arwyn

thank you!

a large square crochet blanket. the most striking aspects to this are "pink" and "hello kitty", because of the 4x4 checkered grid that makes up the blanket, half are regular pink, four are magenta pink, and four at the diagonal are white hello kitty faces, made of black eyes and whiskers, a black-outlined yellow nose, and a black-outlined red bow in her usual jaunty position. between each checker square is a black border, and the entire piece is bordered by pink and white scalops.

two years. this piece took me over two years. i redesigned almost every part of it, including the entire face and the bow (of which i am particularly proud).

and tomorrow it goes to the birthday teen. who will love it, and never tell me so as much as my heart, and effort, desire. but that's okay. 🧶

audiobooks mean i can read AND craft, without needing my partner to be free to read to me. i prefer physical books when I'm reading aloud to the kids, but I'll take ebooks in libby, especially if we're not sure we want to keep the books. (if i can get it to load, i prefer e-ink reader to phone.)

Single comicbook panel showing the Hulk lying prone on some grass near a beach. He's saying (in two speech balloons): "Hulk will sleep now, and maybe when Hulk wakes up ..." "... everything that has made Hulk tired will be changed!" (From Incredible Hulk #261, 1981)

C'est moi

I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here

and of course, hunger really helps with jumping through hoops and parsing paperwork...

wearing a mask in, at the very least, public indoor spaces (grocery stores, pharmacies, transit, healthcare) is one of the most basic forms of allyship you can offer disabled people you’re forced share space with.

omg for like three years EVERYTHING was related to steven universe around here. though entrapta specifically helped us talk about autism when explaining a dx to a kid.

a light? most are rechargeable at this point, but it might be an older one.

serious question: how is this not ethnic cleansing? "see brown people working, call gestapo, gestapo grabs and ignores paperwork"

I cannot begin to properly articulate how upsetting it is to have had people baselessly accuse trans people of being groomers and pedophiles only for it to come out that they were deliberately doing this as part of a project to provide cover to actual groomers and pedophiles in positions of power

(for younger teens that should be "space without anyone else" as they learn about their own bodies. but the point is we are SUPPOSED to be sexual *before* we enter the realm of adult sexuality. adults who want to invade that space aren't "having sex" with "underage women" they are fucking rapists.)

partic'ly i am concerned about the puritanism of denying teenagers access to their sexuality. you don't suddenly get horny on your 18th birthday any more than you suddenly stop feeling sex is dirty on your wedding night. but older teens deserve space WITHOUT ADULTS to explore sexuality. that's key.

...there are so many ways to stabilize people's outdoor shelter so they have more energy and more resources for navigating the overworked services to get back into real housing. sweeps do the opposite, but we *keep doing them* like suddenly THIS time will magically work!

i'd add that there are a lot of options between "sweeps" and "do nothing", which is what those of us who advocate against sweeps often are accused of wanting. for example we can provide trash services to encampments (eg GLITTER), install portland loos or portapotties throughout the city...

there's some strong contenders here, but Imma go with labcorps as my top pick, because now EVEN OUR BLOOD AND ILLNESS are for someone else's profit. (also they just really, really suck, and require misgendering at sign in.)

on the one hand, as someone who started having consensual sex at sixteen i dislike the yelling of "they're not women they're CHILDREN". but since we're not going to suddenly start having reasonable takes on liminal ages, we're gonna insist on a binary, and the context is RAPE, yes.

keep yelling.

i redesigned the entire face. i redesigned the border (a lil). i made much better whiskers and handsewed each and every one on. also this is 98% cotton yarn it was SO EXPENSIVE i could cry but it's so soft you'd want to cry.

and now it's done.

or.

will be.

in one. more. whisker.

i had to re-make a fifth of the squares because of gauge changes. i made all the bows according to pattern, in the pattern colors, and then said no that's not right and completely redesigned them and now they are PERFECT, LOOK AT IT.

photo of a crocheted blanket, one square of which is made into a Hello Kitty. she has black eyes, black whiskers, a yellow and black nose, and the quintessential red and black bow. you can see a black, pink, and white border on the edge, and hints of pink and magenta squares on the rest of the blanket.

y'all, i am *one. whisker.* away from finishing this blanket. i have been working on this for over TWO YEARS.

lol that's soooo baaaaaaad, but well done making a thing anyway! and the yarn is pretty!

yesss... but also instagram has primed us to want / feel we need to offer these highly stylized, aesthetic, artistic *photos*, as though the art we made with our hands wasn't enough. and i love that for the photographers among us! but the *expectation* of it encourages ai use, and then it backfires.

much as with star trek, i feel like (for obvious reasons) mainstream culture forgets just how radically anticapitalism It's a Wonderful Life is. our cultural memory only holds on to the schmaltz at the end, forgetting the two hours before it of GREEDY MEN WITH TOO MUCH MONEY RUIN EVERYTHING, y'know?

and the meaning! ugh I'mma get verklempt. reclaiming the piece from one soured symbol to make new art with it... AI COULD NEVER, IS ALL I'M SAYING

see what moves me about real art, like this, is it is BOTH aesthetics and experience, beauty and skill, image and product. and it's the combination of *how many* artists and craftspeople?? the yarn, the dye, the design, the knitting, the lighting, the posing, the photography...it's the work of many.

omg everything here is art. 💜💜💜💜💜💜

but not to the extent we have now. not at the cost of the fucking planet.

if i want to make an artfully displayed custom knit top, first i find a shepherd... and in idk two, three years i can work on the photography. but ai is fueling our ever-present urge for instant gratification, for appearance over substance, aesthetics over experience. all those are fine and good!

and less directly but no less seriously, i think ai is contributing to the acceleration of fast fashion and completely unrealistic ideas about what crafting is and what it costs. they can prompt a crochet top in thirty seconds and buy one in target for $19.99, why can't we make it now, for $10????

omg the number of people i see complaining about bad patterns they have PAID ACTUAL REAL DOLLARS FOR and then turns out it's just pure slop—! or, and this is almost worse, designers who are just starting out, use ai for images, and then people demand money back when the pattern doesn't match.