A friend and I were out with our kids when another family’s two-year-old came up. She began hugging my friend’s 18-month-old, following her around and smiling at her. My friend’s little girl looked like she wasn’t so sure she liked this, and at that moment the other little girl’s mom came up and got down on her little girl’s level to talk to her.
“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”
Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.
My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.
“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”
Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.
“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.
What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.
Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.
And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?
I try to do this every day I go to nursery and gosh it makes me so happy to see it done elsewhere.
Yes, consent is nonsexual, too!
Not only that, but one of the reasons many child victims of sexual abuse don’t reach out is that they don’t have the understanding or words for what is happening to them, and why it isn’t okay. Teaching kids about consent helps them build better relationships and gives them the tools to seek help if they or a friend need our protection.
I wish this post featured the OP’s name more prominently; it’s by Libby Anne of love joy feminism, and she writes fantastic stuff. A survivor of Christian patriarchal fundamentalism, she writes about parenting from the perspective of someone working through her own traumatic experiences. I love reading her blog.
homophobes are not allowed to use computers because the inventor of the computer was gay
People think this is just a joke but Alan Turing was the inventor of the computer and his sexuality was illegal in his time (which was not even 100 years ago) and he was arrested. They put him on drugs that destroyed his genius brain and committed suicide a year after being covicted. He was gay and a war hero as well. He helped to break enigma which was a German code that they put all their messages through. He shorted WWII by two years and saved so many lives in the process.
“Everything in the universe is like a jellybean – made of the
same basic materials, varied in color and flavor, but all more or less
conforming to an expected pattern. But every now and then, by chance, a bean comes out deformed…odd…weird. I pulled an especially strange bean out to show him, and then dropped it and the rest of the bag at my feet.
The beans began to tumble downhill, but one bean, the deformed one, almost magically rolled backwards, up the hill, right up to the town border.
Dipper’s eyes widened. I could see him beginning to understand.”
A game that is marketed as your standard fishing game and for the first 20 minutes or so you catch normal fish like bluegill and bass and what have you. But the further you go into the lake you start to catch fish with mutations and it gets more and more intense until you’re pulling in Eldritch horror monsters and sometimes severed human limbs. You realize you don’t recall how you got to this lake in the first place and the objective becomes to find your way back to shore. You have no real weapons but you can throw the creatures you’ve caught far away from the boat as a means to distract whatever is underneath you, bumping into the boat sometimes.
Additional items for the game.
A fishing pole with a radar that starts out with just beeps but later includes noises with hidden messages.
A GPS that displays texts and story elements.
You meet other boaters, all from various backgrounds, countries, and time periods. Some are friendly, others want to sacrifice you to the lake monsters.
You can also take the route of sacrificing others to the lake monster.
Or you can assemble a party and work to keep them safe.
The more fucked up looking the fish you catch, the closer you’re getting to a boss fight, which is usually running from something you can only see part of in the water.
????
And that’s my game idea.
More details.
It never stops being a fishing game. You are always fishing and searching for new areas where there is more activity in order to progress the story.
Depending on the choices you make and the amount of mutant fish you consume, you may start to mutate yourself. The fishing pole is part of your arm, you don’t notice it until later. If you consume mostly non-mutated fish and don’t sacrifice to the monsters you can keep the mutations to a minimum.
You can go full mutant and the boat becomes part of your body as well. This makes the monsters pay less attention to you, but you can no longer befriend or trade items with humans. You can still catch human remains and most of them are carrying items.
If you stay mostly human you can work to gather as many surviving humans as you find and assemble a fleet. The possibility of one of them turning on you always stands.
If you’re mutant you gain the ability to capsize yourself and view things under water. This is how you find ultimate monster.
If you’re human you can explore small abandoned docks and islands. These are where you find portals leading to different time periods and countries. You deliver members of your party to these. Only the person who originally belongs there can go through it.
Possible end game situations.
You find the portal leading back to your world, where you wake up on the river bank. You can catch normal fish before going home, making sure they are all free of mutations (they might not be.)
You join the monster, eventually overtaking it. You gain the ability to open time portals near water. You use lures to draw in humans.
I can’t think of anymore endings right now, I may have ruined the game with these new details so feel free to just enjoy the first part.
Terrible concept art. Mini game idea. Compete with members of your party to catch the most fucked up fish. Points awarded based on how many extra body parts it has and if it communicates telepathically with you.
Added my No-Romo posts to this because I feel they are the most important additions. (I am not a writer or game designer or really capable of making anything so this idea is just wishful thinking at best.)
Concept art if it was a more stylized, cute game. You would be able to customize your character and your boat. Sorry this became so big I’m tagging it with it’s working title “Lure” for now. I legit expect nothing at all to come from this, I just like to design and concept out things a bit.
The ultimate ending to the game would be to ignore all plot points and just keep fishing. Meet a person? Tell them you’re not interested in working with them. Feel like you’re getting close to a boss monster? Turn the boat a different direction. Just
keep catching and cataloging the fish until you run out of room in your
journal. After that the sky opens up and sucks you into it. You wake up exactly where the game started but the first page of your journal now says “YOU DID A REEL GOOD JOB!” And that’s the ending I would shoot for.
More shitty concept art! I’m done now. Anything else pertaining to this will have it’s own post. (I ruined it after the first post, I know I did.)
I WOULD PLAY THE SHIT OUT OF THIS THOUGH! I want to romance the Elderich Horror lol
When I first started taking sleep meds, I had some really trippy dreams (after not having had ANY dreams for quite a few years). The dreams lowered in frequency, so I dont have a lot anymore, but last night I had one that I still remember. Wasn’t trippy or anything…
I dreamed I was just going house to house, breaking in… to feed and pet peoples cats. And I would say I was the “Cat Health Inspector” if people caught me. And then give them tips on improving their cats health/happiness…
This is actually literally correct. Polls show that a significant majority of people like the Affordable Health Care Act, but also that a significant majority of people disapprove of Obamacare.
What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.
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