An Awesome Turtle Lives Here

Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.

1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.

The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

Putting my hanfu/textile cheat sheet here so more people can reference it. Disclaimer my Chinese is mid. I made this so I could browse Taobao better. Will probably update this as I learn more.

Fabric terms

- fabric: 面料 miàn liào, 布料 bù liào

- material: 材质 cáizhì

- fiber: 纤维 xiānwéi

- blended: 混紡 hùnfǎng

- outer materials: 外料 wai liào

- auxiliary materials: 辅料 fǔliào

- jacquard: 提花 tí huā

- brocade/damask: 锦缎 jǐn duàn

- floral satin/brocade: 花缎 huā duàn

- satin: 缎面 duàn miàn

- gauze: 纱 shā

- embroidered: 绣花 xiù huā

- embroidery: 刺绣 cìxiù

Fiber contents

- polyester: 涤纶 dí lún, 聚酯 jù zhǐ

- acetate: 醋酸 cùsuān

- viscose: 粘胶(纤维) zhān jiāo xiānwéi, 粘纤 zhān xiān

- rayon (artificial silk): 人丝 rén sī

- rayon (artificial cotton): 人棉 rén mián

- tencel: 天丝 tiān sī

- lyocell fiber: 莱赛尔 lái sài ěr

- tencel-linen: 天丝麻 tiān sī má

- linen: 亚麻 yà má

- cotton-linen: 棉麻 mián má

- cotton: 棉 mián

- ramie: 苎麻 zhù má

- wool: 羊毛 yáng máo

- real silk: 真丝 zhēn sī

- silkworm silk: 蚕丝 cán sī

- fragrant cloud gauze/gambiered Guangdong silk: 香云纱 xiāng yún shā

Clothing terms

Hanfu: 汉服 hànfú

Short: 短 duǎn

Unlined shirt: 衫 shān

Long robe: 袍 páo

Yuanlingpao: 圆领袍 yuán lǐng páo

Round collar: 圆领 yuán lǐng

Vertical collar: 竖领 shù lǐng

Stand-up collar: 立领 lì lǐng

Parallel collar: 对襟 duì jīn

Half sleeve: 半袖 bàn xiù

Pipa sleeve: 琵琶袖 pípá xiù

Cross-collar long gown: 交領長衫 Jiāo lǐng chángshān

Straight robe: 直裰 zhíduō

Pleated skirt: 百迭裙 bǎi dié qún

Beizi (outer garment): 褙子 bèi zǐ

Baofu (bellyband): 抱腹 bàofù

Raccoon sleeves: 貉袖 háo xiù

Ming dynasty/style: 明制 Míng zhì

Song dynasty/style: 宋制

Motifs

- bamboo leaf: 竹叶 zhú yè

- bird: 鸟

- butterfly: 蝴蝶 hú dié

- cat: 猫

- cloud: 云

- crane:

- dragon: 龙

- feather: 羽毛

- fish: 鱼

- fishscale: 鱼鳞

- heron:

- jellyfish: 水母

- kingfisher: 翠鸢 cuì yuān

- phoenix:

Colors

- ombre: 渐变

- white: 白色

- grey: 灰色

- black: 黑色

- brown: 棕色

- red: 红色

- orange: 橘色

- yellow: 黄色

- green: 绿色

- cyan: 青色

- navy: 藏青色

- blue: 蓝色

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

Latest sculpture. This one is of Goumang from Nine Sols, one of my favorite-ever games. I thought she might be fun to sculpt, and I ended up proving myself tremendously correct.

She's made entirely from earthenware clay, and measures around 22cm/9in tall. She's not entirely finished- once she's been fired, I'll add her halo-thing and paint her; I still figured I'd post this version.

(Point-of-view of someone who's about to get two Jiangshi soldiers sicced on them.)

I tried to be as on-model as possible. I stuck mostly to the images in the artbook, since in-game sprites are proportioned for readability more than even cannon accuracy, but even then I took some slight liberties in proportioning her according to my tastes. (This largely meant reducing her head size so it wasn't, you know, a full quarter of her body height.) So she's really based on what she looks like in my head more than anything.

(I did change a few elements of her dragon-chair. That was mostly for practical reasons. I needed the arm-support parts to be sturdy enough, but also needed the back to be low and strong enough to hold up the core part of the figure. So the sides look a little different. Don't worry about it.)

This one took ten days from start to finish, appropriately enough. One day per Sol.

For her expression, I wanted to do something based off of how she interacts with Yi. I've always thought that it was remarkable how Goumang is one of the only Sols who actually seems to do her freaking job, and doesn't seem to have much of an ulterior motive if any at all- and we see quite the different side of her in the Chien comic. So I figure that what we see in the game might well be her worst side; she is, after all, facing off against her lifelong rival, whom she hates deeply. Anyway, I wanted to get across a sense of her deep scorn, but mixed with the haughtiness that she's built up for herself since being made a Sol. It was surprisingly easy to render on a simplistic Solarian head.

(Those ears, too, were quite fun to sculpt.)

I honestly don't think I could have chosen a better subject. I wasn't sure at first, since I thought the whole dynamic sitting pose paired with the difficulties the chair might pose would be a bit ambitious, but it worked out quite well. I'm quite eager to finish this one once it's been fired. Let's just hope it doesn't crack too much in the kiln. I will put a link in the comments once the full version is done, so keep an eye out for that!

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

give them a variety of exes. give them relationships that shaped who they are but did not last. give them people they tried very hard to love but it didn't work out. give them situationships that taught them things. give them something deep that was real but could not endure. things that hurt. things that ended amicably. people with whom hot passion cooled to warm affection and became undying friendship.