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Hey y’all, I’m looking for an autoimmune support group (Hopefully on discord?) for a friend who just got diagnosed with MCTD - which is a bit too rare to find a group for on itself (although! I would be interested) Does anyone have any good recommendations?

Thanks heaps!

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you’re hearing it more and more

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Story time: I’m a trans guy. I have an identical twin. We’re both tall, androgynous, and have naturally deep voices

In high school a rumor was spread that one of us was trans. For years, everyone in school had convinced themselves that my twin was “the trans one”. She rolled with it to keep me safe, and said it felt like a compliment to be mistaken for a trans woman since she looked up to a lot of trans women. That didn’t stop the bullying, but it’s easier to deal with when it’s directed at the wrong person. I’m engaged to a feminine cis guy who is several inches shorter than me. I have 20-30lbs on him and I can dead lift him. He’s more delicate and soft both physically and socially. He cries during sad movies, owns half a million stuffed animals, and clings to my arm when he’s nervous or it’s cold out (oh yeah, also he’s adorable) Whenever the topic of being trans comes up, cis people tend to think he’s the one who is trans. Direct all “what do your parents think?” comments onto him. Completely ignore me. Ask him invasive/transphobic questions about his body. Tell him “you pass so well!” through grit teeth. Like with my sister, I get pretty pissed about this, but there’s not much I can do about it. I have had to argue with cis people to establish the fact I’m trans because they don’t believe me & think I’m joking. they’re like “but he’s - no, she’s trans!” and frantically point fingers at my fiance and sister. Because there’s no way an adult cis woman could be taller than 5′9 and choose to be bare-faced, and an adult cis man could love How To Train Your Dragon 2 with a fiery passion, enough to watch it 3 times in the theatre.  Terfs take one look at us and try to convince my sister she’ll never have a uterus or that she’s “appropriating women’s spaces”. Transphobes say my boyfriend will “always be a girl” and call him gendered slurs. They talk over them, block them, and grill them about what genitalia they have online. Completely unknowing that they’re talking to two cisgender people who are gay and gnc. @ young, closeted, scared trans people: any cis person who insists they can somehow “know” your “birth sex” by looking at you because “it’s so obvious!” is full of shit. people come in all shapes and sizes regardless of gender. Not only are they being transphobic, but they’re being homophobic too.

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You've drawn an axolotl... But have you drawn...

An olm?

day 565

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The War Chest Review, Australia, February 1919

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Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like... oh... you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like... actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

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Sticky hand wall update

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it would be fun if an angel and a vampire were friends i think

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Robots are fucking warm, actually

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gay af for a man to be a bounty hunter. why are you hunting down another man? to kiss him? because you’re in love and want to find him?

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You can add pockets.

You can add pockets to anything with a side seam.

They can be big pockets.

Anything we want can have big pockets.

We have unlimited power. Over the side seam pockets.

There’s two steps: drafting the pattern and sewing the pattern. The pattern drafting is really quite easy:

I’m having trouble getting google drive to give me my pictures, so I traced over the foundation lines.

The first thing to make is the pocket template. 

Draw a 10″ vertical line on your drafting paper.

Measure 1″ down from the top of the line, and draw a notch. This is notch #1.

Measure 6″ from the top of the paper, and mark it “x”

Measure 1″ down from X (7″ from top) and make a little mark to come back to later.

Measure 3″ down from that mark (4″ from x, 10″ from top) and you should be at the end of your line.

You have now drawn your vertical foundation line.

Draw a 3.5″ long horizontal line at the very top of the vertical line

Draw a 5″ long horizontal line that comes off the point you marked X.

Draw a 5″ long horizontal line that comes off the very bottom of the vertical line.

You should now have all the photoshopped in lines in my image, your foundation lines, on your paper.

You sort of eyeball in the curved lines. Starting at the mark you made to come back to later (7″ from the top of the line), draw in your pocket bottom. It’s just a little swoop that eventually touches the bottom foundation line. You also need to draw in the curve at the top of the pocket, to connect it to the middle horizontal line.

The good news is that if your foundation lines are right, you can go pretty nuts with eyeballing in the curves and still be in the right place. If the drafting was tough and you’re more a go with the flow kind of patterner, just look at my pattern and guess how you’ll want yours.

Make sure that you can see your notches at 1″ and 6″ from the top. You’ll need them.

Now you have your pocket template, and you need to turn it into three pattern pieces.

The first pattern piece is for the pocket front, and it’s very easy. Take your template, trace it onto a new piece of paper, and add 1/2″ of seam allowance on all sides. Make sure you transfer your notches.

(Sorry for that +/- thing there. I’m having trouble with google drive and I’m way too lazy to try to troubleshoot it when I could just take sloppy screenshots)

For the pocket back, trace your template onto a new piece of paper. Measure a vertical line in 1″ from your vertical foundation line. Erase the part to the left of that line, leaving you with a sort of slimmed down version of your front pocket piece. Add seam allowance all the way around.

Now you’re going to do the same thing you did with the pocket front, but keeping the smaller part. This is the pocket back.

