It kind of really confuses me when Barbie commercials have little girls dressing them up and brushing their hair Like no Barbie is not about fashion. Barbie is about collecting as many dolls as you can get your grubby 7 year old hands on and dominating the living room with your expansive empire of plastic women. Barbie is about creating intricate social structures and spicy inter-family conflicts between town house residents. Barbie is about formulating complex back stories for tortured Ken dolls with emotional scars. It’s about creating near-sadistic dramatic plot twists that split up marriages and cause that one Barbie you really dislike to be ceremoniously tossed down the stairs in order to be offed by the jealous ex-wife of Ken #4.
Yes, but how do you make it into a marketable commercial that won’t freak parents and caregivers out?
I’ve always had the impression that advertisers don’t really understand how girls play with their toys.
When I played with Barbies I had this thing called “The Dead Pit” which was a purple bratz laundry hamper. So whenever a Barbie got killed off she would go in there. And what I would do was I would carry her to the dead pit while singing the dead pit song. The dead pit song was just saying “The dead pit” over and over again in different tones. Anyway, once I finally reached the pit I would announce “(name) has died.” And drop her in. I would wait a few moments. Then, I would violently shake the hamper while shrieking, pretending to be the tortured souls of dead barbies of the underworld. I thought it was hilarious.
I feel like I should be horrified but I was actually way worse as a child
I wasn’t supposed to have barbies (my mother found them personally offensive) but someone got me two for my birthday one year, so then I ended up with a whole pile of them with various skintones and hair colours, with jobs and doing actiony things like horseriding to counter the possible influence 90s fashionista barbie and purfume barbie (both white and blonde) could have on me.
equestrian barbie was the unstoppable dictator because she had ball jointed limbs which made her superior to the other barbies who couldn’t bend their knees. both kens were her husbands and would form a human throne to carry her about because her horse was too important to be used as a form of transport.
some of the barbies attempted to stage a coup to overthrow her in the name of social equality but they were betrayed and the ringleaders were placed into the kettle and publicly boiled alive while all the toy citizens of my bedroom were forced to watch in case they got ideas.
offbrand mermaid barbie was a spy who was supposed to be infiltrating the remaining resistance but was actually feeding them information about equestrian barbies weaknesses (her right arm joint was coming loose. soon she would be vulnerable)
eventually i was given a second horse which meant equestrian barbie could ride in a carriage, so i spent a week constructing a functioning carriage out of chopsticks and cardboard drink holders, which was given as a tithe to equestrian barbie. there was a large parade in the living room for the carriages debut, however the resistance agent who had infiltrated the build team had rigged it with an explosive and so publicly assassinated equestrian barbie, ending her brutal reigeme.
the new government ruthlessly hunted down equestrian barbies loyalists and tortured them for information by tying them up by their feet under the hot tap until my mum found me doing that and my barbies were replaced with leggos and mechano, which i used to build houses and cars for lizards i caught in the back yard.
hollow what /every/ fuck
listen friend that is only what i did to my *barbies*
other notable entertainments include “finding owl pellets and reassembling the mice to make new friends”, “settling with duct taping a wooden spoon to my forhead to become a unicorn because my mother said no to knives” and “funerals for lizards, attended by all my plush toys in full mourning garb”
People never want to admit how creative, perverse, and downright frightening the imaginations of little girls are. God bless them all.
I had a couple of barbies from when my dad’s sisters were kids. they were originally the same white, blonde barbies as the other barbies i had, but they were so old that they had yellowed over the years and their straight hair had become frizzy and for whatever reason, one of them had brown eyes instead of blue like the others. i always had them as either the mothers or big sisters of the one kid doll i had who happened to be a little black girl that came in a pumpkin costume and had a pumpkin top glued to her head. and this other barbie i had who had this weirdly thin, pointed face and WAY more eye makeup than any of the other barbies was a lady who wanted to steal the little pumpkin girl away from her mothers/big sisters. and she would succeed! so the older yellowed barbies would have to team up with my equally old and yellowed ken to steal the little girl back. But the lady would actually be an evil witch! and she would brainwash ken! So the mothers/big sisters had to create a convoluted plan that involved befriending one of the evil witch’s daughters (always the one with the round pretty face and short curly hair that i got at a garage sale, not the one whose hair became pink if you used a little blow dryer on it) and sometimes it involved my mermaid barbie whose tail changed colour in water (she was especially useful because mermaids are impervious to magic). but now they had to get out both the little girl AND ken. most of the time, the plan didn’t work and they lost and were all brainwashed by the witch. except the mermaid, but she couldn’t do anything cause she didn’t have a way to go onto land and so she had to abandon her friends to the clutches of the evil witch.
the thing is, i sort of knew that other people would find this weird, so i didnt make much noise and my parents would just find me moving my barbies and whispering their dialogue and some narration to myself. which was probably weirder than that one of my barbies brainwashed my ken into being her hunky shirtless manservant.
