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justice-turtle:

is anybody still awake out there

is anybody still alive

it’s like a horrible reverse rapture and I know if I eat all the ice cream I’ll have a sugar crash and my teeth will hurt and I won’t be able to sleep but I want to eat all the ice cream :-(

*hides*

To be perfectly honest, my first thought when Mom knocked on my bedroom door this morning to tell me Trump had won was “goddammit, JT is going to lose their mind”. (In part because of trying to help you keep your mind last night, but still.)

*hugs* I love you, please stay safe, and if ever you flee to Canada, I will be the first to welcome you home.

Tags:

#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog

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somnilogical:

somnilogical:

Whenever I post something with p values, tumblr deletes the part after the less than sign. This is very frustrating!

I had commentary on that article tumblr! And you deleted it! I just got to the point that stopped copying everything before posting it because I trusted you. Arggggh!

Textarea Cache? (That way you never have to decide whether you trust a text field enough to not copy it.) I don’t know if there’s a Chrome equivalent, and unfortunately I’m pretty sure there isn’t an Android Firefox equivalent.

Tags:

#Textarea Cache saved me this very afternoon #from having to rewrite a complaint I filed with Canadian Blood Services #(they used to test you for anemia as the *first* part of the screening) #(but the higher-up rearranged things and now it’s *last*) #(so I had to wait *40 minutes* to learn my iron hadn’t recovered from my previous donation) #(when previously I would only have wasted 5 minutes) #((it really ought to have recovered by now though)) #((it’s been four months)) #((going to talk to my doctor about iron supplements)) #anyway #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #reply via reblog #tangents

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{post I was replying to}}

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

Tags:

#in which Brin attempts to use her cultural osmosis from hanging out with philosophy nerds #(charity nerds are often also philosophy nerds) #death tw #suicide tw #scrupulosity tw #reply via reblog #this feels a little rambly and not-entirely-coherent and feeling-things-out #but so is the OP so I guess it fits

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another-normal-anomaly:

The really weird thing about Doctor Who is how the TARDIS is simultaneously

1) The most powerful entity in the series by far, basically a divine being, beautiful and awesome in both the new and old senses of the word

2) A shitty pile of kludges that’s permanently about to fall apart

 

chroniclesofrettek:

“the” (singular) really weird thing about Doctor Who???

 

another-normal-anomaly:

You come into my house, you bitch about my perfectly standard and acceptable figure of speech, and you don’t even capitalize the first letter of your sentence when you do it? Away with thee, half-assed pedant!

… Doctor Who is really fuckin weird.

 

chroniclesofrettek:

It’s been awhile since a new one came out, I miss it

 

another-normal-anomaly:

Good news–there’s a Christmas special coming out soon, and then the new series (complete with new companion!) at the start of 2017. And in the meantime, there’s that new spinoff Class, which I hear good things about.

 

chroniclesofrettek:

I have heard literally nothing about Class until a minute ago. What is it about?

 

another-normal-anomaly:

Okay so I haven’t actually watched it, because my activation energy for watching TV is crazy high, but it’s about the students at Coal Hill school dealing with normal teenager shit and also monsters from various parts of spacetime, who keep ending up there because the Doctor has gone to the school so many times that it’s some kind of temporal wheel-rut. There are only two episodes out so far, with more every week. First one was prom and shadow people, second one was dragons.

 

chroniclesofrettek:

Hmmmm. The problem is that Doctor Who works much better as a social show (at this point in my life), and I don’t know anyone in the bay who watches it. Followers? You know anyone?

Not in the Bay, but I have seen Class. It’s been okay so far; it’s hard to tell how good a show’s going to be from its first two episodes. Pretty gore-y, though, so be warned.

Tags:

#ClassDW #(following @doctorwho’s lead on how to avoid name collisions when tagging this show) #Doctor Who #reply via reblog #poor Ram has gotten *more* than enough blood spurted on his face for one lifetime

Anonymous asked: pure curiosity, what would a future child call you instead of gendered parent terms? or like… would they alternate?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

cptsdcarlosdevil:

there are no good choices

if no one comes up with something better I’m going with “zaza”, on the grounds that all nonbinary words include z’s or x’s

 

towardsagentlerworld:

Can they just call you Ozy?

