FishLake

I like drawing characters but haven’t done so in the past few years. At one point in my life I wanted to be a comic book artist. I am trying to expand my art making back into character drawing. Especially since my kids are growing into artists themselves, it’s been fun rendering their ideas on paper. They heard a song on my playlist and I decided to show them the music video. Starlight Brigade by TWRP is one of my favorite songs. The music video is beautiful. It’s disappointing that the featured singer (Danny Avidan of Game Grumps and Ninja Sex Party fame) has stayed silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Regardless, please don’t judge this too harshly. The character is inspired by the music video and the pose is lifted from some Attack on Titan art I found.

Our household withstood the full force K-Pop Demon Hunters for a long time. During a recent snowstorm we decided to give it a shot. There have been lots of requests from our 2 and 4-year-old. This was one of my favorites I’ve done so far.

Crayon is a really fun medium.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9118653

My 4-year-old has reached a big milestone. We’ve been sending surprise messages from across the living room with our Lego train all morning. They’ve produced their first Trogdor the Burninator. Look at all of its majesty.

My 4-year-old has reached a big milestone. We’ve been sending surprise messages from across the living room with our Lego train all morning. They’ve produced their first Trogdor the Burninator. Look at all of its majesty.

Pretty proud of them. Been hand building so long I thought I’d forgotten how to throw. Not pictured are about a dozen failures 🙃

Hello beautiful artists and art appreciating comrades. The school year is starting soon here in the big bad place. Each year I like to fill my classroom walls with artwork, creating a classroom gallery. To mitigate displaying my own biases, I would like to illicit your help in selecting pieces. I would love to see a few of your favorite pieces you’ve found/made recently.

Keep in mind I have an elementary school classroom in a very conservative and reactionary school district. Of course though I want my students to see as much subversive art as possible without getting fired. I can’t trans commie pill the youth without being at school. And please no AI created images.

If you could, please provide:

• An image of the artwork (or link to it)
• Artist name (link to artist profile/statement if possible)
• Year created, if know (please try to select contemporary pieces)
• Why you like the piece :)

The Fish Family will be embarking on our first family vacation sometime in the next coming weeks. It’ll be just the four of us: my partner, 4yo, 2yo, and myself. We’ll be on the road for a long time, around 15 hours over two days. And the same coming back.

So the question is… how the hell do we do this?

We’ve got pit stops factored in. We got snacks. We got toys. We got music and audiobooks and the nuclear option of an old busted iPad that may or may not work. But I’m nervous about how this is going to work.

Our kids take up the back seats. 4yo sits in a forward facing carseat. 2yo is read facing. My partner and I are tiny people. So our arms have a hard time as it is reaching back to aid our kids with anything. How’re all you all traveling with toddlers?

Edit: My partner has vetoed my idea of getting one of these. I married this person. Where do we even go from here? Reddit answers only.

Where did the “Donate to the IOF” button go?

There’s a good chance many of us will be unable to get the vaccine this year.

Their bottom line: Going forward, Covid-19 vaccines will only be recommended for people over 65 or with at least one chronic condition. If manufacturers want to offer updated vaccines to younger adults, they must run a new placebo-controlled trial after a variant arrives. Their rationale is that, given higher levels of population immunity, the original trials are no longer relevant. Vinay followed up by saying, “This is a restoration of trust. It’s bringing us back to evidence.”

We have to be strong and remember we’re in this together. Continue to organize. Demand that your orgs adopt disease mitigation practices in absence of these lifesaving vaccines. Educate others. Protect our young, old, and disabled comrades. A better world is possible.

Basically that. I wanted to play Minecraft this summer since it’s been ages and introduce it to my kid. Didn’t realize I’d missed the deadline to migrate my Mojang account to a Microsoft one back in 2023.

I wish I could still access my old account. I really tried. But it’s lost. I could buy a new copy of the game. I could upload my old skin, the one I made myself in 2012, but it wouldn’t be the same. I won’t have my name, and I can’t claw it back from Microsoft. Worse still, the account I bought my partner when we lived apart, so we could raise pigs together, is gone as well.

