tatjanalara

[tatjanalara]

Happy regular platypus :)

(dont ask why some colors change the original file looks good to me)

[tatjanalara]

i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

[tatjanalara]

Man, when I was like 16 I got so sick of being made fun of for being the fat kid that I took an axe down inna woods, chopped down a tree, and started doing log-lifts all the time. I got strong as fuck, but I didn’t lose no weight. I actually got bigger.

Same thing happened when I got into fighting. I got even stronger, and I got *fast*, man, and nimble, like a cat. Still chubby.

Body-building culture is a bunch of crap, my dude. Functional muscle is not necessarily toned or lean. You can be swole as hell and still be heavy. And that’s cool.

Embrace your inner barbarian. And when fatphobic little gym twinks try to body shame you, you should DESTROY THEM with your MIGHTY AXE

[tatjanalara]

Ninerose sketches

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"The Forest"

An illustration I painted and turned into an animated gif. This was very tedious but I like how it turned out.

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The Tower

Hello there…. Yes I know I was inactive in these day’s ……well weeks. But, but! I can explain. I had a cute art block, and my last creative energy’s I used to write (I writed 8 hard page yes im a hero I know thank you)

[tatjanalara]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[tatjanalara]

Gale is such a comfort to paint. I adore him 💜 My Ko-fi | Commissions | Prints

[tatjanalara]

This is definitely not a google drive full of the sleep stuff from the Headspace app, including sleepcasts, music, and wind down meditation, that normally costs 17.99 a month, no siree and you definitely shouldnt share this with people

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The second page of my graphic novel in progress.

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every year after you turn 17 you get further away from being the age of the dancing queen and that’s my least favorite thing about growing up

[tatjanalara]

Actually thinking about my time spent in purgatory, aka “the service industry”, I had some wild fucking events over the course of a decade.

There was the time a bride decided she didn’t want to go through with the wedding and tried to make her escape through the back kitchens of the venue and wound up sitting out back in the drizzling rain, bumming cigarettes from the delivery drivers, pristine white dress turning to mulch as she sat on an over turned catering crate. After a good half hour the groom came and found her and asked if she was okay. When she said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go through with it he just nodded and said she should get out the rain because it was cold. The two of them ended up going back inside together, skipped the wedding part and basically had the most expensive party of their lives with all their friends and family.

There was another bride who could never decide on place settings, so in the end just turned to the coordinator and said “surprise me”. So we mismatched everything and called it “boho chic”. She loved it.

There was the groom who got caught in our supply closet during the late night reception…with the best man. And then there was also the father of the bride who absconded with the mother of the groom and had to be asked nicely to put their clothes back on and get out of the wine cellar.

At the same wedding.

There was the drunk best man who proposed to me using an umbrella cocktail and told me he was heartbroken when I told him I was flattered but married. He wore it behind his ear the rest of the night dancing like a mad man and telling anyone who would listen about “the one that got away”.

There was the Indian wedding with 800 guests. We rotated them in batches of 200 to fit them between spaces. All I can remember is never having enough drinks to hand out.

There was the arch bishop who only liked his coffee ground by hand because the effort of the worker “made it taste better”.

There was the time I took out the crystal drop of a chandelier with a champagne cork because the runners shook up the bottles for a joke.

There was the funeral party where the body couldn’t be delivered to the crematorium because the crematorium caught on fire.

There was the other funeral where a fist fight broke out over something our Jeanie said to our Mary 40 years ago, but then it turned out Mary was the one who said it.

There was the wedding where in a room of 200 people, the bride and groom only had eyes for each other.

There was the christening where the godmother kept crying to me over mocktails because she never thought she could love something as much as she loved “that bald little head”.

There was the old man at the wedding who came alone and smiled very kindly at everyone and always said please and thank you and who told myself and a coworker he’d been married to his wife for over 60 years and how she would have loved to see these two finally tie the not. She’d only passed the week before. He’d brought a picture of her so she could enjoy it in spirit.

There was the really tragic funeral where everyone kept hugging each other and saying “I love you” and us staff had to take frequent breaks to breathe because grief is tangible but so is love.

There were the times when nothing in particular happened at all, but they stand out so much because everyone there was happy.

Of course there was also the times when someone threw up on your shoes, or you got groped while serving the table, or someone was rude or snide because you were “the help”.

People are wild.

[tatjanalara]

I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.

They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.

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[tatjanalara]

know the difference

It has come to my attention that many people mistake wyverns for dragons, so here’s a post to help you remember

Dragon: 4 legs, 2 wings

Wyvern: 2 legs, 2 wings

Drake: 4 legs, flightless

Wyrms: long snake like body with no appendages, can also appear as a traditional Chinese dragon with 4. Legs and no wings yet can fly

Amphithere: 0 legs 2 wings, can be feathered

Lindwurms: 2 legs, 0 wings, long body

Luck dragon: 4 legs, no wings, can fly, long body, furry with dog like face

Komodo dragon: 4 legs, no wings, real

Bearded dragon: 4 legs, 0 wings, often kept as pets