I'm worried about this trend of post about the Barbie movie who are all about "treating men like they treat women", mocking men who go see the film and even open misandry and other radfem idea without the radfem label.

That's not what the movie is about! It is not about making men feel inferior to women or hating on them. It's about everyone regardless of gender getting to decide who they are by themselves and for themselves. It's about not depending on love to be someone. It's about not having to fit in the expectations people have for you, no matter how nice those expectations can be. It's about how a world with only men in charge is bad, but a world in which only women are in charge is not ideal either.

Go rewatch the film. If the only thing you heard is the antipatriarchy message you did not listen hard enough.

I think one of the most profound forms of love is "I'll try that, for you. I may not like it, but I'll try it."

It's a confused middle-aged man in a pottery class, whose daughter is helping him with his clay's plasticity. It's a kid scrunching up their brow while listening to their mom's favorite music, trying to figure out why she likes it. It's a girlfriend who says "Yes, I'll go with you" and her girlfriend cheering and buying a second ticket for a con. It's a friend half dragging another friend through an aquarium, the one being dragged laughing and calling out "Wait, wait, I know we're here for the exhibit, but I haven't been here! Slow down!"

It's being willing to spend some of your time trying something new because it makes someone you love happy.

So I’m a big fan of the idea that humans are “space orcs”, and today it got me thinking about something else. 

Human birth is pretty unique among mammals. Not only are our birth canals narrower than standard due to being bipeds, but we have a larger head to body ratio then any other mammal. As a result of this, the only way to fit a baby’s head through a person’s birth canal is for them to be born very early, and massively underdeveloped. 

Other mammals are capable of walking and running within the first day of being born, where as a human baby doesn’t even have strong enough neck muscles to hold up their own head. 

They can’t see, they can’t crawl, they don’t have the coordination to grab things, and they have a soft spot on the skull that leaves part of the brain incredibly vulnerable. And while an adult can adapt to a range of temperatures, babies have to be constantly monitored to make sure they aren’t chilled or over heating. 

Can you imagine you’re an alien, who knows humans as these highly adaptable endurance machines that can eat almost anything and survive tremendous physical pain and injury, and you learn that their young are so fragile. That they emerge from the womb barely able to function biologically. 

And suddenly you remember all those humans on your crew who get attached little creatures. The toughest, burliest people who will coo and coddle over fluffy little cats and call lizards babies. And you realise that their whole species developed to care for these tiny, vulnerable, defenceless babies, and that kind of attachment tends to spill over a little. 

And now you understand that old adage, that the most dangerous humans are the ones whose young are in danger. Because if they’re going to stand a chance at surviving until adulthood then human parents have to be willing to defend their children with their lives, and that is exactly what they do.  

Holy crap. That means that we’re like pouchless marsupials (though not as extreme in the underdeveloped infant department).

It fits that we’re called Space Australians.

OKay this is my favourite response so far

To be fair, the mammals “born able to run within hours” are the terrestrial ungulate mammals. They are newcomers and parvenus and they die when they step on a bee. They only showed up when grasslands became common, the meme-loving fucks - they’re all matcha lattes and YEET. Like, okay, we get it, hoofed ungulates: you’re vegan, you really like synthpop, you’ve “discovered” a “new” continent, you ran fifteen miles this morning, your baby walked within eight hours of birth, sure. Fine. You’re cute, diversity is important, you can stay. We need something to eat, after all. 

But ungulate mammals are REALLY poor representation of Mammalia.The ancestral Mammal, rodentlike, that gave rise to Placentals and Marsupials, would have been more like - well, more like today’s Placentals and Marsupials. More like us. More like badgers and dogs and monkeys and hamsters. Born blind and naked, and hidden discreetly from polite society, until the horrible alien thing looks more like a Real Animal. 

Consider the mouse: born completely naked, hairless, blind, deaf, helpless, only able to drag itself to a nipple with terrific effort. Consider the cat: born as a thinly furred sausage with eyes and ears glued shut for weeks. Consider the newborn dog. Big cats. Rats. Bears. Squirrels. Sure, consider the marsupials; also, weasels and rabbits and porcupines and pangolins. All the mammals that aren’t the bloody ungulates. 

