My grandfather will have died three years ago this August. He and my mami hid it from the family for two years before anyone was told, and then it was another year before anyone told me (this is not uncommon, as the only child they often try to "shield" me). He went downhill for a while and the last year of his life…

The burden of proof is still not mine, and I'm no more agnostic about fairies than I am about gods. Many gods have testable characteristics (the efficacy of prayer, miracles), and even the untestable ones (divine revelation) usually have simpler explanations (lying, mental illness, the use of narrative to inspire…

The burden of proof is not on me that something doesn't exist, it's one the person claiming the existence. We cannot disprove bigfoot, fairies or the invisible pink unicorn, but there's a sliding scale of likelihood that is not in their favor.

I've always personally liked "atheism is a belief system like bald is hair color."

I was raised in a house by lapsed Catholics. The concept of a god was never entertained, we never talked about an afterlife or spirituality. I knew my grandmother went to mass, but she never talked about that with me either. I thought it was just a thing grandmothers did. I did get some weird shit about it in…

Oh man, I'm so thankful this was posted. I've been wanting one of these but I can't justify the price, but then it looks so difficult to replicate. I didn't actually think it would be possible, because that seam detail is really just stunning. I wish I had one of these "Duané Rêadé" stores near me.

That would have absolutely made my day. I love how into these dolls kids get. I know a woman whose daughter insisted she get a Toreli doll, because, and I quote, "I'm going to make her be nice for once!"

If you're pun-intolerant then this is emphatically not the toy line for you. Not when Frankie Stein's favorite class is Home Ick and she's on the fearleading squad, cheering on the casketball team before going on to play skulltimate roller derby. Though my favorite is still Abbey Bominable.

I've heard a lot of people bandy the word about, I shrug my shoulders at it. They're dolls, and while I consider them better dolls than most, it's not because they're progressive. Mattel has a really high production bar for quality and the concept is cool.

I think that's a lot of the appeal to these dolls. Barbies are all interchangeable, same clothes in slightly different colors, a "blank slate." MH dolls all have their own stories, personalities, interests, there's a lot of world building going on. And several of the dolls are nerds. When did Barbie ever cosplay…

I think the "progressive" part (I've never ever heard anyone market the dolls this way, but if that's the terminology the internet wants to use, ok, I'll run with it) is that the dolls really stress a pretty neat range of interests. When I see Barbie, I see a "Stock Character" and they swap out the…

There's a reason for that actually. When Mattel original won the lawsuit against MGA to acquire the Bratz property, they anticipated releasing their own Bratz dolls (natch). The Monster High dolls are the body sculpts. When MGA won the suit on appeal, Mattel was stuck with this body they'd spent all this time…

I'm not sure where that came from. I own several of them and I've never had to remove a hand to dress them except to take off bracelets. I consider that a bonus, because that means it's impossible for tiny, lose-able accessories to just fall off and roll under a couch to be lost forever.

Let me get my fainting couch out as yet another person derides this line for Reasons. At least this time it's not religious fundamentalists claiming the dolls encourage Satanism, or someone whining that a skeleton doll encourages anorexia...although claiming that a bone-white (she's not true white, she's actually…

You don't need to take the heads of to dress them. The only thing you do need to take off occasionally is the hands to remove bracelets, which is preferable because this way they don't get lost by falling off.

Yes...keep the corgis coming.

I can't take her constant hysterical outbursts. I think they're going for "wacky" but all I get from her is "obnoxious."

I'm not not the only one who can barely tolerate Maggie, right? Unprofessional, flighty, obnoxious, mess. I just keep wanting to shout at Jim to run for the hills.

It's for their own good. I'm not saying they don't understand how to eat, just that we need to protect them from themselves. Otherwise they'd be gnawing on any molten-cored pop tart that bursts out of a toaster.

If they couldn't handle the consequences of hot pockets, they should have kept their mouths closed.