Racing Turtles

Once you exit the womb, you can use the left stick to walk around and explore your surroundings. You can press A to jump, allowing you to access higher places. Try jumping onto the doctor's cabinets

I would be so good at having periods I wish I could take that burden off one woman out there. because I'm a feminist. I also have pretty wide hips and have for a while thought I could easily give birth to a child. it's really not fair that if I ever knock someone up she'll be the one who has to do that. whatever happened to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"?

This isn’t about chicken

Motherhood is a huge burden. It is. It’s years of your life devoted to little or nothing else. Many primary caretakers I know got to a point where their kids didn’t need them 24/7 and realized that they no longer had any idea who they were. Some of my friends are reinventing and rediscovering themselves, and it’s painful and difficult and takes years. Others, I think, never manage, never have the support or the self-awareness to break free, and spend the rest of their lives living for others, being what they believe they are supposed to be. 

A lot of people don’t have the emotional capacity or maturity to do what needs to be done, to love like a child needs to be loved, and children get hurt. A lot of others maybe genuinely adore their children, but don’t know how to break free from the incredibly harmful parenting messages our culture is absolutely soaked in, and perpetuate that damage without ever understanding that it’s damaging.

Parenthood is a huge financial sink and liability. It all but condemns a single parent to live in poverty, at least in the US. My mother worked most of my childhood in a job that paid a fraction of what it should have, because I could come straight there after school. Childcare is fucking expensive. Bearing and raising a child is, much more often than is discussed, damaging to a person’s health. It was to mine. Quite a lot, actually. Birthing can be dangerous, especially without access to good care (this by the way 100% includes access to non-mysogynistic care and midwifery and compassionate care, so actually MOST people in the US don’t have that).

So, this Mother’s Day, let’s let it be about a person’s right to choose to bear a child–or not. If we are to recognize the huge emotional and practical difficulties of the job, from beginning to end, then we really need to recognize that it should be chosen. It should be a vocation. You shouldn’t have a child because you wanted sex and accidents happen. You shouldn’t have a child because anyone else wants you to. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a child you’re not ready for, because no one is ready, but you should want it more than you fear it, certainly. 

You should have a child because YOU WANT TO RAISE A CHILD. No other reason.

Keep abortion legal. Make it more available. Make it easier. Make it cheaper. Everyone should have access to affordable, safe abortion. It makes society better. It makes lives better. It matters.

anon I need more information. what the fresh hell are you talking about

We cut from Terezi discussing her doomsday visions of babies to Aradia decapitating a (sometimes) symbol of babies… don’t know what that’s about. But the cut from the decapitated in the mud to the Faygo in the sand (effectively declaring the Faygo a severed head, full of delicious red juice) is consistent with comments I made (x)(x) on Jane’s initial tour of LOCAH: that her balloons are an inversion of the “potions” (bottles of blood), and that the wish-emissaries are furthermore consistent with decapitation imagery in Act 6. What’s more, here as with Jane’s wish balloons, the launched bottle began as a prayer.

@corvid420 says:

Mm… definitely not just an aesthetic choice, but I don’t really have a ‘why’ handy. I can give you more context and examples though.

1. With Jane, decapitated heads always seem to (attempt to) return to what they lost. When Jack “beheads” her tower on Prospit, the dome lands on an obelisk, as though in imitation of the tower it once stood on. Likewise, when Lil Seb chops off the lamp’s head (beside shaving cream, a Dad symbol), the noggin lands in a pipe-image on the floor (another Dad symbol).

2. Birth itself is a ‘decapitation’ insofar as the born has been cut off from their source – which is one explanation for baby!Dirk attempting to crawl back into his own ecto-tube, as though attempting to re-merge with the immaculate slime from which his form was iterated (eg the source of ALL Dirks). Dirk’s suicide likewise puts the bunny (his noggin) back in the (red) box – you might say death is conceived as a return to that from which we were born.

3. Dirk sending of his own head is a repetition Gamzee’s gesture maybe: sending a severed head (coded-object) to a Hope player. I’ve wondered before why the clouds on Jade’s island are Hope colored (cream and orange), and this might be a step towards explaining that: just as Jane’s wishes are launched into the sky, heads/sodas are sent to players most closely associated with it? Eridan’s lighting and Jake’s Jupiter/Zeus associations likewise situate them as cloud-dwellers, on a symbolic level (and Eridan literally flies in the clouds in his intro I suppose).

4. Actually, having juxtaposed Eridan with Jake, it’s suddenly very odd that our very first revival kiss (Feferi x Sollux) happens right after Eridan slams a Faygo? (Prompted by Gamzee, naturally) So corpse-smooches and Faygo-drinking were synonymous from the outset? I’m imagining the DirkJake kiss panel as an advertisement for Faygo, with the volcanic eruption serving as a fizzy-bottle proxy to indicate the nigh-orgasmic ecstasy of drinking cheap soft drinks.

5. Before I forget, the potion/balloon isn’t the only time Jane has flipped a symbol of wishes: flipping the capitals in ‘UrobUros’ is how she unlocked the Auryn-Juju (which granted wishes in the Neverending Story).

6. Not directly pertinent, but I’m willfully misreading the first line of Rose’s erotic puppet poem to be about decapitation, for giggles. “Prong of flesh bereft of home...”

I touched on this in today’s update to the Jade post, but I think the joke here is that ‘pink wigglers’ and ‘human grubs’ are ambiguous on whether someone is filled with babies or worms/maggots. It’s an image of morbid fecundity; ‘mummies’ are filled with scarabs.

what a time to be alive