Dominant and sterile. Perhaps unapproachable.

She specifically came back on the couch to sit on my foot. My foot that is now falling asleep. I am very stuck 😭

The lure of the peanut butter jar opening cannot be resisted

What a sweetheart

@leatherbookmark

hi hello sorry for the lack of posts lately ; - ; there has also been some lack of drawing but not actually as much as the silence here makes it seem haha. i have a few pieces to post which i just never got round to, even though some of them were ready approximately three million years ago. here is one of them!

this was done a while ago for the Bearer of Light LWJ zine! links to the pdf are here~ i just think, baby twin jades. thank you for your consideration.

this has alt text. extended image description below the cut.

I sometimes wonder if Nie Mingjue would have rethought his attempts to kill Jin Guangyao at all if he ever came close enough to succeeding that he thought he'd actually done it.

If Jin Guangyao hit his head at the bottom of the stairs Nie Mingjue kicked him down and was knocked out, would Nie Mingjue feel any regret or fear when he realized that Meng Yao wasn't getting up? Would he realize that by the terms of their oath, he should be torn apart by five horses? Would there be any relief when Jin Guangyao woke up? And if he did regret it, would it shake him up enough to make him actually change?

"In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

—Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass)

Humbaba, Guardian of the Cedar Forest

Disability Pride month let's not forget about the people in our community with intellectual disabilities!

I just found out about the Stay Up Late campaign to advocate for people with intellectual disabilities to have the right to go out in the evening and not have to be in bed by 8pm

I learned about it from this video:

And I found the website for the campaign which is here:

Let's support all members of our community

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.