Rodents are born practically fetal, their limbs mere buds, their skin see-through, their eyes bulging in their transparent skulls. Their bones aren’t even opaque! You can see their dark livers, the white milk in their bellies! Their eyelids are welded shut, their heads too large to raise. They are a lot more alien than a human baby - a liminal animal indeed. Certainly, rodents grow quickly, because they die so young. Their helpless childhood is still proportionately a large chunk of their life - nearly the same proportion as ours, actually. But they are born like uncooked eggs. I would add a picture of a newborn rat pup here, but young and impressionable children read this blog.

And we are not the weakest of the Furry Mammal clan, if we zoom out. It takes about two weeks for a kitten to open their eyes. It takes about four weeks for their hearing to come online. This is because these senses are still developing. They’re born undercooked, too! 

By contrast with many mammals, human babies come out with their senses active (unless that specific baby is blind or deaf or has another sensory disability)*. It takes a while for human babies to focus their eyes, because we usually have a lot of apps installed (color vision, facial recognition) that take forever to boot up the first time, and focusing requires muscle control - but human babies are goggling at the world with open eyes, and processing what they see, as soon as they come out. Human babies come out able to hear, if hearing is included with that specific baby. We are born able to record and process sensory information, where our other mammalian cousins can’t.  

I mean, I am so guilty of this trope too, I love it to pieces and use it all the time. Even more hypocritically, I personally agree with the “Fourth Trimester” theory, which is that human babies need about three months to adjust themselves to life outside the womb. Thus, the first three months are the “Fourth Trimester,” where you just carry the baby around, and it boggles helplessly at the world and goes “ugh!!” That is the part that makes sense when you look at the birth canal etc, and you go “oh, we’re so undeveloped,” and you mope because you can’t see yourself ever getting your life back. But the first three months is only a small piece of the longer story of human babyhood, and the “weak, helpless” stage is not particularly unusual among our mammalian family. It just seems so terribly long because we compare it to horses and rats, which is unfair on everyone. And at some point we get our lives back, and can’t remember where the time went. And it isn’t as bad as it could be. I mean, we can usually shit on our own. So that’s something!

No, it really is something. Many baby mammals cannot excrete on their own. Cats, for example; the mama cat must lick certain areas of the baby to stimulate it to poo and pee. They can’t do it by themselves. Mama cat must lick them religiously, to make their bowels and bladder work, or the waste will back up and the kitten/cub will die. This is relatively common among the Furry Mammals. Every kitten on Earth had to be forcibly poo’ed for the first three weeks of its life. Every tiger took six weeks (!!) before it could pee by itself. And that’s just the felids. Don’t talk to me about werewolf cubs unless you’re ready to make the decision on whether they need diapers, you cowards.

Humans, though, are born perfectly capable of shitting by ourselves. Which is rather nice, when you consider the alternative. 

So if you take us in context of the other baffling and amazing animals on Earth, we are not really particularly “undeveloped,” taken as a whole. Not particularly in comparison to our cousins, whom an alien would find just as strange and foreign. We humans are simply hitting milestones at our own pace - sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always legitimate, always because an ancestor dodged death once by doing something slightly different. Our infants are for carrying in our arms, so it doesn’t matter that they can’t hold their heads up - but they are born shitting, and boggling with their enormous eyes.

Anyway, aliens would probably regard all this nonsense in the same way as the dinosaurs did - “Lord, what fools these mammals be,” at first, and then “OH FUCK THE MAMMALS DID WHAT?”

“Parenting is important,” reply the badgers and the bears and the humans, aggressively cuddling something they call a baby, although they might be taking the piss: “Really, we will bond with and nurture ANYTHING that meets our vague criteria. Isn’t cuteness just the best thing you’ve ever seen? Don’t your hormones just SQUISH when you see something with specific proportions? You know what’s inherently rewarding? HOLDING SMALL THINGS AND MAKING A SOUND ABOUT IT.” 

“Erm, I guess?” replies the alien or the dinosaur. “I guess… I guess your baby…. thing…. is very …. important? To you??”

“YES I LOVE IT A LOT”

“I …. see that you do. It’s … cute.”

“Cuteness is a powerful weapon,” the mammal says seriously. “Oh, also? This is our planet now.”

* Many humans are born without the ability to hear, see, see in color, eliminate, socialize, process sensory information, etc. Or they may lose these abilities later. They are valid, human and loved. These “space Australian” posts are about generalising humans, so I generalise here, but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. 

