This is an interesting story because people my parents age are like “How dare he” and people my age are like “oh same”
What’s even more interesting is he’s not serious. In India there’s a culture of intense deference to parents. He believes that this is a very unhealthy way for people to live and so he’s using this court case as a way to tell people that the idea of “you must grovel in gratitude to your parents because they brought you into the world and fed and clothed you” is a bad thing and that parents have to feed and clothe you because it’s their damn job and they chose to have you.
He really gets on with his own parents and his mother has publicly voiced her support for him.
Tl;dr: This isn’t incel bullshit like the dude who’s parents evicted him last year, this is a political protest to unhealthy expectations parents have for their children even though he isn’t pressured into those expectations by his own parents.
So like, the metamorphosis process in amphibians is a whole complex thing but its initiation and progress is pretty straightforwardly reliant on two hormones, thyroxin and prolactin; the first pushing metamorphosis and the second opposing it. As the relative levels change through the tadpole stage, different tissues are affected, hence why tadpoles develop limbs etc. in a specific order.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that if a tadpole has a thyroid hormone deficiency (can be genetic, environmental or a result of physical injury), its body never gets the signal to do things like “grow legs” or “turn into a whole frog”. One of the scientists who studied it noted that it’s developmental level is basically as if it’d hatched very recently, except that it’s huge, so basically it got just past the external gills phase and then just…stopped changing (except in size).
Sadly, Goliath died in 2019 but was still growing at the time of its death. As far as I know they don’t know why it died, but it’s possible that it was just a matter of it being Too Big for its physiology, that never having been made to support a tadpole that size.
I love how Defunctland is like “in order to describe the history of this one specific dark ride, I think I will recount the entire history of dark rides as a whole, starting with the American picnic trend in the 1800s” and I am like “oh YEAH let’s have it!!! Gimme that information”
For those that don’t know, Kev has also done documentaries on:
Searching for the composer of the four-note Disney Channel jingle. (Feature length.)
The history of a Star Wars-inspired band that played at Disney one year, HALYX. (Feature length)
Queuing theory and Fastpass and why Fastpass sucks. (Feature length)
Coney Island and how institutional racism affected the whole area.
The bizarre trend of Santa Claus themed amusement parks and how they fizzled out.
Muppet Babies
All of these documentaries are legitimately riveting. Even the one on Fastpass of all things.
The moment I saw he made The Fastpass documentary I knew it was going to blow my mind with facts… but nothing prepared me to what he had in store with that surprise reveal on the second half.
His series on the history of Jim Henson and the Muppets had me bawling and feeling inspired to create something meaningful with my art.
im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!
an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.
“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids
because its easier for parents to blame their kids for doing things than it is to reflect on their own lack of parenting
