Talk arty to me B)

confidants.

Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?

The textile book: okay here is some of the ways that textiles are important to human life

me: Okay!

The textile book: Clothes separate the vulnerable human body from the conditions of the outside world, and in doing so absorb the sweat and debris of human existence, accumulating wear and tear according to the lives we live. In this way, various lifestyles and professions are represented by clothing, and the clothing of a loved one retains the imprint of their physical body and their life being lived, as though the clothes absorb part of the wearer's soul

Me: ...oh

The textile book: The process of weaving a garment and the process of a child being formed in its mother's womb are often referred to using the same language. Likewise, when a baby is born, a blanket or other textile material is the first material object it encounters and protects it. Textiles can create the idea of two things being inextricable, as with being "woven together," or can create the sense of separateness, as with a curtain or veil that separates two rooms or spaces, even separating the living from the dead, or separating two realities, such as a performance ending when the curtain falls

Me: ...oh God

The textile book: Odysseus's wife Penelope undid her weaving in secret every night to delay the advances of her suitors. In this way she was able to turn back the passage of time to allow her husband to come home. Likewise the Lakota tell a story of an old woman embroidering time by embroidering a robe with porcupine quills. If she finishes the embroidery, the world will come to an end, but her faithful dog pulls out the quills whenever her back is turned, turning back the clock and allowing existence to continue.

me: ...is...is...is that why we refer to the fabric of space and time?

The textile book: The technological revolution of textile making is sadly underappreciated. The textile arts are possibly the most fundamental human technology, as once people created string and rope, they could create nets for catching fish and small animals, and bags and baskets for carrying food. In the earliest prehistoric times, the first string or cord perhaps came from sinew, found in the body of an animal. Because of this perhaps the body of a living being could be understood as made of a textile material. Indeed textiles have the function of preserving life, as with a surgeon stitching back together the human body or bandages being placed on a wound. Textile technologies are being used to create life-changing implants to restore function to injured parts of the body, as though a muscle or tendon can be woven and made in this way. Cloth can be used to create a parachute that will save a human's life as they plummet out of the sky. Ultimately, the textile technologies are used to enter new parts of the universe. [Photo of an astronaut and details explaining the astronaut's suit]

Me: STOP!! MY MIND IS NOT STRONG ENOUGH FOR THIS

The book is "Textiles: The Whole Story" by Beverly Gordon

:D this is it! The post that got me to borrow this book from my library! This book is constantly rewiring my brain and parts of it constantly slap me in the face when I am going thru daily life and notice textiles.

Like, fiberglass ANYTHING can be considered a textile! Paper? Textile! Chain link fence? Textile!

And more than ever now when I see something like fabric on a couch or mosquito netting I wonder just how much work it would have taken if it was non-factory made. How many people have still had their hands in making it now. 

I never understood why so many cultures placed such importance on textile gifts as ritual, like many native americans gifting blankets. I get it now.

Tons of other stuff too and it's all the time!

And I'm only halfway through!

Anyways OP thank you for bringing this into my life it's literally reshaping the way I think in a way I'm constantly in awe of <3

(the book if anyone was curious)

Here! I found it in an online archive!

It functions as a digital library, so you have to sign in and wait your turn. I'm not sure why you have to do that with a digital book, but it's free so i don't care.

New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

"ok but where would Israeli Jewish ppl go" Palestinians have already created a plan for unity, YOU'RE just horny for this idea of brown "savages" getting revenge. White people did this with indigenous peoples, with freed enslaved people, with apartheid SA...also, if your main concern is the settlers/oppressors while the oppressed people can't even recover their dead to count them... (Insert something that'll have me put on a list)

Liberation is never bloodless, and if you're one of the settlers (which is violence...by squatting on these people's land and barring them from water, food, their own homes and comfort, you are being violent...), idk! My reaction to seeing people who are participating in genocide by being the ruling class in Genocide Land get their shit handed to them is uhh, well, you know where my sympathies lie.

