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The top middle one has been my phone wallpaper for ages

Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.

We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.

The bigger part is schema.

Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.

One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.

If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”

The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”

BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.

Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.

Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.

Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. 

And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.

And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.

But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.

So you see this.

And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)

Do you see what I’m saying?

I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.

And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.

But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.

So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.

It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.

So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.

(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)

I love a good lecture.

it's not glamorous, but it's also not honest work, and nobody needs to do it

very first reply knocks it out of the park

i cant believe i have to make this post but here we go

i just saw on my dash a reposted version of my own comic that i did 5 months ago, and it had 13k notes. you have no idea how awful this shit is for an artist who’s worked 5 hours for this comic. It’s not the first time it happened, but this is the most notes one of my reposted art pieces ever got, so i’m doing this.

as you can see on the first picture, the comic was posted a month ago. i took the screencap from tumblr user beifong234, who is the reposter. heres the link to my reposted comic on their blog

the second picture is my original post, posted 5 months ago as you can see. heres the link to my original post. its a comic i drew in relation to this picture i drew a day before.

what i’m asking you is to please signal boost this, as i dont want anymore people reblogging the reposted comic (that was reposted, of course, without my permission)

Thank you for your attention.

i cant believe i have to make this post but here we go

i just saw on my dash a reposted version of my own comic that i did 5 months ago, and it had 13k notes. you have no idea how awful this shit is for an artist who’s worked 5 hours for this comic. It’s not the first time it happened, but this is the most notes one of my reposted art pieces ever got, so i’m doing this.

as you can see on the first picture, the comic was posted a month ago. i took the screencap from tumblr user beifong234, who is the reposter. heres the link to my reposted comic on their blog

the second picture is my original post, posted 5 months ago as you can see. heres the link to my original post. its a comic i drew in relation to this picture i drew a day before.

what i’m asking you is to please signal boost this, as i dont want anymore people reblogging the reposted comic (that was reposted, of course, without my permission)

Thank you for your attention.

Origins of Astonishment (circa, 1997). Digital-medium

All of us when we realize this is the official Pokemon account

these are my cats i don't have a problem

the worst part about the stereotype that young people are lazy is that it makes so much of our work seem invalid. i know so many kids who have 6+ hours of homework a day, do sports/extracurricular activities, have jobs, get less than 5 hours of sleep a night from studying, and still get dismissed as being lazy just cause their room isn’t clean

I used to get fucking straight A’s and everyone still joked about how lazy I was because I was too depressed to keep my room clean. I’m still furious about that.

As someone who ran track and cross country for 4 years in high school, this always fucking mystified me the most out of all the insane shit PE had us do.

Track and field club taught all new runners how to properly warm up, stretch, pace, etc. Its a process, and doing it properly takes 15-20 minutes to make sure your body is ready so you dont hurt yourself.

PE didnt do jack shit, they just said "go run a mile" so 70% of the fucking kids sprinted flat out the first lap and basically walked the other 3. Multiple people did it in boots or tennis shoes. I'm amazed more of them didnt pull a muscle or worse in the process.

I dont know what the purpose of PE was, but it sure as shit wasnt proper exercise. And I think a lot of people suffered for that. If they spent the time teaching us about the importance of physical health, proper nutrition, how to safely stretch/exercise, etc, we would all be better off now.

Let's be real, PE exists to shame and torture the fat kids, and for pretty much no other reason.

*Insert that thing with all the people who dread gym*

this one?

the purpose of PE, as it currently exists in the American school system, is to prepare kids to join the military. that's not some sort of moral-panic hyperbole. that's...pretty explicitly the purpose.

most of the prominently nightmarish features of PE, such as running the mile or doing sit-ups, originate with the Presidential Fitness Test. This test, which president Eisenhower implemented in schools in 1956, was created after a different fitness test (the Kraus-Weber test) revealed that Americans were less fit than Europeans -- specifically the Swiss.

The difference between the Kraus-Weber test and the Presidential Fitness test is that the Presidential Fitness test was specifically designed to test military fitness. While the Kraus-Weber test measured total fitness by testing things like core strength and flexibility, the Presidential Fitness test doesn't really make much sense in the context of ordinary fitness -- only in the context of military fitness. Do you remember being tested on how far you could throw a softball? That test mimicked throwing grenades. And it's pretty easy to see why Eisenhower went this direction. In 1956, the Cold War was in full swing and WWII was barely in the rear-view mirror. There was a real possibility that we would be at war with parts of super-fit Europe in the near future. Eisenhower wanted the nation's children ready to fight in that war.

