I feel ya, I’ve always been a mix of “not ready” and “not wanting”. Then my perspective on what fatherhood even is shifted and I was able to unshackle myself from the Christian thing.
That said, if you don’t want kids for yourself then what impact are you having on those 20 somethings when you soapbox about how difficult and dangerous the world is?
Have those people committed to not have kids until those issues are resolved? And have they set thresholds of easier, safer, more affordable to trigger their child rearing?
Here’s a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from ~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval, and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia “sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades”.
Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and filled it with bawdy raunch.
Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the 20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man, which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the cheerleader.
Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written, crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We’re filling the gaps with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding gaps they didn’t know were there. It’s odd being here, but my point is that if we are stuck in a loop then there’s the potential that on the horizon is a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob Comedies.
| not me
ok so why raise issues about easier, safer, more afforable if they’re not your reasons?
This post is creating company culture by its promotion of ditching coworkers and seeking validation through memes. Disassociation is the problem!
moralizing “diminishing relationships to promote etc” sounds like ayn-rand-libertarian-christian-nationalist-trumper lizard folk valuing the ability to say horrible things to people then hoist blame on them for corrupting society while camouflaged behind a veil of repentant self-exile
11 shots of tequila
why wouldn’t they?
a task you need to be sober for
Did somebody get drunk and imagine herself the victim again?
“Hey wanna hang out?”
“I can’t sorry, a Catholic witch on the Internet was on her hands and knees crying begging me to live a tortured life and I felt bad telling her no”
losing sleep over Big Values because you got caught pirating is common catholic crybaby, but the cheapskate won’t pay to enter and find out
deleted by creator
me: picking imaginary fights with made up enemies is toxic
some jerk: no it doesn’t!
I mentally replaced cars with boats recently and it’s been inducing nautical terminology everywhere I speak. Cap’n and Crew sounds great for this usage, it feels honest without the shock of great grandpa’s heavyweight authoritarianism. I usually wind up stepping down to Spongebob or Pirates to filter out seriousness too, as long as the packet arrives and the replicas are jolly.
I’ve been chewing on the idea that Sauron is part of the fellowship lately and this seems like the opening I need to tackle the framing.
I think there’s one perspective in which The Eye is an unrelentingly repressive aspect of authoritarianism and The Ring is both part of Sauron and a catalyst for the unnameable evil inherent within her.
Alternatively The Eye’s power is identifying the thing that corrupts, and The Hobbit’s power is carrying it. Singling anything out is an isolating task for Mean Girls, and in her work separating the Ring from everything else in the universe Sauron grows the thorniest, vilest crows she can to shield her loneliness. Still, when the Hobbits are at their lowest she reveals herself to hold their hands.
It seems that one approach to devils is pointing them out for somebody else to hurl into the fire and another is relegating them to the negative space by directing identity towards the Main Picture.
I thought it was obvious but now I’m not sure. Who did Stuart’s nephew kill?
The pattern feels like a-b-c sometimes, but the rebranding keeps the story feeling fresh
besides these two lazy kids and the witch who just wants to eat there’s also the hungry stepmom who pushed the idea and the deadbeat dad who went along with it (until both women die and he ends up the hero)
Heracles could shoot the eagle and break the chains, but then Prometheus might inform Zeus of the path to Troy. Titanomachy is one way of exchanging fire, but I’m human and content to hand it back and forth between each other. The pain of letting go is nuclear enough after Gaia and Uranus’s Family Vacation tore valleys through the mountains.
There’s bacteria that grow in the roots of legumes that are capable of capturing gaseous nitrogen. That nitrogen makes its way to the soil, where the trees can suck it up to produce protein, like sunflower seeds. I eat those and by the time I urinate and die the nitrogen has been so concentrated within me that I burn a small hole in the ground for the fungus, sun, and time to decay and heal.
If I could photosynthesize the carbs needed to bootstrap this operation I would. If I could plant a piece of myself and feed it rainwater and atmospheric nitrogen to grow a steak I would. If I could leave behind shelter I wood.
all your time learing to configure an abstraction layer instead of interfacing with the real underlying tooling
Bro it’s state machines all the way down and expressions up top
They called themselves the Kool Kids but we knew them as the Terror Twins, the Masonic Menace. They’d force their way into any bit of joy or loss, a trail of rubble and scars bolstering their smothering presence, the moon’s the only force strong enough to pull them away.
At least that’s what some say happened the night Kool-Aid Man landed on the rocks. Everybody has their say on how he got there, but the facts of the matter are he did get there, the tides were shifting when he did, the moon was full and the sky was clear, and a group of yutes had just started a fire for a clam bake near where shards of glass were later found. All the king’s horses and men gathered to put him together again, but with one piece lost in the sand he bled out entirely.
The coroner informed Warm-Hinder, who froze in place. A sudden strong gust cracked his icy joints in half, sending his upper parts rolling down 95. When he finally thawed out somewhere near Maryland he dragged himself to the woods, to the remotest cabin of the least connected mountain in all of Appalachia.
Out front sat Marge and Paddy, who offered a refill to the dehydrated tumbler and pointed to the trail of sweet tears leading to the stranger on their porch. He drank deep then reached for a horseshoe on the ground near his foot, hurling it at the hosts’ hearts. A cloud shifted as he did, and a ray of light caught the glass in the old couple’s hands. A rainbow fired from between them blinding the guest, who fell to the floor grasping at his eyes.
“I can’t see, I can’t see!” he cried scrambling on all fours, kicking up dust and throwing what rocks his fingers could find.
“What is it you can’t face?” asked Marge.
“I thought if I tried hard enough,” he trailed.
Paddy chuckled through the break in the noise and shared a slice of moldy bread.
The two sat sipping in silence where they had been and where they’ll stay rocking. The one watched as the rain fell and the sea filled with boiling fire, and the earth pulled in closer still. He heard rhythm in his frantic breathing and saw seedlings sprouting out of softened soil. The beating of his heart filled his feet and he began to dance.
Night had fallen by then but the forest was bright and the path was clear. So he danced with the gravity pulling him through forest and flood and ocean until daybreak. And when he arrived home he saw the gates and gears of the city lifting and turning, and a river of Red 40 flowing through.
I love to uncle, too. I passed on military entirely and rejected workplace leadership for awhile, but aging into “older male” triggers that itch sometimes. I’ve always joked that I like to rent not own, now my friends have kids and I got bonus nieces and nephews. It sounds like yours do have someone looking out for them. Good job, man!