Mark Rothko, Earth Green (detail), 1955

creatures & guys

from the croy hours, flanders, c. 1500-1520

source: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1858

THE TREATY PRINCIPLES BILL IS BEING PRESENTED TO THE HOUSE TOMORROW!!!!!!!

EDIT: Here's a link with more info on the Bill and it's contents and breaches!

This matters to EVERYONE in our country! If you're Māori this is about our LITERAL existence, if you're Pākehā, tauiwi, tangata Tiriti this concerns you because Tiriti is what gives you the privilege of existing on this whenua! The Waitangi Tribunal has already said this Bill will be the biggest Waitangi breach ever. YOU have a responsibility to do something.

ACT, our coalition government, and the Ministry of Justice have been intentionally keeping this bill under the wraps. Mad mihi to the MoJ analyst who leaked that draft though (I'm sure they got sacked if not massive repercussions).

What we know so far is that Te Pāti Māori, Green Party, and Labour WILL NOT be voting for this and that ACT, NZ First, and National WILL be voting for this tomorrow. NZ First and National have said that they WILL NOT support this Bill after its first reading so it will go to Select Committee and then die at first reading.

National and NZ First have said they'll only support this Bill to first reading (thankfully) but there is always the chance of closed door promises & favours and we still need to advocate for this disgusting bill to die.

I'll post more about submissions when they open for Select Committee but I'm happy to help answer questions or help with that and the process.

But the racist idiots to email and drill in that you DO NOT want this Bill are...

ACT MPs

1. David Seymour (Email: [email protected] ) (the one bigoted brain cell behind this bill)

2. Brooke Van Velden ([email protected])

3. Nicole McKee ([email protected])

4. Todd Stephenson ([email protected])

5. Andrew Hoggard ([email protected])

6. Karen Chhour ([email protected])

7. Mark Cameron ([email protected])

8. Simon Court ([email protected])

9. Parmjeet Parmat ([email protected])

10. Laura Trask ([email protected])

11. Cameron Luxton ([email protected])

AND

- Prime Minister Christopher Luxon ([email protected])

- Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters ([email protected])

If you're able to participate with any part of the hīkoi please do and please be safe!!!!

Toitū te Tiriti! Ake ake ake!

TOM WAMBSGANS & GREG HIRSCH in SUCCESSION 1.03 "Lifeboats"

a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up

There should be a way to say “there’s a loneliness crisis” without it being interpreted as saying “women need to put out more.”

It’s a problem of people having no friends as well, not just no romantic partners. And I don’t even think it’s necessarily affecting men much worse than women? Lots of lonely friendless women out there too.

Paolo Sebastian | A Lover's Kiss

Approximate Sunset Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 8x8". Charles Morgenstern, 2023.

btw if you find yourself dehumanizing any person or group for any reason you've already lost

Ok, but how do you fight that once you’ve realized it?

The therapy answer: You can train yourself to follow unproductive thought patterns and you can retrain yourself to follow more productive ones instead. The first step is realizing what you're thinking and correcting it, and the next step is repeat step 1 until it starts happening automatically.

The sociological answer: people typically become less prejudiced when they spend extended time with groups of people they are prejudiced against, especially in a non-adversarial context.

I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

@krisabobbi, Loara’s full name is Loara Standish. The 1991 remaker is Joanna Harvey.

Harvey actually named a specific unique stitch from the work after Loara, The Standish Stitch which takes 13 passes of the needle to complete!

I didn’t have the magazine with me to remember full names when I posted originally.

@shieldmaidenofsherwood a great question!

Only one and it is not the best, but it is lovely regardless. I would love to have seen them printed a bit bigger!

I tried to find a bigger image but there are too many photos of women who have made their own! What a wonderful problem to have. I can’t find an original because too many people are celebrating the work of this single girl from three centuries ago :)

Here's information from Pilgrim Hall Museum, which has the sampler in its collection! there's a link to a pdf with additional pictures but unfortunately they're not very good. But here's a blog post from someone who made a replica with the reference images she worked from and here is a picture of the sampler on display (shared by someone on findagrave.com where you can see Loara/Lora's gravesite)

Felix Vallotton

Sunsets, Sunrises 

more

btw if you're annoyed with Google search giving you results for stuff that's similar to but not actually what you typed in, go to search tools, go to where it says "all results" and change that to "verbatim" and then it will search for what you actually asked for

why this is not the default is beyond me other than obvs enshittification but it has rescued a bunch of searches for me lately where the top results were completely unhelpful until i switched to that so. might be helpful for others

it's here btw

i find it particularly makes a difference for the nicher searches and things where google is less sure what you're looking for and/or if your keywords are similar enough to something it thinks it can sell you

whenever someone says they "just prefer to wear makeup, as a choice" because when they don't they think they look "sick or like a slob", I'm just going to assume that's what they think of any women who don't wear makeup. you can say it's your personal preference all you want but it really does 1000% reflect your values when you talk about it.

examine why you think you look sickly or slobby without makeup, and why you think that's a bad thing. Is it socially unacceptable to have visible redness, pores, or acne? socially unacceptable to have eyebrows that aren't perfectly shaped? is it inappropriate to look visibly unwell? is makeup a form of social status and those who can't afford it are slovenly poors?

at the end of the day, you can do whatever you want with your disposable income and skin, but examine how you talk about makeup and decide if that's the message you want to be sending to the people who hear you.

ASSAD ZAMAN as Armand