The Armenian Genocide in that region is complete. Over a thousand years of Armenian history in that area is done. The Republic of Artsakh will be officially dissolved starting January 1st 2024, this was officially signed by Samvel Shahramanyan. But by the 1st of October, so for a month now, it was considered an empty Republic anyway.

Today is the remembrance day for all the killed Ukrainian children. Take a few moments to read the story of little Sofia, killed by a russian missile, and her grieving family.

On August 19, 2023, Olha Holynska and her 6-year-old daughter Sofia came to Chernihiv to visit Olha's brother. Sofia had just climbed up on the stage and was playing when they heard a whistle of a russian missile and an explosion. In a moment, Sofia fell on her mother, and blood was pouring out of the child’s stomach. Olha's leg was crushed by the stone. People stopped the car and asked to take the child to the hospital immediately. Sofia was still breathing, lying with her eyes open, her hands were warm. Unfortunately, Sofia died later in the hospital.

Now Olha comes from Kyiv to Chernihiv every Saturday, visits place where her daughter died with coffee for herself and whipped milk for her daughter.

"On the very day when everything happened, we did not have time to drink coffee with her, and she did not have time to drink milk. I come here because I want Sofiyka to remember that her mother loves her very much. Now I do everything for her. She lives always in my memory, in my heart, in my soul", says Olha.

Olha sits next to the flowers and toys at that place and speaks to her daughter: "I think about you every day. Not a day has passed that I haven't thought about you. I wake up and think about you. I go to bed thinking about you, my Sofiyka. You are my life and my soul. You are my meaning. I have impressions that I live one big day. Nine months have passed, but the pain does not subside. It is such a terrible pain that burns in the soul, in the heart".

y'all, she terrorized those people. every single time she saw someone outside, she was riling her dog up to bark, waving a gun in their faces (that for all intents & purposes they certainly thought was real), yelling at them, calling the cops (thank god the 2 rural-ass cops didn't actually give a shit), etc.

and she justified it with fears of womanly fragility & inability to defend herself, and I believe how afraid she was! she talked about fearing they would break into her house at night and sexually assault her, and I believe she was legitimately afraid of that. she's been victimized in many of the ways she was afraid of being victimized by them.

the thing is that it doesn't matter how real the fear is.

nothing ever happened, nobody ever tried to threaten her, nobody tried to break in, nobody even approached her. she initiated every single interaction. when she told them not to go through her yard, they did the best they could to respect that without giving up their camping spot; which was on someone else's property, who didn't mind them being there (not to mention one of them is actually indigenous to this specific land!)

she was a thousand times more threatening to those people than they ever were to her, but her fear of them was still real. and that's exactly what made her so dangerous.

this woman is bright & bubbly, she's pretty and young-looking, she's charming & charismatic. she's smart! she's successful in tech! she's got a nose ring and tasteful tattoos and she dyed her hair blue, she had an undercut for a bit, she's fashionably androgynous, she's got queer friends and she's An Ally(tm)! (hell, she'd likely be queer herself, if not for the gen X "I don't like labels" brainrot and internalized misogyny)

I worry that when I describe this side of her, people are envisioning a very unsympathetic caricature of a rural woman who lives alone and waves guns at trespassers. I don't want yall to picture a stereotypically Bitter Old Hag and distance yourselves from the possibility that you could know someone like this, or that you yourself could ever be this person to someone else.

my mother is on feminist tiktok, she asks me questions about puberty blockers so she can defend trans people to her friends, she shares tiktoks about ADHD with me (and has even shared her adderall with me when the pharmacy has run out of mine. in minecraft.)

she is also deeply conservative in many, many ways, and her fear- which, again, is often justified by her real-life experiences- lies directly at the root of that bigotry.

The feminism that goes "Women can't walk alone at night, that's a silly dream, BECAUSE MEN WILL KILL US" and "Women can't just decide to talk to strangers in public because MEN MIGHT STALK US AND MURDER US", where all kinds of fear-of-men is treated as not just good, but rational, and as sacred. And where saying "Are you sure that's likely?" Is depicted as being at best naive and at worst misogynist.

And I think part of the issue is that people are often just… Not taught about fabrics anymore. a lot of the terminology has completely gone by the wayside and we don’t know how to recognize different fibers (or, as seen above, know the difference between a term for a fiber and a weave). I research 19th century clothing and textiles as part of my job, and there are terms even I can’t fit to a certain weave or fiber in my mind. Just the number of different types of natural fiber textiles that used to be in people’s lives is absolutely mind-boggling considering that now it’s all just different forms of plastic 99% of the time

"Microfiber" refers to a variety of different essentially plastic fabrics which all use a very fine thread.

"Viscose" is related to "rayon" and "acetate". All are made from cellulose fibers, most often wood pulp, through a chemical process. They are not plastic, although they are heavily modified.

"Ripstop" is a kind of nylon used for rugged outerwear and luggage.

"Fleece" is a weave, not a fiber. It most often refers to sweatshirt knit, which can be anything from 100% cotton to 100% polyester.

"Jersey knit" is a weave, not a fiber. It's the sort of plain knit fabric they make t-shirts out of. It can be made from any fiber.

"PET" is ethylene polyester fabric made from recycled plastic bottles. It's sold as eco-friendly, but it really is not.

"Vegan leather" is most often pure plastic. There are plant-based imitation leathers but they generally have to be bonded with plastic for greater durability and thus are neither compostable nor recyclable.

"Polyurethane vinyl" is a kind of plastic.

"Lycra", a.k.a. "Spandex" a.k.a. "Elastane" is a stretchy plastic fiber. In the US and Canada "Elastane" is called "Spandex".