It kind of really confuses me when Barbie commercials have little girls dressing them up and brushing their hair Like no Barbie is not about fashion. Barbie is about collecting as many dolls as you can get your grubby 7 year old hands on and dominating the living room with your expansive empire of plastic women. Barbie is about creating intricate social structures and spicy inter-family conflicts between town house residents. Barbie is about formulating complex back stories for tortured Ken dolls with emotional scars. It’s about creating near-sadistic dramatic plot twists that split up marriages and cause that one Barbie you really dislike to be ceremoniously tossed down the stairs in order to be offed by the jealous ex-wife of Ken #4.
Yes, but how do you make it into a marketable commercial that won’t freak parents and caregivers out?
Do you ever memorize a person’s voice? Like you can construct a sentence in your mind that that person’s never said, and yet you hear them say it.
Is that a thing people can do?????????
yea
there are people that cant do that??????????
We are a chosen few. We have a great power.
It’s called echoic memory
That reminds me…
You’re welcome.
Damn you
Man, I love having echoic memory. Once, when I was writing an exam for a psych class, I made my internal monologue sound like Sean Connery. It was infinitely more entertaining.
it really helps when writing fanfiction. The downside is if you’re talking to a person you start mimicking their tone and speech patterns, which can get a little weird
^^^^ If I can’t ‘hear’ them in my head I usually can’t write them.
-all the ways they avoided saying “sex”
-eyebrows
-cats turned into sexy ladies on two separate occasions
-the ensign that Chekov was hitting on in “The Apple” that beat the shit out of two grown men
-Uhura
-“how many times can we reuse this set before they notice?”
-“how many times can we reuse this actor before they notice?”
-the spray painted pipes glued to plywood, glued to the walls to make them look more legit
-all aliens wear go-go boots
-“lieutenant please call all the ship’s most important personnel for beam down to this hostile planet”
-everyone else has like an actual shirt under their uniform but Kirks just got a little black collar sewn into his uniform so that when it gets ripped we get to see his chest
-every ship had its own insignia and this is never mentioned in any of the other series (not even Enterprise as far as I know)
-all the other captains are assholes, all of them
-“Fear not fair maiden!”, “Sorry neither.”
-the prime directive is more a suggestion than a rule
The second sentence of Les Misérables starts with “Although it has no direct bearing on the tale we have to tell” and I think that kind of sets the tone for the whole book
Say what you will about how Harry Potter increases in complexity and darkness as it progresses but I think JKR sets the tone of the series pretty well when she has Dumbledore play ding-dong-ditch with a baby in the first chapter
one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too
the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”
Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.
when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.
I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.
My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.
“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.
“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.
And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.
YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER. FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.
ANVILS ARE A THING.
From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:
“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”
I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.
Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.
THIS. when i was in first grade i was bored in class a lot. my solution was: finish my work as quickly as possible, then read a book, because teachers said that books were good and i liked to read. except i got in trouble, more than once, for working ahead. because… we were doing it as a class i suppose? but if y’all are gonna take an hour to descirbe how to tell time, why shouldn’t i finish my worksheet? i remember we had these clothespins with our names on them and we had to move them to yellow or red from green if we got into trouble, and because i answered the next three questions ahead (correctly, i might add) i had to move my pin to yellow and miss recess.
and it didn’t stop as i got older. i once had an 8th grade science teacher tell me off for reading in class and said he would throw my library book away, because i had finished my work and the other people in my group, who didn’t want to do their work and were whining to copy off mine, hadn’t finished. because i was expected not to be done until they were, and he refused to believe they wanted to cheat. (of course the solution here was to let them cheat and go back to harry potter, because fuck if i was going to listen to them complain through every single problem they didn’t want to do).
tl;dr: STOP PUNISHING KIDS FOR WANTING TO WORK HARD
in fourth grade we had an end of the trimester pizza party or whatever for the kids that had worked hard enough to read x amount of books. it was like, four books and the only requirement was that it had to be at your reading level or above, so the kids who struggled to read could also get the chance to partake.
well, i had read the third and fourth harry potter books along with some others, and i had one book left. we had to tell our teacher what we were reading so she could keep track. i told her i was reading order of the phoenix and she said no. “you’ve read too many of those.”
