Worlds cross where pen meets page

♟ she / her Past urls: none for this account; wasntthereyesterday et al. for rp (been a while) Elsewhere: I don't think I'm likely to vanish, but just in case, I can be messaged at Ao3 under this name or wasntthereyesterday. ♜ I tag things very thoroughly, but a lot of my fandom tags are nonstandard (quotes, phrases, ...) so they don't show up in searches / tags. If there's something you want to avoid / block / know about tags, please let me know, I can definitely point you to what to block etc. ♞

[emily-e-draws]

figure studies but make it murderbot <3 altogether too excited for this show to start airing.. gotta practice drawing the fave and its funky armor in preparation

[emily-e-draws]

knew yall would see the vision

[stclements]

[wisphunt]

My final for the first year of my fashion and textile course :] fossils cardigan featuring living fossils like coelacanth and lots of dinosaur bones. Big love letter to palaeontology and natural history. Got super into my knitting machine but I wasn’t very adept with it yet so I sort of crocheted around the edges of my pieces and sewed them all together, and crocheted some edges/ribbing. The buttons are handmade from polymer clay. Used some second hand gold yarn I found in a charity shop and a whole bunch of mixed variegated wool together. My most ambitious project yet I completely just did not speak to people for that final month I was working on this 😭

Some close ups:

And my watercolour paintings this piece was based on:

[uoouaquarium]

One thing I keep coming back to about TMBD is how profoundly anti-cynical it actually is.

Cynicism says: everything is systems, systems are corrupt, therefore individual actions are ultimately meaningless or absorbed.

Murderbot’s world absolutely agrees with the first two parts. The systems are corrupt. Corporations are violent. People get reduced to functions, assets, liabilities.

But it refuses the conclusion. Like yeah I’m a person living in this hell also known as the Corporation Rim and UGH those corporates are total bastards but what am I supposed to do about it anyways—NO. I’ll do something. Anything. Also, no, I don’t operate from a belief that things are fundamentally good, or that institutions will improve, or that justice is inevitable. Those are irrelevant. Instead, my ethics are local, immediate, and situational:

“This person is in danger.”

“I can prevent this harm.”

“If I don’t act, this will get worse.”

And then I act. That’s it. No grand moral architecture required. That’s Murderbot for you.

What makes it anti-cynical is that it never converts systemic awareness into withdrawal. It stays fully aware that the system is broken, while still treating individual moments of care, protection, and intervention as real and meaningful in themselves.

And I think this is where it diverges from a lot of other contemporary “capitalism hell” narratives. In many of them, systemic clarity tends to collapse into paralysis, fragmentation, or withdrawal—an understanding of how totalizing the system is becomes emotionally and narratively disabling.

Murderbot does something different. It holds both truths at once: that the system is overwhelming, and that action within it is still possible and meaningful, even if only locally, even if only temporarily.

And I think that’s why The Murderbot Diaries hits so differently.

[ohthewhomanity]

Here’s the thing though I don’t think we need an upper age limit on holding public office. What we need are term limits - firm term limits, for every office, across the board. Once you’ve held power for X amount of years, you can’t have that office anymore, ever.

Elderly people are not our enemy. Elderly people deserve the same chance to be represented among our leaders as any other adult or any other minority. What’s gone wrong here is that career politicians care more about keeping power than about doing their job. Everything is about rallying your base to vote for you in the next election, not about doing your part to make the country function.

If you know that you only have X amount of time to do your job, you do your job. And that means that we, the voters, get to choose person who is right for this moment, not the person who has always been there. That’s democracy.

[yesterdaysprint]

New-York Tribune, September 10, 1916

[hollow-keys]

ID: The Federal law for the protection of migratory birds has gone into effect. As a conscientious student of anti-suffrage literature we view such legislation with disapproval and alarm. Does it not violate the right of each state to protect its own migratory birds?

Besides, do the migratory birds desire such legislation?

A bird's place is in the nest, and good birds are content to remain there. Nothing but harm can come of such encouragement of the growing restlessness of the modern bird. End ID.

[bunjywunjy]

yeahhh I lied.

one more time, HAPPY MOON LANDING DAY!

aaand gooodnight.

[brynmawrspeccoll]

In honor of the first day of Women’s History Month and Super Tuesday, here are two suffrage cartoons from the Carrie Chapman Catt Collection. 

Carrie Lane Chapman Catt was an internationally recognized suffragist, feminist and political activist. The Carrie Chapman Catt Papers focus on the history of the women’s suffrage movement, with material pertaining both directly to her and to the movement as a whole. There is a wide range of material in the collection, including correspondence & memorabilia, cartoons, and photographs.

The collection contains approximately sixty editorial cartoons pertaining to suffrage which appeared in newspapers around the country from ca. 1912 to ca.1920.

To see more of the Catt Collection, click here.   

[penmeetspage]

Original site down - archive here

[penmeetspage]

I do have thoughts on Suffs as musical and as a structured story that doesn't always do what it's clearly trying to do in terms of impact of this or that song or moment, but also I did cry three times and also audibly gasped when Ida B. Wells stepped onstage

[herowyn]

5 0    Y E A R S    A G O

[rarebird22]

Almost 57 years ago!

