#pb is my stem kid side

[chiquilines]

My everythings

[serendertothesquad]

The Ultimate Serendipity-Odd Squad Lore Post

Because you people keep asking for my entire story.

No, no, not my life story. Christ sakes, we'd be here until Gen Z'ers died off if I had to reiterate my whole life story.

No, I'm talking about my entire Odd Squad story. You know, how I got here to begin with, how I rose to fame, and how I am objectively still a god without a religion, a cult, or a religious cult. That story. You all want to hear that story.

If you're an oldie, you've probably already heard my tale at least once. If you're new here to the funny kids STEM show fandom, then damn boy howdy are you in for a wild ride.

Get a snack and a drink, pop below the break, and let's begin.

Allow me to take you back to the year 2014. I was the ripe young age of 15, finishing up my sophomore year of high school, and suffering from undiagnosed depression of the "I'm trapped in my own home" variety. We didn't have cable, and so stuff like PBS Kids, NBC Kids, and 4Kids were the only things I watched on a regular basis. In the online space, I was largely chronline to the tenth degree (and note the "largely", because, y'know...school). The Internet, and spaces like Tumblr, served as escapism, and I spent a lot of time particularly in the Wild Kratts side of things.

I had first heard of Odd Squad through PBS's own upfront, the PBS Annual Meeting, that was held in May (though the show was, as I would find out much later, officially announced back in January at that year's TCA Winter Press Tour). It was the network's first live-action show since The Electric Company reboot in 2009 that got swiftly cancelled, which was already enough to get me interested because PBS hadn't taken a chance on live-action stuff since. The premise, as well, was charming and incredibly interesting -- a secret organization that solves problems using math sounded a little saccharine and thus perfect for PBS Kids, but since it was live-action, I figured it could bring a little spice to the network in a way that not other kids shows of the modern network era (read: 2013 onwards, past the network redesign) did. The fact that PBS was willing to go all-in on the show, up to teasers, previews, even having two new games available for fans to play before its premiere, was practically the cherry on top.

Fast-forward to around September. By this point, teasers and promos were already coming out for the show that showcased Olive, Otto, Oprah and Oscar in action. And by this point, I was absolutely invested. On a whim, I decided to take my Sony camera and record a reaction video of me watching it. Was it weird? Yes, but I had no money for a laptop that wasn't a decade old and didn't run about as well as a computer from the days of yore. You make do with what you have.

Needless to say, when the first episode "Zero Effect" premiered, I was having a whale of a time. That's...pretty much all I remember. Aside from the swearing. Lots and lots of swearing.

(...Look, it was 10 years ago. My brain can only go on a decline after being fully developed. And the depression has been eating away at me for that long. When astrophysicists perfect the art of the time machine, call me.)

I uploaded it to my YouTube channel the day after the show premiered. No editing, just a straight-cut video of my reactions laid on the table. I figured, "Okay, so this would be nice to look back on and laugh, maybe."

And then, a month later, I got a PM from Joshua Kilimnik, the actor who plays Season 1's big bad Odd Todd.

Before I get into that, though, a bit of backstory for my channel is necessary.

I had made my channel in 2011, when Wild Kratts premiered. At the time, it was mostly hosting Wild Kratts content, mainly Top 10 countdowns of fan videos I stumbled across on Tumblr or elsewhere as well as Sparta Remix-related stuff. (Yeah, remember that old meme? That isn't as dead as you think it is? Yeeeeeeah.) Around the middle of 2015, it unfortunately got struck down pretty hard when PBS began to go Nintendo on it, viewed fanworks as threats to their IPs, and decided to rip down my videos from the 'Net in three easy strikes -- and with it, my entire channel. It stung, to see my relatively hard work go down the drain. I'd be lying if I said I had wanted the channel to stay up just so I can look back on it in 5 years and cringe at how juvenile it was. Christ sakes, I even had MLP stuff up there at one point. Why? Don't ask me. I wasn't even watching the show at the time. I truly got into it when Season 5 began airing.

But back to the PM. You know, back when YouTube gave you the option to PM people.

Getting the PM from Joshua, I was, naturally, suspect. Celebrity impersonators are all too common, and as I would later come to find out, Odd Squad was not exempt. I had to laugh, because an autistic nobody like me getting a PM from a child actor who was in the industry long before Odd Squad was like Ariana Grande up and inviting me to have dinner with her because I made a few comments about her diction. It's a miracle, people. Miracles that only happen to those with life-threatening illnesses or those who have done good for the community. I had neither of those. Unless you count me going to high school as doing the community a service, in which case I have one of those things.

I read the PM again. And again. And again. And something in me thought, "Maybe...just maybe...this guy is actually legitimate. Maybe he's telling the truth about the entire Season 1 cast and the show's crew members, creators included, seeing my video. I mean it's 2014, what creator wouldn't look to the Internet for first reactions on their show?"

Fuck it. iBalled. I went for it. I reached out to Joshua.

And by God's oddness-laden utopia, am I so happy I did.

We immediately hit it off, taking our conversation from YouTube DMs to Twitter DMs (no, my current Twitter is not that ancient -- my time on birdsite-now-saltyman-hellhole is a whole different story) and discussing our hobbies and what we did. Joshua confided in me that he helped disabled kids, which, honestly, is a green flag in my book off the bat as someone who is, in fact, disabled. I told him about my animal shelter work and how I loved the show.

At the same time, I had posted on Tumblr about the show. Don't ask me what the post was about -- I honestly couldn't tell you, and combing through the tag is something I'd need a hell of a lot of motivation for -- but it somehow, by some astronomical means, took off. People came in like a small trickle. It was small, but over time, we built a strong community. I didn't exactly know how big my impact on people was until I read "how I got into Odd Squad" stories and saw my name pop up enough times to the point where I could safely say I was an inspiration to more than one person.

At some point in 2015, I had created a Wiki for the show. Fandom -- or Wikia, as it was called back then -- wasn't exactly new territory for me, as I had visited other show Wikis before. However, my Odd Squad Wiki didn't take off, and someone else ended up making another one that became far more successful.

...Yeah, you're surprised, aren't you? Figures. But not even I can lay claim to everything.

When the other Wiki took off, Joshua decided to dive right into the fire and engage with the fandom directly. Now, for any big-name fandom, this is everyday normalcy. The My Little Pony fandom has fans directly engage with cast and crew members who answer their questions, for example. But for small fandoms of niche IPs -- and oh believe you me, Odd Squad was incredibly niche back then -- a cast member interacting with fans was a huge deal. The hype only increased when Joshua was named an administrator, along with a few others, myself included.

Needless to say, Joshua being involved boosted the fandom's activity exponentially, and not just due to his spectacular acting on the show. Fanfics, fanart, fan videos...it was a bustling time of fan content. I can recall some of the most notable works just off the top of my head. The fandom got to be so busy that I made a news blog just to cover every bit of news, shifting away from my Wild Kratts news coverage to focus on a different show instead. I enlisted a few old friends to help me out, converted them to be oddballs (which, I will say, was a stroke of luck), and put them on the "staff team". My aim was to create something akin to Equestria Daily, but on a smaller scale. We did editorials, episode followups, and scoured the Internet for any and every bit of Odd Squad news we could find. It became a reliable source for many, especially considering PBS's horrible track record with even the most basic of news -- cancellations, renewals, and other such announcements. Not to brag, but I like to think I did a better job than them at actually giving news to fans who deserve it. (Hell, I still do. My hunger for even small crumbs of news is very strong indeed.)

I can easily recall when Season 2 was announced. Me and my friends were ecstatic. For me, I never thought Odd Squad would get a Season 2, and the Season 1 finale -- affectionately named OINFO (don't confuse it with "O is Not For Old", that's a different rodeo; this is "O is Not For Over") -- made sure of that. Originally, it was set to air in May, before it got shifted to June to coincide with Season 2's premiere.

