Aaaaand skip ahead two weeks to the final result...
A little bit of protest linoprint inspired by a phrase Hank Green used in a video "No Effort Is Wasted" which was in turn inspired by his conversation with Wyna Liu (which you can watch a snippet of in the video above at about 21:30). The video's main idea is that everything we learn to do comes back to us in some way throughout our lives, often at surprising moments, and so nothing we learn is a waste.
As a teacher, I took that a step further thinking about the use of AI in learning and how misunderstood the point of going to school is. We need to move away from the idea that learning is a transactional process. That mindset only encourages corner-cutting and the use of AI to do all the "hard work" for us. It eschews learning in favor of results and completely omits the critical thinking stage. Learning is not about scores or results, it's about adding to your knowledge and improving yourself as a person.
You cannot learn to do something without putting in the effort; the effort is the point of learning. So, of course I took the extra effort to learn new techniques and hit new roadblocks with these block prints. More process details below:
My goal was to get something that looked rough and handmade but not rushed or too messy. I sort of got there, in the end. You can see in the original tracing in my original post that I worked with my hand-drawn letterforms reversed from the beginning, just to challenge myself to focus on the shapes in the letterforms. I didn't base the characters off of any particular typeface though it is meant to be a geometric sans-serif with a blocky, retro look.
I carved the initial 5x7" block in about an hour and ran my first hand press with just black (below, right) then tried taking out some extra chatter (the uncarved parts of the block leaving marks you don't want) while the ink was still on the block which resulted in the pieces of linoleum stuck on some of the letters in the second print (below, left). I actually kind of like the destressed look of this version but since I had to clean the block it is a one-off.
During the next class I tried removing even more chatter. I wanted to keep the chatter around the letters (like the H, F, R, T, etc) for texture but didn't want as much chatter in the whitespace outside the type. (I did, eventually, give up on this which is why there is still visible chatter along the edges.) In an effort (ha) to make this whole thing more fun I tried some rainbow rolls going from magenta to cyan and then later adding yellow to the magenta end to create a fun sunset/80s inspired look.
I also did a rainbow roll of the this Rusty-patched Bumblebee (Bombus Affinis), which was the first design I did. For this one, the background chatter ended up looking like a cool wood texture, so I kept it.
trying to search for like the one thing that treats us like any other girl for once!! only to be met with a reminder that we are considered a porn category first. it makes me so very sad and upset.
imagining a world like this is the first step in making it real. i want to see a world like this become real in my lifetime because tgirls deserve to be girls when they are young.
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The social forces that prevent you from being able to admit to your own desires in the safety of your own mind are far more evil than any desire you could have.
Unacted desires are fundamentally neutral, and you can't decide what to do about the things you want unless you can admit to yourself what they are in the first place. Everyone has desires that would hurt other people if they acted on them, but most people would not actually go out and do anything they know would cause harm. Far more harm is done in this world by people who are trying to pretend they can't possibly want anything they think is bad than people running around going "ehehehe I love hurting people!"
All of us have a hungry, horny, angry, scared animal inside ourselves. You do not need to excuse or justify what that animal wants, it simply is. You cannot escape it. Lying to yourself about the animal that you are will only give you less control over it, not more.
Yeah almost everyone is interpreting this as being exclusively about sex and, while that is obviously included in this post, I do mean something broader than that. These tags are a good example.
everyone needs to hear about the situation in india right now. the youth of this nation are going through hell and back to protect the foundations that our country was built on in the first place, while the adults who are supposed to actually be in charge try to silence our voices.