(I may teach my child to call me by my first name, because (1) that’s what everyone else calls me, and (2) I’m going to call my child by their first name, so it’s only fair that they get to do the same for me)

(In India, there are specific titles for “older brother” and “older sister”, such that younger siblings typically don’t address their elder siblings by name. Elder siblings, however, do address their younger siblings by name. It eventually started to feel to me like the main purpose of these words was to enforce age-hierarchical relationships, and so I was happy that English doesn’t do that. But American English still has the norm of not calling your parents by their first name, and while I don’t think most parents have the intention of using this to enforce a hierarchical dynamic, I wonder if it has the same effect.)

(This is a really tentative hypothesis, and even if it’s true, I imagine the effect would be really small. And so I don’t think that teaching your kids to call you “Mom” or “Dad” [or “Zaza”] is wrong. But I personally don’t see a good reason for the terms “Mom” or “Dad” to exist, and I definitely want my child to know that they can address me by name if they’d like.)

 

coffeespoonsposts:

My stepmother specifically said that she wanted her son (my half brother) to call her ‘mum’ to enforce a hierarchical relationship. She’s generally very liberal.

 

towardsagentlerworld:

huh, okay, datapoint.

 

warpedellipsis:

When parents get pissy that their child called them by their first name, you know it’s a dominance thing. Most parents get pissy about it. It’s not just convention. I’ve never met any that haven’t. 

 

sinesalvatorem:

I once called my mother by her first name and she looked at me like I’d started speaking a foreign language. She didn’t, like, say it was wrong, or something, but she did seem to think it was hella weird.

And, like, it felt weird in my mouth, and no other kids did that, so I immediately switched back to “mummy”. It feels more natural.

But, now that you mention it, I think most parents do get upset about it. Yikes, even more hidden dominance shit.

OTOH, not having any special way of referring to one’s parents (or *children or other relatives) feels even weirder to me. Ideally, every relationship relative to the speaker should have a lexical title, for ease of sorting people. Maybe I could go by “Mother Alison”, the way nuns do?

*The child title in my culture is “Likl [name]”, from English “little”. I also like how our community has settled on “Baby” for “Baby Andromeda” and “Baby Merlin”, though that probably won’t last throughout childhood.

This reminds me that, earlier today, my cousin asked me if he could call me ‘Aunty Alison’, since that’s the adult female familiar title. I am So Touched.

 

warpedellipsis:

All other relatives, at least American-style, do go by title/relationship-name though? Like, Grandma Jane, Uncle Phil. Parents are the only ones that don’t, I think. Cousins don’t because that’s an equal relationship, not a powered one. 

I wonder how much of the resistance to alternate family structures, like multiple and blood-unrelated parents, is because of this. If you don’t have ownership of the kid, then you have no title, and if you don’t have a title, a separate title, then you have no way to know who the kid is referring to. And no way for other adults to refer to you. It’s all very set in 2-opposite gender parents for each kid, zero flexibility. If there were other names or flexibility, there wouldn’t be so much reason to resist. 

What’s the neutral name for a parent, that isn’t parent? It just sounds way too formal to go “Parent Haley”. Maybe that would work for places like schools to address the family, and I think that’s how they’ve handled same-sex relationships, but I don’t think a kid could do that. Are there other languages or cultures that have some kind of Name-(affectionate additive) or Title type thing that would fit this? Make one up?

 

sinesalvatorem:

My maternal grandmother is “Granny”, my paternal grandmother is “Grandma”, my maternal grandfather is “Granddad”, and my paternal grandfather is “Grandpa”.

I was 10 by the time I learned it was possible to use language such that The Four Grandparents might be ambiguous.

Likewise, if I had two parents of each gender, they’d be “mummy”, “mama”, “daddy”, and “papa”. Do other varieties of English not have two kid words for each parent-gender? This certainly wouldn’t be a problem for someone who grew up with my variety.