And even long before that, the movie being announced blew our minds. I genuinely couldn't believe this niche little IP, birthed only several months ago, was getting a movie. And not even one of those specials that PBS markets as a movie as a ratings stunt. No, no, this was a full-blown theatrical movie. With A-listers to boot! And it was a damn good movie!

(...Okay, unrelated, but man, I'm reading through all my old posts and comments on the Wiki and cringing. God, did I really type like a 10-year-old back then when I was in high school? Egh gross cringe. The "let her say fuck" was strong with me back then.)

Of course, as most actors do, Joshua largely moved on from the show as the years went on. Most long-timer fans stuck around until the end of Season 2 before either other interests caught their eye or real life just got in the way too much. A majority of these fans dropped off the face of the Earth like an introvert who suddenly disappears mid-conversation, though they still popped into the Discord server a few times and I reconnected with one or two on Twitter. Hell, some of them even made a "hey, I'm back, and here's what's up" post on Fandom that made me ask if their accounts got hacked.

As a result, when Season 3 premiered, the fandom had slowed down to a crawl. Anyone who's bore witness to it, whether an episode or a nugget of criticism, can probably guess why. (And anyone who hasn't can feel the wrath of my "trust me bro" card, thank you.) It was like I willingly leapt off of the boat, it sped away without me, and I was trapped in the middle of fuck-all nowhere with sharks. So, you know, like Open Water if it was actually good. But the point stands in that I was pretty much all alone. I couldn't crawl to anyone for the sweet release of death after seeing just how hard S&P tried to avoid The Shadow's very obvious murder attempt by way of hacking into a car to make it fall into a lake of green goo. All I could do was scream and cry into a mic, edit, upload to YouTube, and let all the unsupervised kids looking for free episodes come to me in droves.

Oh, and post to Odd News. Until I accidentally deleted the account.

By that point in time, my old friends had all left due to real life commitments, and only one, Angelica, remained. But even she drifted away, and I was stuck running it all alone. So, I made the difficult decision to let it rot, and frankly...I haven't touched it since. Largely because I left Tumblr entirely and only just now came back. On the news front, I expanded my coverage to PBS Kids as a whole network, just as I do on Twitter.

It wasn't until the back half of Season 3 premiered that the fandom slowly but surely began to grow from planted roots, and I could connect with people again. Seeing people flood the Discord server and Tumblr, sharing art and news and theories, was amazing. Not for Season 3, though -- it was because of the past two seasons. Honestly, to say there's been more talk about Otis and Odd Todd than about any other character in the entire franchise is a hell of an understatement, because it dominated pretty much 98% of the fandom.

From there, new fanworks, fanart, and other pieces of fan-created media were created, and many still continue to be created to this day. Though hyperfixations can be yoted off the cliff and die in an instant (with deepest apologies to Shroom), it's great to see a burst of activity in such a small fandom. Hell, it even got big enough to where we had a Secret Valentine's exchange a couple months back, which was a real joy because it gave me a chance to flex my writing chops even if it did leave me on the verge of a third panic attack. And...the fandom being revived did land me a solid interview for a college assignment. Which, to me, is my own equivalent of getting a dedicated panel at a convention.

But this isn't a whole entire story about fandom lore. It's a story about me.

And honestly...I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little tired with Odd Squad myself.

Between the choking responsibilities of adult life (yay work), the state of my mental and physical health (yay depression and anxiety), and the franchise being fucked over sideways to Pluto and back by numerous entities (yay TV industry), I really can't just focus on Odd Squad anymore. Now, I'll give a fair warning to you and tell you to make no mistake -- my enjoyment of the franchise will die with me and my entire bloodline if the franchise itself doesn't die first. But I've found other special interests and hyperfixations that have grabbed me more than the funny kid agent franchise has. I derive more joy from binging the 90s Frasier series, Pretty Cure, and Neighborhood Wars than I do with the funny kid agent franchise.

Now, does this mean I'm leaving the fandom? God no. To do it on the verge of the franchise's 10th anniversary would be utter blasphemy. And I do plan on weaponizing this blog for more Seren's Studies, including episode reviews and character analyses I can't do with the limited resources I have. But the drive for Odd Squad is just...no longer there for me. I did not, unfortunately, get the "Odd Squad forever" autism. I got the "childhood is hell, but okay, sure, I'll make you a functioning competent adult to a certain degree" autism.

Maybe one of these days, amidst the countless new pieces of media that keep releasing, I'll be able to rewatch Odd Squad. It's worn out its welcome nostalgia-wise, but I find it to be a pretty enjoyable view when I take off those glasses and put on the "my God is an awesome God and that's why I try to attend church every Sunday" ones. I'm still making crossover fan projects to other IPs like MLP, Super Monkey Ball, and Precure. And of course, I'll be seated for Odd Squad UK to see if it's good or not -- I'm more than happy to take the bullet for people who don't want to see it for whatever reason, just as I did for the back half of Season 3. But for now, the drive is pretty much gone.

I will admit, I'm likely missing some stuff. My memory is absolutely terrible, and I had to go fishing for a lot of stuff to refresh it (one of the reasons why this took so long to release in the first place). But this is what I can dredge up.

I'm honestly proud of the little fandom I birthed. I could work a hundred jobs in my lifetime and still say that founding the Odd Squad fandom is by far my greatest accomplishment. I've met so many amazing people, seen so many amazing things, and really, I'm hoping to see more people in the years to come. If the aim is to introduce Odd Squad to new generations of kids, teens, young adults, and adults alike, then I'm all for it. Expose them to goodness. None of that Cocomelon shit.

Thank you for reading, and to all of the people in the fandom both old and new, thank you for touching my life in ways I never thought of. If you've got any further questions about my story, send 'em my way; I'll be glad to answer 'em.

See you all in the next Seren's Studies, whenever that may be.

[thefringespod]

Okay I know I already reblogged @the-sassy-composer 's post about story inspiration but I would like to expand upon things because I went back to some of my earlier notes and I left off a major player in the original inspiration of this show

Starting with the more average inspirations, we've got The Adventure Zone and Dimension 20. I'm looping them together because a lot of my inspirations for this show are d&d based and my love of d&d comes from these shows. This show was originally set in a planar system like in d&d (specifically the one that features heavily in TAZ Balance). It also was originally going to have ttrpg elements to the creation and execution of the show (side note: if you wanna see a show that's actually *doing* that, check out @souloperatorpod) There's something about the way that TAZ and D20 weave magic and sci-fi (see TAZ: Balance and D20: A Starstruck Odyssey for the best examples, though most of my D20 inspo was actually The Unsleeping City) that has always really spoken to me and greatly influenced the magic systems I used on the Fringes

Like every depressed 15 year old on Tumblr, I watched a LOT of Doctor Who. It's a huge part of my sci-fi-ish inspirations (the multiple realities and ways to travel between them mostly. Yes in DW they travel through time but the feeling I'm trying to evoke is similar). Sci-fi that deals with traveling between worlds or time or realities has always been something I've loved and a lot of that fascination stems back to Doctor Who (and also Marvel comics but they're less of an actual inspiration and more of a fix for my multiverse needs)

And then there's Between the Lions

If you were not a USAmerican child watching PBS between 2000-2010, Between the Lions was a children's educational puppet show (more like Muppets than hand puppets but not official Muppets) that followed a family of lions who worked/lived in a library. It was like an anthology series for kids, each episode featuring a different children's story being read

The original drafts of the Fringes very heavily followed the idea "what if Between the Lions had a psychological horror element"

Before it was on the Fringes, this story took place in the Library. The Library (she/her) was a sentient and infinite library where our Storyteller (any) lived. The Storyteller would read stories from the lives of those living in the realities outside of the Library to the Wanderer. If you've listened to the Fringes, you can probably see that the Library became Minerva, the Storyteller became the Keeper, and the Wanderer has always been wandering. And if you've listened to the Fringes you can probably figure out what the Library had done in my original drafts. In addition to kidnapping, however, the Library also fully consumed anyone who came into the library by absorbing all of their stories and leaving them nothing but bones. Between the Lions! With kidnapping and horror implications!

