#inform with the intention of educating

[nicollekidman]

i think eventually we’re going to have to find a way to appropriately and realistically engage with young people who are publicly learning new information, because everyone is on board with the concept of “after a certain point you can’t blame ignorance on education you have to take responsibility and seek information out” but then when kids lack the foundation or framework to then analyze and synthesize that information it’s too easy to sit back and say stupid gen z the youth are doomed!!!!!!! especially when those same kids are - for better or for worse - working through their ignorance in a public forum.

like we either have to swallow our knee-jerk reaction to their lack of understanding and offer guidance when we’re able, or we have to have a bigger conversation about what it means to become radicalized or introduced to leftist spaces when you don’t have a strong background in how to interact with new information/facts and when information is spread through Trends like a new pair of shoes. i know that wailing about how we think the youth are wandering into bigotry traps or don’t know how to verify information or whatever is like. standard but. i do remember what it felt like when every new thing i learned required that i readjust my entire worldview and how i accepted things and thought critically about things, and there is a way to extend that grace to people who have the unfortunate impulse to document their journey out of stupidity online without catastrophizing.

and again i guess the context changes for each person as everyone is being fed different videos/articles about The Youth(tm) and their habits but personally i have been so uplifted by the massive amount of young people who are trying to learn (and unlearn) an enormous amount of information in a very small amount of time, especially considering that many of these people (again, that i have personally seen) are doing so without the support of the adults in their lives or often their peers. and trying to do that within a hive mind echochamber in public is HARD and i guess i just think there are more beneficial ways to react to sensationalized accounts of what they’re doing and how they’re reacting than just like. assuming worst case scenarios for entire generations of people…. especially when we know the people who are used as examples in articles etc are always going to be the dumbest and most controversial

[bloghrexach]

💥 … Oh well, the future that awaits! — Starting January 20, 2025!! … 💥

@hrexach

[2024skin]

People will come online fuming with hate and anger about Anything and expect everybody to instantly understand and validate them instead of being concerned about.... the genuine hate and anger. You know that behavior wouldn't fly in front of IRL strangers

[eats-the-stars]

sometimes being an adult is also soft-core parenting your peers into not dying from an impacted molar because they did not know you could just "go to a dentist" or that you could get dental insurance independently, as opposed to workplace dental. my sister's boyfriend has a whole flock of 20 something guy friends who have somehow made it this long with very little information about how the world works. the boyfriend is coming home telling my sister stuff like "wow. sucks that Kyle's tooth is still killing him. nothing you can do tho" and then my sister just sits there a moment and i can see her thinking "do i let this go, or do i do something?" and she inevitably caves and goes "okay so when you say his tooth is killing him, do you mean literally?" honestly i think schools should focus more on "how insurance works and how to get it" and "this is how to figure out what kind of state/federal support is available and who is eligible for it, and how to apply" and "yes anyone can go to a food pantry you don't have to be a certain level of poor or provide proof" and then "these are signs that you should go to the doctor/dentist ASAP" and "here are some basic lessons on how to clean/maintain your house/apartment." throw in some info on basic hygiene and actual decent sex ed just for fun. because i swear to god, there are a LOT of people who do NOT know these things, and i'm pretty sure it is legit killing some of them.

[edaworks]

And while we're at it, it's For all INTENTS AND PURPOSES

NOT

For all INTENSIVE PURPOSES

...because the latter would indicate that your next point applies to SUPER HARDCORE, FIERCE, HIGHLY FOCUSED PURPOSES ONLY, and I don't think that's what y'all want out of that.

IT’S NOT ‘PEEKED’ MY INTEREST

OR ‘PEAKED’

BUT PIQUED

‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’

THIS HAS BEEN A CAPSLOCK PSA

[daveinediting]

Yesterday I laid out a part of my story as it intersects with education and how that education informs my belief in the interplay of subconscious and conscious processes.

Interplay?

Sure. A lot of the time it's not obvious right away. Sometimes, sure. But sometimes months, maybe years later.

As brand new information and as new mental associations that point the way forward.

