Gloomy-octopus - Octlantis

HOW TO FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, 2021, by Yumi Sakugawa

Belt pouch I made after a while of fantasizing about it <3

I find it quite funny that coincidentally reptil diy did a video on a bag like this, like a day after i finished it, shouldve waited for his video instead of what i did lol :D

It isnt the prettiest and i still have to install a zipper but im very happy with it. It holds small things that i always forget to specifically bring with me when leaving the house

So apparently some Swiss company found out that Brazilian blood has more immunoglobulin (which is used in some medications made by pharma companies) than European blood, and now international pharma companies are lobbying to change Brazilian law to allow them to use our blood as a resource

There is no current evidence that those things are related, but it just so happens that at the same time there is also another law being discussed that would get rid of "bureaucracy" when it comes to ethics analyses of trials on humans. It would also remove the right, which all brazilians currently have, to access to the medication resulting from the trials they participated in

Both sources are in Portuguese because both news have been recently broke by a Brazilian investigative news agency, but if you don't speak it, you can always use automatic translation

I know there's a lot of fucked up shit happening in the world right now, but please pay attention to medical rights in Brasil right now. Especially if you're European, because virtually every company related to this is from your continent and plans to benefit you above all

ETA: using blood as a resource for these medications is not new; however, current law in brasil only allows that use to come from donated blood (because it comes from the plasma and apparently not all of it is used in blood transfusion; I'm not a doctor so I'm not clear on the details but that's the gist of it) and to be processed and used by Hemobrás, the State-owned company that handles this type of medical technology. The new law would allow for private companies to buy our blood from blood banks for their use. It is worth noting that at least one company has already explicitly stated that they won't be making the resulting medication available in the Brazilian market, so, essentially, they will be taking blood Brazilians donated to help other Brazilians and using it to treat immunocompromised Europeans, to the detriment of immunocompromised Brazilians that need the medicine. In the process, they will be making it harder for our State-owned company to use that same blood, forcing us to import from them and therefore making the medication more expensive. They also want to make it possible for Brazilians to sell their own blood - a deeply ethically questionable practice that is discouraged by the WHO and that has led to HIV outbreaks in Brasil in the past

no matter how terrible my day is. i can always end my day in bed imagining fictional characters making out sloppy style and fucking raw. and that's beautiful. there's some good in this world mister frodo and it's worth fighting for

making simple chinese bamboo fan by 长安的一世长安

i dont think i posted these but here i made a little frog pattern to make tiny frog toys with my grandma

this is the first lil guy I made while still learning how i should sew it

The Osamu Tezuka crossover that almost nobody talks about

Everyone in Brazil knows Monica’s gang, it IS the Brazilian counterpart to Peanuts and Little Lulu in many ways, especially Little Lulu, considering it also happens to have a strong, opinionated 6-7 years old girl who typically wears red as the main character.

Anyways, I’m not here to discuss the cultural impact that Monica’s gang had on us Brazilians, I’m actually here to talk about a lesser known spin off with a manga inspired format called Monica Adventures.

The main characters(including Monica herself) now are 15 years old and usually deal with typical teen drama while having many crazy adventures at the same time, the most popular arc of the entire series is the infamous end of the world saga written by Emerson de Abreu, most notably the umbra arc.

However, I noticed that there’s a certain crossover series that nobody talks about, not even the most hardcore fans of Monica Adventures.

And no, I’m not talking about the immensely popular crossover with the superheroes from DC comics.

I’m talking about this crossover:

If you’re young and doesn’t know what I am talking about, there’s an actual Monica Adventures two-part comic called "green treasure" which is about a crossover with many Osamu Tezuka characters, including Princess Sapphire of Princess Knight, and the titular characters of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion.

Monica’s creator, Mauricio de Sousa, was friends with Tezuka back when the latter was alive, and they were planning to make a crossover like this for a long time now.

