The worst excuse I’ve ever heard for gendering books is that, “What if it confuses my kid? What if they grow up gay or trans because I let them read about too many girl/boy things?”
Your son’s first crush might be the rowdiest boy in a story about boys doing “boy things”. Your daughter might want to be with the gentle seamstress who makes the magic cloak, not be her. Your tomboy might be a boy, and he might identify with the protagonist’s science-loving crush, not her.
Your kid is your kid, and they will be who they are meant to be. Give them all the boy/girl books you want, but you can’t control how they’ll feel about them, or what they’ll take away from the story.
As a parent, you can’t iron the world flat to keep your kid from stumbling, but you can absolutely prepare them for the bumps. If they walk an unexpected path, having read more widely will only ease their way, and get them where they need to be.
“As a parent, you can’t iron the world flat to keep your kid from stumbling, but you can absolutely prepare them for the bumps.“
Just so you know there was a scene during my test screening of into the spiderverse where Peter Porker says fuck and I just went and watched the final film tonight and they cut it out. It appeared in a speech bubble with a bunch of symbols like “f$&@!”. He also had a horrifying line about one of his family members dying and it smelling like singed bacon that legit got gasps during the test screening but they cut that as well. I just want you to know they made John Mulaney say so much weird shit that did not make it into the final cut of the film and y’all better pray they put it in the extended features because I was DEVASTATED at some of the jokes they removed.
Fun fact, they didnt make John say any of that stuff. in an interview he said that, since he was a comedian he was told to “have fun with it” during his recording sessions; which apparently lead to a lot of swearing and morbid jokes for at least 2 hours before he stopped and asked what the movie was rated. “PG.”
“Oh, so you can’t use anything that I’ve said at all”
We all know that Hoth was a simmering mess of hormones and stress and I would pay good money for a soap opera about them. Here are some things which Definitely Happened:
There’s a betting pool going on who takes Luke’s virginity. The favourites are Han and Leia, but Wedge Antilles has pretty good odds, and there’s a small contingent of aliens who are convinced it will be Chewie (after all, who could resist that Wookie musk? Headcanon: most alien races consider humans soft and gross. Most alien races find Wookies absurdly attractive. Han Solo isn’t the ladykiller; Chewie is.)
Leia and Han scream at each other in every corner of the base. Everyone is desperate for them to fuck. They do not. The sexual tension is so thick that it could be cut into blocks and sold as wall insulation. More than once they are ‘accidentally’ locked in a supply cupboard in the vain hope that claustrophobia will act as the catalyst that enables their frustration to spark into true love – or at least nasty raunchy cupboard sex. It does not. All that happens is that the offender has legally changed their name to escape the Wrath of Organa.
Someone paints a shirtless Han Solo on their X Wing. Leia is furious. Han is delighted: both at the highly flattering portrait (he has an eight-pack, he is shredded) and at Leia’s fury (you’re jealous princess/no I am not/you’re jealous, hey I can pose like that for you if you –). Hoth’s winter had nothing on the chilly silence that followed that suggestion.
Luke and Leia both have very graphic dreams about Han Solo. Han Solo has very graphic dreams about the twins – individually, together, he’s thirty fucking years old, why is his brain doing this to him.(Later on they will, individually, realise that due to Luke and Leia’s Force-bond they probably created a circle of Han Solo Sex Dreams: Leia had them, so Luke sensed her lust for Han which intensified his own lust for Han, which led to Luke having Han Solo sex dreams, which led to Leia lusting – and so on, and so on. For the sake of their sanity, they never share this revelation which each other.)
Luke is SO COLD. All the time. WHY DOES NO ONE APPRECIATE HOW COLD HE IS. He comes from a desert world. Of course he’s cold! What is all this white stuff? It was pretty for the first fve seconds but holy fucking Force it is so cold it burns and what the hell is going on with that? He bundles himself up in so many layers that he waddles rather than walks. Fearsome Last of the Jedi indeed.
Luke tapes a knife to a cleaning droid (disc-shaped things that swish around the base, sucking up dirt) and names it Stabby. Why, says Leia. Luke, the boy from Tatooine, shining and happy despite everything says why not. Why not indeed. Stabby is very fond of chasing Han. Han wants desperately to shoot the fucking thing– but then he sees big-eyed Luke and sharp-toothed Leia cooing over it and, well. A little bit of light stabbing is nothing, compared to those two smiling.
STABBY THE SPACE ROOMBA!
I am torn between wanting Stabby to be grabbed and evacuated along with the Rebels and make it to the next base, and wanting Stabby to get Vader.
Compromise: shortly after losing the Millennium Falcon, Vader, storming through the Rebel base, is startled to feel a sudden jolt of pain from the artificial sensors on his left leg prosthetic: a sharp sensation on his ankle. Surprised, because he sensed no threat–is the limb malfunctioning?–he looks down, and there is a cleaning droid with a knife taped to it, a little painted-on Rebel lieutenant’s insignia, and the word STABBY written on it.
He stares down at it, completely and utterly taken aback for the first time in over a decade. Fearlessly, it chitters back at him, sounding very triumphant.
He picks it up.
Off in the fractal weirdness of hyperspace, Rebels on several ships are surprised to find an update on Stabby’s kill-update feed, and then thoroughly shocked at the accompanying image: the upward-pointing camera has captured an image of Darth Vader staring down at the droid.