I said it before, I'll say it again: I was not a model student. I legitimately pissed off some of my teachers. I drove others to distraction. Even the ones who taught me things I actually use in my professional life... I gave them a hard time, too.

The Education of Me was a pretty gnarly process.

During that gnarly process, however, something in my brain held onto certain experiences and knowledge, most of which I did not consider relevant to my life at the time. In general, the categories are: performing arts, literature, and writing. And my future career was light years from my awareness.

In school, from elementary halfway through my senior year in college, I thought I'd be something about writing. By high school I'd zoomed in on journalism. By my senior year in college I thought for sure advertising.

So I was not consciously learning what I would later need to know in order to sustain a future career I was in no way preparing myself for.

Lemme give you one example of how that played out.

I was working on the music for a pretty lengthy section of a show for broadcast television. The section of show was about a humanitarian organization and some of its component parts. So I got to thinking about how the music could be and immediately my brain came back with the word Rondo.

Rondo?

Yes. It's a music form in which you establish a theme and follow it with another theme. Then you come back to the original theme. Then you jump to a new theme. Repeat as necessary. 

The themes wander about a bunch but are always anchored to the original. The form is represented as A-B-A-C-A-D-A and so on. And it's a pretty good template when you're crafting music for a thing with parts.

A thing...

With parts.

And my brain comes back at me with BAM.

Rondo.

I wasn't a very good piano student, by the way. I never practiced, really. Not seriously. Not intentionally. Not relentlessly and methodically. But I do remember sonatas and variations and, yes, rondos. Although here's the thing:

I only practiced one rondo that I'm aware of. From Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique), the third movement, Rondo: Allegro. 

I could play some of it... but not all of it. I could perform what I could already perform without practice. So yeah.

This one song, this Rondo, didn't mean that much to me.

And yet...

And yet, when presented with a thing with parts, my brain recognized the form from this one area of my life I didn't much pay attention to and applied it to this other area of my life for which I was being, you know, paid.

So.

When the sequence for which I was crafting music focused on the main organization, that was the A theme. Anytime we pivoted to one of the organization's departments, that was the B, C, or D theme.

It worked, by the way.

It worked well. 

That's, I think, my most memorable story of onboarding a lot of random knowledge as opposed to getting it on demand.

And it is how my brain works.

[weenie-wizard]

Pro tip for US citizens, you can go on LegiScan and read any proposed state legislation, past or present.

Keeping up with what your representatives are actually doing with their power/authority can help you to take more informed action for advocacy!

[grunge-mermaid]

my mom's hairstylist is 7 months pregnant and I'm not sure who I feel worse for: the baby whose mother is "too scared" to learn anything about pregnancy, childbirth, or childcare because she thinks she'd "back out if she knew the truth"

or the pregnant woman who is so uninformed (self-inflicted) that she thinks that 3 hours is a long labour

[mckitterick]

electoral strategy for Republicans - and other authoritarian parties around the world - depends on an uninformed electorate, because if people really knew what the right-wingnuts wanted to do, most would not vote such garbage people into public office

understanding the majority of voters are kept intentionally ignorant is far preferable to believing most people are self-destructive and hateful - if that were true, we wouldn't have made it this far as a species

but how do we reach those so out of touch that - even in this media-saturated world - many somehow didn't even know Biden wasn't in the race?

now more than ever we need a true free and fair Fourth Estate, journalism dedicated to public education that somehow reaches everyone

but the nature of how people are informed these days emphasizes keeping people locked-in to billionaire-controlled social media and streaming services and hate- and fear-mongering podcasts dedicated to blindering their audience

the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

[desertrosew]

https://twitter.com/DesertR70131969

[call-me-strega]

Dc x Dp Prompt #23: The Custody Battle Turned Romance

A freshly resurrected Jason is found by Single Dad Danny raising a de-aged Dan and Dani who goes "surely one more kid can't hurt?" and takes him in. Danny helps him deal with his catatonia, trauma amnesia, and other side effects of being undead without the need for a Lazarus Pit.

He takes the kid to a therapist Jazz recommended and supports him thoughout his recovery. They did some bloodwork and found out pretty early on he was The Jason Todd-Wayne but then he decided not to reach out and let Jason decided what he wanted once he was recovered.

