i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.
“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside
“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)
we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.
we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.
two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺
got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks
expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv
was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this
tiny……….
dear autistics who
white
low support needs
not need 24/7 support
can work independently
can pay taxes
language privileged
intellectual & cognitive privileged
who can fit in societal definition of useful & productive (yes, even if hard)
when fight back against eugenics & ableism, you NEED to fight alongside, fight with, n fight for autistics who
radicalized & POC
from places of world where there critically lack autism knowledge n support
visibly autistic
higher support needs
need 24/7 care
can’t work independently or even work at all
can’t pay taxes
nonverbal, nonspeaking, minimally verbal, without functional communication, or cannot communicate via language at all even AAC
w intellectual disability or cognitive disabilities
who cannot fit into society definition of useful n productive, no matter how hard we try
because we always are & always will be primary target.
because we most vulnerable most marginalized within our, OUR community, which you belong in.
because once they finish us off you won’t be spared.
Call or write your Congressperson today to oppose the SAVE Act. It would require documents that many people don’t have every time you update your voter registration, would eliminate registering to vote online or by mail or in volunteer voter registration drives, and would severely reduce registration at places like the DMV/MVA. The whole point of this bill is to suppress voting from women and people of color, and to go back to the days when you had to travel to the courthouse and go through a time consuming legal process in order to register to vote.
You can find your Representative here:
Or call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121.
By the by, you know what's a fun and easy thing to do as you're scrolling through your social media feed and checking your messages?
If you see an ad for a fascist, one of their orgs, or any of their pet projects, report it as a malicious ad.
If you see an account rattling off fascist bullshit in the comments on whatever platform you're browsing, block it and report it as spam / bot / hate speech / misinformation as appropriate.
If you get a text or an email from one of those organizations, block the address but also flag it as phishing. Not just spam. PHISHING.
This accomplishes three things.
One, it cleans up your feed, your messaging, and your inbox.
Two, it weeds out bots and psyops accounts and General Assholes.
And three, if enough malicious ad reports and phishing flags are submitted, the companies posting the ads may have trouble posting material in the future, since their accounts may be suspended, their emails will be marked as phishing, and their ability to reach people will be reduced.
Sure, it's a small impact. Sure, it's not a guaranteed success.
But EVERY SINGLE WRENCH we can throw into the machine of fascism breaks some small part, causes some small delay, prevents things from rolling forward smooth and easy.
And the more of us that do it, the harder it will be for that machine to keep rolling.
Think of it as the online version of tearing down posters and disrupting communications.
Make them take time to create new accounts. Make the algorithms work against them. Make them have to adjust and pivot again and again. Make them spend that time and money and effort to get their propaganda through.
Nobody needs to do everything. But everyone should do something.
Keep Going.
I’m watching Splash (1984) which is a romcom about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid, and when she chooses a human name she chooses Madison and guy says “that’s not a real name, but alright” which seems to imply that Madison was not a name until at least the 80’s and all girls named Madison are actually named after the mermaid. thought you should know
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
the jen taylor halo 2 outtakes are so good i couldnt /not/ animate them!!
buy my buntana stickers, if u want :)
I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.
Whoever conceived and animated this moment, I hope they're doing well and thriving. This is S-rank romance stuff here.