2018 post I rediscovered by trying to find a different post. I appreciate how I did actually do the math - it wasn’t available anywhere, and nobody else on the internet seemed to have pointed it out anywhere, so I had to do MATH for you people - to find out that mice spend a similar proportion of their lives in “helpless babyhood” as we do. That was MATH. WHERE are my citations

my brother had a brilliant idea that i wanted to share with other people who have four-legged family members: he trained our two cats to go directly to the door when they hear the fire alarm.

obviously at first the fire alarm sent them scrambling for cover, but he started slowly by giving them treats whenever it went off, when someone burned food or forgot to open the fireplace flu. he then progressed to calling them to the door to offer treats immediately after the alarm went off. and it actually wasn't too long before the cats voluntarily started going to the door upon hearing the alarm.

i think this was genius because in the event of a real emergency we know exactly where the cats will be and we will not have to waste precious time trying to find them to rescue them. i think this method would work equally well with dogs and probably other free-roaming pets such as rabbits, ferrets, etc. and i certainly encourage others to give it a shot!

I trained Neelix to alert me to Sounds. So in the even of A Sound he'd find me to let me know about it. Oven timers, knocking at the door, weird creature stuck in the yard, etc. This has the added effect of being able to scoop him up and bring him to safety in the event said sound is a fire alarm or a tornado siren.

The downside is, when I had a baby, every time it cried he'd barrel into the room to let me know. Even if I was already in the room. And if I couldn't make The Sound stop (because an infant works differently than an oven timer), he'd start biting me urgently. 😅

Confused, but doing his best:

Oh, context is that I'm deaf not that I wanted to create a beast that'd harass me over sounds.

People will really talk about how Star Trek: Voyager isn't good and then list reasons that LITERALLY apply to all classic Star Trek. "Developments didn't carry over from episode to episode." "There's a lot of bad or boring episodes." "It missed a lot of opportunities." Have you ever seen Star Trek? Have you ever watched a Star Trek series? Are we really pretending these are just problems in Voyager?

"I don't believe in GMs who only play for 4 years. You need at least 10 to be a GM in my eyes".

If you only ruled your first session - you're a GM.

If you're playing with the same party for a year - you're a GM.

If you're looking for another party because you were mistreated, or because your party don't have time, or for whatever other reason - you're a GM.

You stop being a GM on one condition only - if you're caring about your story more than about your players. Than you just need to write a book.

If you believe that quote, I’m not actually a GM yet. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Please don’t wait until you think you know enough or have enough - you’re enough right now. This very moment. And the second you believe that (even a little bit) is when you should begin.

after my fall out boy concert i told my mom that they played my second favorite fall out boy song of all time (headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet) and she asked what the song was called (it’s called headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet) so i immediately answered “headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet” and she turned to me and said “there’s no way that’s the name of the song” which gave me the incredible privilege of saying “alexa play ‘headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet’ by fall out boy” to which the alexa responded “NOW PLAYING ‘HEADFIRST SLIDE INTO COOPERSTOWN ON A BAD BET’ BY FALL OUT BOY” and my mother promptly walked out of the room

joined the ranks of oppa homeless style and homestuck cop for playing a song for my mother, more at 11

Ppl dont seem to realise that "only perceivably queer people should have access to queer spaces and support" and "nobody is obligated to out themselves to you and nobody needs to provide proof of their sexuality/identity" CANNOT coexist.

People are very quick to say "nobody should ever be forced out of the closet, there is no one way to be queer" but then throw a fit when someone who isnt visibly gay plays a gay character or when someone who isnt officially out acts in a ~queer way~.

Also, sometimes the person you think is the poster child for cisheterosexuality is in fact incredibly queer because that's the way they feel happiest presenting. And sometimes the person you're dead certain is queer is cishet and just really cool about it. And you will never be able to tell the difference on sight and that is a good thing.

snoopy of the day

he makes me so happy and so profoundly sad at the same time

like this?

KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users' Mental Health Crises for "Content"

I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

• What you say on there won't be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn't even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)

• Also, what you say on there? Is now...
• Koko's intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
• Publicly performing or displaying your "content" (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
• Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
• Sell / share this "content" with other businesses

• Any harm you come to using Koko? That's on you.
• And Koko won't take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

Keep reading

Kokobot is incredibly predatory and exploitative. I wrote a post about how it exploits minors' empathy and gamifies "giving mental health advice", resulting in an unregulated mess that can only do harm to teens' mental health in the long run.

There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.