don't hug me i'm scared

My redesign hot take is that if you’re aiming to “desexualize” a female character, don’t make her boobs smaller. You’re implying a lot here.

Instead of shrinking her boobs, try:

There are probably lots more options too! I’m not an artist! Just a person with a big chest and back pain!

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

updated link

Adding a "protect libraries" angle to the above, especially in light of the MARCH 14 executive order that calls for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the nation’s only federal agency for America’s libraries.

This new EO is aimed at defunding public and school libraries across the country. NOW is the time to reach out to your Congressperson and U.S. Senators on this matter.

ALA STATEMENT: "We call on all Americans who value reading, learning, and enrichment to reach out to their elected leaders and Show Up For Our Libraries at library and school meetings, town halls, and everywhere decisions are made about libraries."

I call this the create a new problem technique

I don't know how people came to think that "the banality of evil" means "evil people are people too". It's also true but it's not what the banality of evil means.

The term was coined by Hannah Arednt in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the "final solution" in the Holocaust.

It describes the way in which the Nazis at large and Eichmann in particular have turned the horrendous act of mass murder into just another job, disconnecting themselves morally and emotionally from their actions.

Before the death camps and gas chambers, Nazi soldiers simply shot Jews into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. It was a lot cheaper and faster, but it caused great psychological disturbance for the murderers.

Their solution was a massively upscaled version of the "gas vans" they used to mass murder hundreds of thousands Germans with disabilities and mental health issues.

Shooting bound civilians in point blank rank over and over is something you can't just pretend you're not doing or is no big deal. But if you're just the guy who sorts people into groups. Or just the guy that funnels them into a room. Or just the guy who opens a cannister on the roof. It's must easier to distance yourself from what you know is happening.

The same principle applies to much lesser evils, like soldiers operating drones from a distance, or insurance workers denying coverage for life-saving treatment.

fyi things like insulin, hearing aids, wheelchairs, glasses costing money at all is a form of structural ableism

disabled people should not have to pay to live their lives like everyone else. and in the case of insulin, disabled people should not have to pay to Not Fucking Die

entire thing is awful but this part is really chilling

been seeing a lot of nuremberg defense over the past year gonna be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come i'm afraid

Another layer of fun. The first time I applied for a passport I was told my birth certificate was fake. It was the original. Literally the same piece of paper. But the state that issued it used to do half pages, so the government in other states, and then, the federal government wouldn’t accept it as real.

I had to get a new copy of it, which required a separate process, so I could then reapply for the passport. At one point they misplaced my submitted documents so there was a couple extra weeks. And then the earliest passport appt was like 9 weeks out.

If you changed any part of your name for any reason — Did your parent remarry and changed your name when you were little? — go start the process. You have no idea how many hoops it takes.

I don’t know if this will be in place. I don’t know if there will be another election. Start this process anyway. Right now.

FYI - if you were born on the rez, this is also probably how they feel about your birth certificate. I had to get mine reissued because I had a “certificate of live birth” not a birth certificate. Even if you are SURE you won’t be impacted, you should check.

Fwiw - the process of getting a birth certificate was at least pretty straightforward

Gap on my resume because I had to do me

hey. Don’t fucking call it that

my tractor i was walking down the road on a leash got really excited when we passed by a field of alfalfa and well im not really that strong enough so it got free and collected all the alfalfa and proccessed it into hay bales

“the Pam to my Jim” “flirt to roast ratio “fluent in sarcasm” “not political” “hobbies: travel” “debate me: the office or friends” “just here for your dog” “like Chandler and Monica” “girls on lexapro” “helen keller wasn’t real” “looking for a goth mommy” “pineapple does not go on pizza” “i’m a slytherin”

Women that think Helen Keller wasn't real hit me up beautiful

There are people disabled in the same way Helen was that exist now so I guess the part that’s supposed to be unbelievable is that a person that became disabled as a child could grow up to have other skills and talents as adult, yk exactly like any other person has the potential to?

Helen Keller lost her ability to see and hear due to damage from scarlet fever as a toddler. When she was about 7, her parents hired live in tutor who helped her learn to communicate using a combination of tactile sign language+fingerspelling (the words were spelled directly onto Helen’s hand skin so she could feel them, and she could then reply the same way or with signs), Braille (to read and write), and Tadoma (feeling the vibrations in a person’s jaw to perform a sort of tactile lipreading). Helen’s tutor was Anne Sullivan, another woman who was mostly blind and got her education at Perkin’s school for the blind which Helen later attended as well. At Perkin’s, Anne had befriended an older graduate named Laura Bridgman who was the first deaf-blind person to receive complete schooling in the united states (she went on to become a teacher), and Laura taught Anne fingerspelling which Anne was then able to teach Helen. Laura was taught by Samuel Gridley Howe, the director and founder of the school, who worked his entire life to improve teaching methods and accessibility (ie: the printing of braille books) for his students. The Perkin’s school for the blind still exists. You can go visit the school. They have a website. They have social media where they will happily answer FAQs and show you videos of how they teach everything from finger spelling to music. Perkin’s also continues to make strides, including but not limited to teaching blind/deaf-blind people to use smart devices/computers and partnering with tech companies to work on accessibility devices and software. Just like Helen’s story, many of the achievements for blind/deaf-blind people have been through the collective work of these disabled people themselves.

Ik y’all think this is heehee haha quirky and contradictory but at its base this sentiment is nasty and hateful bc what you are communicating is that the first impression you want a stranger to have of you is that you are intentionally narrow minded and that you choose to believe someone different than you is not a human being on the same level as you. You are advertising that you revel in your own ignorance despite being perfectly capable of accessing information because you refuse to look past the tip of your own nose

Aa small moment by Cornelius Eady