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El Barkla

@elbarkla

art human. games too much. all work tagged #elbarklaart is mine. she/her πŸ’œπŸ€πŸ€πŸ–€
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He's worried about stepping on flowers. He loves nature.

Wow thanks everyone ;v;

Mini lore snippet lol: at first I just doodled the cat alone in the middle of a page, but I loved him so much I just turned the page and drew the whole thing. He's so great.

i think "bedtime abolitionist" is an unserious pejorative and i think less of people who use it. it's bad that children's lives are so heavily regimented, actually, and it'd be good for them to have more autonomy in these matters.

but, yknow. ruthless criticism of all that exists unless it makes you look like a whiny child, or something.

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I used to work extensively with kids and I am unironically a bedtime abolitionist.

Specifically at summer camp, I noticed that trying to enforce a bedtime would result in nights of me going cabin to cabin telling kids to be quiet repeatedly until 1-2AM. Then we would all be cranky and exhausted about it the whole week, and it made me come off like a controlling asshole to the kids cause...I was being a controlling asshole. And like, I was young enough to have really salient memories of having been a camper, so excited to talk to new friends that I didn't sleep - the kids had good reason to stay up!

So I figured out that I could, instead, lay out the first night that they could stay up as late as they wanted, and talk to their friends, as long as they were physically in bed with lights off. I would get a lot more sleep and was better able to function in the morning, and if a kid complained about being tired the next day, I would ask about how long they stayed up the previous night and let them connect the dots themselves. Inevitably, most kids would stay up really late the first night, and then they would self-regulate and get to sleep way quicker, because they were motivated to balance their own wants & needs instead of an adult breathing down their neck about an arbitrary externally-imposed sleep deadline.

I started extending this method to more things, trying to make sure my role was less Authority Figure and more resource for learning how to care for themselves. I went through college and found it was backed up by a lot of the research out there on parenting and teaching styles. Literally just respecting the autonomy of kids in my care and talking them through decisions instead of telling them what to do would make "behavioral issues" evaporate, and make both me and the kids happier. It helped even more when I started working with traumatized kids and teens in foster care after college. Sometimes a kid would even point out to me when a given rule in a workplace didn't make sense and I could give them an exception and/or go to my boss and try to get things changed. Often, arbitrary rules from higher-ups made things way more difficult for everyone.

Trying to explain this to authoritarian parents AND my worse bosses over the course of my childcare career was like pulling teeth.

Kids deeply crave autonomy and responsibility, and if you give them the former they will often gladly take up the latter, but you have to give them the chance to make their own choices and make non-life-threatening mistakes first. But to someone who views a kid as property, or even a well-intentioned perfectionist parent, the idea of giving a kid that autonomy is terrifying, so they try to make it sound absurd to justify maintaining control.

Anyway, yeah, bedtime abolition forever. The kids will do just fine without bedtime.

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If you’re a fruit, make sure to NOT ferment your natural sugars into alcohol before your work interview.

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Inspired by this diva

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new mug design. planning to add some colour to the flowers and such

colour β˜‘οΈ

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Channeling this energy today 🌺 because I got the brain rot BAD 🧠but without brainrot πŸ§Ÿβ€β™‚οΈ one cannot πŸ’š begot 🌱 brainLIFE 🌈🌟

πŸŒΏπŸΈπŸπŸ›

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if you are "animal lover" and don't find the beauty and silliness stored in the humble leech then you should try

Reminder

They do this :3

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Reblogged seabeck

stop spreading despair and nihilism

stop buying into the idea that nonviolent activism is useless, rather than (by far) the most effective form of protest

stop falsely claiming that BLM accomplished nothing and that most citizens β€œdon’t care” when people are murdered by the state

start understanding that most of your neighbors care about your rights, and their own

start noticing that most people are moved by injustice, including against people who look nothing like them

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i want to do a painting of a tiger taking a bath to put in a bathroom (bathroom-themed bathroom) and to this end i made a little maquette out of clay and i suspect this will scope creep into having both a painting and sculpture of a tiger or perhaps only a sculpture of a tiger. if i do both should they be displayed together or separately

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Tiger maquette by the way πŸ…

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Working on cutting out a large piece of wood to do the painting on, which is a constraint that will either be really fun or really annoying. Maybe both

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Wood primed and underpainted and sketch transferred mostly by cutting it out in different chunks and tracing around them. Stripes to be determined. Nobody let me work on this again for at least two weeks

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The finished Ms. Tigers

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"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."

Arundhati Roy

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Art vs Artist 2025!!

πŸŒžπŸπŸ˜»πŸ¦ŒπŸ•·πŸ›πŸ‘―β€β™€οΈπŸˆπŸŒ²πŸΎπŸΈπŸ­ I drew a lot less, but I wrote a lot more! And started my first ever garden. So here's to a lifestyle diverse as my art style, algorithm be damned πŸ˜‰

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btw, are we making fresh templates for art vs artist? because i got lazy and reused the file from my wet cat mood map, is that cheating

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Reblogged willowwithin
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many people sharing the writing post today... hard to keep up with..... know my universal advice:

  • if it sucks you should still write it
  • if it'll be unfinished you should still write it
  • if you never share it you should still write it
  • if it's not a linear fiction adventure you should still write it
  • if you will have fun writing it you should write it :)
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Art curse: sometimes a shitpost turns out good for no reason. and then you basically HAVE to post it, even knowing you'll look like a freak 😭 . so anyway, here's Empress Theresa in her Little Black Nothing Dress. Enjoy

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