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Samia Halaby (Palestinian, 1936), Mediterranean #279, 1974. Oil on canvas, 48 x 66 in.

followers who have had/are looking to get top surgery!!! i highly recommend thinking about scar mobilization. many times a scar after soft tissue surgery will feel "stiff" or "stuck." this is because in scar tissue, the soft tissue layers partially fuse together:

luckily this can be reversed at least partially most of the time through massage. once the wound is completely scarred over, you can begin to gently but firmly massage across the scar with 2-3 fingers in up and down, side to side, and clockwise/counterclockwise circular motions (more repetitions than i'm doing here), you can also gently pull the scar if it's not painful:

start with very light pressure and increase as time goes on. this should never be painful, only sometimes feeling that "tight" feeling. again, the wound must be COMPLETELY scarred over, no scabs whatsoever. but you can start massaging as soon as that happens.

you can do these as often as you like as long as it's not painful, but once or twice a day for maybe 5 minutes is definitely enough

btw this works for every soft tissue scar, not just top surgery. the same method is used for things like C-section scarring

scar massage is so helpful!!! best thing my care team told me when it was time to start scar massage was that when you’re doing it, you will likely feel the scar tissue breaking underneath your fingers. it feels like rope splitting underneath your fingers. it’s a weird thing to get used to but it’s completely normal

!! i forgot about this sensation. you will probably feel the tissue give way to the massage, it doesn't hurt it just feels really weird. you will notice this especially if you begin massage as soon as u can, less so if it's an old scar

Under the Garden Moon: Woodland Whimsy

My friend keeps sending photos of raw chicken in the group chat, I don't know why :/

our etsy shop is back up and running!

if you'd like to help a severely disabled schizophrenic trans person of color stabilize after being homeless for 6 months, two of which were spent in a hotel, you can now support us through etsy if you choose! if you favorite and interact with our shop, it will help us be seen by more people and improve our metrics!

we make y2k, gothic, kawaii, and alternative jewelry and accessories, as well as sell original paintings, and offer traditional painting commissions!

our ko-fi shop is still open as well, but we need the organic foot traffic from etsy right now to help us pay for our expenses, like our electric bill. thanks for reading, interacting and sharing!

Repairing with gold, kintsugi

this guy gets it

The decadence

lost in the sauce

Kristoffer Zetterstrand 2003- oil on canvas

blue_average | blue_close | blue_distant | clear_close | dense_distant | LowMist | Overcast | standard_average | sunset_average | sunset_dense

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)

hedonism is good actually rich people just suck at it

i think not only do we have a moral obligation to preserve human life but also a moral obligation to maximize the pleasure of others and ourselves (provided it doesn’t hurt anyone)

people don’t just deserve to eat food, they deserve to eat good food that tastes good without worrying about nutritional content

people don’t just deserve clothes, they deserve nice clothes that are well made and fit their personal style

people don’t just deserve the bare minimum, they don’t just deserve to be alive, they deserve to live and have nice things for no other reason than making that particular person happy

Here's another drawing procress

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

this is a baby monkey

he’s too small….. I need to eat him

🏳️‍🌈 New additions to our shop; severely disabled trans person needs help stabilizing after 6 months of homelessness ♿

I'm equinox, I'm a schizophrenic person who deals with arthritis, degenerative disc disease, gastroparesis and other health issues; i just recovered from being homeless for 6 months straight, 2 of which were spent living in a hotel. i need help stabilizing in my new apartment. if you're interested in supporting please feel free to check out my Ko-Fi shop where i sell handmade jewelry: