#kids gift guide

[styleherstrong]

Back to School Gift Guide

Back to School Gift Guide

Hi, Lovelies! I can’t believe we are a week away from the beginning of a new school year. I personally feel like every summer goes by in a flash, but this year seemed to be exceptionally fast. I also can’t wrap my head around the fact that I now have a second grader! How!? A fun little tradition that I started when Lilly entered Kindergarten, was creating a fun Back-To-School Gift Basket for…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The art of Daniel Danger

[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction

The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.

There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.

Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.

The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.

The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.

So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”

There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”

But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”

There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.

The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.

Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.

I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.

http://www.tinymediaempire.com/

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]

Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]

On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]

Danger isn’t just a

very

talented artist, he’s also an

extremely

talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3

[Image  ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]

Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder

So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil

This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:

https://midsummerscream.org/

Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award

And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]

To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger

[catsandbooksstuff]

I might seem like the ideal student: homework always in early, every extra credit and extracurricular I can get my hands on, the good girl and the high achiever. But I realized something just now: it’s not ambition, not entirely. It’s fear. Because I don’t know who I am when I’m not working, when I’m not focused on or totally consumed by a task. Who am I between the projects and the assignments, when there’s nothing to do? I haven’t found her yet and it scares me.

[therainbowfishy]

Here’s a slapped-together, weirdly specific gift guide version of my favorite books of 2022!

THE HURTING KIND by Ada Limón

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A LIST OF FURTHER POSSIBILITIES by Chen Chen

THE LESBIANA’S GUIDE TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL by Sonora Reyes

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC by Kevin Wilson

SCOUT IS NOT A BAND KID by Jade Armstrong

PASSING FOR HUMAN by Liana Finck

MOOMIN: THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP, VOL. 1 by Tove Jansson

LANDINGS by Arwen Donahue CYCLOPEDIA EXOTICA by Aminder Dhaliwal

MAMO by Sas Milledge

THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER by Emily X.R. Pan

HITHER & NIGH by Ellen Potter

DUCKS by Kate Beaton

CLEAVE by Tiana Nobile

WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG by Kelly Link (*a preorder, which might be a good gift for your bookworm friend who has already read everything that exists)

*

Not pictured favorite picture books: MINA by Matthew Forsythe and IF YOU WERE A CITY by Kyo Maclear and illus. by Francesca Sanna

**

More non-book bookish gifts ideas:

A kickstarter tier for Enchanted Lion’s new imprint for picture books for teens/adults, Unruly 

Another tote bag, of course (You can get a double-sided Unruly one from the aforementioned kickstarter, illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova, or there’s this cat one I illustrated, if you’re into shop cats named Zora).

Cute desk lamps or fun candles for reading through this dark winter

A book subscription, a gift that lasts the whole year. May I suggest the customizable one that Avid Bookshop offers or Mr B’s if you’re in the UK. Small Beer Press also has a zine subscription to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that you can add chocolate to.

[alo83]

Help please!!!

Last year I found these amazing kids gift guides that plotted gifts on an X-y axis from most to least educational and then from expensive to affordable. They they had one for each age group. They were great! I thought I found them here on tumblr, but I can’t find it now. Of course I didn’t save it and my browser history does not go back to last Christmas. Does anyone know anything like it?

I was thinking it was @tksstgiftguide but I don’t think it is actually.

Anyone have any ideas???

[cupcakegalaxia]

Yall would not believe how much of Yetenek took Wingfeather saga as a massive inspiration and just ran with it.

[mombian]

Even as our community grapples with tragedy, I think it is important—perhaps more important than ever—to remind young people that there is also queer joy. The books here, some of the year’s best, cover a range of identities and themes and emphasize love, inspiration, and celebration.

[happeningattheharbour]

Christmas markets and events in Dubai

Experience the Magic of Christmas with Happening at the Harbour - Your Guide to Festive Markets and Events in Dubai!

