The other main thing toddlers can freak out about is stuff like, being randomly (or arbitrarily) chosen 2nd instead of 1st, or there not being enough of something they want. Basically the casual unfairness of life that sane adults can handle. Or, please please, should be able to handle

Occasionally toddlers are wonderful but now when I see omniedestructive stubborn stupid behavior in adults I just think “toddler behavior.” Except if they’re adults they’ll never grow out of it, can never be just overriden by their parents, and they’re big enough that their violence is threatening

One way in which Israeli settler colonialism very closely matches that of North America's is the way in which the "frontier-settler" has a de facto alliance with the army. The army allows settler violence to happen and in many cases actively supports it, without official policy needing to say so.

"Don't worry about the Discord thing, it's only NSFW servers and channels that will require age verification! :)" I could remove every speck of risque imagery/topics from my community and there's still a 50% chance we'd get flagged just because we're openly queer. It's not actually about the kids.

It bums me out knowing some people are against space travel on environmental grounds or because creeps like Elon Musk like it. Just like you gotta save enough $ in your budget for a vacation, as a society, we gotta budget our carbon output so there’s enough leeway that we can send people to space

All the stuff Olympic boxer Imane Khalif has had to put up with is absolutely infuriating but I have to admit I like her look with the long hair

An old favorite children’s book. By Judith Viorst and Kay Chorao. The title and subtitle (bottom right) says it all 👻

Has anyone ever done an extremely fun psychological study comparing the frustration of toddlers who can’t manage to do things they want, vs the frustration of very old seniors who can no longer manage to do things they want

“Sylvie and Bruno” by Lewis Carroll: terrible book, a slog to get through (tho I did laugh once or twice. A mathematical certainty over 15 hours of audiobook). What was he thinking? Feels like 3 different bad books jammed together. If you too have read this weird bad book, please send help

“Astro Boy” 2009 American movie: truly awful (as a parent I now seek out random kids movies, in some case with disastrous results). Weird character designs. Cheesy in-jokes for parents. Product placement I think? I guess it’s interesting that they ripped off Battle Angel Alita’s scrapyard plotline

Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno" gives the feeling of someone who's never written a novel before, trying to write one, but he's too old and just can't do it (but still got it published)

Nice bit in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno" where characters worry if they'd get bored in Heaven after eventually writing every song and solving every math problem etc. Carroll then speculates that Heaven is like adulthood compared to childhood & you can't imagine what you'll learn & discover

Lewis Carroll’s hypothetical address to a nonbinary person in “Sylvie and Bruno”: “sir’m” (sir- ma’am)

Finished skimming John Rowe Townsend’s “Written for Children”, a fascinating, tho now very obsolete, 1974 survey of children’s books. (It was apparently updated in the 80s & 90s but I didn’t find those ones.) Lots of lore about the foundations of children’s books mixed with the authors reviews

Biggest aid flotilla ever headed to Gaza in March 🥳🤞🍉 www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/202...

Used this map last night for the conquered city where the evil vizier’s wizards were perverting one of the Six Runes of Truth and using it to imprison angels. The players liked the map!

Almost done slogging through Lewis Carroll’s final and worst work, the “Sylvie and Bruno” books. He was working on them for over 10 years?!! This is why you don’t put together every random thought you’ve had for a decade into a super long book with no plot

Almost done drawing the Dreamlands city of Bombasharna. Just need to do the cartouche

New SFF Audio podcast just dropped, featuring discussions of two great classic fantasy stories: Robert E Howard's "The Tower of the Elephant" and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"! And they mention my comic of it, too! ;) www.sffaudio.com/the-sffaudio...

Edward Lear, author of “The Owl and the Pussycat”, getting too real

Two HRW employees that make up the entirety of the organization's Israel and Palestine program are stepping down after the leadership blocked a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return a "crime against humanity." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Working on maps of Dreamlands cities for Dreamland RPG! Here’s one: Ulthar #dreamlands #ttrpg More art, info & playtest schedules are on the Discord: discord.gg/GZwBD9u3

Star-shaped city walls of the Renaissance (designed to better withstand cannon fire) earthsky.org/earth/star-s...

