a defiant potato

Love or obsession? Sometimes it’s booth.

It's not as big a loss as it looks, because now I have leftover supplies, which will help me talk myself into doing this all over again with a new project!

Make It Myself [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

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.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

It's also definitely not a stretch at all to say he'd probably met people who self-medicated with cocaine to deal with what we'd now call ADHD. Like, the second ever Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson protesting Holmes' overuse of cocaine, and Holmes replying that he needs it to deal with his overactive brain -- it's entirely plausible that ACD had had that exact conversation with someone or multiple someones.

At a time when cocaine was regularly administered by other doctors, Doyle wrote Watson to have a clear aversion and dislike of the drug and understood that it was bad for you. It’s written as a clear indication that Sherlock, despite all his brilliance and genius, is still a human being who can make very bad decisions for himself.

Not only that, but Watson does ultimately win and gets Sherlock off of his addition to cocaine in the end. It takes him a while, but Sherlock is weened off the drug and this is seen as a good thing for everyone involved. In fact in a later story Watson comes home and sees a needle and fears that Sherlock might’ve had a relapse (he didn’t, the needle was just being used for something else involving a case).

He had a clear disdain for social convention while understanding deeply how to conform to it in order to survive; a lot of Holmes' deductions actually depend on assumptions about typical human behavior in a given situation rather than physical evidence alone. It's the kind of encyclopedic conscious knowledge of unwritten social rules you might develop in order to mask successfully.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

Queen! Belt out a banger of a turnmaxing moid

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, [...]

who highkey through savage sidequests toughed it

driven time and again off course, [...]

tell me how he wandered and was lost

after chopping Troy-town to dogfood deadass

once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

Sailed through sick storms and dealt with dramas

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

Locked in to lead his fam to a homey safe space

fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

he worked to save his life and bring his men back home.

Talk of the trips and trenches, the sus opps he faced how the GOAT cooked and vibed with the randos though he lowkey took the L on that mission when his bros

But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove – the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,

He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

Like NPCS blundered badly to beef with the big G

the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun

they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

and got ghosted, permablocked, cooked completely.

and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return. . . .

kept them from home. . . .

Please be mindful that i didn't draw any chainmail underneath, first bc im lazy, but every armor from XV century had some : over the gambeson, under the plate, fully or on located areas. They also used pants gambesons.

Also this is just one example, XVth had so much armor variations for any of the parts above

Here're some references i like to use :

-> The Evolution of Knightly Armour

-> Age of Craft

Ladyhawke propaganda part 1 (part 2)