I left the Library because I kept getting stuck there, eventually finding the room to breathe and create on the Fringes. That said, my first introduction to anthology was Between the Lions and it did still influence a lot my creative process and what ended up becoming the Fringes

I'm going to close this out by returning to The Adventure Zone and one of my favorite quotes of all time "See, there’s magic in a bard’s song. They call it inspiration, and it tells the listener what they need to hear right when they need to hear it. And right now, you hear it too." Inspiration is a form of magic. In d&d it helps you add to your roll. In real life, it helps you create things that you never thought possible until it *happened*. Seeing a bunch of other creators talking about their inspirations for their shows has been so much fun, especially when you know the stuff well enough to see it reflected in their work

[zalrb]

Pose and spn anon here!

I meant which one of the scenarios impacted them? Do you ever think Dean had this normal life ka knowledge and he feels bad that Sam never got to experience that?

Same with Sam? Do you think he felt bad that Dean hadn't experienced college life? Or was constantly manhandled by his dad.

Categorize sam and dean to Pray Tell's life and Blanca's

So I remember thinking about this and asking for clarification because my original response to the initial ask was going to go off on a different type of tangent. With regards to Sam and feeling bad that Dean hadn't experienced college life ... I don't think it's necessarily about college I think it's just about the -- as they say -- "apple pie" life. For Sam...I think he has preconceived notions of Dean that he then reconsiders upon learning new information which would then cause him to feel sorry that Dean didn't experience certain things. For instance...in season 1 when he meets Cassie he is curious about whether or not Dean thinks that the hunter's life is worth giving up a woman like that and Dean doesn't really give him an answer but it's not a question he would even consider asking before I don't think. But he realizes that even Dean gets close to people...even Dean can want something outside of this life. Then in season 3 he sees Dean's dream of Lisa and Ben and he's taken aback but he clearly feels sorry for him that this isn't something he's going to experience. However...I'm not sure if I'm completely sold on the idea that this extends to Sam feeling like he got to experience something Dean didn't and he feels sadness in that specific respect because Sam leaving to go to college is also wrapped up in leaving John and Dean to do it.

With regards to Dean... I don't think he realized how much having those moments with Mary affected him and his views on family until Dark Side of the Moon when you realize even his fondness for pie stems from Mary giving him pie when he was a kid and Sam specifically says I didn't get the crusts cut off my PB&J when discussing the memories in his heaven while also acknowledging that John had skewed what his married life with Mary was like and that even at four Dean was cleaning up after John's messes so again I think Dean would feel hurt and sad that Sam doesn't have something like that to hold on to -- also resentful because he had worked so hard to be that for Sam since he was a kid -- but again I'm not sure if he would feel bad in the specific context of he got to experience it and Sam didn't.

[mrs-march-ahs]

Random Facts About The Evans That Are True Because I Decided So

None of these have any basis whatsoever, but these are certain things that ever since I began watching American Horror Story I thought about the Evans. If you disagree or have anything to add then definitely tell me, I’d love to know! I think it’s interesting that one character can be so many different things to so many different people!

I will accept constructive criticism, APART FROM JAMES AND BRITNEY SPEARS. That is facts and we all know it. 

Some of these are really really stupid but they’re still true.

Enjoy:)

----

Tate

-Likes a finger up the booty

-Has at least one butt plug

-Plays video games like Assassins Creed but just walks around aimlessly every so often

-Over thinks dialogue options in video games

-Plays acoustic guitar

-Has a million different nicknames for his private parts

Kit

-Sings in the shower

-Always humming or whistling

-Wrestles his kids

-Talks to his dogs all the time

-Drives fast

-Tells the cashier to keep the change or puts the change in any charity box nearby

-Opens doors for old ladies and helps them get up if they need help

-Loves golden hour

-Really bad at accents

Franken Kyle

-Likes to make fart noises with his mouth

-But gets upset if he spits on himself

-Likes to play with sand

-If he sits in a field he WILL grab fistfuls of grass and pull it out

- (runs over to the side walk)

- “Ky what are you doing?”

- (steps on a leaf and hums in satisfaction)

- “cronch”

Jimmy

-Can tie a cherry stem in a knot with his tongue

-Party trick is juggling

-Very upset that he’s never experienced picking his nose as a child because his fingers don’t fit

-Has been pulled over on his motorbike at least 3 times

-Very serious grown up man, but would get super pissed if you’re out of peanut butter if he was craving a PB&J

-The type of man to drive three towns over to get the ‘good’ peanut butter

-Humble but good tipper

-Really good at impressions

James

-Hates modern music, but likes Britney Spears

-One year on Halloween he went to a concert

-If you ask him about it, he insists it’s because she’s a sexy woman but he definitely knows the entire Circus album back to front

-Will never admit it though

-Does cocaine

-Does excessive cocaine during Devil’s Night

-Doesn’t masturbate at all, he’ll simply buy an escort if he needs one

-Claims that he’s never burped or farted in his life

-Likes to tickle his s/o

-Will never show you pictures of him when he was younger because he doesn’t want you to see what he looked like without a moustache

-Doesn’t care for sex tapes, but definitely wants to record you consummating your marriage so he can watch it back

-Maybe this is a very British thing but he can do that thing where you put a Malteaser on your lips and then blow it up in the air and catch it

-Can open a beer bottle on the table or on his ring

Kai

-Allergic to something like peanuts or certain fabric softeners, but wont admit it -Knows conversational Spanish -Has names for his balls but he won’t tell you what they are -Pre-blue hair he was very nervous flirting with women -Scared he’ll say the wrong thing, so he’d just ask them questions so they’re talking to him -Has lots of bitcoin even though he doesn’t care about the money, just likes coding -I think he actually created the “Look At My Horse, My Horse Is Amazing” video -Loves Microsoft Excel

[goldenroutledge]

yay okay! and no worries, i know this time of year is super hecticcccc—my mom went grocery shopping earlier and walmart was beyond crowded. we still didn’t do our christmas shopping either, i know we are so behind.

what do you think the pogues’ favorite foods would be? for jj, picture his being both chicken wings and pizza—both saturated with fats and oils. junk food just how he likes it.

and kie, she gives me pasta & salad vibes. i think she would enjoy a acai bowl/smoothie bowl every now and then. — concept anon

yes its so hectic 😭 i was fighting for my life at the store the other day. i just started christmas shopping bestie so i feel u

john b.

i think john b prefers meat over fish, so i’m gonna say he loves a good burger every once in a while. i can see him inviting himself over for dinner at kie’s house on the nights her parents make pulled pork or some kind of beef. i think he enjoys bbq. i can also see jb enjoying bananas as a snack, or when he’s out like at the movies or something, a soft pretzel with cheese!

jj.

jj lovess junk food. for breakfast, i think he loves poptarts. he reminds me of drake parker from drake & josh. cheese balls, snack cakes, chips, ice cream, candy, fast food, jj loves it all. he did say something in s1 about craving shrimp & grits so we can assume he loves that too! lives for a bowl of movie theater popcorn every now and then too, as well as nachos with a lottt of cheese.

pope.

i don’t see pope as a picky eater. maybe when he was a kid, but he grew out of it. i think pope likes healthier foods because he knows the effects of eating unhealthy. i see pope as a sandwich guy and idk why. sub sandwiches with a pickle spear on the side, even a meatball sub is fine with him. i don’t think he minds a pb&j either. i think pope loves a good hot dog too! probably with all the works; ketchup, mustard, relish, and sauerkraut. i think this stems from going to baseball & other sports games with his dad growing up!

