I'm El, pronouns are it/its or they/them, ♠️. I do great and terrible things with fibers, but more importantly I write terrible things about sexy inhuman entities. Icon by @dogfruit01. Fully an adult, I do not post specific ages.
[Image description: three photographs of a redhead wearing a large, multicolored coat. The coat is in autumnal colors, and is made of diamond shaped patches.
In the first photo, the person is running away with the coat trailing behind. In the second, the person is posed facing forward. The third is a closeup of the back of the coat.
End description.]
Okay so technically I finished the Autumn Coat a couple of months or so ago, but I didn't want to show it off without some really nice photographs of it. Thanks to my sister for taking them!
This project took me about a year and a half, and I'd fucking do it again. I'm terrified of having to wash it, I don't think it'd survive. So for now I'm very careful about where I wear it
Edit: just realized that it may not be clear, but yes I knitted this
Also, if you like what I do, consider dropping me a buck or two on kofi
Oh hey this post is making the rounds again! I really need more free time so I can make stuff again. My current project is either three different knitting things, sewing a jean jacket from scratch with embroidery, or making fuckass big foam sword 2.0
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people who express seething, violent hatred towards cyclists: you make people feel unsafe as fuck! you're allowed to be annoyed with cyclists. some of us are dicks who need to learn the road rules. but anytime I see someone "joke" about hitting cyclists with their car I feel a little bit sick to my stomach.
feels like as soon as my feet are on the pedals of my only reliable mode of transport, I become a target for people driving a terrifyingly fast and heavy car. when I was barely a toddler, my dad had to go on rallies to raise awareness about the fact that people on bikes are PEOPLE who do not deserve to be KILLED BY DRIVERS.
he had slogans trying to remind people that he was a dad with a 2 year old son at home, because both him and his friends have had drivers swerve at them any time they got on their bicycles. I just find how "normal" it is to want to kill cyclists pretty fucking scary.
"it's just a joke" yep! but jokes are rooted in ideas that you are reinforcing. you can laugh about how annoying cyclists are without sounding like you want us to get life ending injuries for inconveniencing you.
two day update to this post! so soon, but what can you do!
little request and reminder: this post is not a platform for you to tell the world how much you despise cyclists. I see every addition! [,:
there has been a shocking (but somehow unsurprising) number of people who saw this post about how my friends and family are at the mercy of drivers every time we get on our bikes, this post about how so many people have lost friends to road rage because they were cyclists, and decided this was the right place to seethe about us without even a word of recognition for the actual issue I'm trying so hard to bring light to.
just. I don't know. maybe a post about people being killed is not the place to talk shit about said people! could we please practice thinking before we speak?
I'd drink so much more smoothie if I didn't have to microwave or cook the fruit first. Can you fucking imagine how many cherries and peaches and strawberries I'd suck down? If only I didn't have to cook away the part of them that vaguely resembles birch pollen?
Happy migraine and headache awareness month. This may seem like a minor terminology nitpick, but it’s a serious misconception about migraine: nausea is an actual migraine symptom, not a thing that happens because of the headache. When people with migraine experience nausea during attacks, it’s not because the pain is so bad (the idea that migraine is always excruciatingly painful is also a myth), it’s because migraine causes a lot of symptoms that aren’t pain, including nausea.
This goes for other symptoms as well: although pain can definitely contribute to people’s experiences of these symptoms, fatigue and brain fog are actual migraine symptoms, not just pain symptoms.
This is also your friendly PSA that nausea is not a normal tension headache symptom, if you frequently get nauseous with your headaches, you almost certainly have migraine.
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emotional responses are deeply evolutionarily advantageous in any animals that are making complex decisions and behaviors (in many vertebrates, say) because they act as a reinforcer for a behavior. a bird taking a vigorous bath in a puddle is probably happy because if that behavior didnt elicit a positive feeling they wouldn't do it (it is dangerous to be on the ground and wet!). if an animal can feel fear, which i think is a less contested assertion to make, then it can certainly feel the opposite, that is, happy.
