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A couple of weeks ago, Will and I were talking about Pluto, and I mentioned casually that it didn't have moons. And he was like, "Yes it does! Charon... Kerberos... Styx, Nix, Hydra... How could you not think Pluto had moons? You had to know about Charon at least."

And I said, "Well, I knew about them, but..."

"But...? But what?"

Only then did I pause to check my previously unexamined reasoning, and admitted, "I thought that when they demoted it to dwarf planet, they stripped it of its moons."

#'Haul 'em away boys!' #I know that's not how that works #if I had ever bothered to articulate the thought I'm sure I would have seen the problem #it just didn't come up until now

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We're fanfic writers, we spend hours researching an incredibly niche topic we know nothing about so that we can have one sentence be factually correct

#writing

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genuinely insane that diet culture poisoned people will insists that, if they don't diet, they'll just "eat cake all day" or some other type of sweet candy

because... that's not how it works

like, if you completely give up any sort of dieting and go for intuitive eating (meaning: listening to your own body and giving it what it craves), you're probably gonna be eating "unhealthy" at first, because you've been denying your body something it desperately needs.

For one person, that can be sweets.

For another, that can be fast food.

Just imagine literally anything that could potentially deemed "unhealthy" by diet culture, and someone is gonna crave just that once they start intuitive eating.

But back to my point No one is gonna be eating "only cake" if they don't make a conscious effort to monitor every little thing about their diet, because that's not how the human body (or any living body) works. It's your body's job to keep you alive and well. This includes your diet. Your body knows you can't live entirely off of cake. It's gonna crave salty things, too, not just sweet stuff. And by "salty", i mean, like, an actual meal.

And believe it or not, but vegetables? Can be fucking amazing. On the condition that you focus on making a meal that tastes good instead of being "healthy". Believe it or not, but you're gonna benefit more from a vegetable medley that tastes fucking amazing, than you're gonna get from the same vegetables but raw and unseasoned. I'm not kidding, how much you enjoy your food has a real and measurable effect on how many nutrients of said meal you end up absorbing.

Another benefit of intuitive eating I've personally found is that I'm much more willing to try new things, especially new vegetables. Like, I'm seirous, just listening to your body and trusting yourself to know what you need, like how every single living being, including humans, have been surviving for literal millions of years, is actually really good for you. Cutting out entire food groups, because some """health official""" being paid billions of dollars to say that it's unhealthy and what you REALLY need is their company's product, is NOT good for you. At all.

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I was back in Germany after the holidays for exactly one week when I got a text that my dad - who'd been in the hospital for a bad reaction to his chemo - had taken a turn for the worse and the family was all being called in. I did a video call with him. He was able to say Hi, and I love you, and Bye.

The first flight I could get was 7 PM the next day. I left for the airport at seven AM. Snow, for one thing. Huge swathes of flights were cancelled, but not mine, thank goodness. I left with the contents of the fridge I'd just restocked four days earlier. Sat on the floor at the airport, and ate a jar of olives and an entire bag of carrots. Over two days and four flights, working my way through most confiscatable to least confiscatable, I ate my way through a wheat berry salad, a black bean salad, three oranges, and two kilos of apples.

I didn't make it in time. Dad died while I was waiting to check in. According to my brother, the words he said to me the night before were his last words.

So yeah. I've been back in Canada, and it's been a weird, sad month, notwithstanding the loveliness of absolutely everyone in town, and the parade they did in his honour, and the misprint in the little funeral program that said Dad had been born in 1046. Mom is so far okay, but I worry about how she's going to be when I go back to Germany. She's been kind of isolated.

Grieving has been a process of a thousand tiny... I dunno. Not severing of connections. Archiving them. We weren't what I'd call close, but he was the one who answered the phone, and he won't do that anymore. I don't get to use my creepy Victorian child voice on him. I can stick all the googly eyes I want on the household appliances, but he won't move them onto my possessions. He won't send me Star Trek memes anymore. He won't get my beloved liquored up on too-strong vodka martinis, or watch detestable AI-narrated YouTube listicles. I keep finding new ways to miss him.

