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Bai Haotian: Don’t do the thing

Wu Xie: I’m going to do the thing

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These are based off the main languages learnt in the UK plus English

Other school languages poll here

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AHEM. *leans on doorway* I would like to know about that time you led a strike in preschool.

Okay, storytime. Both of my parents worked full time, and the woman who ran the family daycare across the street “went away for her health”- a charming euphemism for her family having her institutionalised because they couldn’t cope with her schizophrenia, but that’s another story for another time- so I went to preschool for two years. The preschool I went to was a good one. Still is, actually. My brother and his wife have their little sprout on the waiting list already, and he’s not two yet. It’s built onto the side of an ex-church, and it has great play areas, a sandpit, ducks, the works. Nice. We did all the usual preschool stuff; craft activities, storytime, naptime, playing with toys. To help us learn to be responsible and cooperative human beings, we were expected to clean up after ourselves, and put things away when we were done with them. Being small children, this had mixed results, so at the end of every day, there’d be a big group cleanup, where we went through and picked all the toys and books up off the floor of the main room and put everything in order.

All very nice, right? Trouble was, about half of the kids got picked up at 5, 5:30ish, and the other half, whose parents worked later hours, would be there till 6 or 6:30. The cleanup usually happened around 6, so the kids whose parents could pick them up early never had to clean up, and I noticed pretty quickly that the kids who never had to clean up at the end of the day didn’t seem to pick up after themselves during the day, either. They knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it, so they didn’t care.

I feel I should mention that my mother was, at the time, the secretary of a large public sector union. She’d been a unionist for some time (we’ve got a great picture somewhere of baby me on her lap at a Women In Leadership conference) and sometimes she had people over for dinner, and they’d talk about union business. I knew what was going on, here. This was a discriminatory practice. It targeted kids whose parents couldn’t afford for one of them to stay home with the kids. It encouraged unfair behaviour in the kids who didn’t have to clean up. This had to stop.

I went to the staff first. Mostly they laughed at me- in their defense, please picture a tiny blonde four-year-old in a princess dress squaring up to you about “dithcriminatory practitheth”- and told me I should set an example for the other kids by being tidy. Well. That wasn’t going to change anything. Having been knocked back by the administration, I took the struggle to the people. While we were cleaning up, I talked to the other kids who had to stay late, and we came to a consensus that things had to change. Look, to be honest, I don’t remember this happening with any kind of clarity. I was very small. Mum has told this story with great pride for some years, though, and most of the details come from her retelling. I don’t know if it was me who first suggested strike action, but I know it was me who led the sit-in protests; I’m told it was me who made an inspiring speech about fairness and division of labour, and it was definitely me whose parents got called.

Upshot was, we went over to a system of shorter clean-up sessions throughout the day- one before lunch, one after naptime, and one at the end of the day- and my mother has never let me forget that four-year-old me was a rabble-rousing monster child.

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some of my favourite sign fails <3

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Please share with others! I'm curious.

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I don't know when everyone somehow collectively forgot the actual definition of queerbaiting but like... yall know queerbaiting was never about REAL PEOPLE'S actual identities right? It's about the MEDIA they put out.

Queerbaiting is when media hints that there will be queer rep to lure in a queer audience with no intention of ever delivering on that rep.

Queerbaiting is NOT when a celebrity experiments with gender or sexuality without coming out. They are allowed to explore!

Queerbaiting is NOT when an author writes a queer book without explicitly stating they share the same sexual or gender identity!

Queer media is NOT queerbaiting just because you don't know the creator's sexuality or assigned gender at birth!

Is the media explicitly queer? Then it's not queerbaiting! Simple as that! No one owes you an explanation of their own identity, full stop.

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Zhu YiLong takes the cover for Elle Magazine 36th Anniversary Issue October 2024.

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Sept 23 Zhu Yilong Studio shares BTS snaps of Zhu Yilong X Elle Oct 2024 Cover issue photo shoot

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Jack being so horny that we invented the Harkness Test and then it escaping containment is so fucking funny. Like there’s people using that shit who have no fucking idea who he is. His name is just permanently attached to an internet litmus test to see if someone/thing is morally fuckable. And I think that’s beautiful.

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as a tall, i’m going to use this pickup line

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Juana Martin | Fall/Winter 2024 Couture

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Biggest adult life trick I've learned is to lay that platonic praise kink on thick

Yesterday I told my friend "I'm proud of you for reaching out". Today I got told sb is proud of me for stretching and taking care of my body. I absolutely cheered them on for getting pants on and leaving the house

Utterly underrated, telling sb they did a good job. I literally feel the positive reinforcement strengthening some neural pathways like. Telling sb what they did was good makes it so much more likely to value yourself for taking that same action.

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wait wait wait hold on

bonus: tell me how you learnt chess, if you DO know how to play it. i learnt from my older sister, who was in chess club in fifth grade and forced me to play against her.

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I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.

If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.

Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.

I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.

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Three of the four elements are represented in types of hockey; Air hockey (air), field hockey (earth), ice hockey (water). Fire hockey needs to be a thing.