It’s the fastest news ever to travel through the Rebel grapevine, the mix of triumph and loss that is, they are certain, Stabby’s heroic last stand.
Until a day later, when the thing updates again, this time showing an extremely confused Imperial officer. And another, and another, and another, day after day.
They cancel the funeral.
Vader hasn’t done much just for the fun of it in two decades. Watching Imperial officers swear and clutch their ankles as a cleaning drone with a knife taped to it, an Imperial emblem, lieutenant’s insignia, and the word STABBY painted on it, bumps into them and then chatters triumphantly, he’s figured he’s earned.
STABBY FIC! STABBY STARWARS FIC! YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY!
But do they send in a rescue unit to reclaim their most honorable POW?
no, the rebels are all too happy to have vader backing one of their most valuable psychological weapons. stabby’s antics are invaluable for their ability to escalate tension within imperial ranks, and vader’s personal amusement means stabby will get to keep running his miniature interference mission for a long time to come
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSS
STABBY LIVESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Grand Moff Tarkin limps into Vader’s quarters. Again. “Lord Vader, enough of this.”
“I have altered the droid; pray I do not alter it any further.”
(If there’s one thing young Anakin Skywalker can appreciate, it’s a hot-rodded maintenance droid, c’mon.)
VADER PUTS A LIGHTSABRE ON STABBY
HE CALLS IT HIS APPRENTICE
MY SON WILL NOT TURN TO THE DARKSIDE BUT MY SON’S STABBY SON WILL
Stabby is eventually recovered and given a medal after the defeat of the Emperor, but his poor little chassis is too badly damaged by then to even hold onto the knife anymore. His internal mechanism is removed and upgraded, and then the Master Droid Tech charged with fixing him casts around for a new casing to put him in.
“Hey!” calls a teenaged Poe Dameron, walking into the Droid repair shop. “I got this decommissioned BB-8 chassis they said to bring in here. It needs a new owner. Captain said I can have it if I can find a new mechanism for it.”
The Master Droid Tech looks at Stabby, then at the BB-8 chassis, then back at Stabby. Stabby turns his unsheathed ocular sensor to Poe and beeps adoringly. (This is a common if relatively new reaction to Poe Dameron, who has just graduated from his Awkward Stage.)
“Yeah, I got one for you right here,” the Tech says, grinning.
Decluttering is nice and all, but I literally keep and document random shit I find so that I can confuse a future historian.
Why is this piece of gravel being kept in an ornate box sealed with decorative tape? Is it ritual or is it aesthetic, we just don’t know!
My scrapbook isn’t of photos since most of my pictures are on the Internet, so instead it’s full of random crap I found on the floor. Playing cards, concert tickets, fortune cookie fortunes, packaging I thought looked cool.
Fuck if I know what’s going to make its way into history. Might as well keep weird shit.
Keeping the evangelist pamphlets literally for the sole purpose of being future ‘sacred texts.’
It’s a memory book! My mom had one of those. Although she also copied poems into it, so not quite the same.
I guess you could call it a memory book. I’m just calling it a scrapbook, but ‘scrap’ in a more literal sense. Like thinks that for all rhyme I should have tossed, but decided to keep because they happened to me in some way. And sometimes that memory is ‘my manager gave me an expired scratch-off’ and sometimes that memory is ‘I found this once.’
It’s just… things that I think are neat.
Like those playing cards up there were found on the floor of the lobby one morning after a Purdue v ND game and it’s not really like.. an important memory, it’s just trash. But it’s COOL trash!
I’m planning on putting poems and stuff in my book of shadows and make it all nice. That’s a different project that I’ve had to start and restart a couple times.
Got a whole different book just for greeting cards that people have sent me.
And then there’s the entire separate book dedicated to the pamphlets, which started as a ‘people keep giving these to me, I should really do something with them’ and now it’s turned a teeth-gratingly common experience into a fun pastime.
i hate when memes become outdated and i have to deprogram myself from referencing them anymore. whenever my mouth says “this is so sad” my brain immediately follows it up with “alexa play despacito” but i’m not ALLOWED to say that anymore
how DARE u make this post uplifting and cute
If my parents can use slang from the 80s without even feeling self-conscious then I can use a meme that’s a little stale
I had a dream last night I was in a high-rise in Chicago and any time I went to a different floor I was still on that floor but in a different year. I could only travel through time into years when the building existed, so I could go back in time about 70 years, but there were enough floors that it was taking me forever to find 2018 again. I eventually ran into some girls who recognized me as a time traveler and they told me there was a man in the building that knew about all of this and could probably direct me to the right floor but I needed to find him at a specific age so I kept running into him on different floors and different years and trying to figure out if he knew what to DO yet
i was so annoyed at one point because he was being so casual about it. sometimes he knew me and sometimes he didn’t based on what floors we’d already met on and at one point I went down a floor and it was the 80s and there was some art exhibit going on and he saw me and he had a drink and he was like “oh! you! I’m busy, meet me upstairs in a bit.”
and he said it like it was just UPSTAIRS but it was gonna be like. decades away
the building wasn’t like that for everyone. for some reason just sometimes certain people would fall into the time trap and throughout the decades different people working in the building sorta picked up on it and that’s how the girls figured me out
Twenty years from now, kids are gonna think “Baby it’s cold outside” is really weird, and we’re gonna have to explain that it has to be understood as a product of its time.