YOU REALLY, HONESTLY WANT TO TELL A NINE YEAR OLD THAT WANTS TO READ AN 870 PAGE BOOK TO NOT DO IT?
I said fuck her and read it in two days. she was pissed but she had to count it because i passed the computer test on it so she knew i had actually read it.
don’t tell a kid they can’t read something, for god sakes. don’t punish children for wanting to learn or to do something above the regular level. thats how kids wind up not doing anything.
More recently for myself is when highschool teachers embarrass kids for asking “dumb questions” or asking about things they should “already know.” You’re the teacher???? Teach, maybe????
as someone studying teaching, I can attest that organising a lesson plan tailored to ~20 children, all at different levels of competency, skill, and timing, is ridiculously difficult. but it’s part of the job and you should never EVER punish or embarrass a child for being eager to work and learn.
a story about how to deal with this correctly: when I was in second grade my teacher noticed that I was finishing all my work early and reading to myself while everyone else finished. rather than punishing me, she went home and made me my very own writing book. whenever I finished my work early she would give me a prompt to write about. it kept me occupied with something that I loved, allowed her to help the rest of the class without worrying that I was bored and didn’t make the other kids feel jealous of me finishing early because I want getting ‘free time’.
moral of the story: when students put in extra effort, teachers should too.
when i was in 2nd and 3rd grade, we had to show our ability to read by reading out loud. now, beside the fact that this makes no sense because reading in your head and reading out loud are two very different things, i had a speech impediment that made it hard to pronounce my own name correctly let alone an entire passage from a book. so “he rode a horse” came out as “he wode a howse” which prompted teachers to make me repeat the sentence until i could pronounce the r’s correctly - a thing i literally could not do at the time. eventually, “he wode a howse” became “he vode a hovse” and my teachers would give up.
based on our “reading ability” we were sorted into groups that would then read various books. in grade 3, the top reading group was reading the magician’s nephew by c.s. lewis - a book i had already read. i was in a middle reading group and despite reading all the books available to me and telling the teacher that i had read the magician’s nephew several months previously, i was not allowed to move up in the reading levels or read books assigned to higher reading levels. so i started bringing books from home to read - starting with the magician’s nephew.
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
Okay you know what I want for the Deadpool sequel, even more than Wade getting a boyfriend?
Wade getting an ex-boyfriend.
Somebody with whom Wade has History with a Captial H. The boyfriend he dated on and off for four years, who then vanished with no explanation. Maybe he left for Wade’s protection, but Wade doesn’t know that and thinks he was just a fucking asshole.
Vanessa knows about this guy. Not any real details, just that they were serious before he broke Wade’s heart. Vanessa doesn’t know the ex-boyfriend’s real name because Wade only refers to him via expletives, so she mentally refers to him as The Touchy Subject.
The ex-boyfriend’s name should probably be Logan, since there are already so many references within the movie canon (and Wolverine is bi in the comics) but I’m not picky.
.
See, now here’s what I don’t want.
I don’t want the franchise saying, “Well Wade was joking before with the gay stuff. But now it’s different. He’s journeyed down a path of self discovery and come out the other side open to new sexual horizons.”
I don’t want a ~coming out~ story.
I want a 8===D~~~Wade has obviously been out this whole entire time weren’t you paying attention?!~~~Ⴇ===8 story.
.
I mean think about it.
With a movie franchise this big, it could be a gamechanger.
If Deadpool does it, other franchises will no longer be able to justify not doing it.
If the Deadpool tells audiences once and for all, definitively, “We were never joking, and we don’t understand why you would even assume we were joking, unless you were some kind of homophobic asshole who thinks being pansexual is a joke” than every single popular queerbait fuckboy id fantasy franchise is gonna have to fucking put up or shut up.