kiara.

i think kiara loves açaí bowls or bagels in the morning! she likes boba, smoothies, and sometimess sweetened iced tea. she’ll drink some warm tea with lemon when she’s sick too! she likes salads for lunch and will 100% shake her salad vigorously until everything is mixed how she likes it. kie loves pasta too!! i think she likes shrimp fettuccine alfredo. i also think she likes sushi!

sarah.

lovess french toast for breakfast, preferably with fruit on top! for lunch i think sarah lovess kraft mac & cheese. i think sarah loves chicken, preferably grilled, and will eat it with almost anything. lives for a grilled chicken caesar salad! i also think she likes grilled cheese sandwiches a lot (or just sandwiches period), maybe with some tomato soup on the side. i could totally see her getting super excited if someone bought her a panini press lol

[grodyego]

i keep thinking about all these posts that r (understandably) trying to make light of the events of three buckets like “at ep 1: pb and finn host a sleepover to fight zombies! latest at ep: finn kills an alternate version of himself and furthers his trauma” but like... that’s the thing to me. this ep rlly does seem mostly dedicated to furthering finn trauma, which seems a little weird (narrative-wise to me) for a few reasons

this got really really long and kind of all over the place bc i care too much about cartoons so if you read it all i owe you my life

adventure time, to me, doesn’t seem to have any overreaching plot, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! i think it’s why it’s gone on for as long as it has, bc the world and the characters who inhabit it are interesting enough to push themselves along with their own kind of personal narrative elements that develop and come to a head. like, think about it, do u actually care about the lich, like as a villain, at all? or do u care more about the threat he poses to the land of ooo and everybody in it??

so that being said, ppl who watch the show r really gonna care about finn and be invested in what he does and how he feels, i know i definitely am!! ive been watching at since it came out and, while finn is like a teen still in the show, it kinda feels like ive grown up along side him you know? this is my own personal bias showing thru rn but ive gone through some stuff, growing up, and just now am i learning how to like... get better, or have the hope i’ll get better, and i guess where most of my confusion and frustration stems is i want the same to happen to finn. finn’s been through so much traumatic stuff: the lich, farmworld, finding his human dad only to find out hes gonna get no answers out of him about what happened to the rest of the humans and why he is alone in that sense, almost dying in space (multiple times), like... the list really goes on. so my question is why does it KEEP going on, especially when the show is ending after this next season and after to me it seems like... from islands, elementals, and the episodes surrounding this, it seemed like the direction was going to be finn becoming like, i dunno. actually ok

like, lets look at islands as the main example: finn being the only human left in ooo came up a lot, even early on in the show: it was weird and confusing and sad!! i remember early on in the at fandom that was like the prime material for angst, and the shows really spent a long time all throughout its running building on this one thing about finn (and there are a lot of at episodes, trust me, ive been rewatching all of them). up until islands i was really on the fence about getting answers about the humans, about finn’s background (since he already had a family, really) how they might attempt to resolve finn’s feelings about this thing they’d been building for most of the show- but i absolutely ADORED islands! i still do! i think it was done really really well bc, you kind of get closure, yeah, you know humanity didnt go extinct, and you know how finn got out into the world of ooo, but like... finn got closure. it wasnt like he was instantly over it and everything was better, but it was just like... this step for him. and it was really heartfelt and really sweet and really satisfying bc finn’s gone thru so much and like, his earlier attempt at closure with his dad went so south and was so traumatic so this moment of like, i dunno, growth?? just, ugh, i dont even know how to put into words how i felt about it, this is already so long lmfao

related that tho was fern, and i loved fern!! i didnt once think he would go evil, even with being a cursed, bc even when we find out he isn’t really finn, and instead kind of new, his... origin i guess is finn?? and theres nothing that could make finn wholly evil, like, the kid who overcame the fcking lich with nothing but the power of friendship and liking somebody???? how could ANYTHING from him ever resort to evil, to me it just makes so little sense, especially since fern was the one himself who told finn he wasn’t just a finn copy, and had to go and find out for himself what being a hero and being somebody new meant to him. to go the “original” route and try to kill and replace finn, and then fight him to the death, from fern’s own story- it just doesn’t make sense and it just seems so disappointing. it seems so quick for him to go “being myself isn’t working” and then to go the route of attacking somebody who, up until now, he was probably closest to- and could understand him the best and reason this with him??? i dunno man, it seems like kind of a waste

and then finn has to kill somebody he was beginning to consider a brother, if not even closer, who was working on his own closure- and then to be traumatized again??? and with the rest of the episodes in the bomb too!!! learning that you can change and still be the same, marceline’s line about having difficulty dealing with some stuff because shes never talked about with anyone, even herself- and sweetpea asserting no matter where he came from, he’s good! this could have all come together with fern figuring out that it takes a lot to learn how to be yourself and that its often really complicated, and finn helping him like im sure he really wanted or was already trying to do! but finn has to be traumatized again because... i dont know???

at usually sticks to changing the status quo pretty well imo and taking more than one episode to end or solve things, so again with islands- if three buckets had ended differently, it wouldnt have automatically solved everything, but it would have been at least a step towards a happy resolution, for both finn and fern

[jessicakehoe]

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about the social media furor over Ruby Rose being cast as lesbian superhero Kate Kane aka Batwoman and today we’re talking about the controversy surrounding cult Christmas hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

PB: Yesterday, when two of our colleagues began discussing the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” brouhaha I realized I’d never actually listened to the song in full. Growing up in India, it wasn’t something we heard regularly around the holidays (shocker, I know) so I was unaware of its baggage. But I knew I had to give it a listen when I heard it described as “rapey.”

GH: I think we can all agree that one of the most beautiful aspects of cultural exchange is sharing and comparing problematic or offensive pop culture. It warms my heart that we were able to share with you this Ode to Toxic Masculinity: The Holidays Edition.

Before we delve into all the ways that song is icky, I think it’s interesting to note how this issue has been growing each successive Christmas. I remember a few years ago, it felt like calling out “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was a unique observation, albeit one that several hundred people were all having independently. It’s like the Die Hard-as-a-Christmas-Movie debate, which seemed to have hit its peak last year. I think it’s interesting that a song that has been a bit gross for, like 70 years, is just now really entering the popular consciousness.

Hot take: this is all happening this year because of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings.

But, anyway: yes, the song. Last week, it made news by being removed from some radio stations owned by Canadian broadcasters like CBC and Bell Media because of the mild outrage. Then, this week, because of the backlash to the backlash (there’s always backlash to backlash), CBC has put it back up. Now that you’ve finally heard the song in its entirety, what do you think about it?

PB: Initial verdict: CRINGE. The woman’s voice is completely negated throughout the song/conversation. She’s repeatedly ignored, patronized and dismissed, while the man is clearly the dominating force calling the shots. By depicting such a skewed power dynamic in which a man refuses to take no for an answer, it’s propagating dangerous ideas about consent. That said, I think we’d be remiss not acknowledge the era in which this song was written. In the 1940s a woman’s voice had very little power and women very little agency or independence. They were expected to be coy and demure, and let a man “take charge” and never, ever make the first move. So the song is clearly a reflection of the societal mores of the time, hugely problematic as they were.

On a second listen, though, my strong initial reaction was tempered a bit. If you listen to all of the woman’s objections, they’re largely of the “what will people say” variety: “the neighbours might think,” “I ought to say no, at least I’ll say that I tried,” and “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” Again, this is an era in which a single woman drinking alone with a single man was bound to raise all sorts of eyebrows. So most of her reluctance seems to stem from a desire to protect her reputation, rather than, you know, a desire to get away from him. What do you think?

