yeah, people have pointed out how ironic it is that for all Musk's stupid invocations of The Matrix, Vivian is the one whose life story has played out like Neo

It's very common for former "designer babies" to have trauma from not just the fact that they were basically a product sold to their parents as superior healthy optimized children, but also because biology doesn't work like that & the science is overhyped so many parents become resentful & abusive when the perfect kid they paid a lot of money for ends up just being a regular imperfect human being.

The first "designer babies" are already fully grown adults & many of them are speaking out about how messed up it is.

It's a new refrain on an old song. My grandparents adopted my mother by picking her description out in a catalog. 3-year-old girl, blond hair, green eyes.

Fortunately, it means today's designer babies have models and systems available to them if they need to get out, thanks to so many of the children who escaped alive.

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.

TFW you're a small Canadian business and the country 90% of your customers live in just made exporting to them way harder 🙃 so you have to change your tactics up a bit

Now at my Etsy shop

I sell stick-and-stitch embroidery patterns that are extremely easy to follow. They're taken from medieval and 16th century embroidery, or designed by me. They can mend patches in your jeans, decorate your clothes, or help you build a new costume. Then when you're done, just wash the pattern away!

This is the biggest discount sale I've done yet. It runs until April 1!

The OTW is Recruiting for PAC, Translation, TWC Copyeditor and Strategic Planning Volunteers

Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? Are you fluent in a language other than English and passionate about making OTW more accessible? Do you have experience copyediting or proofreading academic journals? Or do you have experience with research methods, problem solving or nonprofit governance? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting! Read more at: https://otw-news.org/8p6fjmwj

The text of this tweet says:

I find it fascinating how much the tight framing of the tweet elides the context of these long, long battles. I also find it interesting that a short list of civil rights gains that is otherwise entirely American invokes the WSPU bombings, which a) had no direct impact on American suffrage on account of being a United Kingdom-based protest movement, b) did not directly or immediately result in votes for women--the WSPU voluntarily ceased their campaign of bombings, protests, and arson when the UK entered WWI in 1914, which brought an end to it--and c) pissed off local observers enough to inspire retaliatory violence against suffragists from community members who were otherwise not directly engaged with the women's votes.

Note that women received the vote in the UK in 1918, four years after the bombing campaign ended, and that by no means were the WSPU the only women organizing around suffragism in the UK; indeed, they were much smaller in numbers than the more mainstream advocates for women's votes, and the failure of a 1913 suffrage bill was understood at the time as a partial backlash against the bombing campaigns.

In the US, which is the context the tweet is otherwise talking about, women's suffrage was an activity complicated by the Fifteenth Amendment and the Civil-War-era treatment of racism in suffrage. The story is similar in some particulars--civil, nonviolent forms of protest like hunger strikes were important to both actions--but the American suffrage movement never descended into violence. Women were not barred from running for or holding office in the US as they were in the UK, so starting in the 1860s women made some very high-profile runs for political office, some of which won. US suffrage advocates also saw early successes by integrating with the temperance movement through the late nineteenth century and by taking advantage of the addition of new states to advocate for state-level opportunities for woman's suffrage (i.e. temporary voting rights for women in Wyoming and Utah in the mid-1860s, something that the UK would not replicate for another fifty years but which were quickly lost). In addition to losses, however, the state-level push to enshrine voting availability to women was successful, with fifteen states enshrining full voting access for women between 1910 and 1920, and another fifteen protecting routine voting rights for women in some more limited form (usually either Presidential or municipal voting). You will see that the American context included fierce opposition from, largely, the ex-Confederacy, and that was more or less the context in which American suffrage activists were working.

You know what those American women's activists never fucking did as part of organized resistance in the US? Violent activity, including bombings. Funnily enough, it turns out that while disruptive direct action and protests were crucial to making the case for women's suffrage, violence and terrorism were not necessary to make that case. Civility has two definitions in the context of protest, and civil protest in no way precludes being disruptive or annoying--just not violent or dangerous.

Never mind the fact that both the Million Man March (which did shut down DC) and the Capitol Crawl (which did not only entail wheelchair users, but disabled people using a variety of mobility aids) were fucking civil, nonviolent protests relying on the legal right to occupy a space as part of the First Amendment. Both were just about as "anti-civility" in tone as the fucking Women's March: the Million Man March was actually quite similarly controlled in its messaging in a bid to avoid violence, and the Capitol Crawl's sum total "damage" was reckoned in terms of inconveniencing a few American Senators.

This historical analysis is bullshit, or at the very least severely dishonest, and history proves that, too.

After all these years and psychology degrees and all these diagnostic systems, and one of the best systemic methods of analysis of the sum total human, systemic, and cultural causes and elements contributing to a horrendous circumstance, and it comes from....

aerospace engineering.

AND THEY CALL IT "THE SWISS CHEESE METHOD"

#Repost @gogreensavegreen

You might be more than one. You might be different ones at different times. 🫶🏽🫶🏽 you might not be one of these. There are more roles 💪🏽 but this is an amazing intro.