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

ohhh my god I just fact-checked, Nolan actually DID cut the "Nobody" scene from his Odyssey movie. Mfer that is like cutting the Father reveal from Star Wars. Let me speak in a language you understand this is like not dressing Batman up in his suit. "It was not possible to work it in" the TikTok musical with a budget of $4 and a scratched Hamilton CD managed to work it in in SONG form, step up your FUCKING GAME

[its--showtime]

Them <3

@bikinibottomdayz's master

[lesbianshepard]

Hating how Nolan's Odyssey looks on the basis of being into Classics, but chuds have made it a culture war thing, so now I'm fighting for my life arguing that the issue isn't that Nolan cast trans and black people as gods and heroes, it's that he cast those people and then put them in dogshit costumes

[hikergirl]

A Kate Beaton classic for Ida B. Wells birthday.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

Two days in a row and still nothing! And a couple weeks ago, AND again a few days before that. give me my thunderstorm!!!

[commodorez]

Apollo 11 in Real Time

A real-time interactive journey through the first landing on the Moon. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.

It's that time of year again, time to follow along with Apollo 11 in real time, exactly 57 years late.

I love doing this every year.

[penmeetspage]

So I grabbed a copy of Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens off gutenberg because I cried three times watching Suffs and thought it would be interesting to read the writer-character's real-life counterpart's account.

And I did not anticipate how funny this would be. She's absolutely skewering Wilson via footnoted citations to previous remarks. I'm only halfway in and I suspect it'll get a lot grimmer shortly but this is delightful.

[penmeetspage]

[penmeetspage]

Not all humor and history, of course, there's also lines like this

[penmeetspage]

[penmeetspage]

The banners proceeding from ordinary slogans to outright quoting Wilson's statements to turn them back on him, is maybe not new information but it's very entertaining to read. Especially the frequent cuts to various congressmen and committees scurrying around the subject , being wildly hypocritical or ineffectually 'helpful' or both

[penmeetspage]

Ah

[penmeetspage]

Oh my gosh

[penmeetspage]

"settled accounts quietly but efficiently" is the second best way I've ever heard to say somebody punched a guy

[penmeetspage]

As the public reactions heat up, she's including more and more quotes and passages from articles, papers, letters of condemnation or support - one bit from a respected journalist's letter to the DC chief of police:

Oddly timely, actually.

[penmeetspage]

It's really interesting to me how Stevens trims and uses quotes from others in the larger context of this being a work if propaganda. (And as a sidebar I think it is useful to sometimes read older propaganda concerning issues in which we are not personally super emotionally invested as current: it makes for an intriguing look at how this stuff works.)

What does she choose to select and show, and where does she choose to trim around things or leave them out? How does she frame younger suffrage women (innocent, frail, at risk), older suffragists who we know her peers clashed with on tactics and organization leadership (taciturn, hedging, but then suddenly very direct in specific ways), well known figures in her own group (valiant, beautiful, speaking mostly in bold declarations), men who opposed them and men who support them? She draws clear lines between enemies of the cause who she holds in enormous contempt (even if by their positions she'd like to be able to respect them), and those who oppose it but who she can laugh off or treat with gentle ribbing and then sideline them as ridiculous and ineffectual. She spends a lot of page space gassing up specific men (many of them writers or public figures not necessarily in politics) who threw support behind the suffragists, in language deliberately appealing to notions of gallantry and manly heroism.

And there's a really clear throughline here that so much of this campaign rested heavily on the respectability of the protestors - "ladies", who are expected to be treated with civility and gentleness, such that even when their protests and public behavior break how ladies are supposed to behave (and accordingly those protections are withdrawn in the eyes of specific observers), there is still a perception of wrongness by the public at "rough treatment" and violent suppression. The whole public opinion battle is only partly about ideals (liberty, right to petition & protest) - it's even more about forcing that contradiction into the public view. Which very much rests on the privilege they do have as upper class & respectable.

[penmeetspage]

If anybody is thinking about reading this too, I do want to mention that as interesting and entertaining as it is, it's still a book by an upper middle class white woman in the nineteen-teens. And even with that context I am sometimes caught off guard by the blatant racism.

It's particularly jarring because Stevens clearly thinks of herself as fairly progressive and opposed to "race-hatred"; she'll be speaking with contempt about prison officials trying to pit different groups of prisoners against each other on racial grounds, and then half a page later discuss black women in the prison in incredibly dehumanizing terms, and complain bitterly about the imprisoned "ladies" (white picketers) being made to share cells or clothing/blankets/stuff with black women and "ordinary criminals".

And - it's been interesting reading through and finding many of the major characters in the musical pop up in the narrative. But you know who's missing from the Stevens version of the story? Every single black suffragist. Every single one. The only black women she puts on the page are those who she can see/show as lower class. Even in the context of events like the DC march where we know perfectly well some very prominent black suffragists were present and making waves.

[penmeetspage]

Also she's like this about every prominent woman in her party and some outside of it:

(describing Alice Paul, Alice Paul, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Lucy Burns, and Lucy Burns + Alice Paul as a team, respectively)