#excited for employment but also

[tangledinink]

guess who just received. a. job offfeerrrrrrrr.

[upsidedownsmore]

2024 art summary!

i uh went a bit overboard lmao

This has just one big happy mess of a year, and I wanted to reflect that as literally as possible by collaging basically every piece I made! Idk if this is comprehensible at all to anyone but me lmfao. Try zooming in!

For something a bit cleaner, I also made this artist vs art summary pic as well!

It was a bit challenging to choose just eight pieces to feature, which I guess is part of why I made that monster collage above lmao

Last year's art summary! (jesus christ)

More thoughts below the cut:

It really has been an insane year, between the Warframe creator program and Hollowframe developments and my first Tennocon as a creator and continuing to help my parents move and too many art classes and applying for a dream job and preparing for my art capstone and

It's uh been a lot

And I'm glad I got to share it with you guys :)

[solarmorrigan]

So I officially put in my two weeks' notice today. Gonna be moving from working in an academic library to the public library

I am very excited but boy did I give myself a headache out of sheer anxiety

[anonymousbathtub]

Introducing the main trio of Airs Above The Ground, my final year's concept art project! Get ready for middle age lesbians & dragon dressage 🐉✨

[uwuppa]

might do a goodra ych so i can spoil my wife with treats and yummies teehee

[expatesque]

Realise sleepover might be over but this girl was offline and could do with some advice on asking for a raise at work? She’s also approaching the mid twenties and mildly overwhelmed by all I want to do and achieve but also excited (I’m trusting that this rollercoaster is just life).

Also, how are you doing my dear??

Also also - I’m going to see the Alice in wonderland ballet at the ROH on Friday and I’m so excited 😌

Ooh good one. Okay first: raises. So scary! But also so normal! Three pieces of advice:

(1) Choose your time. At my last place, we discussed salary exactly once a year, and it would have been out of place to bring it up outside of that. But if you're somewhere more flexible, then you should still think about timing. Is there a natural milestone coming up that you could use (e.g. your work anniversary, a big project finishing up)? Whatever time you choose, just make sure you really knock things out of the park in the month+ leading up to the talk; people have short memories, make sure you end strong to put yourself into the best position.

(2) Be prepared. This boils down to (i) knowing what your colleagues make and what is standard for your industry, and (ii) being prepared with reasons why you should be paid more. For (i), talk about money with your colleagues. It's awkward but it's really important - do it over drinks if need be. Also useful to answer one of the recruiters that I'm sure are in your inbox, take 30 min to have a call with them and use it to suss out the market. This will help you know what you should be asking for. For (ii), your work on (i) will help but also come prepared with examples where you've knocked it out of the park, gone above and beyond, etc. Be ready to justify your value to the organization.

(3) Do it with the confidence of a privately educated white boy. This is one of the best times to borrow from the boys work-wise - they tend to be much less skittish about money, and study after study shows that this benefits them across their careers. If you can't summon their confidence, summon the rage that so many mediocre idiots get more by doing nothing more special than asking for it.

As for the rest of being in your mid-20s: such an exciting time! If all goes well, you should be almost unrecognizable to yourself in half a decade. That's a good thing, we can't stay the same, as much as we might want to. Embrace the change.

As for me, I'm actually pretty good at the moment. Feeling very rooted and content. This break was actually so incredibly needed, I cannot believe how burned out I was. But I'm feeling inspired and settled and ready for new challenges. So we'll see! Bring on 30.

[onrainynights]

I'm about to be so annoying btw

[vainlungs]

life update 🌿

i’m (hopefully) done with uni for the rest of my life, currently waiting for grades to be registered and then can do the graduation request; my summer job starts in a couple of weeks, so i have actual free time without a billion things needing me to do them. I have read two 300+ page novels in three days, which I don’t think I have done in a decade?

also my thesis advisor said that my thesis could be made into a proper peer reviewed article (!!!!) so I’ll be working on that during the summer, which is nice; I already miss writing essays. although don’t know how well I’ll survive without access to my uni’s electronic journals and articles

wherever I’ll be in September

[velvetstreets]

got rejected for a job I was perfectly qualified for and for once was excited abt 😃👍

[sysig]

Today: Teeth hurt, batteries are sold exorbitantly but only in person, and I think I have Tamagotchis now

[daisywords]

finished that horrible application but at what cost

[virtuouscycle]

Tomorrow my prof is calling me to discuss where he thinks I should do my field placement and for some reason I’m mortified about it ajdjajdhd

[communistkenobi]

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” ��biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

[express-archives]

oh nooo my hand slipped...... augh...... nooooo...... *fatui oc upon ye!!!!*

[expatesque]

Hi Sarah, your thoughts on a life conundrum would be highly appreciated. I’m working at a law firm and a pretty exciting in-house opportunity has come up. I’m thinking of making the jump but I’m a bit apprehensive as I do like the typical things you get at a law firm (stability, salary, prestige etc.) which are not guaranteed elsewhere. As you have made an even bigger career change, do you have any advice on how to get over that fear of the unknown and commit to new opportunities?

So let's tackle this in pieces:

The stability is completely find-able, just don't go to a start up and you'll be fine. Lawyer in a big company is basically as safe as lawyer in a big firm. And lawyer is a great career generally for stability because it tends to be fairly countercyclical - people need lawyers most when things are tough.

Salary is one you're going to have to come to terms with. You'll probably switch over on your current salary but you will find the ceiling much more quickly than in a law firm. There are very few in house lawyers that are paid as much as law firm partners, maybe some GCs in big American companies. In exchange for a lower salary though, you get a life back and some time to actually enjoy the money.

The prestige is the most interesting one here to me because I think it holds a lot of people back. And it's funny because people outside of law don't think about it with anything near the intensity that lawyers do. Like, you tell a typical consultant or person working in finance that you're a lawyer at a big company or at a big firm and they are unlikely to have a significantly opinion of you - but that doesn't stop lawyers from being completely hung up on this. The fact is, at some point you have to start living life for you and not for your parents or people you meet in pubs or what you think people will think of you. You're the one living your life, you need to make the choices that are right for you.

And that's really the secret to getting over fear of the unknown: you've got to trust yourself. Trust yourself to make good choices, to overcome challenges, and to figure it out as you go. The fact that you want to do it indicates that you should, you just need to trust that gut instinct and make the change.

+ let's have a sleepover