Yesterday my mom, my 5 year old nephew and i were hanging out, and my mom kept constantly using female pronouns and calling me by my birth-name.
finally my nephew interrupted her to say,
“He wants to be called Ben. He’s a boy now. You can’t call him a girl if he’s a boy.”
and right after that, she started using my pronouns and name correctly. i guess it kind of hits you hard when a 5 year old child calls you out, cause anytime i’d try to correct her she’d keep making the excuse, “It’s hard, I’m trying.”
i am so proud of my nephew, i shit you not.
YES! on the fourth of July, my 8 year old cousin followed me around and everytime someone called me by my birth name, she whispered “Ben” behind me.
When I went home for my birthday this past week, my parents were using the right name/calling me Ben but using the wrong pronouns. When I gently reminded them of my pronouns, my step dad was incredibly defensive and yelled at me and said not to bring it up. The next day, (my actual birthday), I was alone with my 14 year old brother. I told him I was bummed, told him the story and asked if he wouldn’t mind trying to use the correct pronouns around our family to lead by example/encourage them. He was like yeah no problem dude! Layer that night, my mom used the wrong pronouns and my brother responded with “yeah, I think he would like that.” And looked at me and smiled and my mom responded using the correct pronouns.
This trickle down education bullshit clearly does not work. Younger kids are so eager to understand and accept things, and it makes so much more sense for kids to be taught and go on to educate their parents.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
Imagine if Dudley did have a magical child though.
He and Harry haven’t spoken since ‘I don’t think you’re a waste of space’ and he’s matured enough to realise his parents were not good to Harry, especially since the birth of his own little girls because God forbid anything happened to him and they were treated like Harry was.
On Daisy Dursley’s eleventh birthday theres a knock on the door and his wife, Anita, just stares and he feels his stomach drop because the stern lady on the doorstep is wearing a cloak and pointed hat.
They listen to the woman – Professor McGonagall – explain and Anita is surprised but receptive, Daisy is excited and Dudley is terrified of what this means.
It’s a surprise to his wife and little girl when at the end of her explanation, while Daisy’s flicking through a book with moving pictures and Anita peers over her shoulder, Dudley blurts out ‘it’s safe now then? Your world?’
Professor Mcgonagall gives a wry smile and assures him that the magical world is indeed safe. It dawns on him that she was expecting this, that she’d perhaps researched him and was aware of his relation to Harry.
He then admits to Anita and Daisy that his cousin is a wizard, before turning to the Professor and asking if she by chance knows a Harry Potter. Looking amused, professor Mcgonagall acknowledges that she does.
’D’you know where he lives?’
That does surprise her a bit, and she tells him that yes, she knows and that though Daisy’s acceptance into the school has been confidential up until this point, Harry would likely not mind a visitor if he wanted a word.
Daisy begs to come along and he relents eventually, bringing Anita and their youngest, Poppy, along.
All four of them stand on the doorstep of a modest house that Dudley would call nice if there weren’t squat little creatures snickering and running around the front garden.
The door is opened by a slouching boy with turquoise hair who arches a purple eyebrow at them. He yells over his shoulder for someone named Ginny and steps back to let them in, and, when he notices Daisy staring at his hair, he smirks and a second later it’s bubblegum pink.
Daisy squeals in delight and Dudley is still trying to get his head around that when young girl and boy around Daisy’s age with bright red hair and thick brown curls respectively, hurtle down the corridor.
‘Teddy you promised you’d practice the sloth grip roll with us!’ The girl yells in an accusatory tone.
A woman with hair the same shade of flaming red as the little girl appears with what Dudley recognises as a wand in her hand as the boy with blue hair flashes a grin at them before chasing the two younger children outside to a shout of ‘No higher than the treetops Teddy!’
Harry is much like Dudley remembers him, lanky with a pointed face, straight nose and mess of untameable black hair. It’s awkward, but, apparently forewarned, Harry greets him pleasantly and introduces his wife before Ginny goes outside to reign in a gaggle of children he assumes aren’t all Harry’s.
A woman with thick, bushy hair pulled into a messy bun with a wand stuck in it smiles and makes an effort to talk to Anita. She’s not too strange, he thinks, and reassures them that her parents were just as baffled when they found out she was a witch.
‘Why don’t you take Daisy outside to see the broomsticks, Al?’ Harry suggests to Daisy’s obvious delight and Dudley swears Harry’s trying not to laugh.
By the end of the visit Dudley is more informed about the wizarding world than he ever thought he would or wanted to be. Daisy, with a bruise on her forehead and scraped knees, because despite both his and Harry’s warning she hadn’t been able to resist trying to fly, is bouncing off the walls because ‘daddy how could you not tell us?!’