However, most people(especially kids who grew up with 90s and 2000s anime and manga) in Brazil didn’t exactly grow up with Osamu Tezuka’s works, while SOME of his more well known mangas were released in the country during the early to mid 2000s(most notably Princess Knight, which released in Brazil before it did in the USA), the anime adaptations aren’t that well known, only the 2003 Astro Boy anime and the Princess Knight 60s anime were dubbed here as far as I’m concerned(I know Don Dracula did have a Brazilian dub but it is most likely fully lost media or at the very least only partially found), but even then, they aren’t considered as being extremely popular with anime and manga fans here in the country like Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon are, especially back in the early days.

There’s also the fact that most people who typically read Monica Adventures are kids between the ages of 9-12, yeah, it does have its fans who are older teens and young adults but my point still stands, most of the actual demographic obviously doesn’t know who Tezuka is and would unfortunately care less about his historical importance in the manga industry, I know that because before I even read this crossover back in middle school, I had no idea who Tezuka was and I barely knew anything about his works except maybe for the Astro Boy american animated movie and YouTube videos discussing how The Lion King ripped off Kimba the White Lion.

But then, I’ve actually read this crossover at age 12 and re-read it multiple times throughout the course of my life, all I can say is that while it’s not exactly a masterpiece, it is actually enjoyable and well structured, I did wish it was longer and some plot points felt unnatural like the fact that the main reason why all the characters met each other was because of a visit to a lumberjack business, which actually exists in real life and felt too didactic at times, but other than that, it is an alright crossover.

Would I recommend it to an Osamu Tezuka fan? I guess so? While Astro and Kimba are definitely in character, Sapphire’s initial characterization felt unnecessarily brasher than usual, but she still remains a kind, loyal, strong and decisive heroine like she was in the 60s manga and the anime adaptation(who is also from the 60s), Dr. Tenma and Atlas being antagonists was expected considering their respective roles in the 2003 Astro Boy anime, but what wasn’t expected was Rock Holmes’ appearance and the sudden Black Jack cameo but I digress…

Overall, it is a decent crossover, while it isn’t anything very special and can be very generic at times, the story does pay a nice homage to Osamu Tezuka and his characters, so it’s not outright bad and it does have plenty of good moments.

#uggghhhhh i hateeeee it when Art is Good and manages to hit something within you

Ok also I think the reason I Saw The TV Glow is so powerful (and everyone is making jokes like it got them to start hrt) even beyond its fundamental message of hope and There Is Still Time etc is because as a trans person there are so many people and medias that will ask you the question What If You're Faking It. What If It's Not Real. And ISTVG is the first media I've seen that asks What If You're Not? What if you're not and you keep going on like this?

And it gives that question a name and a physical presence and a weight and an aesthetic and a horror. It's like TV static. It's like falling asleep on the car ride home. It's like living with a light inside you crawling to get out. It's like suffocating to death. It follows that thought to its logical conclusion and, in a frankly extremely painful and hard-to-watch but deeply needed way, excruciatingly draws out what that looks like. Suspended animation. Stasis. A life that is not your life.

It says that choosing not to transition is still a choice.

So I saw a video on a technique for patching sweater holes, and I really wanted to try it.

Fortunately (unfortunately?) I had an old sweater that got chewed up when it accidentally took an unprotected ride through the laundry. It had PLENTY of holes to practice on, of various sizes.

I decided to start on some of the smaller holes:

It went......okay? I guess? It's a new technique. You can probably see which hole I tried first and what progress I made doing it a second time....

I ended up getting myself a new toy to continue (a latch hook, because my crochet hook was doing well-enough-I-guess but I figured I could neaten it up a little if I was less likely to drop loops). So I decided to go after one of the bigger, more irregular holes:

(this picture actually has the most accurate portrayal of the real-life color of the repair yarn. I don't know why it's so grass-green in the other pictures. It's even a little darker than it looks in this picture, and blends in better with the rest of the sweater colors.)

Which also went....okay........I'm new-technique satisfied......and there are a lot fewer holes in the sweater now, anyway. (I did a weave-darning on the spot on the very right, but that was only to try it out to see how it looked.)

So it got me brave enough to try some of the really big holes:

The first of which went okay:

but I'm still clearly struggling with how much working slack to leave on the loops, which you can see with the increasing tension as I worked from right to left.

But you know what?

This monster is next. We'll see how it goes! Regardless, I'm enjoying the technique and learning a LOT. Plus....I'll be able to wear this sweater again!