Are You Doing Okay?

"Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?"

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.

@evolution-is-just-a-theorem

I don’t think (f) is necessarily about minds, especially given your interpretation of g. “Sherlock Holmes has a name that starts with S” seems to me to be the equivalent of “Justice has a name that starts with J.” Even though Justice is not a physical thing that exists in the world any more than Sherlock Holmes is, the second statement can still be evaluated as true or false, in the sense that the first letter of the string “Justice” can be determined.

(It is possible that you are using a more narrow definition of the word “name” than I am, which could affect this analysis.)

Bullet of the day: conversations about fictional objects are non-sensical*. One cannot reasonably ask whether or not Sherlock and Watson did the frick-frack.

@lambdaphagy , because you had good comments the last time I talked about a similar topic.

* They can be made sensical without changing the conversation *too* much, but in my experience people don’t even realize they’re doing something strange.

What if instead of gilly weed Harry had showed up to the black lake challenge in muggle scuba gear like “like where’s your advanced magic now bitches? Got me a free fishing knife with this thing”

Honestly people who use “grammar” as a cover for their transphobia and desire to invalidate nonbinary people had better not have any speech habits that don’t conform 100% to that narrow subset of academic English they claim to worship. Drop the slang, no run-on sentences, and I know I did not hear you use a sentence fragment on the phone earlier!

And if they’re opposed to neologisms they’d better be consistent with that, too. What’s the cutoff date for a new word to be old enough to be considered “real”? The word “e-mail", coined in the 80s, is newer than the pronouns “sie” and “hir”, transphobes. Don’t use “selfie” if you’re aginst nounself pronouns, which have been around longer. Xe/xem/xer pronouns are older than the word “podcast”. Oh, and the singular “they” has been in use for hundreds of years, so better avoid saying things like “antibiotics” and “lightbulb”!

tl;dr - your cries of “But grammar!” and “But made-up words!” are woefully transparent. You’re doing a truly terrible job of hiding the fact that you’re a transphobic asshole who prefers making marginalized people horribly uncomfortable and possibly dysphoric to, you know, just respectfully changing one word you use to refer to someone.

Reblog if you go to fictional characters for comfort.

Whether it be when you feel you don’t belong, when you feel upset, when you’re angry, when you’re going through a hard time or when you’re feeling empty. (Social Experiment: I want to see how many people do this)

I’m studying Japanese, and this is way more complicated than just sticking three sets of characters together for comparison. (I am not studying Chinese. Take everything I say about Chinese with a heaping mound of salt.) Japanese is written with three different sets of syllables (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji), which each have a different use in the language.

Examples of hiragana: あいうえお

Examples of katakana: アイウエオ

Examples of kanji: 私漢字日機口

The kanji might look similar to the Chinese writing system, because that is where they were derived from. Confusing something written entirely in kanji with Chinese is completely understandable if you don’t know either language. (For instance, 中  from the original post could be either Chinese or Japanese.) However, most sentences in Japanese will have other characters, while most Chinese sentences will not.

Example of a Japanese sentence: 私の名前はロバートです。

Example of a Chinese sentence: 的名字是羅伯特 (I think; I pulled this from Google Translate so it could be wildly ungrammatical.)

Korean looks totally different, at least to me.

I don’t really understand getting mad at people for mixing up korean, chinese, and japanese

Like, look at them together

見る한국어中国死ね我要吃你マンコ형사我有大鸡巴

and tell me they don’t look similar lol

Binary gendered language is one of those things that often goes unnoticed even at churches that are trying to be LGBTQ inclusive. Breaking the binary is a simple change that can make a difference.

How might you incorporate this language into your prayers, sermons, and church activities? 

(Source: Latina Rebel)

Get out.

It depends, if you do it at home and don’t use expensive dye, I’ve heard it’s actually pretty cheap. I'm not really an expert, though, thanks to the aforementioned uniform code.

How should I get my hair cut? send me suggestions!