“Who here plans on driving their car today? Show of hands!” … “I recommend getting to know these people, because you are far more likely to die in an car accident caused by a stranger than by someone you know. But also don’t upset them, as you are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know rather than a stranger.”
“Mr Tourguide, aren’t you supposed to talk about sharks?”
I think we all grew up with one or two non-verbal, watched at all times, screaming in the halls kid in our school. What the fuck would you want to call a kid like that? They don’t know or care what you call them. That’s what comes to mind for me when special needs is mentioned. Not autistic, or ADHD. Full blown mental retardation.
‘Special needs kid’ is a surprising lack of hate-speech for anon though. It doesn’t make it okay for us since most look at it from the distance and we don’t reproduce its’ culture there. But observing these pieces knowing the context is a niche way of having fun.
This one doesn’t lose much from omitting that part though. Seems like anon didn’t come up with a worthy punchline and just dropped it here, being in a delusion that it’d make the greentext work. A fabric softener in a school setting, what?
This story could’ve taken another turn if a kid tried to fish it with an improvised hook and scaley anon was so bored and depressed about the kid’s effort so he proceeded to make some fake bites, this becoming their daily tradition. Alone in his bowl, anon finds a weird, deadly relationship with a kid, and asks itself what would happen if it’d bite for real? Would it know when it’s time to risk it, or finally go? I believe many anons questioned themselves about euthanasia and if they’d find courage to do it before they’d turn into a dead weight on their relatives’ backs and not enjoying life at all, so this could’ve started an interesting conversation even there, while overwhelming the use of a special kid character somewhere in the middle.
There was a conversation awhile back about how any term used to describe someone with a disability eventually becomes a slur and history tends to back that up, but I’d say ‘special needs’ is probably about the least offensive qualifier we have today.
I did theatre in high school (a decade ago) and we performed the straight play The Boys Next Door, a story about four intellectually disabled men living together with the help of their caretaker. The original show was written circa 1988, and uses “retarded” as the word to describe the men. Obviously for a high school play, we couldn’t use that.
Our director interfaced with a local group to determine what the correct terminology should be, and over the course of rehearsal, we changed the phrase from mentally challenged to intellectually challenged to intellectually disabled. It was important to us to make sure we got it right, but it was also surprising that the term changed very quickly.
Not sure what the politically correct term is nowadays, I try and avoid the R slur. Point is, this is a dumb greentext among the many I have saved; I Guess I could have picked a different one.
I’m amazed none of these have been mentioned yet. Here are some of my faves
Explaining stuff that’s happening
Real Life Lore (I’m almost signing for Nebula because of him, gorgeous map graphics)
Cold Fusion
Wendover
History stuff
Fall of Civilizations - Hands down the best documentary-like content I know of. Takes forever for new stuff to show up (because research), but it’s so fucking worth it!
Kings and Generals (the narrator butchers every non-anglo name, it really grinds my gears)
Heroes and Legends - The long form, documentary-level videos are amazing. Watch the ones on Gertrude Bell and Voltaire
Gamurrs
Basement Brothers - Almost monotone narration, but possibly the only channel in english that plays and shows several details of old Japan exclusive PC games (PC88 and PC98 mostly)
Russian Badger - There’s a very high chance you’ve seen some of the memes straight out of his videos. Start with “Heavy flamer heresy” if you’ve never seen any.
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