send me crabs

Art doll commission

Character design belongs to client.

The doll is almost 1 meter full length, fully posable with plastic ball and socket+ wire skeleton inside. All solid elements are 3d printed from tough resin.

long-eared bat

Psalter, England c. 1360-1400

His joy and whimsy at seeing this

His acknowledgement of it not being as interesting as the chase

Don’t overlook paternity leave because it’s a hugely important feminist issue

Celebrating fatherhood with official paternity leave policies challenges traditional gender roles and empowers parents in the workplace. It’s one of those rare issues where men’s rights activists and feminists can find common ground with a mutually beneficial cause. It even has an impact on LGBTQ equality.

- It’s important for LGBT+ parents who don’t fit the cis-hetero mold of one mother and one father.

- It’s an important feminist issue for reducing the second shift: when only one parent gets adequate parental leave, it’s only natural for a pattern to develop that the only parent who got adequate parental leave takes on the lion’s share of childcare. However, if both parents get adequate parental leave, then it’s more likely for a pattern to develop of sharing childcare duties. This is obviously massively important for reducing how much women’s careers are affected by having children.

- If the mother has post-partum health issues (anything from recovering from a C-section or other physical traumas, to post-partum depression and/or anxiety) it’s incredibly unfair to expect her partner to just go back to work immediately instead of allowing her partner to stay home and help with childcare duties. When someone is recovering from having a baby, it can be really important for their partner to stay home to help care for them and the baby.

However, one important point I haven’t seen brought up in why equal paid parental is so important for social equality is how important it is for reducing hiring discrimination.

By that I mean, when a country has *only* guaranteed maternity leave, but either no paternity leave (or really short paternity leave of a few weeks like the U.K. has), this is only going to raise the risk of hiring discrimination against women.

So if a company is choosing between two candidates for a position: one is a young woman and the other is a young man, if the country this company is in has a maternity leave policy of several months or more, but paternity leave is either just a few weeks (or completely non-existent), the company will look at the woman as riskier and less reliable to hire than the man.

So equal paid parental leave leads to more equality in the job market, because it means companies are less likely to see women as riskier and less reliable to hire. If everyone, not just women, has the same length of parental leave, everyone runs the same risk of needing to go on leave for the same amount of time.

Currently, both parents get seven months each of paid parental leave, and there’s an extra two months they can divide between themselves any way they please (both two months go to one parent, each parent gets one extra month each, etc.) however, they are only allowed to receive those extra two months if both parents use their full seven months. If one parent says “I don’t want to take parental leave / I don’t want to use my full seven months” then those two months are gone and can’t be used.

That way fathers can’t skip out on paternity leave without there being a penalty.

Submissives cannot punish each other for bad behaviour, but they can use force to prevent each other from disobeying orders.

Eventually this system introduces such rigour that no-one has been shocked in weeks. As an experiment, their Dominant brings in a new trainee, and introduces a new rule, that none of the other subs can tell them that it, or any of the others, are shock collars. Within a month the new one's been conditioned to obey, without being shocked once, or learning why the others are so uniform in their discipline. Unbeknownst to the others, the new one isn't even actually wearing a shock collar, all it does is trigger theirs and flash. This experiment is repeated, time and again, until there are 2n submissives, half of whom have never been shocked, and hqve no knowledge of what the others are going through, but all of whom are rigorous in their application of discipline.

The old and new guard are separated into different areas. The ones who have never been shocked are provided with a new trainee. This trainee isn't even wearing a collar, but no-one cares. They watch the new one like hawks, ensuring no breach of discipline, because that's what they were trained to do. When this training is complete, the new one is given a simple leather collar, incapable of shocking, or signalling.

Winter has arrived on Poob.

walking around asking people if they want to pet your rat (plushie)

going in character as a fur trader carting around a wagon full of exotic wares at competitive prices

handing people a business card containing only the printed image of a flea (and on the back, the text "uh-oh!")

*instinctively you flip it over searching for information*

@thatlittleegyptologist