John Tenniel's famous illustration of the Jabberwocky for "Through the Looking Glass". Lewis Carroll knew this one was a hit, and considered using it as the cover; however he also worried it'd be too scary for kids and should be removed entirely. In the end he took the middle ground and kept it in

I've been digging thru old books, but at some point I need to look at recent (like in the last 30 years, to me 🤪) YA/kids' fantasy isekai novels to see which ones are Dreamland like. I know there's literally series out there set in Dreams, and I've got to read them! But there's just so much stuff!

Reading the "Alice in Wonderland" books: it's clear these are written for younger children than most kids' fantasies of the time (like "Water Babies"), and written knowing they'd be heavily illustrated. The text is MUCH lighter than stuff like "Water Babies". This probably helped the book's lifespan

Reread the "Alice in Wonderland" books. One thing about them is, they both have nice endings. Not that they 'resolve' anything, but they go out on an interesting note: nostalgia for childhood in "Alice" 1, and questioning reality in "Through the Looking Glass" (Alice 2)

One player (Alice), the others are GMs/Wonderlanders inflicting one thing after another on her. 😉 Or a one-on-one game, of course.

I’m skimming John Rowe Townsend’s history of children’s books (including YA), and it jumps out that much of the 1800s & early 1900s was inspiring/tragic stories of poor kids. I’m honestly ignorant, is there even anything like this today? Who depicts child poverty?

Anyone who tells you there is a 'ceasefire' in Gaza is gaslighting you and is an anti-Palestinian racist:

Recently discovered that “Goody Two-Shoes” is a reference to a real 1765 children’s book

“Threesomes are popular in the classical adventure story” - John Rowe Townsend in part of a survey of children’s fiction. But he means stories with three characters who are friends. Sorry

Trying to think about how to incorporate “Alice in Wonderland” into a roleplaying game but so much of it involves characters being completely annoying to Alice who mostly just takes it. I don’t know if RPers would be able to handle it. 🤔 Maybe players would prefer to RP the Wonderlanders? 🤪 #ttrpg

“It’s really dreadful the way all the creatures argue! It’s enough to drive one crazy!” - Alice in Wonderland, lampshading itself

Found this old beauty in my parents’ house. All the D’Aulaire books are incredible

Reading “Alice in Wonderland.” With all of these adult figures answering Alice with these annoying non-answers, negging and twisted logic, it almost feels like dialogues between the girls Carroll was telling the story to, and Carroll (in character) teasing them

I wish that as ProCreate calculated the maximum number of usable layers, it would just set the max as 'the number of layers at which the program won't constantly crash', instead of letting you work in the last 5-10 layers when the program is completely iffy

Grenville MacDonald (son of fantasy writer George MacDonald, a friend of Lewis Carroll) heard “Alice in Wonderland” before it was published and expressed one complaint: the ending where it all turns out to be a dream

At any given time my mind is half full with examples of screwed up things from my childhood, both personal and pop cultural, but it’s hard to thread the needle of talking about them without sounding like I’m going “…and that’s great!” or “…and thus we were all monsters. The end”

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Fact: Lewis Carroll briefly considered titling his book “Alice’s Hour in Elfland” #aliceinwonderland

Even in 1945, Japanese drawings of white people looked like @mockman.bsky.social. Sorry, Jason.

Not just any journalist, she won the goddamn Triple Crown of broadcast journalism (an Emmy, a Peabody, and a Murrow) in 2024 for her reporting on Gaza. This is textbook censorship of the highest degree

More highlights of Clive Barker’s “Abarat”: evil wizard who’s also just an abusive drunk, sitting around demanding the imprisoned heroine pour him more rum. Too real

Mad #ttrpg genius Patrick Stuart does the world’s deepest deep-dive on the Avatar movies (including random tables) 🎲 falsemachine.blogspot.com/2026/01/spid...

Today's mood music (one of my favorite vaguely fantasy-ish pieces of music EVER) www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcDA...

Anyone out there going to NecronomiCon Providence this August? 🔥 #cthulhu #dreamlands #hplovecraft #cthulhumythos #ttrpg necronomicon-providence.com/welcome/

A hippopotamus is totally different from a horse yet its name means "water horse", while a donkey is basically just a stocky little horse and yet it has its own name

My Goodreads review of "The Garden of the Plynck" (1920): really original children's fantasy book stained with one really racist element www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

I know more about WW2 than my kids ever will (because they don't have a Boomer dad continually watching WW2 movies and collecting WW2 books and talking about his childhood during WW2), and that's fine