GH: That’s a really good point! And by good, I mean, it’s a new point that I’d never noticed before. See, because I always read her stated objections as the excuses she chose to say in order to be the most persuasive, while still being relatively inoffensive. Like, she can’t just say, “No. I don’t want to make out. I want to go home. Back off, creep.” Because, ha! Who cares what a woman wants. But! If that woman makes it about more than just herself, ie. worried mothers, gossipy neighbours, maybe—just maybe—she’ll convince the dude that she needs to leave, despite the cold.

Actually, I realize it’s kind of like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” That song, despite its adulterous undertones, is about a mom and a dad kissing while the dad is dressed as Santa. It’s never explained in the song because the songwriters assume the listeners will know (spoiler alert) that Santa isn’t real. But as a kid, because Santa was real, the Mommy was just a cheater. It’s all about the assumptions you have going in.

From our modern perspective, we can’t help but hear the woman in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as endangered. We assume she doesn’t want to be there, hence her always wanting to leave. But, the piece, which was written by a real life couple, wasn’t meant to carry that kind of baggage. The songwriters would likely have assumed that listeners would believe that the couple was just being coy. That they both really wanted to stay together but were pretending to have doubts. Granted, that people at the time wouldn’t assume a date rape was happening represents its own problem.

PB: Right. I read a couple of interviews the songwriter’s kids have done in recent years, always around the holidays when, like clockwork, the debate rears its eternal head. “They’re really equal roles. No one is really the aggressor,” Frank Loesser’s son told Vanity Fair in 2016. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. It really wasn’t anything but that.”

That said, when people hear a song on the radio, they don’t immediately rush to Google it and get the whole backstory. Their assumptions and opinions will be based on an intuitive response. And that gut response is naturally shaped by the context of the world we live in. Last week, Loesser’s daughter told NBC News that the song was beloved until “Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody.” Well, lets face it: the world is changing. Why should we have to take off our new, Cosby-coloured glasses in order to enjoy a song?

Which brings me to the inflammatory question fuelling this debate year after year: should the song be banned?

I think it’s important to acknowledge just how much pop culture shapes our society. I mean, a generation of young boys listened to this song, which by all reports, seems to have gone the 1940s-equivalent of viral. (It also won an Oscar!) Which means a generation of boys grew up to be men who believed that getting a ‘yes’ out of a woman was just a matter of pushing long enough to invalidate all her hesitations. Whether or not that’s what the song set out to do is besides the point; if that overwhelmingly seems to be the takeaway then that is the takeaway.

I don’t know if banning it is the answer though because a) honestly, which young kid these days is modelling his behaviour on a classic hit from the ‘40s that he probably only hears once a year? b) there are far more pernicious pieces of pop culture out there that deserve an irate debate more than this one (I’m looking at you, R Kelly) and c) I’m not in favour of blanket bans in general. If there are parents out there with an aversion to the song, change the channel. Don’t play it for your kids on Christmas. TALK to your kids about consent.

But if a radio station doesn’t want to play the song, I’m totally fine with it. That’s their executives’ decision. If a nightclub doesn’t want to play R Kelly, that’s their choice. If a film festival doesn’t want to screen a film by a problematic director, again, their choice. And I respect it.

Which side of the ‘to ban or not to ban’ debate do you fall on?

GH: I agree. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that since I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve wanted to leave a woman’s house only to be ignored (and potentially drugged). Well, actually, I have been in that situation, but it was different since there was no potential for physical violence. But I digress.

The truth is, this is one of those issues where both sides seem disproportionately passionate about their cause. Will a Christmas song really influence anyone’s behaviour (aside from going to bed early and choosing not to cry or pout)? No. But will Christmas and Freedom of Speech be ruined if this one song is forgotten? No! A Christmas song—let alone a controversy surrounding one—is basically privilege in action. There are, as you say, more important things to worry about. And until I do something to, like, help the poor and hungry at Christmas, I’m not going to pretend that fighting against problematic songs is really making the world better. And besides, as you say, there’s a teaching opportunity here.

Like how “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” taught me about polyamory.

The post “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban? published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

[lindyhunt]

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: To Ban or Not to Ban?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about the social media furor over Ruby Rose being cast as lesbian superhero Kate Kane aka Batwoman and today we’re talking about the controversy surrounding cult Christmas hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

PB: Yesterday, when two of our colleagues began discussing the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” brouhaha I realized I’d never actually listened to the song in full. Growing up in India, it wasn’t something we heard regularly around the holidays (shocker, I know) so I was unaware of its baggage. But I knew I had to give it a listen when I heard it described as “rapey.”

GH: I think we can all agree that one of the most beautiful aspects of cultural exchange is sharing and comparing problematic or offensive pop culture. It warms my heart that we were able to share with you this Ode to Toxic Masculinity: The Holidays Edition.

Before we delve into all the ways that song is icky, I think it’s interesting to note how this issue has been growing each successive Christmas. I remember a few years ago, it felt like calling out “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was a unique observation, albeit one that several hundred people were all having independently. It’s like the Die Hard-as-a-Christmas-Movie debate, which seemed to have hit its peak last year. I think it’s interesting that a song that has been a bit gross for, like 70 years, is just now really entering the popular consciousness.

Hot take: this is all happening this year because of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings.

But, anyway: yes, the song. Last week, it made news by being removed from some radio stations owned by Canadian broadcasters like CBC and Bell Media because of the mild outrage. Then, this week, because of the backlash to the backlash (there’s always backlash to backlash), CBC has put it back up. Now that you’ve finally heard the song in its entirety, what do you think about it?

PB: Initial verdict: CRINGE. The woman’s voice is completely negated throughout the song/conversation. She’s repeatedly ignored, patronized and dismissed, while the man is clearly the dominating force calling the shots. By depicting such a skewed power dynamic in which a man refuses to take no for an answer, it’s propagating dangerous ideas about consent. That said, I think we’d be remiss not acknowledge the era in which this song was written. In the 1940s a woman’s voice had very little power and women very little agency or independence. They were expected to be coy and demure, and let a man “take charge” and never, ever make the first move. So the song is clearly a reflection of the societal mores of the time, hugely problematic as they were.

On a second listen, though, my strong initial reaction was tempered a bit. If you listen to all of the woman’s objections, they’re largely of the “what will people say” variety: “the neighbours might think,” “I ought to say no, at least I’ll say that I tried,” and “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” Again, this is an era in which a single woman drinking alone with a single man was bound to raise all sorts of eyebrows. So most of her reluctance seems to stem from a desire to protect her reputation, rather than, you know, a desire to get away from him. What do you think?

GH: That’s a really good point! And by good, I mean, it’s a new point that I’d never noticed before. See, because I always read her stated objections as the excuses she chose to say in order to be the most persuasive, while still being relatively inoffensive. Like, she can’t just say, “No. I don’t want to make out. I want to go home. Back off, creep.” Because, ha! Who cares what a woman wants. But! If that woman makes it about more than just herself, ie. worried mothers, gossipy neighbours, maybe—just maybe—she’ll convince the dude that she needs to leave, despite the cold.

Actually, I realize it’s kind of like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” That song, despite its adulterous undertones, is about a mom and a dad kissing while the dad is dressed as Santa. It’s never explained in the song because the songwriters assume the listeners will know (spoiler alert) that Santa isn’t real. But as a kid, because Santa was real, the Mommy was just a cheater. It’s all about the assumptions you have going in.

From our modern perspective, we can’t help but hear the woman in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as endangered. We assume she doesn’t want to be there, hence her always wanting to leave. But, the piece, which was written by a real life couple, wasn’t meant to carry that kind of baggage. The songwriters would likely have assumed that listeners would believe that the couple was just being coy. That they both really wanted to stay together but were pretending to have doubts. Granted, that people at the time wouldn’t assume a date rape was happening represents its own problem.

PB: Right. I read a couple of interviews the songwriter’s kids have done in recent years, always around the holidays when, like clockwork, the debate rears its eternal head. “They’re really equal roles. No one is really the aggressor,” Frank Loesser’s son told Vanity Fair in 2016. “It was a flirtatious, wonderful, sexy number between people who like each other. It really wasn’t anything but that.”

