I Dont Even Know

Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew

Some male friends of mine were once talking about how useful they’d be in an apocalypse, and I pointed out that as a weaver and sewer and maker of stuff, I’d be pretty damn useful and they tried to tell me they could just loot clothes from WalMart and they’d be fine. As if WalMart has endless supplies without weekly deliveries.

So just last night a friend of mine was talking about who he’d round up in the event of a zombie apocalypse and how I’m his go-to farmer on account of I know how to keep an entire homestead up and running and we’re talking about what kind of resources I’d need to keep a colony of about 50-ish people alive and i bring up what all goes into processing wool for clothing and such and he just kind of stops me like ‘wait, wait, we don’t need to do all of that because we can scavenge for clothes we don’t need to be able to make them’ and i’m just like, ‘dude, that works in the short-term maybe but if this community is going to be sustainable you’ve gotta have people whose job it is to make clothes and blankets and shit’

also cloth rots pretty quickly when left exposed to the elements and after the first few years or so anything we manage to scavenge isn’t going to be wearable anymore and anywho we’ve got to teach the kids everything or they’re not gonna know what to do some decades down the line when everything’s too rusted or rotted out to be of any practical use anymore, etc etc, and he’s reckoning that things like woodworking and smithing and ranching are more important than say, cleaning or cooking or dairying and meanwhile i’m just smh may all the gods have mercy on this poor fool

He also balked when i brought up how to run a laundry and what all was needed to make everyday shit like soap and toothpaste - like dude, you think this is going to be all about hunting and scavenging and being neato manly-man drifters like in the walking dead let me teach you a thing about keeping a village alive and healthy for more than a week man most of it is shit you keep thinking is non-essential on account of it being “women’s work” or “simple chores” that’re actually pretty labor-intensive and take time, training, knowledge, and practice to do successfully, let alone well, and are 100% absolutely necessary work in order for you to have any reasonably good quality of life after the world ends

I’m reminded of this post I read a while back about some guy who thought his underwear lasted years because his wife would periodically replace his boxers and socks with identical boxers and socks when they started to look old and he just … never noticed.

People who have been comfortable all their lives have no idea how important socks are.

Ask a soldier, prisoner, or someone who’s been homeless about socks.

I love socks

I’d add animal husbandry and handling to the list of things I’ve seen so many men instantly NOPE out and where farm/horse girls will rule the world.

Maybe this is the real reason so many people in post apocalypse movies are wearing leather, it’s the only think left and no one knows how to make new clothes.

Running a village would be very much like running a household but just 50× the quantity, cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening, child care, elderly/sick care arnt as glamerious as hunting and building the perfect impenetrable base but they are the things that are vital to human life.

And all of these things become 100 times more labor intensive when you no longer have electricity. Being a cook without a fridge or any appliances is an all day affair that takes metoculious planning just for a single meal. There is no getting home after a days work and preparing a quick meal. Cooking is the entire days work.

Ever sewed anything without a sewing machine? A simple piece that would take an experinced seamstress 20 minutes to throw together with a machine is now a 8 day affair.

Machines will have laundry clean and dry in an hour. Hand scrubbing and air drying can take all day or longer depending on the weather.

There is no grocery stores, you want bread? Well you need a farmer for the weat, a miller to turn it into flour, a means of aquiring salt (mine or seawater evaporation), someone to fetch and filter water (no indoor plumbing), someome who can build an oven, someone to cut wood to fire the oven, and a baker to put it all together. This isn’t even including yeast.

If you want any quality of life or to eat anything but boiled meat in the apocolypse you need to prioritize the mundane aspects of life.

If you want any quality of life or to eat anything besides boiled meat in the apocalypse, you need to prioritize the mundane aspects of life.

the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

So what makes a butcher knife more butch than other knives?

The knife itself isn't necessarily butch. It's named that because it's wielded by a butcher, who is more butch than the other food shop owners

Hmm, I see.

What, then, makes the butcher more butch than other food shop owners?

the knife

That's what ancient Greek philosophy is like

I think something a lot of other people can relate to is the way that you get so conditioned to discomfort that you stop registering it.

I remember sitting at the table with my family, eating dinner as a child. I’d try to eat, because of course I was hungry. But sometimes the flavor or texture was so repugnant that it moved into a category of Not Food.

“Two more bites before you can leave the table.”

“I can’t,” I’d say, trying to explain the impossibility.

But because I was a child they heard, “I won’t,” and made me sit at the table. I’d sit in dull agonized silence, bored and hungry for hours until bedtime when they’d give up. I’d hate myself for not eating and my parents for forcing me to sit there. The few forcefeeding moments ended in vomit.

