What Y’all Think ‘gifted Child’ Discourse Is Saying: I Used To Be Special And Now I’m Not And

Made of legos and various bits, his name is Servo - an old butlerbot sympathizing with the nigh-extinct human race in a world ruled by robots. To be fair, most of the humans decided to become robots, anyway.

His screen can’t really glow, but it does have swappable expressions. n_n

What are your go-to sites for finding fabric in period prints/colours, specifically cotton? I'm starting a quilt that's going to be entirely of repro or plausible-looking 18th/19th century prints and while I've had some luck with 'traditional' collections from brands like kona, was wondering if you knew of any smaller purveyors I might look at?

Ooh, I don't think I'm the best person to ask about historical cotton prints, since I've never sewn a historical garment from a reproduction print. Someone who's sewn 19th century day dresses would probably know some much better options.

My personal favourite places to get fabric are:

Pure Linen Envy, which only carries linen.

Pursilks, which has a variety of silks, cottons, and synthetics, but they're not historical.

Burnley & Trowbridge, which focuses on historical fabrics and reproduction notions, but have barely any printed cottons.

Renaissance Fabrics, which has a few cotton prints, and some nice silks and wools.

Williamsburg also has some reproduction cotton prints, and Virgil's Fine Goods has a few as well.

However! If you want a bunch of different little pieces and are willing to do some editing, one option is to dig through Smithsonian Open Access, and The Met's collection, both of which have a huge amount of public domain high resolution images of fabric swatches & fragments, including lots of 18th & 19th century printed cottons. Some are pretty stained and ragged, but there are plenty of nice looking ones too. Make a pinterest board for them!

You could make a blank document the size of the printable area of a yard of fabric at 150 DPI, and fill it up with all your favourite fragments (cropped and resized to be the right scale) and then get it printed on a basic cotton on a site like MyFabricDesigns, ArtFabrics, or DesignYourFabric. (Spoonflower is also an option, but they print with inks, and the other 3 I linked use reactive dyes, which are more colour fast and don't make the fabric stiff and crinkly like the inks do.)

I plan to eventually make repeating patterns of some of those swatches, but it's quite a lot of work for each individual pattern, and I think you could get enough small bits for a patchwork quilt pretty quickly of you just arranged them all in one big rectangle.

I don't know if you have any photo editing programs, but if not then photopea.com works, and is one I use sometimes!

Social Security doesn’t actually publish the rules for disability benefits, I don’t know if y’all are aware of that.  

You don’t get a booklet when you apply or approved that explains how things work.  Not for SSI, anyway; SSDI is a separate thing that works very differently and I don’t know anything about it.  The SS website isn’t the easiest to navigate, and only lists minimal information for many aspects of the program, and for specifics, you have to call them and ask.  When you do that, they offer to send you some pamphlets, which contain the same information that’s on the website, which means you wind up having to call again.

And the thing is, even when you reach someone, they don’t always give you the same information.  Some employees seem ignorant about the entire system, some seem apathetic about everything, and some are doing their best but don’t know everything.  And some do know what they’re talking about.  And there is no way to know what kind of person you’re dealing with, and no way to check their information against something you already know to make sure, because you very well may not have the right information.

I have, in fact, been told things that are incorrect more often by SS itself than by anyone else, and I have been told wildly conflicting things by SS employees.  As an example, I was told initially that I had to report all income, even if it was under $1000. Then I was told I only had to report income if it was over $1000.  Then I was told that they can only go by taxable income, meaning if you made over $1000 at, say, an off-the-books unlicensed popup lemonade stand, or if you sold a dozen of your empty butter tubs on Craigslist for $100 each, that money doesn’t count because it’s not money that is taxed by the US government.

I was told these things within the span of six months, and the most favorable take, the latter one, came from someone higher-ranking than anyone else I’d spoken to.  She said, in these exact words, that “We only really care about taxable income.”

So what would you do?  Go by what is most favorable to you, but run the risk of having it held against you if someone decides it’s wrong, or if it IS wrong but you didn’t think it was because an employee of Social Security itself told you it was correct? Or would you go the conservative route and live in more hardship just to be safe?

We shouldn’t have to crunch ourselves into the smallest possible living situation, afraid of what they might do, not knowing the rules. Even in school, even for the very smallest children there are, there are clear rules, and everyone knows what they are so the kids can abide by them and the teachers can fairly enforce them.

You don’t get that with SS.  You get the information piecemeal and from unreliable sources. We are treated in a way that authority figures agree even children should not be treated. And I want people to know that.

Now, I admit I may have missed something. Some very obvious site, or a rulebook they were supposed to send me and I just never got, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I think they deliberately keep this information kind of under wraps because they don’t want people to “take advantage” of it.  But withholding information people could use to help themselves qualify for benefits they deserve is harming the many people who need help in order to prevent a few theoretical people from fleecing the system. 

Something like 5 million people are on Social Security. Compared to the number of people who genuinely need it, welfare fraud is nearly nonexistent. And yet policy is set, not by the overwhelming need of those who cannot do for themselves, but by the potential abuse of “undeserving” people.

Keep in mind, even those trying to fleece the system have to go THROUGH the system to do it, and it is designed to catch those people using measures that would be absolutely exhausting and almost impossible to fake.  I should know, I’ve been through the approval process.

Keeping information secret that could help someone after they have been approved is low, it prevents us advocating for ourselves and keeps us dependent on a largely untrained or poorly-trained network of social workers, SS workers, and case managers.  It is utterly inhumane.

THAT SAID

It IS worth it to fight.  It IS worth it to be on SS.  It DOES help.  It gets you into the Medcaid/Medicare system.  It helps get you SNAP benefits.  It is not enough to live on forever, not by itself; the system is broken by design; but it is SOMETHING, and without it, even fewer people would be able to survive.  The process is difficult and discouraging.  It is still better to take whatever they will give you, not as alms, not as a pittance meant to keep you quiet, but because they deserve to have to give it.  So TAKE from them.  Take everything you can.

Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin

I made a teensy tiny Longfurb for my bjd Jonah.

It’s a bit messy around the face. I think i’m gonna keep trying to refine this idea. I was considering teeny tiny printed face plates maybe instead? But i’m not sure how small one of those 3d printed buddy faces can go. I’ll have to ask my dad to test it “how small can you print one of these?” lol. Because just attaching that to a small plush noodle would be WAY easier.

wip

Have I told y’all about my husband’s Fork Theory?  If I did already, pretend I didn’t, I’m an old.

So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time. But it has a corollary.  You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right? Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.  A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”

“I was raised Catholic” just translates to “I’m an atheist, but I feel kinda bad about it.”

Got Kay's padding done! The belly is just a bit of a legging and stuffing. Her chest is thin foam padding up top (to "shorten" her neck) and the rest is the same materials as her belly. It's all removable, so if I ever want to take some pictures of Amaya again, I can easily swap everything out.

Unfortunately, the only thing I have that fits her right now is the high-waisted pink dress that's a smidge too small for her chest. I'll take more pictures once I get her different clothes.