Although, really, now that I’m aware of the potential creepy ownership stuff, I think I’ll just have [title] + [name] for all relatives; people of equal or lower social status included.

I need to learn, and raise my kids with, a language that handles all this stuff better. Language nerds!, any suggestions?

I, too, distinguish the four grandparents by using different variants of “grandma” and “grandpa” rather than by name. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent mapping among families that do this, though: mine are “Gramma” for maternal grandmother, “Grampa” for maternal grandfather, “Granny” for paternal grandmother, and “Grampy” for paternal grandfather (though by the time I was old enough to talk Grampy was dead, so that term never got a whole lot of use). The lack of consistency always annoyed me a bit, that if I were speaking to someone outside my family, I couldn’t just say “Gramma” to communicate that I was talking about my maternal grandmother.

(Region notes: my grandparents lived in Massachusetts, part of New England. My parents moved to New Jersey after marrying, which is too far south for New England but still part of the broader Northeast.)

“Mama” and “Papa” sound slightly foreign or old-fashioned (I think I’ve only encountered them in historical novels, people from the South, and possibly-Brits-but-those-might-have-also-been-historical, never from speakers of my own dialect), but not so weird that they wouldn’t suffice if “Mom” and “Dad” were taken.

—

Another difference I’ve seen is in how a child refers to parents of other children. Apparently “Mr/Mrs X” is very common, and in many places the only polite form of address. I never did that: if I knew the parent through the child, I called them “[Child’s] mom/dad”, and if I knew the parent directly, I called them by their first name.

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#reply via reblog #language

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snowwhiteandhisworldofglass:

justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

I can’t remember now who it was (I know @sinesalvatorem has been talking about school lately, but I think it was before that) who was talking about the overly large grip the school system has on society, and gave the example of how “what grade are you in?” is often used instead of “how old are you?”. I was thinking this morning* about that, about my own attempts to navigate the dreaded “what grade are you in” question as a homeschooled child.

At first, when I was very young, I would just freeze in confusion. I had no idea what they wanted from me.

Eventually I learned it was a weirdly convoluted way of asking for my age. I didn’t think in grades, I thought in years. Sometimes, if I could remember the age–>grade translation algorithm well enough (it was hard to keep straight even at the best of times), I would translate for them. Other times I would try to cut to the point and give them my age in years. (Occasionally I’d get persistent people who would keep asking for a grade after being told an age. Usually I tried to explain that that’s not generally a meaningful question when you’re homeschooled**, either in that abstract way or–if I could remember the grade levels involved–saying things like “well, my math and history textbooks are designed for Xth grade, my spelling workbook for Zth grade, my writing textbook for Wth grade…”)

This all got worse after I moved to Canada, because it turns out that by Canadian standards I was born on a different side of the school birthday cutoff. While homeschooled grade levels are, as I said earlier, generally flexible, my parents had taken the lead of the American school system and started me on a kindergarten program at the same time I would have started public kindergarten, shortly before I turned six. While the grade levels of my textbooks soon diversified according to my abilities, there was a rough trajectory based on this starting point. In Canada, the birthday cutoff is in December instead of September, and a Canadian kindergarten would have wanted me shortly before I turned five.

There was no simple translation anymore, not even at the best of times. If I told them my grade, they would think of me as younger than I was. If I told them my age, they would think of me as older than I was. If I told them both, they would think to themselves “ah, she was held back a grade”, lower their estimation of my intelligence, and view me through that lens.

In an attempt to avoid all of these outcomes, I started to use longer explanations more often. For a couple of years in my mid-teens, the explanations began with “I lost count at 9th grade”, because frankly I had. I didn’t bother trying to get a grip on it again; what would it help if I were going to have to do the whole explanation anyway?

When I joined Girl Guides, soon after moving, I was placed by grade. I was placed according to the grade I was “actually in”, not the grade I “would have been in” if I’d been raised in Canada. I was a year older than people expected of me, and it tripped them up, especially in my last year after I reached age of majority.

(”You forgot the ‘parent or guardian signature’ bit on this form.”

