Everyone felt sad for the penguin walking alone and the monkey rejected by his mother. But this video is far more heartbreaking, yet it didn’t receive the same attention.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
My niece loudly said "look at all this AI slop. They should be embarrassed to sell this" right in front of several booths at the festival and you know what? She's sooo right and I hope they heard her
things that players never realized when playing pokémon.
back in 2006, when pokemon diamond and pearl launched on the nintendo ds, players were trying to catch all the new pokemon of sinnoh region, but there was a secret mechanism that determined catch rates .
the ds had an internal clock, and the game used real world dates to change how often wild pokemon appeared. on fun holidays like christmas eve, st. patrick’s day and the 4th of july, encounter rates went up by 5%, giving players more encounters possibilities and more fun on those special days.
the opposite happened on sad anniversaries. on august 6th and 9th, the anniversaries of the hiroshima and nagasaki bombings and on september 11th, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the game lowered encounter rates by 10%.
this feature was never mentioned by game freak or nintendo. it stayed completely hidden for 14 years until 2020, when a dataminer named shinyhunter_map discovered it buried deep inside the game’s leaked code.
bro, why are people acting like having a private account is some kind of crime??? blame the person who leaked it, not the idol. y'all joke about your oshis having private accounts all the time, but the moment it's real, suddenly it's a problem???
My stance hasn't changed. I don't care about my oshi's private life when it doesn't come directly from them, and I don't really believe it either. So I'll be here as usual because this isn't a problem for me