"Vegan shearling" -- Uhh, I don't know what this is, sorry. If it's the combo of faux suede and fake fur that it sounds like, it will definitely be made from plastics.

"Acrylic yarn" is a form of plastic.

"Dacron" is a trade name of polyester (plastic) fiber.

"Performance velvet" is a polyester fabric chemically treated to be water-repellent and stain-resistant, used for upholstery.

"Organza" is a weave, not a fiber. It is stiffly-spun threads in an open weave and has a texture sort of a cross between a veil and a soft window screen. It's very common in silk, although there are poly versions too.

"China silk" is silk. Of course. What the heck. It is a very fine, thin, plain weave lightweight silk. (The only thing called "silk" that is not silk is "art silk" which is short for "artificial silk" and means "rayon" (see above). It was big time illegal to call rayon "art silk" for a long time because of deliberately misleading advertisers, but I have seen the term creeping back in online discourse.)

"Broadcloth" is, again, a weave, not a fiber. It's a densely-woven smooth medium-weight plain cloth mostly used for shirts. Historically it was always wool. More recently it was made from cotton. Nowadays poly-cotton blend broadcloths are most common, though you can still get pure cotton and wool broadcloths.

"Flannel" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a soft fabric brushed to have a nap on one side. Flannels used to be all wool or cotton. Microfiber is depressingly common these days.

"Sateen" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a satin weave, but not using silk, popular for bedsheets. Historically it was cotton. These days you can find it in polyester.

"Taffeta" is a weave, not a fiber. It's a crisp, plain, lightweight, tightly-woven fabric. The nicest taffetas are silk. They also come in nylon and polyester, sometimes rayon if you're lucky.

"Moisture-wicking" just means a fabric acts a certain way. It's neither a weave nor a fiber. Wool is naturally moisture-wicking. The term is mostly used these days to describe artificial fibers.

happy pride!

People think us delusional, but we know that ceding is dooming people living there to repressions, to suffocating all their cultural identity, to burning books that are deemed nationalistic propaganda (like a Ukrainian alphabet, for example), to torture chambers, to reeducation.

This.

Back in November 18-year-old Mykyta Zasiadko died on the frontline. At the age of 15, he was awarded the title of Master of Sports of Ukraine in swimming, and at 17 — a candidate for Master of Sports in freestyle wrestling. As soon as he turned 18 he voluntarily joined the army. He was born in 2005.

Hi. I can't really answer this. I mean, I can try, but I'm not good at answering vague questions. I'm not well-spoken enough.

How come so many USAmericans worship Trump and see him as a savior of the poor when he's the exact opposite? How come far-right parties all across Europe gain more and more popularity, with people believing that fascists in power will resolve all their problems? Hell, we can take it a step further and ask how come people become anti-vaxxers and flat Earth believers? The answer is only one - propaganda. People fall under the harmful influence.

Russian propaganda has been extremely active in the southeast of Ukraine basically since we gained independence. Russia has been spending millions upon millions on brainwashing Ukrainians. The propaganda became more and more aggressive since the Orange Revolution. It was everywhere in the Donbas, you couldn't even wear a piece of orange clothing without risking being beaten up.

I was only a middle-schooler, but I remember it in detail. Propaganda materials such as leaflets were distributed everywhere. I remember one with Viktor Yushchenko (pro-European presidential candidate) against the background of the US flag and Uncle Sam who's saying, "Yushchenko is our pResident." I remember asking my mother what it meant, and she said it means that Yushchenko is a very bad person. This stuff was wild. And it only got wilder.

Russian propaganda claims over the years varied from the statement that "Donbas feeds the entire Ukraine" to "pro-European politicians and the US will make concentration camps in the Donbas for the Russian-speakers and will populate the territory with people from the West instead." I don't know how, but people believed in this purely artificial conflict. Not only were there never any persecutions against the Russian-speakers, but you would actually feel more comfortable speaking Russian in Ukraine. In most regions, the Ukrainian language was considered a "redneck" language and would get you nowhere. Of course, the Ukrainian government is also to blame for letting Russia control the narrative. But for most of these independent years, Ukraine was basically externally managed by Russia. During Yanukovych's presidency, we were like Belarus is now - a false "president" taking instructions straight from the Kremlin. So the brainwashing was getting worse and worse.

I told this story several times, and I'll tell it again. Before the "referendum" in Donetsk, most people laughed at the idea of the "republic." It was supported by some local lunatics, but mostly the whole thing was done by russian mercenaries and russian military. During this time, my aunt told me that those who support this are crazy and they're calling war into our homes. She was a reasonable person. She had a job, a nice apartment of her own, a happy family, and a bright future ahead. In 2015 they fled from Donetsk to russia, along with my grandmother. Why to russia? Propaganda. Then they got russian citizenship and used it to vote for putin. I asked how they could vote for him after what he did to them, after they lost it all. "We're thankful he gave us a home, gave us citizenship," was the answer. At first, he took everything from you, ruined your life, then let you restore a tiny bit of it - and you're grateful. I don't know how this works. It's not like they were welcomed in russia, they faced a lot of prejudice and oppression for being from Donetsk. To the point that my niece was bullied at school for being from the Donbas, not only by kids but by teachers, despite being an excellent student and graduating with honors. Russians are outraged that their state "rescues" and "helps" those Donbas khokhols instead of helping "true" russians.

In the second month of the full-scale invasion, my grandmother proposed that I move to them, to the moscow region of russia. "This is the country that is trying to kill us all, how can you ask me to move there?" "What difference does it make which country to live in? It's safe here." So along with pro-putin brainrot comes also apoliticalness, passivity.

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