“I’m eighteen. I am my guardian.”

“Oh, right.”)

—

This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness*** that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?”

—

*An hour before waking-up time, goddammit brain.

**Sometimes you get homeschoolers who try to be very rigid and follow a strict grade system, but most of them loosen up before long and the ones who don’t are considered kind of weird.

***Example: “I’m on vacation between Xth and Yth grades,” says a child in October.

“ This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness*** that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?” ”

aka brin summarizes MY ENTIRE LIFE ;P

OH MY GOD!!! so I feel this on a deep emotional level!!! Like I’ve been homeschooled my whole life and while I managed to keep track of my grade (because of church Sunday school) I eventually just started saying something along the lines of “well so age wise I’m a (insert grade here) but actual school wise I’m like (insert higher grade level here) in (this or that subject) and (whole other grade level) in (this or that subject)
As I reached high school I started just going by my hs grade because while I was doing entirely college level stuff I just started giving people the answer they were looking for (i.e. How many years into the awkward adult limbo stage are you?) it’s always confused teachers that I’ve worked with a lot who don’t have a grasp on how weird and wobbly homeschooling is compared with how structured “normal school” is.

*fistbump*

High school grades are even worse because they also have names. Like, “freshman” means 9th grade and “senior” means 12th grade, okay sure I guess, but I could never keep “sophomore” and “junior” straight. (Unless I actively had Wikipedia open in front of me, but unfortunately you’re usually not allowed to do that in offline conversations.) In high school, even on those occasions I couldn’t dodge the grade question, I tried very hard to go by number and avoid dealing with those damned confusing names.

–

@justice-turtle

ngl, I was thinking of you when I wrote that bit

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#reply via reblog #homeschool

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sinesalvatorem:

I lost my first tooth while my mother was out of the country and I was home with just my dad.

He was So Excited about getting to be in charge of a parenting milestone all by himself.

It was honestly really cute.

Because my parents didn’t believe in lying to kids, I knew it was the parent’s job to steal the kid’s tooth and then pay them damages.

So, I knew it was my dad who’d put $5 in our currency (~$2 USD) under my pillow for it.

When my mother got home, she was SHOCKED.

She was basically like “WTF, why would you give them so much money???”

“Even if you were trying to keep up with inflation since when we were kids, wouldn’t you give them one dollar???“

“Do you know how many teeth kids have????”

“They never would have noticed the difference! But now you can never reduce the price!”

My father is usually a very thrifty, financially-savvy man. He had just gotten over-excited.

But now his wallet flashed before his eyes.

And he had a face of “Dear G-d, what have I done”

The type of horror you’d feel after accidentally launching a nuke.

I felt sorry for him.

But I never let him reduce the price >:)

I could see an argument for “the first tooth is more special and gets a higher price”.

(My first four teeth refused to budge even as their replacements began to grow in, and had to be pulled. I got $10 for the four of them, and a warning that this was due to special circumstances and I should not expect $2.50 for every tooth.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog

Anonymous asked: I actually just had a sex dream for the first time. But I was a guy in it, which was weird (cuse im not), and it was more like I was reading something than actually experiencing it. Very weird, and not unpleasant, just confusing.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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{{OP by asexualactivities}}

brin-bellway:

(something something be the change you want to see in the world, hold on)

(okay, let’s see if this works)

Wait, do other people have a distinction in dreams between reading a story and experiencing it? “I’m reading this thing” is sometimes used as a framing device, but I still experience it as I would if it were “actually” happening within the dream.

(The thing about Erotic Dream Week is you see some of the non-sexual variety in people’s dreams too. Although I already knew non-prosopagnosics tend to see faces in dreams, so that part didn’t confuse me.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #dreams #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rendakuenthusiast:

chroniclesofrettek:

inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality?  Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible?  Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.

The first five minutes were a brutally realistic depiction of high school instead of the more tropey version I’m used to. Sort of like the opening of Saving Private Ryan vs a more conventional war movie. 

