Hands up if you were the child that read thousands of books and as an adult you hit burn out and now only read stories about the same 2 idiots falling in love over and over as you don’t have the brain power to get emotionally attached to new characters.
i want my shows one episode followed by a whole ass week of going a little insane over it with the people on my phone, writing fics theorizing and going over every single scene through amazing gifs and meta, before the next ep drops and the cicle begins anew
I’m loving this new trend of people going to zoos and participating in animal enrichment. We use to observe large exotic animals for our entertainment, but the fact is that we are now trying to make ourselves equally as entertaining for them. It’s interactive, completely parpicipatory and I would argue that eventually someone’s gonna come up with something new enough that it expland ethologists understanding about how some animals think, problem solve, communicate and feel and I think its fantastic.
Human: play?
Aquatic creature from an entirely different branch of the animal tree: play!
I had a group of undergraduate students who almost always did their readings for the day, but on this one particular day: they hadn’t. They all said they had midterms to do and chose a class to not do the work for and it was mine. Lesson plan scrapped, I needed to quickly come up with something to do, and all I could think of was this post.
So I gave it a go.
Our lesson for the day was on historical re-enactments and why people did them. My students, having not read their assignments, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to engage in a re-enactment and didn’t understand the point. So I set them up with this game, explained the rules, told them they had 45 minutes to make the largest group without a witch in it, and let them go.
Within thirty minutes they were getting loud enough that I was worried I’d need to tone it down because I didn’t want to bother other classes. Some students went full in character, they created elaborate backstories, they improved their way through the entire thing and in the last five minutes had created an entire imaginary community based on this elaborate tale they’d created and were damn near ready to commit murder, screaming “she’s a witch” and splitting into two distinct groups with a lot of hand grabbing and pulling to get people into the right group.
When I told them the truth, they were stunned speechless. I reminded them of the rules: all they had to do was make a group without a witch in it. I never told them someone would be a witch, and they presumed someone would get the role. Similarly, the salem witch trials presumed that there were witches and invented them in their group.
They told me after we did our wrap up that they had been learning about the witch trials in other classes, but had never understood why anyone would actually believe in witchcraft. They were shaken, not only by the realization they were about to throw hands with their fellow students, but that all it took was someone in authority to imply something was so.
The “re-enactment” helped them to understand something that just reading about the trials hadn’t.
And, it also helped them to understand why some people do engage in historical re-enactments. They all admitted to having A Lot of Fun and that it was something that gave them a chance to just play and engage and do something they’d never done before: actually experience the history they were studying (sort of).
It was an excellent exercise, and I’m grateful for this person for writing about it because it worked so well for our class.
“I hate fandom, it’s everywhere on this site,” Sir (gender-neutral) this is Tumblr, aka the Denny’s parking lot at 3 am of websites.
Of course, fandom is everywhere. Their tagline on the app store used to be “the home of fandom.” You’re the one who walked in here, you can walk yourself right back out.
Do we need to remind people of Tumblrman?
God, I’d somehow forgotten this existed. What a cursed time to be reminded of it.
i had to trace over him and yes he DOES look like kevin bacon with a bad mullet:
ah yes, here he is, dr. harrstiel sherloki tumblrman.
The conversation around abortion shouldn’t be “are you absolutely sure you want an abortion” it should be “are you absolutely sure you want a child”. You can get pregnant again. You can adopt. But you can’t half-heartedly raise a child or change your mind midway through parenthood. Children are a huge responsibility and if someone isn’t 110% sure they are willing and able to do it, they shouldn’t. Having a baby shouldn’t be the default because of how extremely demanding and difficult parenthood is and the irreversible damage it does to a kid to be raised by someone who didn’t even fully want parenthood and wasn’t prepared for that level of responsibility.
