What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’snot merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
Mary Shelley’s father taught her to spell her name by taking her to the graveyard and having her trace the letters on her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gravestone.
NO ONE will ever be as goth.
didnt she also have sex on said grave
She lost her virginity on her mother’s grave yes
… that’s it we can all go home, peak goth was achieved before we even started.
In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel’s lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as man and wife.[126][note 13] With the help of [American actor John Howard] Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple.[127]
The more I learn about Mary Shelley the more I love her
I mean makes sense that she was supportive of her non-straight friends because like she and her husband had an open relation ships and he definitely slept with other men (Lord Byron) and there’s a decent chance that Mary Shelley may have at the very least kissed other women
So she was an LGBT ally icon as well as the Mother of Science Fiction.
Adding her to my list of heroes.
(also @garrettauthor sorry I keep tagging you, but I feel you’d like this.)
The context behind this image is even fucking funnier imo. Dolphins will bonk this kind of puffer fish because when it puffs up it also release a toxin that’s normally deadly to other fish but just gives dolphins a mild high