Perfect post but also I want to add that Dr. Abu Sittah, a Nakba survivor, did a survey on inhabited land in Palestine and found that a majority of the depopulated villages from the Nakba and Naksa are uninhabited. Israel literally just prevents refugees from Gaza from just WALKING home out of pure racism. He also lays out an in depth plan about resettlement in this video. So its plainly just racist projecting and people should be ashamed of themselves for pushing the idea that liberation of Palestine means enacting a massacre for all Jews. Those people should educate themselves about Palestinian history and theory before asserting their opinions on things they don't know about.

The Will of This Heart 🖤

hey guys i just finished a draft for one of the stories in my comic but could really use some critique. basically ive been interviewing multicultural people and then writing short comics based on our conversations. i think ive been staring at it too long and need a fresh pair of eyes. please be harsh idc. are the drawings too stiff or monotonous? do i need to add more background? is it written ok should i rewrite anything?

One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health."  Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?  What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?

Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.

For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.

For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.

Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.

One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.

Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.

By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.

The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.

Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.

But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?

Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses. So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.

As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."

The other side of this is the insistence by many people who work with unhoused folk that they are “too mentally ill” to even want housing, that, when given the option, they will choose to remain on the street.

When interrogated a little further, you find out that they aren’t being offered housing as the rest of us understand it. It’s not an apartment (or room) for which they have the key, a bed, bathroom and kitchen(ette) that is only theirs, security for their belongings and the freedom to come and go when and as they please. There are always rules, and hoops to jump through and limitations on their ability to live freely, and the sword of Damocles intentionally hung over their heads: break the rules and we will gladly put you back on the street.

Of course that is going to be rejected by people whose entire lives demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to live within other people’s (or society’s) restrictions and imposed expectations!

“They don’t get better” is ideologically not even a millimeter apart from “they don’t want to get better” as an expression of a completely parochial and controlling perspective on how unhoused people must demonstrate their eager willingness and ability to live like healthy, abled, capitalism driven workers in order to have basic human necessities.

Just give people housing, dammit.

Right, they aren't "refusing housing" because they aren't being offered housing. They're being "offered" incarceration with extra steps.

Hey btw, here's a piece of life advice:

If you know what you'd have to do to solve a problem, but you just don't want to do it, your main problem isn't the problem itself. Your problem is figuring out how to get yourself to do the solution.

If your problem is not eating enough vegetables, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make vegetables stop being yucky". If your problem is not getting enough exercise, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make exercise stop sucking ass". You're not supposed to just be doing things that are awful and suck all the time forever, you're supposed to figure out how to make it stop being so awful all the time.

I used to hate wearing sunscreen because it's sticky and slimy and disgusting and it feels bad and it smells bad, so I neglected to wear it even if I needed to. Then I found one that isn't like that, and doesn't smell and feel gross. Problem solved.

There is no correct way to live that's just supposed to suck and feel bad all the time. You're allowed to figure out how to make it not suck so bad.

The Dungeon Meshi renaissance is making me want to share the resources that taught me how to cook.

Don’t forget, you can check out cookbooks from the library!

Smitten Kitchen: The rare recipe blog where the blog part is genuinely good & engaging, but more important: this is a home cook who writes for home cooks. If Deb recommends you do something with an extra step, it’s because it’s worth it. Her recipes are reliable & have descriptive instructions that walk you through processes. Her three cookbooks are mostly recipes not already on the site, & there are treasures in each of them.

Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden: This is a great guide to seasonal produce & vegetable-forward cooking, and in addition to introducing me to new-to-me vegetables (and how to select them) it quietly taught me a number of things like ‘how to make a tasty and interesting puréed soup of any root veggie’ and ‘how to make grain salads’ and ‘how to make condiments’.

Grains for Every Season: Rethinking Our Way With Grains by Joshua McFadden: in addition to infodumping in grains, this codifies some of the formulas I picked up unconsciously just by cooking a lot from the previous book. I get a lot of mileage out of the grain bowl mix-and-match formulas (he’s not lying, you can do a citrus vinaigrette and a ranch dressing dupe made with yogurt, onion powder, and garlic powder IN THE SAME DISH and it’s great.)

SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT by Samin Nosrat: An education in cooking theory & specific techniques. I came to it late but I think it would be a good intro book for people who like to front-load on theory. It taught me how to roast a whole chicken and now I can just, like, do that.