The main issue with the Presidential Fitness test is that, as pointed out above, it really doesn't teach kids how to stay fit or incorporate physical activity in their day-to-day lives. A soldier at war might need to run a mile with no warm-up, or perform a pull-up, but for the average middle-schooler? The tests were just kind of...pointless exercises in misery. You're only really good at the Presidential Fitness Test if you've been practicing the specific exercises tested. And what 12 year old child is doing pull-ups for fun and pleasure? So instead of inspiring America's children to train themselves into a super-fit army, it just humiliated kids who didn't perform well.

There's been a recent push for PE classes to focus more on life-long fitness (things like actually teaching kids to warm up, exposing them to different types of physical activity, etc). Unfortunately, the Presidential Fitness test has already done its damage. It continued to be used in schools until 2013. That's 60 years of teaching kids to associate physical activity with shame and dread. The idea of military PE classes is pretty much baked into our cultural memory, giving us all a background dread of physical activity. and guess what, eisinhower?? that's just going to make people less likely to be physically active!! Maybe if we're trying to emulate the fitness of the SWISS, we shouldn't have gone with MILITARY TRAINING FOR CHILDREN!!

anyways. take some comfort in the fact that nobody will ever judge you for your mile time again. and if they try, ask to see them run a mile. directly away from you.

fucked up onion my belothed

...You know, this explains why there was a marching band except for PE in all 3 districts I was in growing up better than anything else.

The podcast Maintenance Phase has an episode about this! It basically explains what this post says.

Good Linguistic McElroy Jokes

feel free to add more

having a nickel allergy is actually so insidious because what you MEAN I need to pay attention to the nickel content in my food. what do you MEAN that it doesn’t even present like typical food allergy symptoms (no tingly mouth, no throat closing, no stomach pain etc) and it took until my mid-late 20s to realize that dietary nickel is probably why I’d sometimes get hives randomly on my arms with no apparent cause and have also now deal with chronic eczema. what do you MEAN that all the foods that I eat specifically because they are high in nutritional value consistently also contain nickel.

Here I was thinking my nickel allergy was pretty mild!! so many mysteries in my life were all probably caused by nickel. It was always nickel.

I can’t lie, that does help a little bit

hey yknow what food item has high levels of nickel? Oats.

yknow whats a common ingredient in eczema lotions that’s added specifically to treat eczema? yeah you guessed it fucking Oats

the more you know

a lot of foods naturally contain nickel, which is good and fine.

but foods can also have a lot of nickel from how they’re stored/prepared.

did you know canned foods have a much higher concentration of nickel?

did you know something like stainless steel pots or an electric kettle can add nickel to your food?

did you know I recently switched to drinking loose leaf tea because I wanted less microplastics in my body, and have been preparing it in metal strainers half the time?

you know what naturally contains a lot of nickel? tea.

I love visiting people who have some kind of pet reptile because they're always like "would you like to hold the reptile" and I'm like "of course I would" and then the rest of the conversation happens with me just holding a random reptile and the reptile Has No Feelings about the situation. They always just sit there, probably vaguely wishing to return to their heat lamp but clearly exuding an energy of This Might As Well Happen. and then I put it back in its enclosure and go home and the reptile very clearly has no strong feelings about the situation.

Sometimes little pleasures in life are loadbearing. Whenever someone is like "If you'd just give up tea and coffee and sugar and--" im like I'll stop you right there. Because if you finish that sentence i am going to kill everyone in this building and then myself. If i have to face the horrors of the world without my little jar of caramel flavoured instant coffee i am going to go full American Psycho. Believe it or not, my main priority in life is not to have perfect teeth or be an Olympic athlete or look like a supermodel, but to actually enjoy living, because I spent far too long not doing that and it royally sucked. And boy, some people don't like hearing that. Particularly dentists

completely enamoured with this beast

"they took pluto from you" "they took dinosaurs from you" "they took neptune from you" grow a second personality trait and stop getting upset that our understanding of the world has grown since you were in 3rd grade

They took naptime from you

THEY’RE ING THE CAT!!!!!