Danny, Ellie and Jordan love and treat him like family in a way he's never quite had before even with Bruce. They’re just so open and honest about their feelings and never make him feel out of place. So when Danny ask if he’d like to reconnect with the Waynes or stay with the them, Jason chooses to stay with them.

The world has moved on around them, and so has the Batfam. Jason knows about Tim (and talked through his feelings in therapy). He knows about the foundation Bruce created in his memory and the way he very publicly grieved. He witnessed the news over Nightwing nearly beating the Joker to death. He knows enough to decided it’s better to let the dead remain dead. Instead, he becomes Jason Nightingale, eldest adopted son of a mechanic in the Narrows. The family welcomes him with open arms officially accepting him as a brother and son.

Danny supports Jason to finish his high school and college education and Jason decides to be a doctor as an homage to Thomas Wayne and aspires open a free clinic like Leslie Thompkins. They get his death certificate revoked under circumstances of resurrection (which is a thing that actually exists in public documents due to the resurrections that tend to happen in the DC universe) and legally adopt him so that he can go back to school. However, Batman monitors public records to a degree and this gets flagged in the system bc it’s Jason’s death certificate.

Suspicious, but optimistic Bruce informs the rest of the family what he has found out and ask them to come as back up for when he goes to find Jason. He’s investigated and is sure that the family who helped rehabilitate Jason is clean and nice people but he wants his son back. They others also wanna see Jason but are worried if this is a good idea since Jason hasn’t reach out himself and there is paperwork for an adoption in the system. But Bruce decides to track them down anyway.

Bruce shows up as the Nightingale’s door and asks to see Jason. Danny, sympathetic, agrees on the condition Jason wants to see him. Jason is hesitant, but decided it would be good way for both of them to get closure and agrees. Bruce and Jason have a tearful reunion and a long heartfelt conversation at the end of which Bruce says “Let’s go home son”. To which Jason has to awkwardly break it to him, but he has no intention of leaving the Nightingale’s and returning to the Manor. He lets him know that he’s open to meeting the rest of the family at least once more but that Danny is his dad now and Ellie and Jordan are his little siblings.

Bruce is devastated.

He lets the rest of the family know and they all make their visits while Bruce wallows in despair. Normally he wouldn let it go, but he just can’t stand to lose Jason another time. So he decides to take Danny to court in the hopes of getting visitation rights if not split custody.

It’s one of the weirdest cases to hit the Gotham courts: two dads who were never together in any capacity but aren’t antagonistic of each other, are trying to come to a custody agreement over their adopted resurrected child in family court.

Over the course of the court case Bruce sees what a good dad Danny is and bonds with his two “bio” kids. Meanwhile Danny gets to meet Dick, Tim, and Cass (Bruce’s legal kids as of rn) and gets to talk to them about their experiences with Bruce and how much they want to form/reform relationships with Jason. They do form a healthy respect for each other, and accept each other’s places in Jason’s life.

Court case ends up working out in favor of Danny. It’s split custody but he gets custody of Jason majority of the time (as per Jason’s own wishes) and Bruce and the Wayne's still have partial custody and open contact with the Nightingales.

Over the years kids all start to see each other as siblings and both Bruce and Danny as their dads. By the time Damian shows up Bruce and Danny have been functionally co-parenting each others kids for years. They provide support to each other’s kids that the other parent may not be well equipped to, but helping each other improve.

When Damian does arrive his superiority complex is quickly curbed and Bruce puts him into counseling on Danny and Jason’s recommendation. It takes a while, but Damien slowly finally opens up and gets to act like a real kid. Ellie and Jordan, who are around the same age (maybe a bit younger?), love having him over to roughhouse and play princesses/knights/dragons (but with politics and consequences). Sometimes they’ll go out and trick people into thinking they’re triplets.

It’s actually Damien who first suggests parent-trapping Bruce and Danny so that they can be one big family. He obviously gets Dan and Ellie to agree first. Then the three of them bag Tim and Cass. The five of them approach Dick next. Jason is actually the hardest to convince but the manage to get his approval. Thus, these guys try to set up the Oblivious Danny and the Emotionally Constipated Bruce.

