#free range kids

[smolphrog-littlebrain]

I VERY much have leash kid energy, and I prob should have been one, but my mother let me free range, and now I am the way I am<3

[incognito-princess]

For a lot of 'free range' 80s and 90s kids the street lamps coming on was the signal that it was time to go home, but, because my dad left for work at 10 p.m. for the older kids on my block (tweens and teens), my dad starting his Jeep was the signal to go home. We got a good 90 minutes extra to play 'kick-the-can' or 'hide-and-seek' in the dark!

[bryonyashaw]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bryony | Lifestyle | family | foodie (@bryonyannie)

𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙮𝙘𝙖𝙮 -

The family and I had a lovely time in the sun (and rain) while staying in the caravan at (was has become) one of our annual summer activities.

There was a music festival on too - where my mum grinded up against a fake Robbie Williams - called Grange Fest so it was a whole afternoon and evening of various tribute acts and a DJ Set! Always fun to watch. Other activities wise we went to a kids disco, there was a nearby park to play in, Arcade and a little water area with sand to keep them busy.

On site at The Grange there is a range of on-park activities, including fishing and golf, as well as cafes, bars and even take-away restaurants.

The kids weren't fussed by the evening entertainment as by 8pm after a long day playing they were done in but loved being able to have the freedom to play safely in the sand and park. Featured here are some happy photos but it wouldn't be a typical staycay without kids having their tantrums!

📌 𝘈𝘭𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘙𝘰𝘢𝘥, 𝘔𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘱𝘦.

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Things I have said to customers

[honestly remarkable I haven’t been fired yet]

The Government’s job is to protect your freedom. Who told you that less government would make you more free?

Do you actually believe that a Hotel Chain Manager is going to do a damn thing about the Wages & Rents crisis? The man’s fortune is built on exploiting that wedge!

You wanna be mad about wasted tax dollars, I agree, let’s be mad about wasted tax dollars! Like why are Oil Executives getting handouts? Why does Elon Musk get a free lunch? Money for kids to go to college is, like, explicitly one of the things tax dollars are good for! C’mon man think for a second you know this.

Look man, stuff like Work Ethic & Loyalty have to be taught. By example. If you want [“Kids These Days”] to exhibit those qualities, you have to make a world where those things are materially rewarded. They’re not stupid; they’re just new, and they’ve never lived in an actual Meritocracy.

“Nobody wants to work these days” we never did! Like. Buddy. PAL. If I invoke the specter of Communist Labor Camps, then Work is… not good? Like. A large part of what makes Work rewarding is being materially rewarded. With Currency. Oh! Prison labor! How could I forget prison labor. You get me?

[queenlua]

The crisis of the last year with student protests has made even the richest institutions aware of how much of their presumed wealth can be yanked away from them by a donor class who are increasingly inclined to exert their influence and authority in openly oligarchic ways. The obsession with safety—and the contradictions of that obsession—is as much about financial management as anything else. But that also is a wider sociocultural formation: the American upper middle-class is generally an asset class now who think about safety in the same way as universities both because all institutions with asset-based wealth have to and because they personally have to safeguard their assets in the same fashion, and face some of the same risks from liability exposure. [. . .] Moving away from the caretaker era can’t just be a matter of exposing students to risk and dismantling systems that make safety the mandatory product of an intrusive regime of surveillance and correction. If the people in charge inside the university and outside of it aren’t equally exposed to the natural consequences of their actions and decisions, all this means is forcefully communicating to students—or perhaps all young people—their relative powerlessness and vulnerability. It means deciding that the lesson you really want to teach is that it’s bad to be powerless and thus you should strive in life for power and wealth in order to be beyond consequences. Arguably, if the caretaker era and the bystander era were both aligned with a wider social ideology that was broadly shared across a generation, then this in fact the new ethos of our time—that there is no safety but in power, and that where power believes people are not being sufficiently punished for the things that power disdains, it will find a way to make consequences where there have been none.

bleak essay that nonetheless collects a lot of idle thoughts i've had in one place & puts them together with more coherence than i've ever managed

[kedreeva]

I was vending at the reptile expo when I felt a little tug on the back of my shirt and suddenly I had a baby to keep me company. He was very tired of being manhandled by the small child he belonged to, and slept up on my shoulder in peace for about an hour before stealing some of my water and heading back to his own people.

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

"yes im so fine"

*researches whether i can get my hands on ipecac*

[ritoryb]

other stuff from the rika sketchpad

[djsherriff-responses]

So guess which arc it is that Dolph gets kidnapped by Pagan Min in Laserhen

[babacontainsmultitudes]

*Henry and Mercedes in one hand*

*Glenn and Morgan in the other hand*

*Puts them all in the same jar and mixes them like chemicals*

[bright-and-burning]

who amongst us hasn’t been the strange eldest child their parents thought was normal until they had more children

[bryonyashaw]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bryony | Lifestyle | family | foodie (@bryonyannie)

The super mario bros

[trexalicious]

Free range parenting...

[septembersung]

9yo: I’m kind of relieved we lost Eugenides.*

Me: A common sentiment, no doubt.

*A recently vanished cockerel who liked to cause problems on purpose

[hairtusk]

are teachers outside the north west of england NOT doing this ?? i thought this was normal ??