That said, when people hear a song on the radio, they don’t immediately rush to Google it and get the whole backstory. Their assumptions and opinions will be based on an intuitive response. And that gut response is naturally shaped by the context of the world we live in. Last week, Loesser’s daughter told NBC News that the song was beloved until “Bill Cosby ruined it for everybody.” Well, lets face it: the world is changing. Why should we have to take off our new, Cosby-coloured glasses in order to enjoy a song?

Which brings me to the inflammatory question fuelling this debate year after year: should the song be banned?

I think it’s important to acknowledge just how much pop culture shapes our society. I mean, a generation of young boys listened to this song, which by all reports, seems to have gone the 1940s-equivalent of viral. (It also won an Oscar!) Which means a generation of boys grew up to be men who believed that getting a ‘yes’ out of a woman was just a matter of pushing long enough to invalidate all her hesitations. Whether or not that’s what the song set out to do is besides the point; if that overwhelmingly seems to be the takeaway then that is the takeaway.

I don’t know if banning it is the answer though because a) honestly, which young kid these days is modelling his behaviour on a classic hit from the ‘40s that he probably only hears once a year? b) there are far more pernicious pieces of pop culture out there that deserve an irate debate more than this one (I’m looking at you, R Kelly) and c) I’m not in favour of blanket bans in general. If there are parents out there with an aversion to the song, change the channel. Don’t play it for your kids on Christmas. TALK to your kids about consent.

But if a radio station doesn’t want to play the song, I’m totally fine with it. That’s their executives’ decision. If a nightclub doesn’t want to play R Kelly, that’s their choice. If a film festival doesn’t want to screen a film by a problematic director, again, their choice. And I respect it.

Which side of the ‘to ban or not to ban’ debate do you fall on?

GH: I agree. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that since I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve wanted to leave a woman’s house only to be ignored (and potentially drugged). Well, actually, I have been in that situation, but it was different since there was no potential for physical violence. But I digress.

The truth is, this is one of those issues where both sides seem disproportionately passionate about their cause. Will a Christmas song really influence anyone’s behaviour (aside from going to bed early and choosing not to cry or pout)? No. But will Christmas and Freedom of Speech be ruined if this one song is forgotten? No! A Christmas song—let alone a controversy surrounding one—is basically privilege in action. There are, as you say, more important things to worry about. And until I do something to, like, help the poor and hungry at Christmas, I’m not going to pretend that fighting against problematic songs is really making the world better. And besides, as you say, there’s a teaching opportunity here.

Like how “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” taught me about polyamory.

[wellpersonsblog]

A Week of Component Food Prep and How To Use It

Here’s a week of component food prep from a Registered Dietitian and how to use it to make quick, healthy meals during the week!

Hi friends!

I’ve been meaning to write a post like this for a while now and I finally got my act together. You guys know I love food prep. You may also know that I don’t typically prep full meals…instead, I prep components and then throw them together, as well as cook some new things, to make meals during the week. Last week I documented what I prepped and then all of our meals so I could show you how I use what I prep throughout the week.

If you’re not already, be sure to follow me on Instagram, where I share my food prep sessions on Sundays, plus meals during the week.

So here’s what I prepped on Sunday:

I made:

Sweet Potato Muffins

Carrot Oat Bars

snacking veggies

massaged kale

roasted broccoli & sweet potatoes

Sweet Potato Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Thai Chili Salmon

roasted potatoes

Farro

roasted green beans

rice

Sweet Potato Banana Bites

Salsa Verde Chicken

Not pictured: BBQ mushroom chicken that was in the crockpot

On my Instagram stories, I shared exactly how I prepped everything. In case you don’t follow me there, I grabbed screenshots of the process so here’s what I did:

One of my favorite food prep tips is to think about what you can do ahead of time what takes minimal effort. On Saturday evening I had about an hour before we were headed to a dinner party. I turned on the oven, dumped a bag of baby carrots on one pan and put 5 sweet potatoes on another pan and stuck them both in the oven at 400 degrees. Literally took 1 minute of effort and by the time we were ready to leave, they were both done and in the fridge, ready for me to use in the morning. I also pulled one of my freezer crockpot dump meals out of the freezer and stuck it in the fridge.

So, when I woke up Sunday morning, I turned on the oven first thing and dumped the crockpot meal into the crockpot. While my kids were eating breakfast, I spent 5 minutes chopping the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes and stuck them in the oven to roast.

While those veggies were roasting, I got out the carrots I’d roasted the night before and whipped up a batch of Carrot Oat Bars. As soon as the veggies were done, I stuck the carrot bars in the oven, rinsed the food processor and used one of the sweet potatoes I’d cooked the night before to make the batter for my Sweet Potato Cottage Cheese Pancakes. I cooked those on the griddle while the bars were in the oven.

I had about 5 minutes left before the bars were done so I chopped up a head of broccoli and snipped the ends off green beans to get them ready to go in the oven. I also dumped some rice in the Instant Pot (I do 1 cup white rice to 1.5 cups water for 7 minutes, quick release) and started some farro on the stove. I put the farro and water in a pot, cover, bring to a boil, crack the lid, reduce heat and simmer for 12 minutes, then drain the water.

After I took the bars out and put the veggies in (I spray with avocado oil, and roast at 400 for 12-15 minutes), Little Miss and I made some Cinnamon Raisin Sweet Potato Muffins. I subbed chocolate chips for raisins. We had them ready to go into the oven as soon as the veggies were done.

While the muffins were baking, I did some dishes, started transferring stuff to my Pyrex containers. I can’t find my exact set but this is a similar set of Pyrex containers (aff link)  and made a batch of my Sweet Potato Banana Bites. We were out of chocolate chips so I added frozen wild blueberries and chocolate covered chia seeds from Salba Chia.

Once I put the sweet potato bites in, I threw some chicken into the Instant Pot with a package of Frontera enchilada sauce that my mom bought sometime while visiting. The chicken breasts were thick so I cooked them for 16 minutes and then shredded.

I also put some salmon on a pan, added a little sweet thai chili sauce and had it ready to go in the oven when the sweet potato bites were done.

The last thing I did was chop some veggies for snacking and prep the kale. I remove the stems, chop it up, wash it and spin it dry, then put it in a ziploc, drizzle a little avocado oil on it and massage it until it starts to soften.

Once everything was done, here’s what it looked like. Plus the bbq chicken and mushrooms that was still in the crockpot. (Recipe will be in my freezer ebook) Since most of these are components, I wanted to show you guys how we used the food I prepped throughout the week to make quick meals.

The baked goods are often eaten for breakfast and snacks. Both my kids eat Dole peaches in 100% juice and yogurt almost every morning. Then we change things up with either a fried egg and toast, pb&J toast, oatmeal etc. My youngest usually eats a muffin. She also eats 2 carrot oat bars when she wakes up from her afternoon nap every single day. I usually eat a fried egg on toast with avocado and a muffin for breakfast every day. My husband doesn’t eat breakfast.

Everything in red in the meals below is from my food prep session.

On Monday, for lunch, the kids at some of the shredded chicken, with cheese in a taco. They each had a clementine and Squish had sweet potato bites while Little Miss had a carrot bar. I made a bowl with farro, shredded chicken and roasted sweet potatoes. I topped it with avocado, salsa and chips. My husband had to run out to get lunch between work meetings. He usually comes home for lunch since his office is close to home.

For dinner, I made a package of cheese ravioli from the freezer and the kids both ate that, plus a sweet potato cottage cheese pancake, banana with peanut butter and some leftover Braciole (stuffed flank steak) that we brought home from dinner at my in-laws on Saturday. I have the recipe for Braciole on the blog. I made quick soup using some shredded chicken and roasted carrots, plus some Lotus Foods ramen and chicken broth but only ended up eating about half of it (thanks pregnancy). My husband had leftover braciole, some roasted broccoli, farro and snacking veggies, plus fruit.

