cae_jones
1yr ago
No, I do not. But I have extremely relevant issues, so that doesn't answer the question...
But I have to ask: whence the concept of children's fiction? Or, even, whence the concept of adult's fiction? Or better yet, how functional is the post-industrial idea of child Vs adult, compared to pre-industrial versions of these identities/roles?
Childhood and adulthood as we know them today are new. Yes, the two have been distinguished since time immemorial, but not in precisely this way. Decreased child mortality, child labor laws, compulsory education, the disappearance of jobs that children could traditionally participate in, all utterly transformed what it means, culturally, to be child/adult. "Culturally" being the key word.
Entertainment, though, has such a whacky history that I'm sure I'd miss something trying to summarize it. I think the big thing is that, at some point, the entertainment and toy industries realized how much of a cash-cow specifically targeting children can be, followed by realizing that getting an older audience to stick with it will also increase profits. Furthermore, if we're talking the past 40-50 years? Children's entertainment is wildly different from the nursery rhymes and fairytales of a century ago. At this point, I think culture hasn't really caught up with the fact that the entertainment industry is trying to get really good at selling fun stuff, and that they sometimes succeed beyond what a narrow view of demographics would suggest. Kids growing up with media made for children, these days, are growing up with the products that out-competed weaker products. Of course it's going to have sticking power.
More than all that, though, when entertainment became a mass industry, constantly pumping out new material, I think that left a huge impact on culture we haven't really figured out, yet. When producing new stories in masse was expensive, popular culture didn't have much to latch onto. Pop culture as a concept is spectacularly different following a relevant technological innovation, after all. References to the Bible and classical mythology were the norm, and it was all public domain so you didn't have to worry about getting demonitized for quoting a Psalm or two. Put a clip from Harry Potter in a video on Youtube, and so help you if it's more than five seconds long.
TLDR: this aspect of culture is changing, and fast, and has been for a good century and then some, at least. What do concepts like childish and immature actually mean, and how long have they meant that, and why? What even is the purpose of entertainment? I don't think the answers to any of these are sufficiently agreed upon for there to be a straightforward answer to the original question.
cae_jones
1yr ago
The last time I checked for meetups, they were all either not sufficiently local, mostly old ladies and/or exclusively for women, at inconvenient times, or all of the above. Notice I didn't mention whether or not any of these were remotely interesting. Begars V Choosers and all that. I did see ads for a local axe-throwing place, but even assuming they'd let a blind person throw an axe, the timing was perfect such that the pandemmic killed it.
I mean, I'm writing this at 2:09AM on Sunday morning, having recently woke up. It's a little earlier than I'd normally be up, but I had nothing at all to do last night and wound up asleep way early. I'm not sure I could get an Uber in this town pre-dawn on a Sunday, not sure when busses start (on Sunday), and don't exactly live somewhere walkable. My options even after sunrise are mostly to call some missionaries to ask for a ride to their church, which isn't social activity so much as hymns, testimonials, and discussing the esoteric religious concept of the week. There's a park near me, but it's only open 12:00-5:00PM, and isn't exactly a social option so much as a cheaper alternative to installing a playground in my back yard.
But maybe I haven't checked for meetups recently enough? Everyone insists that meetup is a problem-solver these days, and I'm somewhat out-of-date.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I always preferred dolls to cars, thought it was cool that one time someone gave me a hot pink t-shirt, and was amused when that first letter my parents received about disability benefits kept calling me "she" ... But none of that made me a girl. And if we're talking gendered stereotypes, I preferred action figures and rough-housing and swords most of all, and was conspicuously annoyed when people intentionally misgendered me (unintentionally was / is kinda neat).
When I was 8-9-ish, my grandpa tried to hide a doll I'd sleep with. This was quite upsetting. Were I 8-9-ish today, and anyone at school found out about these things, would I get the opposite treatment? ... And it's hard to imagine how I'd'veresponded. I think I was both aware enough of the absence of seriousgender identity concerns, and stubborn enough to say so bluntly, but I'm only, like, 75% ish confident in that. And that mostly because I haven't heard anyone who would be doing said hypothetical convincing sound like they'd have any idea how to be convincing to 8-9-ish me.
The especially frustrating part about this whole mess is that I've always wished I'd somehow dodged puberty ever since puberty. But I had to experience a good deal before I could really make that decision, after which it was far too late to do much about it. What's more, I get the sinking feeling that the neurological effects of puberty were relevant to my figuring this out, and to certain ... positive character development? things, and this was never just a physiological dysphoria. Negative character development throughout elementary school also hurt a lot when I became aware of it. As much as I deeply loath what has become of my body, I was at peak a-hole in the couple years before puberty. I like to think I could be reasoned into realizing this and trying to improve, even without getting mindflayed by hormones, but it doesn't seem at all likely that such would actually happen if all this were taking place today. Someone would say "Are you sure you're not a girl? Here: let's put off puberty while you think about it." And that would be it, and I'd probably be even more emotionally incontinent for lack of the trace amounts of prepubescent testosterone or whatever that enabled me to train resistance to crying over minor things.
