#towards a better future

[against-forms-recognizable]

Shower thoughts on the family structure

Despite its current dominance, the single-income household has never been viable on a mass scale, outside of a few decades in the West, due largely to imperialism extracting massive amounts of wealth from the rest of the world combined with technological monopolies which have since lapsed.

Historically, in households where there was one 'breadwinner' and one 'homemaker,' it was because child labor allowed it to be so, because the industry of the household (the breadwinning) was linked into the domesticity: if you were a freeholder farmer, growing your food, farming, what we would now think of as a job, was in the same class of labor as cooking and cleaning, it was all part of the same system, we did not think of one as a job and the other as not. So, as children are often expected to help out around the house today, children back then would be expected to help out in the other productive endeavors of the household, like farming, or other forms of work. And children didn't typically go to school. They started working with their parents from a very young age.

So you hear a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to maintain a single income household, it's because when children are present, they are being freeloaders, generally; all of the labor they would have done to contribute to the household is offloaded solely onto the parents. And when they are not present, well, that was never very achievable in the first place with one person not earning bread, right?

We switched to a system where children do not work but we did not accomodate the switch to that system by altering the family structure to include a higher amount of laborers per household, which would necessitate a higher amount of adults living together for the family unit than just one man one woman. And we got away with it for a long time because of competitive advantages provided by imperialism, the industrial revolution, and so on.

That is coming to an end, and people are finding out that having kids is now a miserable experience that often makes your life worse, because of the financial and time burdens now associated with shepherding someone through the legal and social structures constraining and defining 'childhood.'

It doesn't have to be, though. We can envision alternative household and family structures that make that burden much less intensive. For instance, instead of marriage, some alternative structure in which a group of best friends bind themselves together and agree to live with each other in a shared household, which future spouses and children are incorporated into. (repping Terra Ignota here)

Such a structure could have one homemaker and three breadwinners because the duties typically assigned to homemakers have been made much easier than previous by technology. After spouses are incorporated in, you could even have a division between homemaker and educator, with one person whose sole job in the household of ~8 adults + however many kids is cleaning, and one person who is solely dedicated to day to day parenting and schooling. And in this structure it doesn't really matter how many people in society are gay or trans or in relationships that will otherwise not produce children because every household will probably have at least one straight couple and they can have as many kids as the household can bear if they want, which is the same amount of kids as a household with 4 straight couples.

Also a necessary comment here about how abusive the pre-industrialization family unit often was, being a child often meant being forced to work on the threat of extreme physical abuse or starvation if you did not. That was not good. Returning to that would not be good. We need something new.

[emacrow]

Babysitting duty calls, Klarion

It another world threatening battle for the justice league, young justice against the league of Villains and chaos children before most of the chaos children froze as if they sense something bad was approaching and immediately dipped out.. except klarion whom was fighting with raven who immediately froze up too late in front of the portal.

Only for a green portal to appear, as a worned out floating glowing green, but blue skinned teenage boy who turn into a man with red eyes, a clock staff in hand and a glowing white hair baby in a baby carrier.

Klarion is literally struggling like a feral cat who got wet in cold water against some invisible force speaking in some odd static like language before giving up after half a minute when the man spoke back with a short word.

The man now just shape-shifting into turn elderly just gave klarion the baby carrier before noticing how the heroes and villains have stop in mid battles looking at both klarion and him.

"All in soon time, but be warn Flashes whom break the laws of times will get their due if you keep messing with the past and future." Spoken the elderly now shape-shifted into a young boy before he turn back to klarion leaving him a note and glowing baby bag before floating back into the swirling green portal.

Klarion could only look at note with his eye twitching, Teekl meowing as she climb into the baby carrier purring around the glowing baby.

"Why do I keep getting babysitting duty, it so unfa-..." klarion grumbled as he pick up the baby carrier and bag teleporting away..

....

....

....

"What just happened?" Said Dick whom only one question would be put on hold til later in the watchtower of what just happen before the fight resuming with the young and original justice league winning since the league of Villains were distracted.

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

I'm sorry but James Vowles criticising how Red Bull has treated their drivers in the past, only to go and then treat Logan far worse while pulling the exact same shit Red Bull did, ie the exact behaviour he criticised and called them out for, is so freaking infuriating like the sheer hypocrisy -

[jesuis-assez]

↠ Tim & Lucy ↳ 2x01 - Impact

[bonefall]

i just thought of something about frostpaw’s design having a wolf motif and her huge autopsy scar - it reminds me of how in multiple fairy tales (particularly ittle red riding hood, like you mentioned in the design post), the wolves in those stories have their stomachs cut open. i just thought that was cool :3

I hadn't even considered that, but it makes it work even better. The fairytales don't even just have the wolf get their belly cut open-- they also get filled with stones and tossed in the river.

There's a clear image in my mind that when Frostpaw is put under the human tranquilizer, her mind falls backward and plunges her into liquid void. A dream takes hold, bubbles forming in the dark, her body cradled by clear water as far as she can perceive.

