yee (and i cannot stress this enough) haw

Me? I had some really spectacular bruises and a lil friction burn on my nose from where Mr. Airbag and Ms. Glasses had a disagreement. That's it. That's it.

I was driving a little tiny coupe and went more or less head-on with a pickup truck. The entire engine and hood of my car was twisted rubble that was not connected to the rest of the car afterward. I sat down on the verge, about twenty or thirty feet from the accident, while I waited for the cops and EMTs to work their way through the traffic backup to get to us, and found that I was sitting beside one of the headlights of my car. The whole entire headlight, bulb and reflector and cover and frame and all.

All I had were bruises and that little friction burn. That's it.

Crumple zones save lives. So do seatbelts and airbags; half the bruising was the exact shape of my seatbelt in livid crimson and black on my torso. It was and remains the most insanely intense bruising I have ever experienced in my life. BUT IT WAS JUST BRUISING!! Unpleasant, sure, but eminently survivable and didn't even require much treatment beyond not wearing a bra for a few days. But all the force that created that spectacular bruising was force that wasn't flinging me through the windshield or impaling me on the steering column. My car crumpled and crushed and dissolved but it held me safe and secure and protected.

I present to you, the second bird in our Bird Bags lineup, The Pigeon!

Daily painting 162/365

Use the tag #OSCdisabilitypride2026 in your creations if you’d like, but no pressure!

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.