NEET, which is an exam taken by millions of students per year and is the ONLY gateway for medical admissions across the country, had its papers leaked. so many took their lives because this exam meant everything for their future. and NTA, the agency who conducts this exam, was not held accountable.
there was national backlash. cockroach janta party (initially a satirical political party formed by abhijeet dipke in retaliation to the remarks of the chief justice of india calling the youth "cockroaches" and "parasites of society") started protests at jantar mantar, demanding the resignation of the union education minister, dharmendra pradhan. the movement also asked for ten million inr (~100,000 usd) in compensation for the families of students who died by suicide and wanted NTA be held accountable.
sonam wangchuk, a climate activist and education reformer, also went on a hunger strike at jantar mantar to protest against this corruption in india's higher education system. his fast began on june 28, demanding the resignation of the union education minister. his fast lasted for 20 days until delhi police FORCIBLY removed him and admitted him to safdarjung hospital on july 18.
because of this, cockroach janta party announced "chalo sansad," a march to the parliament beginning on june 20th, 9:00 am ist. but the police seems to be responding with water cannons, mobile jammers, and baton charge. all of this, because of a peaceful protest led by people no older than 30.
and yet there has been absolutely no indian media coverage about a movement that spans the entirety of this nation. so, please, if you see this, keep talking about us. we will not let those old bastards stoop any lower than they've already had. we will not let them ruin our country any further. we will not be silenced
Please look it up. Students have been beaten bloody. They’re using electrified batons. They’re using batons with nails hammered in. They’re dragging people off and locking them up for no reason. People are being beaten, assaulted, and even molested by the police.
The government is doing everything it can except for actually having an honest dialogue with the protestors.
It’s important to note that despite all the police brutality, despite how the government has had extra forces airlifted to Delhi to help quash the protest, this has deterred no one.
Not only is the protest in Delhi going strong, the government closed down every metro station in Central Delhi in an effort to stop them and it still hasn’t.
There’s protests in most major cities in India in solidarity. Palakkad, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kochi, and probably more besides. There has been a protest in the UK as well in solidarity.
People who aren’t at the protest are donating so much food that the organisers have had to ask them to stop doing so because there’s more than enough. In lieu of that people are donating money for medicine, lawyers, cleanup, and umbrellas.
Most crucially, hopes aren’t broken. Spirits aren’t broken. People with bruises and broken bones are still showing up. People are showing up cosplaying as freedom fighters and super heroes and a dinosaur. People are doxxing goons who show up trying to incite violence. People are making reels. People in Mumbai literally opened a moving police detainment van to allow arrested students to escape.
*all links lead to Instagram posts or reels showing the same. Almost every major Indian news network has been bought and either ignores the protests or depicts them unfairly. All honest news comes from people on the ground and smaller independent news outlets.
(Yoinked this from LinkedIn, genuinely interested in seeing how responses align with demographics) (so far it’s those of us over 35 being indignant but I wanna see how those fully plays out) (it’s cultural and technological history/memory, bruh)
was in goodwill men's clothing section earlier today and reflecting on how i feel like i flunked out of Normal Trans Guy School as a teenager in that i never wanted to use the boy's bathroom or locker room because the idea of being a very small very GNC very obviously trans guy after already being weird amongst girls seemed like hell, and while i had some men's clothing in general i found a lot of my options in that section extremely boring and didn't feel right on multiple levels.
it was just a kind of strange experience. having been out as queer since i was in 5th grade i had the experience of growing up as an out queer/trans kid, but not in a congruent "i was a girl but now i'm a boy!" kinda way. i did not do Being A Girl Well at all, not even in the aspects (like makeup) where i did genuinely try. it was very clear i would also not do Being A Boy well either. at the same time i did want gender recognition, as an androgyne (even though i was really struggling with my gender because of all the exorsexist shit i was seeing in online queer spaces around "contradictory" and "MOGAI hell" identities, which were the only ones that actually captured what its like being an androgyne) i did feel like a boy and a girl in certain ways. but not ones that were reflected back to me as socially meaningful or real.
this is just some rambling to share this experience with others, but i guess the core of this is that being nonbinary/genderqueer/gnc is a very strange experience and even within trans contexts it felt like i was doing something wrong you know? like you are a jagged piece of glass that fucks up the whole mosaic no matter where you try to squeeze yourself. there's a reason i consider myself transmasc and transfem & i feel like a lot of people who defend afab transfems/amab transmascs focus exclusively on being intersex as a reason people can feel that way, but people always seem to underestimate the experience of being nb/gq/gnc and truly being like. well i can't be the gender people expect me to be right because i can't be cis about it, i can't be the "opposite" gender" right because i can't be binary about, but also even in "accepting" spaces there is no real non-binary existence, and especially not for those of us who are actively both and not just neither. its such an experience that is hard to describe to people. anyways i actually did find some pretty clothes in the goodwill men's section by the grace of transgender god
It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.
