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✨SPIN THE WHEEL TO GET YOUR CHARACTER✨

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the Illustrious Client - part 3

Part 1

Part 2

He gave no explanations and I asked for none. By long experience I had learned the wisdom of obedience.

Next update, we will have the displeasure of meeting......

On the shorter side this week, sorry! Come see me at SDCC if you're so inclined...I'll have a few copies of the Sketchbook Volume 2 to give away at my signings.

"I am here to be used" is a canon line which makes me dizzy every time I read it.

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

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Rest = Lying Down, Eyes Closed Because other parts of the program from England made sense, I decided to try resting every afternoon. After some experimentation, I determined that the most restorative rest resulted from lying down in a quiet place with my eyes closed. I was surprised at the results from taking a 15-minute rest in mid-afternoon. Even that short break seemed to help, reducing my symptoms, increasing my stamina and making my life more stable. After a while I added a similar rest in late morning. Over time, I came to believe that my scheduled rest was the most important strategy I used in my recovery. Resting everyday according to a fixed schedule, not just when I felt sick or tired, was part of a shift from living in response to symptoms to living a planned life. The experience showed me that rest could be used for more than recovering from doing too much; it could be employed as a preventive measure as well. In the terms suggested by someone in our self-help program, I learned the difference between recuperative rest and pre-emptive rest. Surprisingly, taking pre-emptive rests greatly reduced the time I spent in recuperative rest, because I was experiencing much less Post-Exertional Malaise. The result was that my total rest time was reduced.

sometimes like an idiot i assume everyone has read bruce campbell on resting/pacing to handle post-exertional malaise affiliated with chronic fatigue. that is obviously not true! anyway here's the hot guide, i linked straight to the "schedule in mandatory complete 15 min rest as part of your day and hopefully you will get to do less surprise many hours of rest to recover" section but the whole thing is laid out pretty clearly

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"Limiting screen time" me to my cats when I close the window any time they hit the window screen too hard while bird watching

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One winter there was renovations at the hotel where I worked front desk. They started these in January so it'd be done for the summer season, because that's our busiest time, but before of the reno it was impossible to walk thru the inside of the building. You instead had to enter and exit at various points to get thru the building. Then the shut down the lobby entirely and set up a temporary front desk stand in a hallway by the elevators. This hallway was a wind tunnel, between two exit doors. All this was very annoying for guests and staff but fine. Except then we had temperatures drop to -5 to -12 for two weeks. Pipes froze, alarms went off, but what was worst was the front office staff standing trying to work and be customer facing while being completely utterly freezing. My toes were numb, I was wearing my full winter gear, coat hat, layers upon layers (they didnt hold us to the uniform). Heaters under the desks did next to nothing. The doors in the hallway kept getting stuck open cause the rugs were so sodden with people tracking in and out and getting snow everywhere. I couldnt type. I couldnt think. I'd have hand warmers in my fingerless gloves, trying to be able to work the computer. People would be yelling in my face about the conditions of their thousands of dollars resort stay and I'd be just blinking at them, too cold to even smile. I felt bad for the bell staff as well, who were actually outside in part of their duties but at least they got to walk around, while I just had to stand.

I'm amazed I didnt quit

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Also, adding polytr/x (?polytrix?) To my list of ships for next uears valentines day, I want to draw these girls soo bad! SUCH good character designs!! And the cat!

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Late to the part but I watched kpop demon hunters and it was fucking amazinggg

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I've seen a lot of comments on Tumblr that are really dismissive about AI and I would really like to understand where people's objections to it stem from.

I am using this technology at work and genuinely want to see what people think and would appreciate your thoughts.

If you can please reblog so I can get as many different views as possible.

Your chum

iSay

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imagine cloth mother and wire mother in family court competing for custody of the baby monkey

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In my hubris, I may have fucked up my sewing machine 2 weeks before renn faire ...

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Quote of the day

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the Illustrious Client - part 2

Part 1 here. Holmes has been investigating the (allegedly!) murderous Baron Gruner...

The blind was three quarters down, but one ray of sunlight slanted through and struck the bandaged head of the injured man. A crimson patch had soaked through the white linen compress. I sat beside him and bent my head. “All right, Watson. Don’t look so scared,” he muttered in a very weak voice. “It’s not as bad as it seems.”

forever obsessed with the way in which this story stands in conversation with THE DYING DETECTIVE. More to come!

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

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‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves A stately pleasure-dome decreed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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and if you're willing to add in tags: do you have eds?