On Tuesday, for lunch the kids had naan pizza. I usually have mini naan bread in the freezer so I just pulled a couple pieces out, microwaved to thaw, topped with hummus, some shredded chicken and cheese. Squish had his with carrots and ranch and apple slices with peanut butter. Lyssie had hers with roasted sweet potatoes and strawberries. I had a couple sweet potato pancakes, plus a few omelet spirals that I made that morning to shoot for the blog. My husband had shredded bbq chicken and mushrooms, rice and broccoli plus fruit.

For dinner, my hubby grilled a few burgers and a package of chicken we bought over the weekend. The kids each had half a cheeseburger, avocado toast and sweet potato bites for dinner (plus Little Miss had some roasted potatoes. I had another bowl with farro, shredded chicken, roasted sweet potatoes and roasted green beans topped with salsa, avocado and chips. My hubby had a burger, roasted potatoes and snacking veggies and strawberries.

On Wednesday, we went to the bakery after swimming. For lunch the kids had pb&j on farmhouse white bread from the bakery (they typically eat Dave’s Killer Bread), veggie straws, clementines and sweet potato bites. I had some of the bbq chicken and mushrooms on a bun+ snacking veggies. Hubby had a burger, plus green beans, rice, kale and snacking veggies and some strawberries.

For dinner, I made a box of mac and cheese. I added some of the roasted broccoli and leftover grilled chicken to it. Plus they had roasted sweet potatoes and strawberries. I had mac and cheese with some of the shredded chicken and roasted sweet potatoes plus a few sweet potato pancakes and leftover omelet spirals. Hubby had leftover grilled chicken, plus farro, roasted potatoes and green beans.

On Thursday, for lunch turkey and hummus sandwiches, leftover ravioli, some sweet potato chips I’d tested for the blog that morning, a green bean and leftover omelet spiral. I had a bowl with farro, green beans and shredded chicken and hubby had leftover grilled chicken with bbq sauce plus rice and broccoli.

For dinner, Squish had a date with pb, cottage cheese, hb egg and bbq chicken and mushrooms on a bun. Little Miss had an egg, roasted potatoes, shredded chicken and sweet potato bites. I had two eggs on avocado toast and hubby had 3 eggs, avocado toast and some roasted potatoes and kale.

Here’s what was left from my food prep session after dinner on Thursday night:

some kale

about 1 cup rice

2 muffins

a few sweet potato bites

about a cup of potatoes

some shredded bbq chicken and mushrooms

a few broccoli stalks

some chicken (which wasn’t cooked until Tuesday and not part of my Sunday prep).

On Friday for lunch, Little Miss had a muffin and roasted potatoes, plus turkey and leftover tortellini. Squish had apples with pb, Love Grown sea stars cereal, tortellini, turkey and sweet potato bites. I had an egg on toast with pumpkin energy balls. Hubby had chicken, rice and potatoes, kale, hummus and veggies and strawberries.

We always go out to dinner Friday night….so after lunch on Friday, here’s all that was left:

1 muffin

5 sweet potato bites

1 cup kale

1 cup bbq chicken and mushrooms

1/2 cup rice

(plus some grilled chicken).

Here’s a side by side of what we prepped and what we ended with:

A few notes:

We obviously don’t mind repeating the same meals a few times during the week, but the beauty of component food prep is that you can do that, or put it together in different ways and flavor differently using sauces etc.

No, our family does not all eat the exact same meal every night. I realize this isn’t the norm but it works for us. Because of the component food prep I do, it’s easy for me to quickly throw together different combinations as shown above in the same amount of time as it would take for me to make one dish for all of us to eat.

No I don’t prep every single thing we eat all week. You can see that I cooked a few things during the week. I use food prep to help me but don’t think you need to prep every morsel of food for the week in order for it to be successful.

We do a pretty good job of not wasting food, but it does take a little practice to understand your family’s needs. I always suggest under prepping as you learn what works for you and then slowly increase the amount you prep until you find what works best.

Most weeks, the majority of the food I prep Sunday nights is gone by Thursday. Most leftovers are good in the fridge for 3-4 days. We typically stretch it to 5 days but it’s certainly up to you and your food safety comfort level when it comes to food prep. If you like to err on the safer side, you can prep enough to get you through Wednesday as well as a freezer meal that you could thaw overnight and cook to eat on Thursday. It’s all about finding what works for you and your family!

If you want to see how much of the meals my kids actually eat, be sure to follow me on Instagram. I share before and afters of their plates for most lunches and dinners.

  Hope this helped!

Enjoy! –Lindsay–

First found here: A Week of Component Food Prep and How To Use It

[theconservativebrief]

Who among us can resist getting a little verklempt upon hearing the strains of some familiar Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood song? Hum with me:

It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive It’s such a happy feeling, you’re growing inside And when you wake up ready to say, “I think I’ll make a snappy new day!”

Generations of American children now have grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, in part because it runs on public television, something that Fred Rogers himself was instrumental in saving. Somewhere between a playmate, an affable uncle or grandpa, and a fairy godfather, Rogers’s slow and compassionate approach to children’s television ran counter to what we typically expect of TV shows for kids; there are no bright, flashy, fast-moving cartoons or slapstick humor in his neighborhood, just simple, direct conversation and storytelling. You got the feeling he cared.

Those same qualities might seem to disqualify Rogers from being a very good subject for a documentary, unless it’s the kind that “exposes” a public figure. But Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor tackles him anyway, and comes to the benign conclusion that Fred Rogers was, in fact, the guy he appeared to be. It’s a gentle film that doesn’t take a lot of risks but doesn’t really need to. Fred Rogers was a kind and gentle man who saw children as important, his work as ministry, and kindness as essential to human existence.

So the main goal of Won’t You Be My Neighbor is to convince us that while kindness and empathy are in short supply today, it need not be that way. Through interviews with Rogers’s close collaborators and friends (his wife, several performers, and the head of the Fred Rogers Center), archival footage (some of it rare), and interstitial animated segments, the film builds out a portrait of a man who saw in the new technology of television an opportunity to communicate with a generation of children and tell them that they were special just the way they were.

And in 2018, that makes him a subversive figure.

The film opens with black-and-white footage of Fred Rogers in 1967, playing a piano and then using a musical metaphor to explain, in the familiar gentle cadence that somehow never comes off as patronizing, that one of his jobs is “to help children through the modulations of life.” What he means is helping children figure out how to express and regulate their emotions during exciting, scary, and confusing moments they encounter in life: dealing with bullies, experiencing parents’ divorce, feeling uncertain about the future, and going through frightening world events.

David Newell and Fred Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Focus Features

That last one — the world events that children in the late 1960s and onward have had a greater awareness of, in part due to the very medium Rogers worked in — is a key part of Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Neville (Best of Enemies, 20 Feet from Stardom) is less interested in giving us a straightforward cradle-to-grave account of Rogers’s life than in making an argument around his subject. That argument is that Fred Rogers’s worldview, a kind of humanism that had roots in Rogers’s Christianity but expressed itself as a commitment to everyone’s dignity, is what helped many navigate the scariest events of childhood (RFK’s assassination, the Columbia shuttle explosion). And the power of that worldview, the film suggests, doesn’t stop when childhood ends.

The film is structured around those big world events. The first episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 1968, amid heated political debates about borders and wars. On the show, King Friday (the stern monarch of the Land of Make-Believe) erected a border fence of his own around his castle, and was convinced to take it down only by messages of goodwill and peace that other characters (both puppet and human) floated over the fence.