They’d say, “If you don’t eat this you can’t eat a snack later,” and I moved past trying to communicate my discomfort into accepting that I’d just be hungry.

That state of affairs didn’t last, because my parents realized nothing could force me to eat so they catered to my palate, worrying they’d starve me. But the message stuck. If you can’t do anything about a situation, just accept the suffering.

A few years later my mother called me off the playground to ask, “Are you limping?”

I shrugged. My feet had hurt for a long time, but that was just the way things were now. My mom pulled my socks and shoes off and gasped. The soles of my feet were covered in huge painful planters warts.

“Why didn’t you say anything?!” She demanded but I could only shrug at her. I’d learned a long time ago that saying things about my discomfort didn’t matter, so now I had no words. Sometimes things hurt and sometimes they don’t. I simply accepted and did my best.

Now as an adult trying to learn to improve my own conditions can be hard. If I make food that I can’t eat I’ll force myself to sit at the counter still, full of guilt and self loathing, trying to will myself to eat it.

At first I needed my betrothed to gently take it away to present me with something I could eat. Now on my own I can usually admit that it’s not happening before too long and get something else, but I still feel guilty.

Laying in bed at night waiting for my betrothed to finish getting ready I let out a huge sigh of relief when they turned the lights off.

“Why didn’t you turn them off if they bothered you?” they asked the first time it happened.

“I didn’t even know it was bothering me until it was gone.”

Assessing my physical state now to see if I can improve it is something I’m still relearning but I’m relieved to finally have the space and support to do it.

Just learned about garden path sentences.

They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.

So we get gems like

my collection of "weird social practices that are too funny to be considered rude"

"I would kill for you. I would die for you" would you take a break for me? Would you sit down and rest? For a day, a week, a year? Would you let others take care of your needs for me? Would you let yourself be held for me? By me?

OP i hope its okay to reblog with your additions bc they are good

not only is it okay, I think i'd like that very much, thank you.

It's still kinda wild how Phineas and Ferb managed to completely hijack an idiom. Now whenever someone hears a sentence leading with "If I had a nickel for everytime [...]", odds are their brain auto fills with "I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice," rather than "I'd be rich," or "I could [action that requires purchasing something requiring an obscene amount of money]". Y'know, what the idiom originally was

free soup

you’re going to be so, so cursed.

I mean, that’s not wrong, we just eventually decided to start cataloging curses and naming them things like “amoebic dysentery”

wdym an average platonic bond cant be deep and meaningful do none of you remember the power of friendship

i have trust in the people.

this blog stands with palestine and if you don’t you can get the fuck out. what israel is doing is genocide and i will not tolerate anyone who supports it.

instead of killing myself i will watch documentary about the ocean

some big guys down there. Huge. they don't know about the economy

I hate it when therapists and other psych professionals try to reassure me that the screening test scores and other such numbers aren't that important and that we shouldn't focus on them. No fuck you, I want you to look at how fucked up these scores are. Look at them. I grew up being told that this is normal and I am fine, and I've got test scores saying that I'm not fine.

If you went to a doctor saying "idk I guess I feel fine, I've just always felt like this but I have a lingering suspicion that it might not be normal just because it's always been like this", and two thirds of your blood test results were in the Holy Fuck How Are You Even Alive, a doctor wouldn't go "don't you worry about the tests, if you feel fine then surely there's nothing wrong with you :)"

You ever have a random thought that's not intrusive, but somehow simultaneously so instinctive and so detached from your regular everyday life, that you vaguely figure it was probably just an ancestral spirit possessing you for a second?

I was baking an apple pie for fun, freehanding cardamom by vibes alone. And a thought pops into my head, must not be wasteful with them, spices are expensive. And I had to halt right there for a second. Why would I feel financial guilt about the amount of seasoning in homemade goods, when I spend money on far more frivolous shit every single day? My own weight in cinnamon would cost less than my rent.

Thank you for your concern, Maarit from the 1600s, but trust me, we're good. I can measure this cardamom with my heart and not the scale.

I came up with a new saying:

"You wouldn't bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven."

It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn't enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you're also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.

The "came back wrong" -trope, but there's nothing wrong with them. It's still just the exact same person, save for one major detail: They can no longer lie. The dead don't lie, there's no reason to say anything that is not truth in the lands of the dead. They don't remember anything about being dead, and they can still remember and recognise that the living do lie and say things that are not true. And they just cannot do that anymore. They can omit things, but not fabricate flat-out lies.

Also as a minor detail, they now see perfectly well in the dark and have that animal eye gleam. It's dark in the lands of the dead, that's just how people are there. It's not a huge change in who they are, as a person, but god if it isn't unsettling to walk into a completely dark room and before you turn on the light, you see this mf just sitting there, reading the newspaper like this:

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!