And for Flavor, just when it looks like they’re about to get together, one of their past love interests comes into the mix, re-entering their parents’ live just to stir the pot. (Which ex is up to your imagination: Sam, Talia, Val, Selina, Tucker, Wes, Minhkhoa, Harvey)

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[chena-h]

Another factor that I think is worth considering:

It's become less safe for kids to hang out in public places, unsupervised, without a cop showing up to confront them.

If anything, I think that's one of the intended consequences of the Reagan era panics - to normalize policing children (moreso than it already was).

I'll share an article that goes into further detail on this from the NAACP's Justice in Public Safety Project

Children Arrest Incidents Show the Barbarity of Policing Kids

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[fairuzfan]

Thinking you can "help" by donating to NGOs as the end all be all is particularly insulting because:

1) my family, and many Palestinian diaspora families, have been donating to Palestinian charities for years and look at where we are at now (ie, the systematic violence has not been addressed AND we already have been consistently donating to make a difference, contrary to what people on here claim we aren't doing)

2) reframing this as a humanitarian issue rather than a systematic violence where a people are occupied by a colonial force

By all means, donate to charities I'm not going to say they're not necessary. They absolutely are. I donate to Palestinian Children's Relief Fund myself. It's a cause near and dear to my heart. However, monetary support and a hands off approach only goes so far and does not address systematic issues that communities face. If all we do is donate, we succumb to an endless spiral of reactive responses to violence rather than preventative.

NGOs are great but to say "just donate" and then ignore the issue completely is incredibly harmful. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are PLEADING for you to take action, get involved, spread information. So find your niche and please help! Make art! Attend protests! Hell, even reblogging posts with the intent to educate is useful.

Remember, our goal is short term AND long term liberation! So keep Palestine on your mind! Keep Tigray on your mind! Congo! Kashmir! We need to remember that the world we live in is not ok but it could be BETTER!!!

[inkskinned]

crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.

i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.

in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.

i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.

i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.

plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.

the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.

we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.

i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.

a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.

today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.

loved beyond thinking.

[eeldritchblast]

30 Questions for your Tav

These questions can be used as an Ask Game or just answering them all for fun character development!

(Dark Urge edition here)

What was your Tav’s place of birth and raising like?

What relationship did your Tav have with their family/guardian(s) growing up? Has that changed with age?

Did your Tav receive any formal or informal education? If yes, how well did they learn? If no, why not?

What hobbies does your Tav have? How did they acquire these interests?

Did your Tav have any formal or informal employment? If yes, what was their job? If no, how did they make ends meet? How did they feel about it?

What is your Tav’s favourite childhood memory?

What circumstances led to your Tav becoming their Class/Subclass?

Did your Tav have any romantic and/or sexual relationships prior to their illithid adventure? If yes, who was it with and what was it like? If no, how did they feel about being single?

What was your Tav doing when they were taken by the mind flayers?

What would your Tav consider to be their greatest skill? Is this accurate?

What would your Tav consider to be their greatest flaw? Is this accurate?

What opinion does your Tav have about the Gods?

How does your Tav feel about the wilderness?

How does your Tav feel about the city?

What motivates your Tav to either embrace or resist the tadpole?

How does your Tav feel about killing?

How good of a liar is your Tav? How do they feel about lying?

What is your Tav’s greatest fear?

What is your Tav’s greatest desire?

What is your Tav’s greatest regret?

How does your Tav feel about love?

Has your Tav become particularly close to anyone romantically and/or platonically in their journey? If so, who, and what is the relationship like? If no, why not?

What are 2-3 songs that your Tav would relate to?

What first impression does your Tav give off to strangers?

How does your Tav feel about what others think of them?

Does your Tav have a treasured item with them? If yes, what is it and why is it special? If no, how do they feel about item sentimentality in general?

How does your Tav feel about giving and receiving orders?

How well does your Tav function under pressure?

What advice would you give to your Tav?

What are your Tav’s intentions/goals after the end of the game?