krokietnik

[krokietnik]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

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here’s a thought: the reason why adult/minor friendships are looked upon with suspicion, and the reason why adults with minor friends are accused of being predatory or having bad intentions, is because we think that minors don’t have anything of value to offer adults that isn’t sex/a relationship. it’s a continuation of the way adults devalue minors and their perspectives and contributions to the world.

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the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

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Two animals people need to shut the fuck up about and be normal are pandas and dolphins

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yall gotta learn the difference between "this character is an asshole" and "this character was supposed to be super cool but the author is an asshole" and "this character is a teenage girl who was mean once"

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you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this

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[krokietnik]

i think “video games aren’t really the violent child-corrupting threat some parents worry they are” and “certain circles of gamer culture are incredibly toxic and can lead people down dangerous/hateful ideological rabbit holes” are ideas that can absolutely coexist

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the internet these days is insane because every 3-5 days you see an honest to god neuron-rewiring video produced by some rando with too much free time, and it's so fucking good that you know would have been its own entire meme for MONTHS in 2005. but we're so saturated with phds in breaking bad editing so you can't go into work like "hey did you see The Bear No Rush video game?" because nobody has any idea what you're talking about. back in my day we watched 1 blurry video of a guy doing the Numa Numa Dance and it sustained all of society for an entire year.

[krokietnik]

As part of her social media detox this girl on YouTube made herself do one hour of understimulating tasks every day and she just counted rice for 60 minutes straight because its no different from doomscrolling in terms of wasted time

[krokietnik]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[krokietnik]

"I would never-"

You would if you were tired enough. You would if you were hungry enough. You would if your mind and body had been worn down enough, through pain or disease or toil or violent struggle. You might if you were put on the wrong medicine, or you got the wrong kind of head injury, or you were forced to choose between someone else and yourself. You might if your livelihood was staked on it, or all your hopes and dreams. You might if you didn't know what else to do, if it's what you were taught or if nobody taught you anything else.

I have not been worn down in most of these ways. I have lived a remarkably privileged life. But I have been worn down in some ways. And they were enough to teach me that in the wrong circumstances, any of us can become someone we don't want to be. It's worth keeping that in mind.

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accused 17th-century English or English colonial witches in a certain subset of modern pseudo-feminist fiction: I'm a girlboss who can read, unlike other women! I live apart from the community and use herbs to basically invent modern medicine! my views align perfectly with many modern progressive talking points! also I wear my hair down because I'm a ~free spirit~

actual accused 17th-century English or English colonial witches: I'm homeless and mentally ill and my community just kind of wants me gone. or I'm Jewish or Romani. or maybe I have property that someone else wants. I could have strong opinions but that's usually not enough to attract witchcraft charges on its own unless the community is REALLY in a mess. I might even be an unpopular MAN who someone has an interpersonal squabble with, although statistically I am more likely to be a woman (unlike in Scandinavia, where the reverse is true)

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Luckily not mine:

Polish meical team send to Korea in 1950s as a part of relief effort- field hospital swarmed with desperate people of all ages and stations in life sleep on mats and makeshift beds. Amnesis- nearly non existent. One Russian speaking local serves as translator. Young women with pale, swollen face, no eylashes, barely able to speak turns in. Probably developed hypothyroidism. Put in barracks with rest of the women. Morning- the barrack was empty. Just that one women sitting on the bed and crowd that for some reason decided to sleep outside. Cue to translator checking on and tearing medics a new ones for putting a leper in crowded space. Moral of the story: while diagnosing consider the environment you work in.

You know you've fucked up when you go to a doctor and the thing you have wrong with you has been named after an occupation that isn't a thing anymore. Like imagine a doctor looking at you and going "yeah you've got ox-drawn ploughman's disease. We don't even test for that anymore. Yeah the reason you've never heard of it is because the last known case was in 1927 and happened to some guy who was like 98 years old and didn't believe in modern medicine of the time. What the fuck have you been up to."

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people needdddd to wear headphones in public because while on an otherwise very lovely walk in the park today i saw a guy sitting under a tree watching a porn parody of the star wars prequels

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The longer I exist as a loudly proudly gay man the more I think that cishet men aren't actually attracted to women.

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the problem with having a decade old tumblr blog is that there are posts on it from a decade ago