can we stop promoting the idea that nature has to look beautiful to be good?

The fastest way to shut down my "freelance life means I have to constantly be working" thoughts is to remind myself that if I was a boss holding a worker to the standards I hold myself to, their union would hunt me for sport and nobody would blame them.

Not me immediately screenshotting this and posting it to the OPP freelance writers chat I'm in

I tell myself: "I'm the owner of the company. But more importantly, I'm also the head of Scriveners Local 23, and I have some demands."

So what that means is that I have a four day work week. I work monday-tuesday and then Thursday-Friday. Fuck the boss if they don't like it.

I have a workplace wellness program that means I can take breaks for yoga, meditation, exercise, and naps.

I have unlimited paid personal days thanks to my project oriented work structure--I get to decide what's the best balance between production and restoration. Fuck the boss if they don't like it.

I have five days each quarter for vacation. attending a convention, conference, expo, bookstore event tour, or a writing workshop *is not a vacation.* that's business-related travel. taking a day or two for a weekend jaunt *is not a vacation.* that's unlimited paid personal days. Five working days. Each Quarter. Vacation. and since I always have wednesdays off, it doesn't count.

I know there's a piece of your brain saying "I have to hustle, I have to hustle"

I know

My brain does that too

And without the union boss in my head, I'll just work until I drop. That's what I did for years. And then I burnt out so bad that this is the first time I have actually made real, noticable progress(1.) similar to my pre-burnout rates in years.

Because the union boss went on strike, and the boss' bottom line was *destroyed.* If I have to crunch now, the union boss enforces recovery time. that's all overtime. but since I don't get paid a wage, I get all that back in time.

The boss never wants to see a strike like that again.

There is power in a union, even if it's only the union in your head.

(1.) only it's not similar. it's half the "speed" of pre-burnout. It's probably my actual true real speed and not my sweatshop labour hustle culture speed. FUCK THE BOSS IF THEY DON'T LIKE IT.

I’m so emotional about dinosaur stuffed animals,,, there are these creatures, extinct long before any of us were alive, but we found their bones and their eggs and their footprints. And we made drawings and models of what they could’ve looked like. And we made them into stuffed animals so we could hold them. We made them soft so we could love them. I’m sobbing

Yeah, we're the animal so preoccupied with petting other animals we're sort of collectively upset there are animals we never get to pet, so we make proxies to snuggle and tell their ghosts we'd have loved them if they were here.

Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.

I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.

Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.

And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!

Is that not just the coolest shit ever????

Impeccable tags on this one, well done folks

These tags do nothing but avoid the question. You're just complaining about people who bring up a point you don't have an answer to.

girl this has been addressed by people like anarcblr and anarchapella like...several times at this point. But i’ll re-write it for you really clear, just this once, because I want them to be visible on this post.

Your Argument: Anarchy would interfere with the ability of diabetics to obtain insulin. Therefore, anarchists are either naive or outright malicious.

My Response:

1. Diabetics are already having a very hard time obtaining insulin--that is, even with current supply chains and infrastructure in place, 50% or more of diabetics worldwide don’t have adequate access. [source] So this is not a new problem that would be created by anarchy after/during some theoretical revolution, but one that already exists. This problem is made worse, rather than better (as those tags point out), by capitalism and the government, two things that anarchists famously oppose.

2. You’re starting from the idea of some kind of ‘anarchist revolution’, where anarchists go around instituting+enforcing new rules and (somehow) these negatively impact insulin availability. That’s just not accurate. Anarchism is not about imposing specific rules, but about removing barriers to you and your friends choosing your own rules. It’s about empowering you, as well as everyone else, to control your own self and nobody else.

This is a big part of why nobody will give you a “straight answer”, anarchism is not about creating plans for other people to carry out in the future. It is about encouraging people to create their own plans to address the present. Ergo, there isn’t the same emphasis on ‘waiting for the rev’ and ‘after the revolution’ that many statist communists have--instead, there’s a call to address conditions in a radical way right now, to reduce capital and govt’s hold on us now. I have friends who I talk to about this stuff all the time, trying to think of ways to meet medical needs with resources we’ve already got access to outside of capitalism.