It has always been possible. It is still possible.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
please wear sunscreen!!! I've seen "fuck the beauty industrial complex" posts about complicated skincare regimens and am 100% with them except sometimes they mention sunscreen and no. no. absolutely not. sunscreen is a wonderful supportive friend who wants to keep you safe, and you should let her do it. throw out all your other cosmetics and skincare products if you want, but keep your sunscreen. and if you're not wearing sunscreen, start wearing it!!!! this is not about terror of aging, this is not about every tiny imperfection our fucked-up culture has made you feel insecure about, this is about protecting yourself from skin cancer. wear the damn sunscreen.
I know Tumblr is full of posts about the virtues of commenting on AO3 fics and such. But like. It works.
I just knocked out 8.5k words in one single day for a chapter update because of one reader leaving one of the most absurdly endearing comments I’ve ever gotten. That is unheard of levels of productivity for me.
The power of the fandom. The power of the comment.
Another two fabric quilt on the go. This one may end up being for me because I love both of these fabrics. I ended up buying about six or so meters each of them with no plans because I like them so much.
I’m gonna do nine patches and bordered squares and put them on point.
I saw a photo of something similar in creams and reds a long time ago and took a screen shot of it, and saw it while I was scrolling through my ‘Quilts to Make’ file. Decided to pull these out and give it a go.
No idea what size it’ll end up, but if I stick to 6x7 blocks with a border it should end up about 64”x72” I think. Which is a nice throw size to cuddle on the couch with.
Of course…
If I really like it after I lay it out, I may have to make more blocks and make it big enough for my bed.
Not enough to make bigger, I think more contrast between the two fabrics would look even better, but this will make a lovely couch quilt!
She ended up 70”x85”, which is a pretty nice twin if a bit short, but it would also layout on a queen with little overhang if someone was looking for a display kind of quilt.
I have a dark teal cotton in mind for backing and Robin’s Egg blue for the quilting thread, which is basically the same colour as the light blue fabric.
Haven’t decided on whether to use the space fabric for the binding or the backing fabric for binding. Either would work.
Had to continue the space theme with the quilting. Pattern is called Interstellar and I did use Robin’s Egg thread on the top and a medium light grey on the back so you could see the stars and swirls on the backing.
I did end up using the constellation fabric for the binding and love the way it looks against the border.
I know I said I was thinking teal for the back, but this blue and black crosshatched print I found in my stash looked nice. I think it was actually what I was originally going to use with the constellation fabric LOL I had enough to back it and just went with it.
reblogged a post with a correction about spray sunscreens (they work way less well than you think) but then decided the very small number of people who might see my reblog wasn't worth the likelihood that people would read it as me discouraging sunscreen use and come to yell at me so i deleted it.
but FYI, here in my own post:
spray sunscreens don't work very well
neither do (most) sunscreen sticks
in general, michelle wong (a.k.a. lab muffin beauty science), a chemistry PhD who is very passionate about sunscreen and spends a lot of time debunking sunscreen misinformation, is a useful resource for learning about sunscreen! both the above links go to videos she made. here is another: many many sunscreen questions answered
a lot of people dont care about insect biomass collapse bc when they hear we are losing 2.5% of the insect biomass per year they just imagine the cockroach and housefly population decreasing by that much. they dont realize those are among the only ones that will remain unbothered
every year of restoring native plants I see a great increase in the insect populations, and loads of new insects i never saw before (all of them harmless--the insects that are harmful or parasitic on humans are the main ones being unaffected by the decrease in insect populations)
(a large part of) the problem is Plant Sameness. we must restore plant diversity
Gah, Skittens EVERYWHERE @wtf-skittens - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
