Cross stitch pattern of a dolphin with the quote “You thought it was an accident, but I did it on porpoise”. Thanks to Dazz for the sprite. Download the PDF here: Dolphin Pattern

Grid Size:61W x 74H
Design Area:4.21″ x 5.14″ (59 x 72 stitches)
Colors: 3

My Patron Marissa is an experienced alchemist working at one of those “we buy gold” pawn shops in order to get gold to turn into even more precious metals. Yeah, gold is expensive, but nuclear cooling rods cost an arm and a leg.

I’ve been told that making art during a trying time is an act of rebellion. I guess that’s what I’m doing now. Rage against the dying of the light and all that. I’m just tired, and I’ve been tired for a long time.

And I see how much better life could be, while simultaneously feeling guilty for what I have and angry about the world I was born in.

There are times when I look around and think of how we are living in the past and news from just last week sounds like it happened decades ago. I get print ads for toilet paper in the mail and my local newspaper runs articles about masks and every single one of them looks to me like a piece of old ephemera on my brother’s militaria tables, like those yellowing headlines about service on the home front.

We’re all in this together they say.

And there are people who tell me that giving up is what the folks on top want. They say that hopeless people are easier to manipulate. That if you isolate someone and break them, then they’ll do whatever you want.

I’m under no illusions that some shady mustache twirling character is specifically targeting me, but I do know that people like me have almost no value to the rich people who dictate what we can and cannot do with our lives.

Maybe creating something that doesn’t add to the national GDP is in itself a tiny display of resistance.

I do it on porpoise.