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john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about how the hyperindividualism and lack of emotional intimacy between men (specifically men in the united states military) immediately crystallizes into distrust and alienation in crisis. how kurt russel with an absurd callsign name and the goofiest hugest cowboy hat imaginable is the Man, running the whole show and managing the crisis until he fails because when faced with having to truly understand and connect with his last remaining ally he can’t, because all he knows how to do is sit in the snow and die next to him. It is a movie about losing control over your own body in the most horrific way possible. It is a movie about cold war paranoia and fear of bloodborne pathogens. It is a movie about how dread is an incredible force and even so sometimes what you CAN see is worse than what you can imagine. It is a movie about how the scariest thing men can conceive of is something that looks exactly like a man and acts exactly like a man but yet on some fundamental level…isn’t. It is a movie, as one of my eleventh graders pointed out this week, about “playing among us in real life.” but most importantly, john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about a dogy who is my friend and wants to become me :)

#The Thing

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new Ylvis mot Ylvis footage!

#undescribed #Ylvis!

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Last night my beloved dreamed that we were in our last apartment back in Toronto, and he was getting increasingly vexed because he could find only three real human skulls for our Hallowe'en decorations.

I said, helpfully - in his dream - "There's a whole pile of animal skulls over there."

And he said, "But that's no good; I'm doing a Paris café scene!"

#waking me pointed out that a Paris café scene would be brilliantly creepy if the skeletal patrons had animal skulls #he said 'dream-you did not offer that insight'

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"Research on a police diversion program implemented in 2014 shows a striking 91% reduction in in-school arrests over less than 10 years.

Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with school incidents has increased.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, K–12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as opposed to more serious offenses like bringing a gun to school.

School-based arrests are one part of the school-to-prison pipeline, through which students—especially Black and Latine students and those with disabilities—are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system.

Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative health, social, and academic outcomes, as well as increased risk for future arrest.

Given these negative consequences, public agencies in states like Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania have looked for ways to arrest fewer young people in schools. Philadelphia, in particular, has pioneered a successful effort to divert youth from the legal system.

Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program

In Philadelphia, police department leaders recognized that the city’s school district was its largest source of referrals for youth arrests. To address this issue, then–Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel developed and implemented a school-based, pre-arrest diversion initiative in partnership with the school district and the city’s department of human services. The program is called the Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program, and it officially launched in May 2014.

Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker named Bethel as her new police commissioner on Nov. 22, 2023.

Since the diversion program began, when police are called to schools in the city for offenses like marijuana possession or disorderly conduct, they cannot arrest the student involved if that student has no pending court case or history of adjudication. In juvenile court, an adjudication is similar to a conviction in criminal court.

Instead of being arrested, the diverted student remains in school, and school personnel decide how to respond to their behavior. For example, they might speak with the student, schedule a meeting with a parent, or suspend the student.

A social worker from the city also contacts the student’s family to arrange a home visit, where they assess youth and family needs. Then, the social worker makes referrals to no-cost community-based services. The student and their family choose whether to attend.

Our team—the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University—evaluated the effectiveness of the diversion program as independent researchers not affiliated with the police department or school district. We published four research articles describing various ways the diversion program affected students, schools, and costs to the city.

Arrests Dropped

In our evaluation of the diversion program’s first five years, we reported that the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia decreased by 84%: from nearly 1,600 in the school year beginning in 2013 to just 251 arrests in the school year beginning in 2018.

Since then, school district data indicates the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia has continued to decline—dropping to just 147 arrests in the school year that began in 2022. That’s a 91% reduction from the year before the program started.

We also investigated the number of serious behavioral incidents recorded in the school district in the program’s first five years. Those fell as well, suggesting that the diversion program effectively reduced school-based arrests without compromising school safety.

Additionally, data showed that city social workers successfully contacted the families of 74% of students diverted through the program during its first five years. Nearly 90% of these families accepted at least one referral to community-based programming, which includes services like academic support, job skill development, and behavioral health counseling...

Long-Term Outcomes

To evaluate a longer follow-up period, we compared the 427 students diverted in the program’s first year to the group of 531 students arrested before the program began. Results showed arrested students were significantly more likely to be arrested again in the following five years...