3. People (some of them anarchists) are already working really hard to make insulin more available! The Open Insulin Foundation for example, who are “working to develop  the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all.” There’s also the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, who aren’t working on insulin specifically, but do have some other medicines they’re developing in an open-source way. Not to mention--all the people who are already making insulin right now? and all their equipment, and all their supplies? Those aren’t going to magically disappear. If those people didn’t have to worry about paying their bills (if anarchists helped them meet their other needs, perhaps?) why shouldn’t they share that knowledge and experience in return? 

tl;dr your point about medicine in anarchist communities is fundamentally based on some incorrect assumptions about how anarchism works. if you wanna talk more about community medicine and explore more solutions, totally message me! As an anarchist dependent on medications for a couple chronic conditions, it’s a subject I think about a lot.

It’s less a matter of “holy shit after The Revolution how will I get my meds? :(” and more a matter of “damn, right now i have to work so I can even afford to buy my meds, depending on a fragile supply chain with humanitarian crises at its base. Let’s figure out a way to get around all that so we can all live better lives!”

People ask others to have a plan as if real well thought out plans don't fail constantly, including the one that is the basis for all "modern societies"

The next major project is at last done. 5inch hoop, mostly single strand with three strand for the scales. Holo shimmer accents, felt padding for the bubbles. I like how it turned out for my first fish!

i love you, Two Catfish as Street Musicians in the Kashina district, ca 1855 of an unidentified artist, you go so hard

@existentialterror

Grad school is lying to you. You can indulge fixations on obscure topics on your own time. You can sit in a library color-coding notes on articles printed from JSTOR for free. You can argue with dead philosophers in essay format whenever you like. Academia is a state of mind.

Rainbow Road is done! Just shy of 3 yards 🌈

I definitely want to only tablet weave right now but I have to do other things 😭

Source

CDC Wastewater Viral Activity Monitoring

BreatheTeq

I bought some Polwarth fiber dyed by a friend at market (Petit Ours Fibers), spun it into a 2ply at meetup, and then knit it into a Castle Cap.

Gotta love Polwarth.

can we just have, like, any feminist movement whatsoever. did everyone just stop caring?

feminism became a declawed commodified marketable trend and then trends changed and everyone just decided to pretend we won feminism despite nothing changing? despite things actively getting worse? is that what happened?

Coats of some British and Icelandic sheep breeds:

Greyface Dartmoor; Cheviot; Icelandic; Beulah; Cotswold; Welsh Mountain; Suffolk; Southdown; and British Milksheep.

anyway i will always remember my freshman year world history teacher who spent a whole day teaching us about the development of hinduism and its cultural impact and the next day came into class and (basically) said “alright so who guessed that everything i said yesterday was bullshit?”

the thing i took away from this was

american non academics have been and will continue to butcher greek mythology and sell it to you like the bible. please. PLEASE. remember those things can be fun but your bullshit detectors should be on.

i am begging people who Were Not In My Class to stop making moral judgements towards the only teacher in a christian school who drilled it into our heads that we had to actually question what we were taught and how we were taught it. you werent there. engage with what he was trying to say or ignore it lol

I can't believe people are missing the lesson that's being taught here: don't trust authority figures on what they say and do your own research! People can and do lie about information, hoping that you will just trust them and not think for yourself. Even experts who aren't acting malicious have their own implicit biases which lead them to omit or not clarify certain information. This shows how important it is to seek other perspectives and make your own conclusions instead of just listening to the first thing you hear about a topic.

FWIW, "mauve" was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.

It was an eye-popping magenta purple

HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey ...

...which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.

(This dress is labeled "mauve" as it is the color the above becomes after fading).

They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.

Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.

Oh! Just like the Victorians did to the Gothic, where actual Gothic cathedrals which had been built to be bright and full of light were portrayed as dark and gloomy places, because that's what happens after a cathedral is filled with candles for several hundred years.

As a person who spends a lot of time lying down and rarely does any kind of activities, I come off as someone who's taking a lot of 'me' time, or a lot of 'resting' time. However I have to assert that any time I spend recovering from an activity is not 'me time' or 'resting time', it's the time that is stolen from me. I can't do anything with this time. I am in pain, I can't move, my activities are limited to 'hopelessly distracting myself so that I do not experience the full horror of what's going on in my body right now'. I don't even get to have 'me time' because of how much of the time is stolen from me.