Embrace the spirit of the season and immerse yourself in the enchanting world of Christmas with happeningattheharbour.com. As your premier destination for all things festive, we're here to guide you through the most magical Christmas markets and events across Dubai.

Step into a winter wonderland filled with twinkling lights, festive decorations, and the irresistible scent of mulled wine as we uncover the city's most cherished Christmas markets. From traditional bazaars brimming with handmade crafts and unique gifts to vibrant street fairs showcasing local artisans and culinary delights, we've curated a list of must-visit destinations to make your holiday season truly unforgettable.

But the magic doesn't stop there! Dive into our comprehensive calendar of Christmas events, featuring dazzling light displays, captivating performances, and joyful celebrations for the whole family. Whether you're seeking a magical evening under the stars at a festive concert or a whimsical journey through a Christmas-themed village, we've got you covered with the most exciting happenings in town.

At Happening at the Harbour, we're dedicated to spreading joy and creating lasting memories during the most wonderful time of the year. Join us as we explore the best Christmas markets and events in Dubai, and let the spirit of the season fill your heart with warmth and cheer.

Make this Christmas one to remember with happeningattheharbour.com - Your Ultimate Guide to Festive Fun in Dubai!

[playingwithapparel]

Holiday Gift Guide 2023: For Kids

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The holiday season is upon us, and we’re all anxiously awaiting the best part of the holidays: watching our little ones excitedly open gifts, play with new toys, and explore new activities! When I’m shopping for holiday gifts for my little ones, It’s important to me to find gifts that could push them to use their imagination, try new things, and play…

[sewgeekmama]

Santa Surprises: 10 Awesome Stocking Stuffers for Kids

[farlydatau]

[trywithmalia]

Holiday Gifting Guide Part 1

Do you need ideas?

Here are some ideas to gift to your loved ones <3

These are gifts I am giving this holiday season

Part 2,3 & 4 coming soon so stay tuned

Thanks for watching

Xoxo

Try With Malia

#giftingideas #giftguide

[cassiefairy]

Christmas guide for children (that'll keep them entertained)

With Christmas fast approaching, here are some slightly different ideas for festive gifts for children. These toys, games and treats will help to keep them entertained during the festive holidays - and beyond!

Some items have been gifted Toys with STEM credentials If you’re a regular reader of my blog you may have noticed that I tend to favour toys with an educational twist. I love the idea that children can play with something really fun and be learning at the same time. That’s why I like to choose building kits for kids at Christmas. Not only do construction kits like the Connetix tiles give…

[thereviewwire]

12th Annual Holiday Gift Guide: 2023 Gifts for Kids & Teens

Find lots of Christmas gifts for those kids and teens on your list in our 2023 Holiday Gift Guide! Make sure to check back, as we will be adding more gifts often! Related: Holiday Guides: Gifts for Kids and Teens 2023 Gifts for Kids & Teens

[crazyblondelife]

Stocking Stuffers for Everyone - For Her, For Him, For Kids & For Baby

One of my favorite things to do on Christmas Eve is to stuff the stockings! I collect little things for everyone that I know will be perfect for them and curate the stockings! Hot sauce, grilling seasonings and Reeces Cups for my sons-in-law, special candles, makeup and holiday ornaments for my daughters, and for the kids…I go a little crazy with art supplies, books, and little toys that I know they’ll love! This year, I have 12 stockings to fill - 4 grandchildren, 3 sons-in-law, 3 daughters, Baldy and Amos (can’t leave out the pup), so I’ll have to start early to get it all done!

I hope you enjoy these fun stocking stuffer ideas - I think they’re pretty fabulous!

And just in case you need a stocking to stuff…

Thanksgiving is coming soon and there is still time to download my free Thanksgiving Survival Guide! It’s filled with recipes, table setting ideas, organization tips and more! Get it here!

I really hope these gift guides are helpful! Have a great day!