Some guy called the park today and asked if we have any outdoor snow activities coming up.
“We should soon,” I said, “Weather permitting.”
“‘Weather permitting’?” he asked. “Can you clarify what you mean by that?”
“I mean… provided it gets cold enough,” I said.
“And why is that necessary?”
“Because… snow… melts?”
back in September I kept getting calls from people wanting me to make the monarch butterfly migration happen for their weekend picnics
sir I do not have the powers you expect from me
Working in a museum w/ a planetarium, we will often have public programs for big anniversaries like the 50th of Apollo 11, as well as for larger astronomical events like eclipses.
Some years back we had a viewing party for a total lunar eclipse that happened to occur in the hours before daybreak, and in the weeks before it happened the planetarium director had to field calls & social media messages left and right from guests FURIOUSLY demanding that we be more considerate of their schedules and move the event to a more reasonable hour of the day.
It seriously the tested the patience of this woman after she had to explain for the umpteenth time, while she understood their concerns about getting to the museum at 5am, rescheduling the orbits of the Earth & Moon was just a tad out of her control.
GOOD LORD.
It’s funny, ‘cause the children I used to teach at summer camp seemed to readily understand that I couldn’t magically conjure an octopus or an orca, and that sightings of those things were up to both chance and perceptiveness. But The Public is different, and often more demanding than Actual Children.
every single negative stereotype about women was dreamt up by men who were projecting. fight me about it.
“women can’t drive”
It is so well known that women are better and safer drivers than men that OUR CAR INSURANCE RATES ARE LOWER. Women get into fewer accidents, get fewer DUIs, and receive fewer speeding tickets than men.
“women never shut up”
Several scientific studies have shown that not only do men talk more than women, they also think that women have been talking for much longer than they actually have. Men interrupt and talk over women, dominate conversations, and still think women talk too much.
“women are shallow”
Lol next
“my wife is my ball and chain lmao”
Multiple studies have shown that marriage between men and women: Increases male lifespan, decreases female lifespan Decreases male depression rates, increases female depression rates Decreases male stress levels, increases female stress levels Increases male health and happiness, decreases female health and happiness Increases a man’s chance of getting a raise or promotion, decreases a woman’s chances of getting a raise or promotion
“women are too emotional”
Men love to say this about women after hurting them, in order to shift the blame and dismiss their feelings in one go. In reality, women are taught to hold our tongues and control ourselves quite literally from birth. We’re taught to put men’s needs and wants ahead of our own emotions regardless of the personal cost. Men are taught to do more or less whatever the fuck they want to women. Men take their emotions out on women while women are expected to shove theirs down.
I could go on and on but I don’t really think I need to.
Don’t know if I agree or not, but it’s definitely an interesting point.
the nice thing about statistics is that you don’t actually have to agree with them in order for them to be true
it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.
example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.
(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)
thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.
the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.
pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.
so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.
so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.
Empathy and universal design are for more than just people with disabilities.
Also, I love this quote: “it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.”
every star trek series since the 1960s: Earth in the first half of the 21st century was chaotic, plagued by social and economic inequality, the disastrous effects of pollution, and a devastating nuclear war
can we like…. talk about what a healthy relationship with technology looks like? not just for us, but for future generations: its super easy for us to accept tech unquestioningly bc many millennials and gen-Zers grew up alongside the growth of tech, and had a naturally evolving level of exposure to it. but what about the 5 year olds with tablets? the 8 year olds with perfectly curated instagrams?? i’m as obsessed with my phone as the rest of us, but can we please stop simply bemoaning how none of us read as much as we were kids and start exploring how all these screens might be affecting the kids growing up right now?
i work in customer service and please know that i am not baby-boomer aggrandizing when i say i have seen so many children, literally toddlers, dead-silent and completely, utterly absorbed in tablets bigger than their heads. i’ve seen a shitton of pre-pubescent girls posing for pictures together, planning their angles and backgrounds, and checking what shots their mom took bc they’re worried “they might look fat.” like. i’m talking 7 year olds. this isn’t meant to be some holier than thou bullshit, this is me being legitimately terrified about a problem i really haven’t seen any of us discuss or even acknowledge
In one of my psychology classes the teacher told us about a study that showed that toddlers nowadays have a hard time learning how to write and do fine motor things because of the skip the stage of learning with their hands and all they do is swipe and click.