So, trace your pocket template again, draw a line in 1″ from the vertical line, and then erase everything that’s to the right of the line. Then, add seam allowance along all the sides except the notched one. I drew over it in green hilighter so that you can tell which one. This is the skirt side seam extension.

Pattern drafting is done.

So, what’s with the funky flap? Effectively, what we have right now is a pocket front that’s made of one piece of fabric, and the same shape for the back that’s made of two different pieces of fabric. You’re going to add the skirt side seam extension to your skirt, and then sew the pocket back to this. This is going to hide your pocket opening.

This is going to make your pocket much less visible. This is important, because you will likely be making your pocket out of a different fabric than your finished skirt. If you made your skirt out of something expensive, especially custom-printed, it’d be a massive waste of money to use that fabric inside the pocket, where no one can see it. If you’re using a looser-woven fabric, like I did for this skirt, you need to make your pocket in something much tighter, smoother, and less likely to form holes. Quilt cotton is great for this sort of thing because it’s tightly woven and smooth.

Take the pattern for the back of your skirt, and tape the pattern for the side seam extension at the top of the side seam.

If you’re like me, and don’t use a pattern for your skirt, pin the extension on the side seam and then trim the side seam down everywhere else (just cut around the extension piece). For 99% of lolita skirts where you don’t use a pattern, losing 1″ on each side seam isn’t going to affect the overall poof.

Side note, I did this on a pleated skirt and pleated the fabric first. In a normal situation, you would do this with the fabric flat, and gather the waistband after the pockets are assembled.

Cut your pockets out of your pocket material. Yes, I was a terrible person and did one on the lengthwise grain and one on the crosswise grain. It’ll be fine.

Make sure that your notches are visible on both pocket pieces.

Now, line the top of your pocket front up with the top of your skirt, and sew your pocket along the horizontal seam. (if your pocket has a RS or WS, sew the pocket to the skirt front with right sides together). If you’re feeling like getting a gold star, press, grade, and understitch the seam.

Line the top of your pocket back up with the top of your skirt extension, and sew the pocket back to the skirt seam extension. Gold star for pressing, grading the seam allowance, and understitching the seam.

So, with two gold stars in hand, put the front and backs of the skirts together, right sides together, with the pockets sticking out.

Remember your bottom notch at the 6″ mark? Stick a pin there. You’re now going to sew from that pin all the way to the bottom of the skirt.

This might feel wrong at first, because it feels like you’re sewing the bottom inch or so of your pocket all the way closed. This a normal feeling, and you’re experiencing it because I just told you to sew part of your pocket all the way shut. The opening for your hand has to be shorter that the total length of the pocket, or else you won’t be able to put stuff in it without it falling out.

This will be roughly where the thicker pink line is.

Once you’ve sewn your side seam (leaving the pocket open, obviously), then you’re going to want to sew the pocket bag together. This is the purple line in my photo up there.

You might notice that my pocket sewing is a lot shorter than the pocket fabric. I sewed my pocket back piece on incorrectly and had to shorten the pocket or else it’d make a hole. Pockets are cool like that. If they’re a little off, no one but you will ever know.

I then did some extra reinforcing (did an extra seam around the outside of my stitching, and did a bit of extra machine tacking at the bottom of the pocket opening to make sure there weren’t rips developing in the future with wear.

So, then you can flip the skirt right side out and appreciate how nice your pocket is. There’s just one more thing:

When you put the waistband in, you’re going to need to take the top of the pocket bag (that little 3.5″ bit at the very top) and sew that into your waistband. As you sew your waistband, this will actually be pretty obvious that it needs to be done, because the waistband intersects with the pocket top. If this was a normal skirt, I’d say to do it now.

However, since this is lolita, you’re probably going to need to gather or pleat your skirt, and THEN sew the pocket top down. It’s just one more step: pull your gathers, get them to look pretty, and then run a line of basting to hold the pocket nice and neat along the top line.  You don’t want to get the top of the pocket caught up in pleats or gathers, or you’ll have weird wrinkles in your pockets that hold lots of crumbs and feel gritty.  Obviously this is the picture that I can’t get google docs to let me see, so if that’s confusing, bug me about it tomorrow and I’ll get that good picture up.

Here, you can see my pins holding the pocket top flat, and you might be able to see my line of basting that holds it in place. Once that basting is there, you can attach your waistband just like normal, and then you’ll have a pocket big enough to hold your smartphone and also some gum.

One last note: if you put really heavy things in your new pocket, make sure your petticoat can support the weight. There’s nothing that says that you can’t build a lolita skirt with pockets, but the laws of physics sometimes say what you can and can’t put in them without wrecking your poof.

Anyway, there we go, the MOST requested lolita tutorial I’ve ever gotten. My brain’s feeling a bit fuzzy and I’m sure I said something weird or that doesn’t make sense, but my askbox is open and I read every comment someone puts on a reblog, so feel free to tell me to clarify.

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How Food Looks Before It’s Harvested.

Sesame Seeds

Cranberry

Pineapple

Peanut

Cashew

Pistachio

Brussel Sprouts

Cacao

Vanilla

Saffron

Kiwi

Pomegranate

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Capitalism is getting very much more dystopian very quickly