絨花 Ronghua

“just torrent it! just pirate it! streaming sites exist!” (proceeds to give absolutely zero clear instructions on how to do any of these things)

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.

What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.

What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’s not merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.

THIS IS HOW WE PLAY WITH DOLLS

some day ill be able to post this on thursday

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.

it’s a vow we make to each other; let’s wear rings of the same colour 

[image is a digital painting of riku, kairi, and sora getting married, all clutching starry bouquets and with matching expressions of joy and delight. kairi is jumping with her arms around her boys’ shoulders, holding her bouquet over her head; her dress is pink, with a wave pattern. sora is a dark suit with a red bowtie and cloud patterns on his lapels. riku is in a silver suit with a blue tie, and he’s reaching around the both of them to clasp sora’s shoulder.]

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

the feygoat! i wanted to make a doll with an unusual limb configuration, and ended up sculpting this little weirdo. their feet still need some adjustments for pleasant poseability, but here's some prototype pics in the meanwhile.

[photo credit: @posnakkel]

Goddamnit Thomas...