Maybe I should buy some new copies. Start over, new usernames, new skins. So many things have changed since I last played. Old pastimes are subsumed by new responsibilities and new joys. Life is sedimentary like that. Some times we must accept that we can’t unearth the past.

You can catch a glimpse of my character if you look up my username. He’s what I used to be, in my favorite shirt and cardigan that no longer fit, and my favorite beanie I lost on a climbing trip. I’m glad he still has them. I like to think my and my partner’s old Minecraft avatars are still present somehow in the digital ether of Microsoft’s servers. Tending to their pigs and spaghetti minecart tracks and falling asleep together over Skype.

Some people interpret their dreams as an exercise in self-discovery. Some let their dreams inspire them in the waking world. Others regard them more simply as a novelty of the human mind. Still more do a fourth or even a fifth thing I can’t think of (my list felt incomplete). Whatever your experience or opinions of dreams are, I think dreams are neat. We go to sleep and our brains hallucinate for a while and sometimes we remember it. I think we often forget how incredible that is. 

If you’d be willing to share, I’d like to know about your recurring dreams.

A few weeks ago I disposed of the last of my 3yo’s heart medication. They don’t take anymore. I mean my partner and I haven’t given it to them in two years. It’s no longer part of their treatment. Their treatment plan, in fact, ended about two years ago. For all intends and purposes they have a clean bill of health. But the medication has been sitting in the back of the fridge, like a splitter that was never pulled out. 

The liquid medication, Amiodarone, is a thick syrupy elixir. Our pharmacist said it was okay to dilute and flush it, which seemed uh…not good for the environment. Amiodarone is hard enough on the human body. When they were taking it, our then 8 month old couldn’t go out in the direct sunlight for more than a few minutes for risk of sun poisoning. Among other side effects to their eyes and liver. It is potent and costly and, given to an infant, inevitably ends up on your couch. Can’t imagine what it might do to a river system. 

Our 3yo’s next cardiology appointment is in a year. After that it might be two years. Then maybe not again until they’re a teenager. My partner and I always talk about getting rid of the Amio. That it’s just a reminder of our trauma, not theirs. They don’t have any memory of it. We’ve never wanted our 3yo to grow up with a sense that they’re meek and fragile. That their defining characteristic is some event that happened to them before they could remember anything. They know they went to the hospital, they know they had a sick heart. More importantly they now that dozens of doctors and nurses worked tirelessly to heal them. Sure, they know these things and act differently. They play doctor differently than other kids, insisting on blood pressure cuffs and echocardiograms. That’s what their cardiologist does. They wear a mask with us to the store, are aware of people who are sick, wash their hands regularly. My partner and I sometimes wonder what unknown traumas they endure. It’d be unfair of us to carry on a token from back then in our fridge.

We’d long since taken down the milestone ECG charts from the cork board. The NG tubes are tucked into a box with other hospital memories. We’ve stored all the photos from the hospital, all the ones from immediately before  and after, on a shared drive. There are some hand-me-downs our 1yo never wore, some toys they’ll never play with because those are hospital toys. All those reminders, big and small, are just as compartmentalized as the trauma in our minds. Therapy and consoling each other when we remember helps too of course. But the Amio stayed in the fridge and became almost like a background texture. 

I consulted a friend with knowledge about drug disposals. They suggested soaking charcoal with the medication and burning it in a container. Then dispose of the container and the ashes. I wanted to do that. But I didn’t have time. That is to say that I did actually have time. Plenty of time. Two years and more of time. It could have waited in our fridge longer. I could have incinerated it and done something with the ashes, like incorporating them into ceramic glaze or something, anything to hold onto it. But I put it in the medication drop off bin at the pharmacy. It was unceremonious. And I felt guilty. 

Sometimes I worry that around a corner or behind a door I’ll be back there, in the hospital. Machines and doctors and nurses and monitors and that jeering noise the monitors make when a heart rate is too fast. And my baby, ashen and unmoving, blanketed in wires and tubes, is still there in the past. Where did it all go?