The unspoken knowledge of her dream tells her that she's in a raindrop, the river, the lake, and Riverstar Himself. The embodiment of water. And He is endless.

Her problems are washed away by the sheer vastness of his being, and she's just beginning to wrap her head around the marvel of it all when she opens her eyes in a den. Warm, comfortable, surrounded by hay.

The vision sloshes in her mind like dancing waves. She has a boiling desire to understand what it meant-- and the only thing that comes to mind is the Tribe of Rushing Water's philosophy that all things are connected by the river. That living by the Lake, fed by the southern delta, which rushes down from the mountain's waterfall, makes their cultures kin.

She decides to start there, and will go further south if need be. Thus begins Book 3 of BB!ASC, The Source of the River.

[mamawasatesttube]

perry with some words of wisdom in superman: lex 2000 ("just because this country is about to go to hell in a handbasket doesn't mean this newspaper does, too!") (and we are all the newspaper, really.)

[virtues-end]

I am absolutely not asking for you to add this to the story because I feel like readers have gotten very free with asking authors to tweak stuff and it's been very entitled in some cases, BUT:

I am imagining the delicious angst of a helvling who took Shea's last name mournfully dropping it after the Ch. 1 revelations. Because apparently they did not have the relationship built on trust the helvling thought they had, and, moreover, why would the helvling want to be associated with Shea's family if that's who it includes?

Yeah, I've talked about it (the last name thing) before in a previous ask. I might yet add it a little further down the line, or when I'm making final edits to the game.

[seance]

WHAT'D YOU DO WITH HIM? I KNOW HE WOULDN'T HAVE LEFT BY CHOICE. I KNOW YOU THINK YOU UNDERSTAND HIM.

[bikananjarrus]

it’s really such a crime that rriordan immediately pitted percy and jason against each other when they should’ve immediately bonded over being kidnapped by hera, having their memories erased, and months of time stolen from them. they should’ve been allowed to recognize each other as leaders of their respective camps (and understand what it took to get in that position, because leadership has a cost) and recognize that they are being pushed around the chessboard by the gods AGAIN, and they should’ve gotten the chance to truly combine their strength (with annabeth’s additional leadership skills) and lead the younger members of the seven. and in doing so hera would’ve realized the mistake of giving them common ground, because percy and jason’s combined power? their matching bitterness and contempt for the gods? unmatched. the olympians thought luke was bad, but god help them when percy and jason turn their power onto them

[incredipuppy]

Oliver “I always believed people were turned evil by their surroundings and circumstances but now I’m starting to think I was always destined to be evil” Nolastname x Marcus “I was created for the sole purpose of doing evil but I want to be good” Davenport

[utane]

[against-forms-recognizable]

Okay, so, here's the thing, here's where a lot of my anarchism comes from.

Let's go all the way back, back to where humans came from, the ancestral environment. In the ancestral environment, when we're all hunter gatherers, sometimes there's scarcity. And when there's scarcity, it's who you know and the nature of those relationships which determines whether or not you survive. So, being a social animal, the degree to which you manipulate the social environment is a huge factor in that.

A lot of the ways we do this are through social structures, phantasms. We have a lot of them floating around; gender, morality, honor, justice, family. These are all things that don't actually exist materially. They only exist as a linking of concepts, a constellation of ideas that we reify into a system. And we use these to control each other, to create a social environment that is more suitable to getting our needs met. They form the bedrock of our civilization and society.

We enforce these structures most often by methods of social correction; isolation, harassment, bullying, and so on, to make people get with the program. And when that fails sometimes there is violent coercion, in modern times usually by the body that maintains a monopoly on violence and violent coercion, the state.

But because these things don't actually exist materially, they are flexible. We can add or remove stars from these constellations while maintaining mostly the same recognizable shape and other people still recognize it and might not even realize we changed it at all. And we all do this, all the time, generally unconsciously, in ways that favor us. This is where identity politics comes from, right? All of the toxicity within it. Everyone is trying to weaponize these structures to extract material benefit from the social environment by reshaping these relations to be more favorable to them.

But these abstractions are largely the way we make sense of the world. It's the foundation of language and cognition and communication. So anything we do together will always result in people playing these games with each other, defecting in this grand prisoner's dilemma.

This applies to communism, too - I think every communist has started out well-meaning, the marxist-leninists included. The thing is that we are fundamentally unable to participate in society without trying to turn it to our benefit, it is hard-wired into us, we are so good at it that we don't even realize when we are doing it. And it applies to anarcho-communism, as well, even in the absence of a coercive state people can still accrue soft social power and utilize that to create a social hierarchy - even a simple reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which posits a flawed anarcho-communist utopia, reveals it as an investigation into how even if you start out with true believers, applying it on a society wide level will result in the vast majority of people talking the talk without walking the walk.

So, at present, because I don't really see a way out of this, my anarchism is mostly formulated as a critical orientation at these structures which create hierarchy and domination, a toolbox of critique that we can use to break them down, a continual process that must be adhered to as everyone will always be trying to build new ones up. Conscious deconstruction, of our unconscious constructions. This doesn't mean I don't think things can be better, that I don't think a positive social project is possible. I just don't know how to get there, right now, with a method I'm sure won't just end up making things worse.