I went to a heavily academically-focused private high school so maybe the dynamics were different from a public school. But I mostly took the movie to be about cliques of people that weren’t mine, and really mostly about things girls did that boys didn’t do. So yeah, I pretty much didn’t think I counted, as far as the movie being about people like me. I also didn’t really like or identify with the movie, although I didn’t think it was terrible either.

You know what bugged me about mean girls? They never said where specifically in Africa they were from. Even though they make jokes about this themselves.

(I tried to fit all of my responses to this thread in the last post, but I saw another branch I wanted to respond to.)

It’s been a while since the last time I saw it, so maybe this doesn’t fit in with the canon, but I thought they weren’t from anywhere specific in Africa. Rather, they travelled around a lot within the continent. Wasn’t that why she was homeschooled, because they never settled down anywhere long enough for her to attend a school?

(I don’t know, maybe I just filled in the blanks from having occasionally met people who were homeschooled because their family was too nomadic to do otherwise.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Mean Girls

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality?  Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible?  Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.

#I can think of way more examples for the first one  #I think the second one is more common in like books  #(and adaptations of books)  #probably to appeal to Sensitive People Who Read  #but it’s still definitely a common cultural trope

Both of them are also common tropes in cautionary tales about why you shouldn’t go to public school. Corrupted By Popularity is more disturbing when you’re a kid hearing these stories, but as I’ve gotten older I find High School Is Like A Jungle getting worse because of that…that knowing superiority embedded in it. “Yes,” it says, “we’ve all had times where we looked at a group of public school kids and saw a pack of lesser animals for a moment before they resolved into people. Most, perhaps all, of us have had times where they never resolved into people at all. It’s okay; not only okay, but worth encouraging.” And that’s…not…okay? It’s sure as hell not worth encouraging. Like, yeah I’ve done it, and I don’t feel inclined to beat myself up over it, but these days I try to actually see people as people? Not seeing people as people has a pretty bad track record in general.

—

@sinesalvatorem​

“Yeah, I think public schoolers see it and think ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that shit at my school’.

ie: It’s not anti-public-school propaganda any more than people think the
average sit-com is anti-family propaganda. It’s a dramatised and
exaggerated version of their /actual lives/.”

#i mean i went to school in a completely different culture  #and still spent that movie going ‘oh yeah i remember that’

…huh. I really liked sitcoms as a kid, but I liked them to the extent that they did not remind me of my own life. They were–rather like Mean Girls, actually–glimpses into other ways of being.

I did once hear that Roseanne was so popular because it reminded people of themselves, and that surprised me. I liked Roseanne best because, as an upper-middle-class homeschooled kid, the lives of the Connors were completely alien to me, and I thought that was fascinating. I mean, it’s certainly possible to have a more alien-to-me life than they did–hell, I’m pretty sure you have one yourself, Alison–but people more foreign than them are generally portrayed as foreign, as people who are interestingly strange rather than interestingly identifiable-with. Roseanne portrayed itself as normal, as a story made by and for an alternate universe where people actually lived like that, and that was why it appealed to me.

—

It may be worth noting that IME, homeschooled minors generally do not date. Teen relationship drama pings as foreign to me, because…look, one time I heard through the grapevine that some sixteen-year-old in the community was dating someone, and the reason that got passed through the grapevine was because it was unusual for a sixteen-year-old to be dating at all. Another time, we got this one age ~14-15 kid who’d started out in public school and only recently switched to homeschooling. Apparently he flirted with the other kids around his age, most of whom didn’t notice and the remainder were weirded out. I honestly don’t know whether he flirted with me or not; I was in the oblivious majority, and I only know this was happening because I heard the parents talking about it.

Bear in mind, this was all among secular homeschoolers.

Mind you, even with the cautionary tales it’s very common for kids to switch to public school later on, especially at the middle-school/high-school transition, and the kids who do this tend to be more otherwise-normal than the kids who don’t. The weirdness level of homeschooled kids thus becomes more concentrated the older they get; in particular, groups of homeschooled teens are frequently upwards of 50% autistic. There are confounding factors and probably complicated feedback loops when it comes to which differences in homeschooling culture are actually cultural.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool

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