

The staggering number of protagonists in sci-fi and fantasy with dead parents grows every single year. Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker (before the retcon in ESB), almost every Disney Prince and Princess, the Baudelaire children. Beyond the realm of fantasy into action, thriller, romance, mystery, slice-of-life, and bildungsromans.

Dead parents, or parent, is the curse of being the hero of the story and for a very good reason:

Parents are inconvenient as f*ck.

Unless the mom and/or dad is the villain of the story or the entire story is about the relationship with the parent/parents, the “dead parent” trope serves many purposes and while it may be “cliché” that doesn’t mean this trope is bad or, in my opinion, overused.

It’s one less liability the hero has to worry about protecting

It’s one less obstacle in the hero’s path to their adventure

It’s one (or two) less characters to find excuses to stay relevant in the story

It’s a juicy backstory a lot of people can relate to

Trauma. Is. Compelling.

It’s an excellent motivation

And their murder is an excellent inciting incident

Living parents and guardians get killed off both for internal plot reasons, and meta writing reasons: Living parents are a pain in the ass to keep up with. You’re stuck with a character your hero should still keep caring about, keep thinking about, keep acting in relation to how their actions will be seen and judged by that parent. That parent becomes an obvious liability by any villain who notices or cares.

Living parents can of course be done well, unless they’re the villain, but they just kind of sit there on the fringes of the plot, waiting around to be relevant again and they kind of come in four flavors:

There when the plot demands for pie and forehead kisses (Sally from Percy Jackson)

A suffocating but well-meaning obstacle in between the character and their independence trying to do right (Abby from The 100, Katniss’ mom from Hunger Games, Spirit from Soul Eater)

A mentor figure (Valka from HTTYD 2, Hakoda from ATLA)

The only rock this character has left (Ping from Kung Fu Panda)

*Notice how many of my examples lost their partners shortly before or during the plot, thus still giving the hero the “dead parent” label.

Most of these are self-explanatory so I’ll say this:  I think this trope gets exhausting when the parents are written out without enough emotional impact on the hero. These are their parents and a lot of the time, the emotional toll of losing them isn’t there, like just slapping a “dead parents” sticker is all you need to justify a character’s tragic backstory and any behavioral issues they might have.

Like, yes, the hero has dead parents, but you still have to tell me what that means to them beyond obligate angst and sadness. When the “dead parents” trope reads as very by-the-numbers, usually the rest of the story is, too.

How present the parents were in the character’s life should be proportional to the death’s impact on the narrative (as with any character you kill off). If they were virtually nonexistent? No need to waste a ton of time. If they didn’t matter to the character before, they don’t need to matter now unless the plot revolves around some knowledge or secret their parent never shared.

Sometimes, the hero’s dead parents are a non issue. Frodo being raised by Bilbo doesn’t impact his character at all. It’s a detail given and tossed away. On the other hand, sometimes the entire centerpiece of the work is revenge/justice/catharsis surrounding the parent’s death—Edward and Alphonse Elric’s entire story is defined by the consequences of trying to bring their mother back from the dead.

As someone who kept one of my protagonist’s parents alive and didn’t make them villains just to spite the trope, I have all the more respect for this enduring legacy of fiction. You can of course keep the parents alive, but I don't think it's seen as lazy or cheating or taking a shortcut just killing them off, so long as you remember that your hero is human and should react to losing them like a real person.

[oksurethisismyname]

I wake up at 5:45 am so I can get 45 minutes before I have to get the baby up. I shower and lie in bed and try to relax in those 45 min, preparing myself for the day ahead.

I like to think Sanji does the same thing with the crew. He’s up at 4am, not because he needs to be but so he can get 45 minutes to shower and smoke a cigarette and have an espresso before starting breakfast. He works so fast and preps as much as possible the night before so he really doesn’t need to do much in the morning unless he’s planning to do something really labor intensive. It’s not that he doesn’t get alone time during the day, of course he does, but having just 45 minutes where almost everyone but him is asleep ? That’s time where he can breath.

[silverlining-ships]

I love how I can be crushing a random character, and as soon as I see good analysis of Jasper I immediately switch gears back to Jasper mode. It's like... I don't know. She is SO so special to me.

What a beautiful and flawed and tragic and CONSTANTLY misperceived character. A living weapon / a broken tool / an antique a victor a trophy a failure. The silhouette of her own reputation. Designed to be this flawless, perfect thing. The Ultimate Quartz. And here she is, her form distorted and scared. She wears every mistake she made out of rage, out of pride, out of her desperate need to prove she doesn't actually need anyone? on her form. She is a museum of every flaw she tries to deny.

And GOD the way she constantly tries. It's really so deeply ingrained in her character how hard she tries, how hard she fights, how desperately she strives to be a needed thing. Tries to shove Steven off, and as soon as he proves himself as stronger than her she's suddenly faced with a way to be what she was BEFORE. A soldier, a weapon, a second hand.

A needed thing. Always a needed thing. The enormity of her need always overshadows her demonstration of strength.