You can’t just like the idea and envision yourself in one of these roles you have to figure out how to be about it ♥️🫶🏽

Via @deiloh & @fablefulart

Anytime you're interacting with your child, but especially when angry, say to yourself "how would I feel if their future partner treated them the way I am currently treating them?"

You are creating their 'normal'

People need to read the UN Conventions On The Rights Of The Child before becoming parents and regularly while parenting and I am so serious about this.

Everyone SHOULD read it, and it is often a distressing experience to do so. Back in 1929 it was internationally recognized that children in particular needed to have a codified set of rights, it has been improved on since - in many ways it is still not perfect but it needs to be understood that the rights contained within are the BARE MINIMUM.

If any of these are breached - whether on the home scale or on the cultural one, particularly for signatory countries - that is a fundamental issue.

I promise that learning what the established bare minimums are in universal human rights frameworks will enable you to cut through so much propaganda immediately.

Children and teens are full human beings and by becoming parents an immense responsibility is applied to treat them as such. They need open and clear communication, not to be talked down too, and to have their questions answered. They have the right to autonomy and life.

Sewing supplies back in shop!

And I mean in shop, since I keep these supplies in my living room/studio and ship orders myself. I want to be able to use and test them myself before I put them out on sale on Etsy.

I just got a new storage unit for them, I'm so proud.

Here's what I've got:

The Sewing Kit:

The sewing kit on Etsy

All this, and more! available at my Etsy shop

am taking perverse pleasure in reminding people it's 2025. that's a star trek year. silly little science fiction number. except it's happening, and DANG ain't it underwhelming!

for Gen Z folks who didn't live through it:

the late 2000s to mid 2010s were culturally, a time of a resurgence of hope. I don't think we seriously realized it at the time (for all the Obama campaign posters), but it honestly was the last period in recent history where it was assumed the future would be better.

that was a big thing, that many millennials didn't realize was a big thing, until it was torn away. we honestly thought it was over, the fear and uncertainty of the Cold War and the Nuclear Age (and Bush 2.0). we were born in an era of reprieve. things were bad, yes, the world was insane and unfair, but it was better than it was before. the world had been at the brink of ultimate disaster, and then it stepped back. (And we honestly thought we had escaped our parents' legacy, by sheer virtue of being born in the correct decade.)

I cannot overstate how much that shapes your worldview, growing up in a time where the recent present is better than the recent past. we had reason to believe the world was getting better. because it was, actually! for a good while there! progress was slow, but it was real, and we could feel its grit on our fingertips.

and now we're in an age of regression. because you were robbed. we were robbed. a great global era of robbery (of housing and food and time and health and body and freedom and fundamental human rights), has blossomed, and is happening everyday today.

be furious. they will steal the teeth from your gums.

@star-anise / @beyondthisdarkhouse / @with-my-murder-flute / @thehaberdasheress here:

I think now I can express where I'm at, because I've managed to wrestle down my gibbering terror today.

Here in Alberta, Canada, the United Conservative Party government is very clearly trying to slash the social support network to ribbons. They are making changes and cutting funding all over the place, but especially for Albertans who are unhoused, low-income, disabled, or mentally ill.

When I got onto AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) it felt like a miracle. I got $1800 a month, every month! I could pay rent AND bills AND one good grocery trip a month! (Median rent here is about $1000 a month for a bachelor or 1 bedroom apartment)

I used to have a dream job. I wanted to be a psychologist since I was like 14. I did years of university and job experience until I was employed to do the work daily. And every fucking time, my body gave out on me. I have fibromyalgia, one of those "chronic pain and fatigue because??? womanly hysteria???" diseases. It's hard for me to work even a fraction of full time. After a 3-hour workday, on a 10-hour week, I shambled home and collapsed straight into bed. I spent 10 years getting a job, doing it for a few months, and needing to leave because my health just got too bad. I never earned more than $17k a year.

Now the province has announced that it's completely splitting up AISH, creating a new category called ADAPT. It's for disabled people who are technically employable, and will make us perform "simulated work" to become employable. They're being coy about the details, but everyone I've talked to with a disability or even family with disability advocacy has agreed, it's pretty clear they're not doing this to increase our benefits.

I am stupid scared. This is as factually as I am able to put it. My processing capacity for politics is extremely low right now. I am not as badly off as a lot of people in a lot of other countries, but right now I am existentially terrified for myself and the disabled people I love. And all the ones I don't personally love, frankly. When I let myself feel the terror and grief and rage, it only keeps expanding.

This new program will take effect in June 2026 and although I will spend the next year and a half fighting as much as I am able, part of me is convinced that we will lose the way we seem to have lost every single fucking fight in this province since 2018. The UCP quite literally look up to US Republicans as role models and mentors. (Did you know Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, AB? His parents came up to work in our oil industry.)

So I just wanted to say: Yes, I am deliberately avoiding political commentary as much as possible. Yes, I haven't had much capacity to help anyone else out, and I'm sorry. I'm mostly trying to just keep myself and my business from falling apart completely, because it seems clear that I have to budget my last few remaining shreds of sanity very carefully indeed.

If possible, please send cat pics.

-Lis