literally everything people say about public defenders on the internet is so wrong and frustrating even when they’re trying to be sympathetic to us. and I certainly said some of that same kind of shit before I did this job. I didn’t get it yet. I get it now. the only people who really do get it are the people who’ve done it and the people who are in or also working with the communities we serve. representing a factually guilty person is the absolute least of any public defender’s fucking problems at any given time and the last thing I would ever lose sleep over lol
what a lot of people in the notes on the post that inspired this train of thought seem to imagine public defenders struggling with and getting upset about: finding out a client committed the crime they're accused of and having to grapple with the morality of defending a person who Did Harm To Others and what that means for the attorney as an individual immortal soul or whatever the fuck
Things that I have actually struggled to deal with in my 2 years as a public defender so far (non-exhaustive list):
Having to put the criminal records and self-esteem and livelihoods of clients I believed were factually innocent, people I'd developed relationships with and knew how much they had to lose if something went wrong, in the hands of a group of strangers who I'd had no more than 20 minutes to question about their knowledge and beliefs and biases.
Worrying those strangers would favor the young, handsome white male prosecutors' arguments over my innocent clients who've had rough lives and it shows on their faces, because of whose voice sounds "authoritative" and who "looks like a criminal".
Never feeling like I had enough time to prepare a case for trial because I also had over 100 other cases pending at the same time.
Put simply, it is harder to represent a factually innocent person than a factually guilty person. I think basically all defense attorneys agree on this. It's more emotionally taxing because of the stakes. There are always material stakes for all of our clients, but for a factually innocent person there are also moral stakes.
Representing people who are technically guilty of the crimes they are charged with, but no one was actually harmed, and maybe the law itself is unfair, and also my client was certainly racially profiled and overcharged. And having to put that in the hands of a jury, because my client wants to maintain whatever dignity they can to the bitter end.
Not being able to just say to the jury, I don't give a fuck whether my client is technically guilty. He's a poor Black man, so he was guilty in the eyes of the American legal system before he was ever arrested. He gets that. I get that. Do you get that? Who gives a shit whether he's factually guilty of a technicality DUI that happened 2 or 3 years ago? What the fuck are we doing? Are we all just here to give another black father a criminal record? Fuck you all.
Representing multiple very young men charged with DV assaults who grew up with fathers who abused their mothers, or parents who abused them, in and out of foster care, multiple generations of cycles of violence and substance abuse passed down from parent to child. It doesn't excuse it. Of course it doesn't. They have done harm to their own partners and they know this isn't the example they want to set for their own kids. But they're human - the idea that abusers are somehow inhuman just sets you up to fail to recognize abuse when someone you love is the person doing it - and what the fuck other ways of dealing with difficult situations and relating to other people were these guys ever supposed to learn? They didn't have the opportunity to learn anything else. They never had a fucking chance.
And if they don't have a lot of history yet, maybe there's still time to turn it around. One of them talked to me about how badly he wanted to break the cycle and not have his kids grow up to be like that. I hope he can do it. I don't know if he will. That's what haunts me about that situation. Not the fact that I had to represent his interests in court. That's just my job.
Family after family after family who call 911 for help for a loved one in a mental health or substance-related crisis. And then the cops show up and throw their loved one in crisis in jail sometimes over the weekend because if you lash out at someone you live with for literally any reason that counts as domestic violence which means the cops legally have to arrest someone. And 24-72 hours later the family is in court upset telling the judge if they knew this would happen they never would have called 911. Cannot stress enough this happens like weekly in misdemeanor court.
A prosecutor submitting victim impact statements for the sentencing of a colleague's client who absolutely had killed their partner, and it was awful - but the victim impact statements were provided by the victim's family, many of whom she was estranged from, and many of them misgendered and deadnamed their dead "loved one". And the prosecutor just threw them all into the public record unredacted. Because of pressure to "listen to victims", in this case coming from the transphobic family.
A 16-year-old getting held in juvenile detention on unproven charges an 18-year-old would get released from adult jail on, because while the 18-year-old is presumed to have the autonomy to find another place to stay, if the charge is related to someone who lives in the 16-year-old's parents' house - or their parents straight-up just don't want them going home - well, then, they can't go home, which means they have nowhere to go. so let's keep them in jail.
On the flip side, having 18-year-olds get released to homelessness because their well-intentioned parents called the cops for whatever reason (see above) and now the court is imposing a no-contact order with someone who lives at their house.