I Dream Of Dinner (so you don’t have to) by Ali Slagle: Ok, look, an important part of learning to cook & cooking regularly is getting kinda burned out and just wanting someone else to tell you what to make. These dinners work well as written and are also great tweakable bases you can use as a starting place.

If you have books or other resources that taught you to cook or that you find indispensable, add ‘em on a reblog.

Appetite by Nigel Slater (UK) has a lot of very basic recipes accompanied by multiple ways to dress them up. Really good for easy but tasty comfort food (assuming your cultural background includes these as comfort foods). This really helped me get to what the heart of various meals was in a way that lets me tinker around with flavour fearlessly.

The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt (US) is perfect for anybody who's a giant nerd about food and food science - it's 1000 pages and most of that is getting into the whys and wherefores of the techniques it uses. I was a proficient cook before I got a copy and I've still found a bunch of ways to up my game here on things as 'easy' as poaching eggs. Really great for comfort food (US-American edition). If you don't want to shell out for the 1000-page cookbook a lot of his techniques are in his Serious Eats column online.

For my AoNZ crowd...no, you really can't go past the Edmonds Cookbook for all the basics like shepherd's pie and the unbeatable one-egg chocolate sponge. It also has a really handy set of charts and tables in the front for cooking times and temperatures and measurement conversions. But if you want to get serious about our baking tradition, Ladies, A Plate by Alexa Johnston is where you should start. You too can make brandy snaps from scratch! You will never be short of ginger crunch again! And I could go on.

Also an enthusiastic second for Smitten Kitchen, and the caveat I am legally obliged to give for Salt Fat Acid Heat: yes it's otherwise very good but she is wrong and potentially dangerously so about iodised salt. Know your own diet and location, and if you don't eat a lot of iodine-rich foods and/or live somewhere with deficient soils (e.g. Aus/NZ), DO use it. You can't taste the difference no matter what she thinks.

A four page comic about drawing, drawn for the Portland Public Library's newest exhibit, "Why We Make Comics: Reflections on Storytelling".

If you live in Portland ME, you can see this comic, as well as three others drawn by Isabella Rotman, Caroline Hu, and Liz Prince, on display from October 6th to December 31 at the library!

chameleon chameleon

a comic about being bigender, and bisexual, by me! happy pride everyone.

It’s delicious! I promise! 

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad

OP this is EXCELLENT

you know how kids tend to subconsciously adopt the mannerisms of their parents? i wonder how far back that stretches.

do i laugh like my great grandfather, because that's the way my grandma laughed, and my mom copied her?

does the way my dad make comedic sounds when he's driving actually originate with a distant uncle two hundred year ago, who made funny noises in the horse-drawn cart because it made his niece laugh?

i wonder which of my little mannerisms came from ancestors long passed, and i wonder which of mine will echo in family descendants long after i'm gone.

#we are echoes#another verse to be song again#in a different way#to the same tune

I'm a love letter

Do Bug Zappers Work? Yeah—About As Well As Any Other Indiscriminate Wildlife Slaughter.

Bug zappers kill bugs by the thousands. But there’s a problem: They kill the wrong bugs. They are ineffective against mosquitoes and other biting flies, and their otherwise indiscriminate killing can disrupt pollination and generally throw the environment out of balance. Plus, the force of their electrocution can spew a mist of disease-ridden bug parts out into the air. All of the mosquito experts we spoke with and every relevant university extension office we could find unanimously condemned bug zappers. To keep an area free of bugs or to prevent yourself from getting bitten, there are much better alternatives.

Read more:

I was a pretty weird outcasted child so one of the greatest wonders of my adult life has been realizing that you can just go someplace and meet some people and casually make some friends, and they might not be in your life forever but you can hang out for a while, and then you can go somewhere else and do it again, and again, if it doesn’t work out no biggie, etc.

Also there’s no point in your life where the window on making friends just closes. You’re never going to hit an age where that’s that, you’re done making friends, you’ll never make another one again. Seems pretty academic but honestly I think it would have saved younger-me (and particularly university-aged me) a lot of stress and worry if someone had just sat me down and told me this.

There is a version of you in the future looking back at who you are now with kindness and understanding, feeling so proud of how hard you are fighting even though your struggles are so painful, feeling glad that you pulled through it with so much strength.