A diminutive of juniper

Pedestrian traffic lights

Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):

The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:

Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):

Traffic light lady in Bremen:

Karl Marx light in Trier:

Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:

Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):

A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:

Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:

Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:

Otto Waalkes (German Comedian) in Emden:

Town musicians of Bremen in Bremen:

A miner in Pirmasens, Rheinland-Pfalz:

Bishop in Fulda:

Source: Saarbrücker Zeitung

Children aren't born having a full understanding of gender or religion — they have to be indoctrinated into it. It might be inherent to people to seek out some kind of gender expression or spiritual belief, but the way we do it is not innate. We aren't born knowing that skirts are for girls and big trucks are for boys.

There is no law of nature that proves it is Wednesday. Days are real - the Earth rotates, the sun rises and sets, that’s physics. Deciding to build our entire westernised lives around 1/4 of the moon’s orbit is made up. There is no law of physics that links this moment in the lunar procession to ‘Wednesday’.

And yet it really is Wednesday. Mum, you need to go to work and later your choir who practice on Wednesdays will be pissed if you skip practice because ‘Wednesday is a social construct’.

It’s also completely valid to have a favourite day of the week - Sunday for my mum since she goes to church, doesn’t work and avoids domestic chores on Sunday. And all those feelings about Sundays are completely valid in the absence of any law of nature which proves ‘it’s Sunday’.

Anyone have any tips on how to prepare for the oncoming changes and how to put my mind at ease? My stress levels are getting unhealthy.

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

Pet Foolery, #93

Y'all, I've managed to grow some peppers!

INCORRECT!!!!!

Gardening is always exciting! Every gardener i know gets HYPED AF whenever someone gets into gardening and gets to enjoy those first fruits! That "I did this!!!" feeling never goes away, you just get bolder and more confident in the kinds and amounts of things you attempt to grow! Once you get the gardening bug, it never goes away. You WILL find yourself feeling an actual physical craving for the smell of putting mix and green things and digging into the ground sometime later winter.

So @meheartjellyfish drew this GORGEOUS Filiori piece, and I became instantly obsessed with Fili's hand on Ori's thigh. Then I wondered what Dori would make of it, and was compelled to explore the idea with a very silly comic.

Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.

That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.

Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.

And easier the next.

Paragraph one: I'm gonna tell you why crochet is great. Here is my thesis: Crochet is great because it improves your brain health, you get to make cool stuff, and if you're a fidgeter it gives you something to do with your hands.

Paragraph two: here's how crochet improves your brain health.

Paragraph three: here's some of the cool stuff you can make with crochet and what you can do with it.

Paragraph four: here's how crochet makes an effective fidget and why that's helpful for you.

Paragraph five: I told you crochet was great. You understand now. You agree.

LEGOLAS & GIMLI

latest finished commission featuring legolas and gimli for @scrimplications — whose dark haired legolas vision is UNMATCHED! 🙏🏽🥹