This whole situation is just so frustrating! Even if I had a mental time-machine, it's not like I could go back to the 90s, chop off my testes, then hand them off to someone who could science up viable gametes just in case I found someone willing to be artificially insemenated by a permachild for some reason other than that I obviously brought the winning lotto numbers back with me. I can't Detective Conan myself smaller now and take advantage of The System™ without contributing to its misuse against children, the majority of whom I'd be quite shocked to discover are any better at resolving this stuff in time than I was. Oh, and the trans activists probably would hate me because it being age-related instead of gender-related pattern-matches to trolls who claim age dysphoria as an excuse for active paedophilia to tarnish trans people by association. (FWIW, I denounce said trolls.)
There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation. The information necessary to make a decision like that is not available to humans with our current level of knowledge and technology. As much as I might wish I'd accidentally sat on some dry ice when I was 10, I can't in good conscience support the policies that would have given me what I want when it would have been viable. When we get Medical Omega, maybe things could be different, but for now, I'm not sure there's anything to do for kids like me besides support after it's too late.
(Attempts to prove me wrong are very, very welcome.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.
cae_jones
1yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
1yr ago
I kinda feel like "adulting" looks suspiciously like the genesis of such terminology. And if I'm being pedantic, my high school health textbook in 2002 divided age into things like chronological age and social age, but those feel more like "biological sex" and "gender roles" rather than "sex" Vs "gender", so IDK.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I'm told my grandmother gave me Dr. Pepper in a bottle long after I was otherwise done with bottles. This was blamed for the wretched state of my teeth when I started Kindergarten, though I've personally believed that the part where nobody told me that rensing your mouth with Dr. Pepper immediately after brushing your teeth is a bad idea had something to do with it.
(I feel obligated to defend myself by pointing out that I quit sodas when I was 13 and haven't looked back since. It's just that, when I was 5, I started school with no upper incisors and silver canines making me look like a sleepy robot vampire.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.
You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."
You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.
cae_jones
1yr ago
My thou-obsessed pedantry is set off by all of those "thy <vowel>"s. It's "thine economics" and "thine international," thou genie-summoner.
/pedantry
cae_jones
1yr ago
I heard recently (I forget from where) that the Wicked Stepmother trope was invented well after the fairytales we associate it with became popular, and the original versions had the bio mothers being villainous. IIRC, it had to do with the change in inheritance traditions from Medieval Europe to Renaissance/early modern dramatically altering the incentives.
cae_jones
1yr ago
IIRC, Penpractice posted a lot of HBD stuff, in a way that eventually started to come across as hiding his power level sort of way. TP0 was sufficiently researched and eloquent as to not be suppressing much, power level wise, but had this bad habit of losing his cool after backs-and-forths with opponents, and after that got him banned he just kinda never came back.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Is it really larping when you've reached the point of blowing up major international infrastructure? I'd think the difference between larping a war-brazened saboteur and actually being one probably includes actual acts of destruction that require at least some skill and planning.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Yeah... is it [il], or [ij], or some other pronunciation that ignores French phonetics? Or maybe tries for some obscure argument in favor of pronuncing the final e... but again, [ilə] or [ijə]?
I want to expect [il], but that'd render it inaudible.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This feels accurate.
Personally, I've always (until somewhere around the mid 2010s) waffled on the question of whether or not I want to / should have children. In hindsight, I think it can be summed up as "Yes, but the more I think about it, the scarier it gets."
The problem is that there are some prerequisits I'm just ... not super interested in. In middle school, I had this tendency to fantasize about having children, but would handwave away where they came from. I think the book I published in high school could be interpreted as a self-insert parenting fantasy, that I suddenly realized was that halfway through and so the SI got uncomfortable about it in awkward infodummps because that's what was happening in my head. (In said book, the protags somehow wound up looking after not one, but two adorable space-orphans, withddout a shred of romance or sexuality to be found.)
This feels like the opposite of the rest of The West, where people have prioritized sex and romance over children, yet somehow it still feels like "we just kinda forgot for a couple generations" applies to me, too. Really deprioritized, in favor of the all-important Education.
cae_jones
1yr ago
McDonalds of sex
"Food, folks and fun" indeed...
Though, this begs the question of how places where prostitution is already legal are fairing. I haven't heard of any major differences between NZ, the Netherlands, Nevada, Denmark, and the rest of the world that are attributable to their approaches to sex work.
I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)
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