Finally, a cost-benefit analysis revealed that the program saves taxpayers millions of dollars.

Based on its success in Philadelphia, several other cities and counties across Pennsylvania have begun replicating the Police School Diversion Program. These efforts could further contribute to a nationwide movement to safely keep kids in their communities and out of the legal system."

-via Yes! Magazine, December 5, 2023

#undescribed #good news

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people that are "failures" have been some of the most coolest, compassionate, and interesting people i've met. they haven't failed, they've only found their priorities, or weren't given the chance to thrive as deserved.

#been thinking about this a lot #I was a failure for five solid years #and the only thing that changed it was a decision that someone else made

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ancient sumerian little girl kicking her legs up in her bedroom imprinting images of gilgamesh and enkidu kissing on her cuneiform clay tablet and then taking it to her mom to bake and preserve it

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porcelain prince

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A Spinosaurus for a New Year's greeting💫

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[Image description: a photograph of the Gavle Goat at night, during a snowfall.]

My nayme is bird And wen it's Yule And Swedish snow Lies cold and cruel I look for seeds With many friends But food is scarce Where flock descends

But then we hear Of ancient rite We leave the trees We all take flight If fire not Its end promote? We do the deed. We eat the goat.

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[Image description: a screenshot of a tweet from mx elle is eepy (@ ellearmageddon.bsky.social) that reads:

"hello, good morning

i just witnessed someone use the acronym 'bdsm' to mean 'business development, sales, and marketing' and i have never been so glad to have my camera turned off]

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the dirt

so interesting the fear that some buckaroos have over letting their art into the world because it is 'not perfect'. first of all it never will be. second of all the dirt and mess and truth are not problems we learn to get over and accept, they are literally what makes art great

#true things

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A quest for The Princess of Darkness

When I was 7 or 8, my mom, a teacher at the time, brought home a carton of books, the kind that you usually find at the back of a classroom. They all had the same look, like a series. One was called The Junkie and Other Stories. I read the first story in that one, and it was about a teenager who thought he was injecting heroin - which he called "scag" - but it turned out to be rat poison and he died. I wasn't interested in the other stories in the book, though. I think I only read that first one because I didn't know what a junkie was and thought it might be some kind of magical creature.

The really interesting book in the series was called The Princess of Darkness and Other Stories. They were ghost stories. The title story was about a bunch of teens on a yacht named The Princess of Darkness, and everyone kept getting hurt mysteriously. There was one called "Rusty," about a boy who snuck into a public pool at night and was saved from drowning by the ghost of a boy who had died not long ago. And another one was called I think "The Girl in the Blue Dress" about a girl who's just moved into the neighbourhood and meets the titular girl, Rhoda. They hang out, and she learns later that the family who used to live in her house moved out because the daughter died in a freak accident. I remember the last lines really well:

"She wore a blue dress?" "Yes. And her name was Rhoda."

There were other books in the series, but they didn't catch my interest at all.

One of the things I've been doing as a gainfully employed person is tracking down all the cool ghost stories I read when I was a kid. So I've been looking for Princess of Darkness and Other Stories, and the best I can say is that I've gotten close. I found, it's called The Junkie and Other Stories for Boys, edited by somebody-or-other Mooney. And that was published by Xerox Educational Editions. The pictures I've seen of other books by the same publisher have the same kind of look as the books I remember. But of The Princess of Darkness and Other Stories I can find no trace. Or rather, "Princess of Darkness" is such a popular title these days that more recent examples predominate.

And yeah. Partly I kind of want to know if anyone else remembers the series, or this book in particular. Partly I just want to get down what I've found so far, so that if I step away from the search for a little while, the progress I made is written down somewhere. I don't have high hopes of acquiring it, since The Junkie appears to be a collector's item going for collector's item prices, but if it's out there I would love to know.

#also if anyone remembers a book about a modern town beset by a witch #where the day after the kids win the authorities kill an unusually large dog #I can't even remember the name of that thing but I loved it at the time #and in my mind it was from the eighties although it might have been able to get away with being the sixties #Princess of Darkness is from the seventies though because it was outdated classroom material in 1984