Every time I hear someone much older than me talking about how their shame about their bodies and weight have robbed them of all kinds of fun experiences and simple joys and delights in life, it breaks my fucking heart. Older women, in particular, have been shamed into and forced into (and perpetuated themselves) so many stupid narratives about what one “can’t do” if you look a certain way. Sometimes they don’t even notice it…they’ll just casually be saying something like, “I would have loved to play volleyball back in school but this big ass wasn’t going to look right in those shorts tee hee” and I’m like that’s??? actually??? tragic???????? Especially when it’s something they COULD still pursue or try but they’ve got a fixed mindset about it.
My 84 year old aunt really spent all of her 30s-60s believing that she COULDN’T just put on a swimsuit and enjoy the water in the summer. I have so many memories of this mindset affecting her all summer. Just casually existing by a pool in a swimsuit was something that women who looked like her Could Not Do. This is someone who broke so many gender barriers in her field, who was a pioneer and a bad ass, but who held herself back from something she truly enjoyed for DECADES because she’s fat. A couple of years ago she told me how stupid she feels having thought like that now that her age has changed her mobility and safety in going to a pool and it’s no longer literally possible for her to do so.
She bought the bullshit and deprived herself of happiness when it was possible, so she lost her chance at hundreds of moments of simple enjoyment she now looks back on sadly.
Really sadly.
I think this is a topic where we can literally see a huge generational change among society right now. The bitchy boomer who says something like, “oh she should NOT be wearing that” when a happy, chunky Gen Zer bops by in a crop top sounds like the death rattles of an ancient relic to most of us in younger generations. After we get over the overt hate that surges when we hear things like that, most of us can see right through that prickly exterior into the deeply damaged, sad, and vulnerable person inside who is the one that’s the real problem in the equation.
And yet, while it can be easy to think, “Thank god I’m not like THAT” none of us are truly immune to the messages that are blasted in our faces all the time that still shame fatness and make us feel like we owe society a certain kind of “beauty.”
Just keep an eye out for any limiting beliefs you have that are depriving you from joy and delight you want and need. As anyone like my aunt could tell you, you won’t someday look back and think, “I sure am glad I didn’t do what made me happy all those years!”
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I cannot overstate how heavy the pressure of body conformity was, but it was *weak* compared to what was pushed on my mother, who grew up in the 50s and 60s.
I can’t help but think that a whole lot of the backlash against trans people has to do with people who grew up in this mindset.
I grew up with a rock solid message that I must never, ever wear horizontal stripes because they would “make me look fat”.
I *AM* fat. And one day I found this dress with horizontal stripes made out of the softest knit fabric, a maxidress, with pockets, the kind of thing you toss on and don’t have to wear anything else at all when it’s hot… the fabric is literally cool to the touch…
And it dawned on me that there were no number of vertical stripes in the world that were going to make me look not-fat and I bought the damn dress and I still sometimes wear it. It’s one of the more comfortable things I own, though I’ve almost completely replaced my wardrobe to be sensory friendly fabrics.
My 40s were about unpacking all the bs my mother fed me, which was, still, tame compared to what she had shoved at her her whole goddamn life. Things like, “You have the wrong head shape to wear a buzz cut.” Like really, that’s a thing that was said to me when I had literally never tried it. I’ve been clippering my hear now for eight years and you know what? There’s no wrong shape to go nearly bald.
The cost of nonconformity was much, much higher back then. We’re not so very far from the times when failure to dress “correctly” could land one in a mental institution or jail.
Thor, watching the Dora train: this is very interesting
T’Challa, watching Thor watch the training of the Dora, unsure how to proceed: really? Because Wakanda has a rich history of elite special forces made exclusively of women, and we take great pride in them
Thor: wonderful! But I was referring to their fighting style. It is very different from that of the Valkyries of Asgard, and I wish to learn it, if possible
T’Challa:
Thor: when I was little I wanted to be a Valkyrie
T’Challa, breathing a sigh of relief: I was inconsolable for a week when my mother told me that I wasn’t allowed to join the Dora
T’Challa: I refused to leave my room
Thor: I refused to eat
(Shuri, filming this from behind a pillar: oh god there’s two of them)
(Shuri, filming this
from behind a pillar: oh
god there’s two of them)
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
According to the internet, $50K in 2023 is comparable to $9,913 in 1995
During an in class discussion about inflation, one of my community college teachers explained that when he got out of the service he purchased a life insurance policy in an amount that he thought would have been enough for his widow to buy a house. Twenty some odd years later, it would not be enough to buy a decent used car. This happened in 1979 and things have most definitely not improved in the last 44 years.
A few years ago I was making around $35K and struggling not just with my bills, but with my father’s constant disparaging remarks because he thought that was a lot of money and I must be doing something stupid with it to not make it stretch
“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.
I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.
In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.
No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.
It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.
Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.
And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.
It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.
~End rant.
There’s an actual term for this, enshittification. I honestly believe the words “went public” are the sign of infection these days.
Genuinely, all I needed to know was this line:
“It started when the company went public.”
That’s it. I could’ve predicted the rest. The exact words and details might be different, but from the instant those words show up, here’s what happens:
Some of the side-projects, beloved by a small group and critical to the lifeblood of the site/project/business and a major source of volunteer effort/employee excitement/keeping the fucking business going, but otherwise seen as less important, starts getting shelved.
Major changes are made to organization, altering the visuals and the aesthetic, as well as reducing functionality. This causes a spike in activity as people wonder what the fuck is going on.
The new leadership touts the spike in activity as a success, and encourages multiple additional layers of reducing functionality, trimming ‘less used’/'unwanted’ and 'unnecessary complexity’, etcetera. Whatever buzzwords and phrases they can slap together to make it sound like the critical bits and pieces that make the site what it is aren’t useful. The leadership will willfully and directly ignore the very concept of loss leaders and how much profit the business is currently making in order to ensure these things get cut because they’re 'unpopular’ (read: not as profitable as they want. Note that I don’t necessarily mean not profitable, I mean only a little profitable, in many cases).
This will continue to get more significant and more extreme until they do something that’s completely untenable and crash the entire business directly into the ground (see: Unity’s pricing, for example, a company that went public in 2020).
Shalom! I'm Deb. Nice to meet you! :) Welcome to my blog! She/her, 30. Esquire. Reform Jew. Liberal with sprinklings of socialism. Flutist since the age of 9. Intersectional feminist. Yankees, Jets, and Rangers fan, but I support all NY (and Chicago) sports teams. Aquarius. (Dark) Chocoholic. Crazy cat lady. This blog has no theme. A brief list of what I reblog: cats, feminism, HP, music, bands, Green Day, Sherlock, Spongebob, books, art, politics, law, international affairs, sports...and so on until infinity. I'm a huge nerd, a sarcastic little fuck, a bit of a bitch. Drop me an ask, or follow me! Or, both. Or, neither. It's up to you.