The parallels are almost too obvious (a border wall in the first week, 50 years ago?), but this really was the way the show started, and the film carefully shows how Rogers went on to gently and subtly address other cultural battles. In one segment that aired during pitched battles about integration, he soaks his feet in a small wading pool outside his home, then invites the black mailman to cool his feet in the pool with him. Today, a shot of the two men’s feet in the same pool may register as little more than a nice image, but Won’t You Be My Neighbor splices the show’s footage together with images from that time of black children being chased out of a public pool. Rogers knew what he was doing.

Sections like this are the strongest in the movie, straightforwardly told with historical footage to contextualize the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood segments and to remind us what it was like, as children, to see an assassination or explosion on TV and wonder what it meant for the future. Rogers’s commitment to addressing these events is framed as stemming from two things: his Christian faith (he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and many interviewees talk about how he saw the show as “ministry”) and his deep interest in child psychology. Those two things led him to believe that children’s emotions were important to address and talk through, and he spent his life doing just that.

“The space between the TV screen and whoever is watching is ‘very holy ground,’” Rogers says in archival footage at one point.

What’s so striking about Won’t You Be My Neighbor isn’t really onscreen, though. It’s the effect the film has on the audience, and what that reveals about us.

As a number of critics have noted, what’s so startling about the movie is the revelation that Mr. Rogers was, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, basically the person he presented himself to be onscreen. And more importantly, that’s unexpected. Watching the film, it’s hard to believe it’s true. Even after seeing the film, it seems a bit suspect, as if a story of a hidden crime will eventually come to light if we just wait long enough.

That we expect this so keenly (and fear it just as sharply) tells you almost everything you need to know about the times we live in. And it’s reflective of a conversation that many women have been having during the era of #MeToo — making lists in private conversations of the men we know or respect whom we’d be shocked and genuinely devastated to discover were predators. They’re very short lists.

If as a nation we were to make one of those lists, Fred Rogers would almost certainly be on it. The man who told us through the TV every day when we were children about our own worth, about feeling our emotions and then learning to control them, about living in harmony with other people — we need that man.

Thankfully, what Won’t You Be My Neighbor turns up is just that man, and a crowd of people who loved him. That’s probably why just watching the trailer of the film can induce weeping: It’s jarring to realize how much his simple message still makes sense, and how little it is evident in our public life.

And maybe most uncomfortably, the film surfaces why. There’s a clip near the end of the film in which a talking head on Fox News decries Rogers and the “narcissistic society he gave birth to.” I briefly expected the audience at my screening to riot, because it was such a plainly stupid response to what we’d just seen.

Fred Rogers believed in radical kindness. Focus Features

But it’s also a good example of the confusion that marks public discourse today, in which kindness far too often is decried as weakness, courtesy as political correctness run amok, respect as pandering, and the belief in each individual’s dignity and worth as narcissism. These things can all go in toxic directions, of course. But it seems clear that ordinary, old-fashioned goodness has gone out of fashion.

Rogers, the film proposes, was interested in “making goodness attractive in this next millennium,” as he says in a PBS segment recorded late in his life. The idea that everyone has inherent dignity was obvious to him; if you say otherwise, for him, “you might as well go against the fundamentals of Christianity.”

After all, Jesus’s answer to someone who asked him “Who is my neighbor?” was to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, a parable in which the most “righteous” and powerful members of his own society passed by a man lying in a ditch on the side of the road. Who finally rescues him and cares for him? A Samaritan — the people whom Jesus’s listeners considered to be less worthy of dignity and respect than themselves. There’s no chance that Fred Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, didn’t have this story in mind when he structured his entire show around the concept of neighbors.

And you can’t miss the parallels to today. Rogers was against the fast-paced children’s programming of his time that, as he saw it, found most of its humor in denigrating its characters’ dignity via pratfalls and cartoonish violence; it’s an easy line from that to the loud and shallow form that cable news uses to get its adult viewers addicted. Similarly, his slow, self-effacing, and deliberate way of speaking, with a gaze that made his audience certain he was paying attention only to them, is in stark contrast to all kinds of public figures today, not least the one leading our country.

So while Won’t You Be My Neighbor isn’t a particularly inventive film as a piece of cinema — its choices are expected, and we’re still left with questions about how Rogers’s work shaped his own life — that may in the end be for the best. The film succeeds on the radically subversive and obvious notions we learned when we were children: that being nice is not a weakness; that speaking with care is a thing we do simply because we believe the person we’re talking to is a human being with worth and dignity. What’s most startling about Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and what makes it feel almost elegiac, is how very jarring that message feels.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor opens in limited cities on June 8 and will expand over the following weeks.

Original Source -> The Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor feels radically subversive

via The Conservative Brief

[hottytoddynews]

Mississippi middle and high school students compete during the 2016 FIRST Tech Challenge at UM. Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Communications

Middle and high school students from across the state will compete in Mississippi’s fifth annual FIRST Tech Challenge robotics competition Saturday (March 4) at the University of Mississippi.

Hosted by UM’s Center for Mathematics and Science Education, judging begins at 7 a.m. in Tad Smith Coliseum. Public events begin at 10 a.m., and the competition runs through 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Two dozen teams of students, ranging from seventh to 12th grade, will pilot their robots with the hopes of qualifying for FIRST’s South Super Regional competition in Athens, Georgia, later this month. This year’s game is dubbed Velocity Vortex, a challenge where robots are programmed to push or lift different sized balls in a specially designed arena.

“Our goal is to inspire students into learning because we are losing our engineering group,” said Mannie Lowe, FIRST program manager at the Center for Mathematics and Science Education. “Our engineers are aging out and no one is coming up to fill the void in this country.”

The For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, nonprofit organization was founded 25 years ago by inventor Dean Kaman in an effort to build interest in STEM fields.

Teams comprise up to 15 people, and any organization can form a team, not just schools. Students are guided by teachers, coaches, mentors and community members. Teams must design and build their own robots, keep an engineer’s notebook and do some kind of outreach to promote STEM careers.

“I guarantee you, part of my group would not have otherwise thought about a STEM career beforehand,” said Holly Reynolds, team mentor for Bigweld’s Bots and associate dean for the UM College of Liberal Arts.

Bigweld’s Bots is an all-female team featuring members of Girl Scout Troop 33016, one of two Girl Scout trrops in the state that does robotics. The two troops soon will be featured on “Mississippi Roads” a PBS show.

During the competition, teams of two face off against each other. This allows teams to learn how to work with other teams and enjoy healthy competition at the same time.

Each match plays for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. For the first 30 seconds, the robots operate autonomously, then they are operated by the students through handheld driver controllers for the final two minutes.

The robots can be built out of virtually any material as long as teams follow regulation rules. In the past, some teams have built their robots out of PVC pipe, wood and aluminum. However, the competition is about more than just robots.

“The fun in my job is watching and working with the kids,” Lowe said. “When you see their ‘aha!’ light come on, it is amazing. It’s the realization that they can do this. They can build, they can program, they can design.

“Once they realize that, the world is theirs. They can do whatever they want.”

In the past, Mississippi teams have done well at FIRST Super Regional competitions. Last year, a Mississippi team won the Inspire Award, the highest given in the competition.

Some 5,000 teams participate worldwide, and the program has grown tremendously in Mississippi, where only four teams took part in the challenge five years ago.

Students begin designing and building their robots in September when the theme is announced. Last-minute changes are normal, and teams keep working to improve their robots until the competition begins.

“FIRST events are part rock concert, part NASCAR race because of the sponsor logos and team numbers on the side of each robot,” Lowe said. “They are also part chess tournament, due to each team’s different strategy, and just general fun. It’s a big party.”

By Alexandria Paton

Questions email us at hottytoddynews@gmail.com. 

Follow HottyToddy.com on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat @hottytoddynews. Like its Facebook page: If You Love Oxford and Ole Miss…

The post UM Hosts State Robotics Competition this Weekend appeared first on HottyToddy.com.