Jen.

Karel van Mander. Detail from The Artist with his Family, 1670.

I remain amazed how many ways, in 2022, places can fuck this up.

You’ve heard of the Mom friend but my husband is very much the Dad friend. He said when he answered the phone she said “hey please don’t be mad” and he’s never felt such powerful Fatherhood energy in his life.

^

Anyway when I read that line I immediately understood what she was trying to say.

And a double thanks to the person I reblogged from for linking the articles.

mind your business

dark science beyond belief

peak character design. he’s just a little baby

“who do i hurt when i do this?” and “could i look them in the eye, validate and acknowledge that hurt, and then keep doing it anyway?”

“whose voice is missing from this story” and then “how do i seek out those voices/how does a story i think i know change when i add new perspectives”

beastly reminder

Almost. Years ago my computer suddenly stopped working and lost everything on it. Fortunately a relatively recent backup still existed bc of my family, a recent parts switch, and dumb luck. But last year a friend of mine got hacked and lost close to everything he had done creatively in the last 17-ish years. Art. Novels in progress. Entire conlangs. DnD character Sheets. Music he had made. All gone. He never backed any of it up. Few months later I started this habit (or ritual, almost) of drawing a reminder beast any time I would make a full complete backup. In hopes that seeing these things might remind others and myself. (Another factor here is that I am an animator and some of the stuff on my computer took literal years to make. And the film university I go to urges us to take this stuff seriously, too.)

This level of capitalistic surveillance of pregnancy in the US specifically is not new and with the repeal of Roe v. Wade it should terrify you.

it’s like damn, stop invalidating kids’ personalities and listen to them and maybe you won’t be so shocked when they don’t transform into a new person later

He said “Pay attention to who your children are when they’re little. If you do that, you’ll never be surprised at who they become. The only people who think kids suddenly become other people when they hit adolescence are the ones who never listened to what their kids were telling them the whole time.”

And somehow my parents were shocked when Adult Me just came out and said, “I don’t want children and I don’t want to go to boring dinner parties. I want to hang out with other geeks who like spooky stuff. I want to be a writer. And also a witch.” I’d been telling them for years. They just weren’t paying attention.