oh!! my god!!! that is an incredibly literal/physical symptom of these newfound techno-reliances we’ve formed. a professor of mine referred to it as our “tech fetishization,” this expectation that all updated forms of tech are innately and unquestionably good things. we see technology as an amorphous, abstract concept vs. a substantive influence in our mental, emotional, and physical states but holy shit it really, really is
@ y’all in the notes completely missing the point and thinking this is about millennials turning into the ‘Thomas Edison was a witch!’ or ‘kids these days!’ crowd…
Look, I fucking love technology. I love what the advancements in my lifetime have been able to make possible. The sheer amount of information and communication and creative tools available is incredible, and I often wonder how different my life would be now if I’d grown up with all these things available and accessible. (How many more things would I know how to do? How much more music could I have written? How much more art could I have produced? Could I have started my own businesses sooner? How many more people from how many more places would I know?)
But the things in the above posts are problems. I see plenty of bitching now about the effects that ‘TV / video game babysitting’ had on you - you think handing a 2-year-old a tablet to shut them up isn’t just another incarnation of the same thing?
We bitch about how fucked up algorithms are all over the internet, and you don’t think kids having nearly unmonitored access is a problem? You don’t see a potential for how this could be fucking someone up? Open a YouTube page as a new user (with zero history, cookies, etc.), click on an innocuous video, and let autoplay run for a bit. It gets weird real fast. (Even with filters.)
As difficult as ‘don’t worry about looking like the people in the magazines, they don’t look like that either’ was for us, you don’t think there’s a potential for more damage with social media etc. now? Everybody has access to filters and photoshop etc. The whole ‘influencer’ thing is that ‘anybody can be a star, you can make yourself, you don’t have to wait for a studio etc. to discover you.’ Seven-year-olds obsessing whether they look fat or if their instagrams can compete with some random person who’s edited the shit out of their photos (and they’re not a movie star, just a random person, so it must be real!) is messed up.
Kids coming into schools with lower vocabulary levels because they haven’t heard as many words from people by a certain age - because it’s easier to sit them in front of a pretty, addicting game to keep them occupied and behaving than spend the time interacting with them person-to-person - is messed up.
There are so many amazing tools we have now that are awesome for helping kids learn and grow. (I would have killed to be able to have ‘how to’ videos on YouTube when I was a kid - there were so many things I wanted to learn that if my parents didn’t know or the school / library didn’t have resources on, I was SOL.) But I’d love to see actual conversations about the problems growing up with tech is causing - without it devolving into the usual thinkpieces and comments that do just break it down as ‘tech is bad!’ or ‘tech is fine, ya loser dinosaurs!’ There’s absolutely a healthy balance here somewhere. I just don’t think people are all that invested in finding it.
This is an absolutely vital conversation to have, and it often gets shut down as a “fear of progress.” No, we need to acknowledge that technology evolves exponentially faster than our biology, and we need to examine what that means and what kind of repercussions that might have on our future generations.
In the Netherlands, abortion is legal. There is however one pro life organization called Stichting Schreeuw Om Leven. But instead of harrassing women who are on their way to the abortion clinic and make them feel miserable, they offer them HELP.
If a woman wants to get an abortion because she is financially unable to give birth to and raise a baby, the organization will pay for everything she needs during the pregnancy and after, until she’s financially stable to raise the baby on her own.
This organization won’t stop women from going to the abortion clinic, but would rather hve a healthy conversation with them. Ask them if they can help her with anything in order for them to keep the baby. They also hand out contraception in the streets for those who can’t afford it.
Women don’t get abortions just because they want to. There are reasons why. This organization doesn’t fight abortion, it fights the reasons why women get abortions. Take notes America.
It’s like. They are actually pro-life. As inthey care about human life