They visit Harry’s a lot over summer and Daisy befriends Lily Luna Potter and Hugo Weasley. Dudley doesn’t feel up to the trip to Diagon Alley but regrets his decision to not go when Daisy comes back with two owls, ‘uncle Harry bought the second one for me! So you can write without having to wait for me to send my owl!’
Petunia Dursley faints when she finds out, and Vernon spends a good half hour cursing and brandishing things aimlessly before retreating to his shed.
Dudley being introduced to what he calls ‘all those bloody gingers’ some of whom are only just on the right side of civil to him (one cheerfully introduces himself as someone who once visited his childhood home in a flying car and asks if he’s going to need to do the same for Daisy or will she be allowed to attend without punishment).
Daisy is shocked to find out Harry’s famous, and finds out as much as she can about him during her first term, which she relays to an increasingly guilty feeling Dudley, who’s gradually coming around to the idea.
It’s not as bad as his parents made out it was. He’s learned to understand Daisy’s ramblings about her subjects and spells and is proud of her achievements at school. He’s met a handful of witches and wizards through Harry and the world that he’s always been told is terrible doesn’t seem too bad anymore, after all, how could it with his little girl in it? He is prepared come excitable little Poppy’s eleventh birthday, for her to join her sister at Hogwarts instead of standing jealously on the platform as she leaves.
Poppy Dursley never gets a letter.
I TRUSTED YOU
No, but imagine. Three generations later, this family FINALLY gets the one wizard kid/one Muggle kid thing right. Poppy is never made to feel less, even though she’s disappointed. Daisy is never made to feel like a freak. Poppy is accepted by Harry’s kids, they play with her and she doesn’t need magic to play wizard chess or toss gnomes and Teddy takes her flying sometimes (she becomes a hell of a Quidditch referee and strategist with Ginny’s help, though she never plays).
Anita and Dudley talk to Poppy about what she’d like to do for school and she goes to a prestigious Muggle school, and as it turns out she becomes really, really good at tech and coding. She takes lots of time off to visit Daisy at Hogwarts where she becomes a favorite of McGonagall (so many clever questions). Eventually she meets Luna and spends most of a summer with her, following Crumple-Horned Snorkacks with the help of some trackers Poppy built to work around magic. Everyone is terribly impressed, and although Poppy tries to be blasé about it, she’s actually really proud.
And soon enough Daisy is graduating and working at the Ministry in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office with Arthur Weasley, who has been working on loosening some of the legislation, and when Poppy graduates she has a marvelous idea. She and Daisy open a shop in Diagon Ally for all these Muggle technologies that Poppy has fixed to work around and with magic. Dursley’s Muggle Magic, they call it.
And suddenly wizards are running around with iPhones and Kindles (Hermione made a digital copy of Hogwarts, a History RIGHT AWAY) and everyone is catching up on decades of video games and a century of movies. Scorpius Malfoy has an Apple Watch. And it’s all thanks the Poppy Dursley, the Muggle.
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness – but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you – and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty – humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits – but they’re highly functional.
Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves – and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
It sparkled so much, that it was believed that it orbited the star in about 3 days
Until 2010 when they took a closer look at it
In 2012 it is theorized that It is supposedly rich in carbon
Exactly like a Diamond
Thats because it is supposedly, literally, made up of solid Diamond. Or at least, a full 3rd of it is.
Which means this planet is basically, one gigantic Gem
According to the coordinates, the planet is located in the Cancer constellation, but isnt apart of the constellation itself, but is just outside of the center of the star.
The Warp Pad Hub in Steven universe has an eerily similar layout
The layout and lines lead me to belive that they were coordinats for the Gem Homeworld
Originally, I thought the Homeworld was somewhere near Orions belt due to the cluster of pads on the right
Then I took another look, and using a real life star map, and the relations of the other supposed stars, thought it was somewhere in the “Monoceros” constellation
Then upon watching this video by pure chance
Found out about this planet
And it lead me to make yet another bloody article on the Homeworld
I had already hypothesized that the Gem Homeworld might actually be a Gigantic, living Gem itself
This being brought up compelled me to research the subject, find the coordinates, and here we are.
The constellation, the stars around it, the warp hub layout, and the fact that a Gem the size of a planet actually exists, pretty much screams that this might very well be the case and the place of the Gem Homeworld.
my father told me once to never date anyone who talks smoothly around you from the start because if someone likes you they should be a little nervous and honestly i think that’s some of the best advice anyone has ever given me
i told my dad about this text post and he got so excited he teared up and then he said he felt like he just adopted forty thousand new children to share his wisdom with and he hopes all of you meet kind, sweet people he would be proud of
theluminouscosmos 