A kid who got pulled over and charged with DUI/physical control of a motor vehicle while under the influence on her 18th birthday. She was a senior in high school. She had never been in trouble before. She had no criminal record. The law doesn't require someone to be booked and held in jail for a first-time DUI charge with no history, so the jail's policy is that they usually don't do that. If it was just the DUI she would have been cited and released. But the cop also cited her for 2 counts of minor in possession. So, because she had non-DUI charges, I guess, they booked and held her in jail. If it had been just one day earlier she would have been in juvenile detention. She cried. I almost cried. I sat in the attorney meeting booth with her for an extra half hour until they kicked us out for the lunchtime visiting area closure, just so she could be in a quiet space with a friendly face instead of back in the adult jail dorm. That was all I could do.
Tiny old people in jail. Tiny old people, deep in dementia, deeply upset, who got angry - personality changes including becoming very quick to anger are common with dementia - lashed out at family members and got arrested on domestic violence charges. (Again, see above.) And all I could see was my own late grandmother, who was a tiny old lady with dementia who lashed out all the time, but she was a rich white lady who could afford to live in a home with professional caregivers who were trained to handle those situations and deescalate, instead of having to rely on overwhelmed family members. And getting praise from teammates for how well I handled those clients and their jail hearings, and knowing it was because there but for the grace of god go we.
A guy who stole 2 beers from a grocery store, products that cost like $13 total, getting held on $1000 bail because he has warrants in other counties. $1000 bail when he's charged with taking $13 worth of beer. From a gigantic corporation. And he stayed in jail. Because if someone is stealing from a grocery store, they probably don't have $1000 to pay.
I think people who talk about the moral conundrum of public defenders get too stuck on the defender part and forget the public. Public defenders, by definition, simply do not represent the worst of the worst. People who hurt others because they can, quite literally can, because frankly most of them don't end up getting arrested and prosecuted for the ways they hurt people in the first place. And if they do, they can usually afford to hire a private defense attorney. I think most of us know the actual statistics about rape and abuse reporting, but for some reason that goes out the window when people talk about public defenders. (The reason is racism.)
Acting with (perceived) impunity is a privilege. It's for rich (and mostly white) people. The vast majority of crimes prosecuted in the U.S. are crimes of poverty and addiction (and that includes many violent crimes - yes, really), and that vast majority is where public defenders operate. There aren't moral quandaries in knowing what our clients did. The part that hurts is understanding the systems that have led them to this place, and knowing what those systems are going to keep doing to them once their case is resolved, and not being able to do jack shit to stop it.
Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!
The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.
Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)
I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.
I've done A LOT of knitting/crochet this year while chronic illness kept me from my sewing machine, but I'm feeling much better now. There will be new quilts to look forward to soon, plus a few more yarn crafts to share in the meantime!
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*drumroll*
Introducing Misuryn! A prosthetics designer, technician and engineer with ambitious transhumanistic aspirations :)
She made both Ochra-Nina's and Leoni's primary sets and generally works with persons who have unique requests for their prosthetic aids that use robotic parts. She worked with Nina for many years and saw her through most of her unique journey, the two became very close.
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~Patreon~Bluesky~
I'm so powerful and make sure great choices; if I stop sleeping then that normally drops my body temperature. I can't possibly overheat in 95° weather if I'm extremely sleep deprived
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Voluntary first past the post voting only demonstrates a party's ability to motivate people to vote at all.
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I continue to maintain that the Australian combination of compulsory voting with ranked choice voting, is the greatest advancement in democracy in centuries.
Compulsory voting shifts the onus ensuring your access to the ballot box to the government. One Citizen, One Vote, No Matter How Remote.
It's hard to restrict the vote when everyone has to vote by law, and compulsory ranked choice voting gives a better median representation of national opinion.
You say "it's my right to refuse to vote", people do that all the time, submit it blank, draw a penis on the ballot, write that you're voting for the Loch Ness Monster. You can also not turn up and pay a small fine.
I will stress... No matter the system, vote. Always vote. Vote in every election. If nothing else motivates you, just remember that you need to vote because there's someone you cannot stand who is voting in that election, even the local one, for something that is going to bother or hurt you for the rest of your life.
In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…
And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…
Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.
He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.
It's incredibly sad people have to resort to this, but it's a damn good resource. Use it. Spread awareness. Maybe one day people with physical disabilities won't need DIYs like this. But until then, reblog and share.