[qoldenskies]

I like to imagine that after some time ccDonnie gets really into training with his bō and in training in general. He's such a solution orientated person I feel like it would get really unbearable for him to feel like he's the weakest and defenseless - after all isn't all of this his fault for being so dense that he could not tell that something was oh so obviously wrong with his brothers and for being so weak that he ended up getting so physically hurt? So really this is something he needs to fix again. Focusing too much on his tech has made him a liability and bad at reading his brothers, so he tries to balance tech and training more.

So I imagine that as an adult Donnie is quite a scary aggressive fighter - softshell turtles are quite aggressive in nature after all, precisely because of their softness - and appears quite distant and cold to outsiders. You would have to know him for quite some while and be really attentive to notice that at heart he is far more gentle mannered and soft, but the most important people in his life already know that.

Also!! I love it when in tmnt whump writers use turtle behaviours as therapy - like swimming being therapeutic. Maybe ccDonnie would also really enjoy swimming and letting his mind rest after all this?

I really liked the animatic!!!! And can't wait for the last chapter of cc! Sending love

honestly this is something i could see! combat is going to be a hard thing for donnie to go back to in particular even without his brothers because he's kind of conditioned himself to panic and do little, curl up in a ball and steel himself. and mixed with the final attack i think he's just going to have problems getting back into the environment and mindset

but like, when he does? i could definitely see some overcompensating going on. donnie gettting vicious out of fear of being helpless again. being triggered and seeing red, falling back hard on the urge to fight back that DID save his life. it stopped leo from slitting his throat and held raph off, really. its still frenzied and panicked but there's an edge of uncharacteristic anger there. he'd otherwise normally be very precise and tactical in his combat, and i do think it'd be a skill he would put a lot of focus on.

im unsure about socially though. i could see him giving off that energy because he would be quiet for SURE, and he always looks on edge and nervous (which can be interpreted as "fuck off" body language lmao) but donnie is hyperaware of other people and he always will be going forward. when he actually opens his mouth he'll be very appeasing, at first at least. i do think he'll be really nervous around new people and it'll make it hard for him to find new connections, but he'll actually be one of the better ones with that. leo will be nasty because of paranoia for a long time.

(also omg yeah i am a little envious because i would LOVE to meditate underwater ... just go under there for ages and chill ... need to project this urge onto him it sounds so calming)

[sincapjelly]

I wonder how it felt when Lilly gave birth to Cole and lost her powers right away. She was pretty young, and she probably had a different vision for herself as an elemental master, meaning she never got to have fun with her powers as much as she would like. She probably couldn't get enough of them.

I wonder if Lou was worried about her when she lost her powers. He has no idea how it must feel like, but he can guess some part of her feels empty now. He'd be so worried if with PPD she would be angry at Cole for taking her powers or feel hurt, because you know, even though in her right mind she was happy that he was her inheritor, you never know.

He finds her sighing sadly when she is taking care of their garden a few times, no longer feeling like a part of the earth below her. It no longer feels like they are one, and it's a very odd feeling, she can't say she likes it. And it took some time to finally get used to it too.

One night Lou wakes up, and she is not beside him. He wonders where she is, and finds her talking to baby Cole. She yaps to him, asks him about how she wonders it feels to him. How she heard that when elemental masters are too little to wield such magic, "the magic is around them and not in them", or something like that, whatever that means. So he probably isn't even aware of the connection between him and his element.

Lou listens to them. How she talks to the baby in a quiet, soft voice, how Cole sometimes makes happy, funny little sounds, how Lilly giggles between her words when he does that. Best of all, Lilly doesn't sound as sad. She sounds happy when she talks to the baby about their element. How she explains to him that she is sad about losing them, but it's okay because she chosed to give up on them. She will be okay, it's just gonna take a little longer to get rid of old mannerism.

[powdermelonkeg]

Starting the year off with a random Zelda theory:

Ghirahim is Lorule's Master Sword, and him being in Hyrule is why Lorule turned to destroying their Triforce rather than hoping the hero would save them and restore balance one day.

[celtrist]

Random headcanon I probably like too much is the idea that Rosie never really swears, or at the least she swears even less than Alastor.

Like, she could if she wanted to, and she's not aghast when people do. She just doesn't. There's something about a cannibal lowkey drawing a line at profanity that gets me giggling.

Alastor makes sense he swears, he's from the south so he probably picked up on that sort of talk even with the transatlantic accent. Obviously he's learned to filter swearing and profanities out for radio, but like to imagine another reason he doesn't swear that much was Rosie rubbing off in him (the irony that his swearing decreased in Hell more than Louisiana is... accurate actually)

While not my favorite relationship, I really do love Rosie's and Alastor’s close-knit relationship and can't wait to see them interact more with season 2. They've also been described as having a relationship similar to Mary Poppins and Jack, so curious if they'll establish them as mentors and protege to a degree or at least just have Alastor always looking happy/in awe at Rosie.