games that i adore on an aesthetic level but that physically punish me so badly as a disabled person I literally cannot experience them as art objects:
KATAMARI DAMACY
PIKMIN
gotta say I really value following @funkentechno.bsky.social on here. just an immaculate embarrassment of dreamy ambient vibes I never, ever would've found without his daily cheerleading.
remembering tonight a time in college where my roommates - really leaning into the whole 'I'm frustrated by inaccessibility" thing - created a large cardboard barricade directly between my room and the common area, from which they blasted Do You Hear The People Sing?
Classic
kinky
Thinking about the 60 emoji again
I don’t want to assume your level of knowledge here, so hopefully you don’t read condescension into the following question:
Are you aware that a significant portion of what a student reads in, say, HMH was created by HMH and does not exist in any bookstore or for any other reason?
No. I do not care about the publication date, at least exclusively. I care about whether the story or article existed outside of an educational k-12 context and then was bought by the company, versus being commissioned by the company to fill a quota or meet an academic standard
Phrased cutely, there’s a difference between a tomato and the little plastic tomato that we buy for kids when we’re teaching them how a grocery store works; you have one side that wants to ban all vegetables from the classroom because of fruit, supremacy, and another side clutching plastic tomatoes
I’d add to this that if you want a specific prescription – speaking only for myself – it’s “ regardless of the size, funding, or political valence of the company, curriculum should be composed entirely out of whole works that existed in the world prior to a company creating them for school”
I’d ask you to take on a small amount of faith that many of us are speaking about very specific experiences at specific companies in specific school districts, but do not want to impact our jobs in doing so.
Sure. I’m identifying a major current that we are often afraid to acknowledge, but I’m not under an illusion that I can classify the entire ocean.
Can you please - I’m not trying to be snarky, tone is super hard over text and I wish we had some tea - translate this into “ on a practical level, what is it that you want me/us think about or do differently?”
I think I agree with the thrust of your statement, but what are the marching orders?
You are not going to catch me hippie punching. The goals of creating and inviting children into a literary universe where all voices are represented have life or death stakes.
But we can and must accomplish this through works that are tricky, multifaceted, effort-soaking, even abrasive.
As a progressive, I think it’s important to openly and without shame acknowledge the moments where the call is coming from inside the house. We may not intend to contribute to some of these dynamics, but we do, and ultimately we do so willingly.
I want to speak respectfully to you because we’re strangers, but in my experience inside a curriculum company, this attitude is in fact, coming from the outlooks and goals of self identified progressives, even if the market fears they create or respond to are conservative
Imagine if Harold Bloom wasn’t a total asshole and it was so much easier to have a conversation about diverse excellence that didn’t make you sound like you were palling around with racists and book burners
The only reason these things are opposed: the ego driven antics of a small handful of people
(Also like, if the gay guy in a wheelchair is saying this, you have a problem.
Mirrors and windows, yes. But beautiful mirrors and stained-glass windows that someone lovingly brought into being, not plastic K-mart compacts and trash bags to keep out the rain.)
Diversity is a real thing and a good. And also, there are writers from all sorts of backgrounds, some of whom are living and some of whom are dead, writing real literature at length that addresses what it means to be alive, and progressive and conservatives alike strain them out of k-12
It brings me no joy to say this is the case – and I don’t think it has to be – but the progressive answer to this question at the moment is “two page story about a kid being bullied at Chinese New Year parade that was written within in the past two years, explicitly for this program”
Her: Come over
Me: I can’t, I’ve left the island and returned to my life as a prestigious spinal surgeon
Her: My parents aren’t home
Me:
the best detail in here is that he fucked up Marco's shoe size, because of course he did and of course Marco wore it anyway
we are weeks away from 'Trump attempts to make horse a Senator' and the only thing stopping him is that he is too much of a sociopath to form an attachment to animals
please enjoy the actual photo of Marco with shoes that are too big for his feet
For the same $6 trillion cost, you could crush child poverty with a child allowance and free childcare, fix unemployment insurance, do paid family, sick & medical leave, massively boost ACA subsidies, and eliminate child uninsurance with Medicare for Kids.
One bike? Like a tandem?
Fortunately weird fiction genreologists have been hard at work on a hierarchy of affects for exactly this situation
Airdrop 50,000 copies of Middlemarch with parachutes attached over every campus in America and then over the western half of Brooklyn
“You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”
holding @dboyfajardo.bsky.social Movie Hostage (i will watch what he wants this week if he watches what i want)
Pixar used to have really strong brand equity as the yuppy’s Disney, sort of like Target was the yuppy’s Wally World. seeing them consciously and deliberately torch whatever remainder of that ancient branding remained intact after years of sequels and declining prestige should be studied in schools.
