Hi there, I'm Enviri | early 30s | they/them | queer | disabled | freak | My blog name is in reference to my late dog Melody, who will always be part of me.
It’s legitimately triggering to me, getting people begging for money in my inbox. Especially the ways which some of them do it.
“$20-30 may not seem like much to you”
Oh??? You know my financial situation???
Fuck off.
If anyone’s curious why I basically never answer asks, it’s because my inbox is full of landmines for triggering stuff surrounding financial insecurity and I cannot handle it, and it only gets added to day by day with what are almost certainly 99% scams which are hoping to prey upon my empathy.
If you claim to understand intersectionality and then say things like "manhood isn't an intersection" or "men aren't oppressed for being men" then you don't know anything about intersectionality. The point is that everything intersects with everything. Something can't not intersect. And no, manhood isn't oppressed in a void. When it intersects with other things, however--
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
On this day, 4 July 1972, students at Fort Street Boys’ High School in Sydney went on strike when they were told by the principal that their shoulder-length hair was too long, and that unless they cut it they would be prevented from sitting their graduation exams.
100 students held a mass meeting on the lawns of the school, and voted to immediately strike. The next day they were joined by more students, ran their own strike flag up the school flagpole, and gave interviews to TV crews arguing for democratic control of the school by students and teachers, rather than the education authorities.
After the strikers returned to classes, the schoolauthorities retaliated and suspended six students “for inciting a strike” and for “gross insolence”. 200 students then held another mass meeting and went on strike again, while the school’s unionised teachers issued a statement calling for the withdrawal of the hair rule.
In a bid to end the unrest, the NSW Department of Education interviewed and reinstated the six students in early August, while no further students at the school were harassed for the length of their hair.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/11258/fort-street-high-school-students'-strike
I love seeing stores and cafes that display and sell shitty local art. Everybody on the planet should be making shitty local art. Everyone in the community should get to see what shitty local art everyone else is making. Eventually you will find something and be like hold on. This weirdly speaks to me. I've never seen anything quite like this, whether because of this person's idiosyncratic style or strange choice of subject matter or what. And suddenly your favorite piece of art is a collage painting done by a woman who waits tables during the day and does roller derby at night and uses the excess flyers and paper menus from both places of work to make amateur art on the weekends and you realize this is such a bizarre combination of circumstances that has produced something so striking to you, how lucky you are to live in a world where this got to exist and you got to see it
This is why I highly recommend not being snobbish about art. Being a big baby just means you miss out on some of the most interesting stuff you'll see.
If you only ever move in curated spaces, look at things chosen for you, you miss out. You miss out!
Shitty art is some of the most meaningful stuff you'll ever see.
a moment of silence for my roommate who has to endure me doing linguistics homework. out loud. making sounds with parts of my mouth and throat I didn’t even realise I could use to make sounds. repeatedly and with passion
it's so crazy that i spend my life expecting myself to become some notable person through art/writing, punishing myself for "not trying," as if i haven't also been discouraged against becoming an artist/writer
but all the people who led to me being alive today were just farmers and seamstresses. a few tailors, a gardener. the most notable positions ive found were a farm steward and a carriage driver. some of them just spent their days Digging Holes.
and i'll never know what went on inside their minds as they went about all that work. but. the standards for our existence today are really fucking high when you think about it. like why are so many 13 year olds trying to become famous online?
i doubt my great-great-great-grandmother was concerned about shit like Social Networking and Media Sponsorships. she just. sewed. helped on the farm. taught her children. repaired the farmhand's clothes when they came home from work. maybe made her child a beautiful dress outfit for a special event -like my great-grandfather, a tailor, did for my grandmother (even tho he was a Total Piece of Shit).
she just passed on her skills and what she learned from life. maybe she was discontent and unfulfilled like me, or maybe she was happy and carefree, maybe she was stern and strict. i don't know. but she didn't have to do anything grand in her lifetime for it to still matter now.
and those things i don't know, can't know - who they were as people, not just their roles in the community/family... those are the things that matter in our lives while we have them. whether we're kind. whether we're trustworthy. whether we're the defender, bystander, or aggressor. idk. am i making sense
the life you live isn't a big deal but who you are is
I miss my leeches for all the normal pet reasons but I also miss being able to use them as a one-hit death blow to end stupid conversations. Whenever I defend the ecological importance of parasites someone will inevitably crawl up and go “well I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if you had them” and oooooo boy let me tell you. It was so fun to hit back with “I DO” and then whip out my phone and show them 30 pictures of my fucking Worms
When you go to the doctor's office, if you're a woman, they should give you a gun to use on the doctor if they dismiss your problem. Same if you're fat. Fat women get two guns in case the doctor really deserves it
i don’t think i’m exaggerating when i say that the average height for women in the US would increase by at least an inch if teen girls were allowed to eat as much as teen boys are
and not to bring my own clocky bitch ass into this but if cis women weren’t so consistently starved their entire lives you’d see a lot more cis women with the kind of bodies that we currently associate closely with trans women. the amount that the standards of feminine presentation are culturally defined by malnutrition is crazy
you have the right to be that person who's reminding people of intersex people, trans men, and nonbinary people, especially when it comes to things like reproductive rights. there's a lot of casual erasure from cis people who talk about these things, and it shouldn't be acceptable; I think these people's reactions to being inclusive of intersex people, nonbinary people, and trans men shows just how important the fight for inclusive language is. we can't let them pretend we don't exist.
and given the importance of careful and inclusive language, i think it's worth adding that reproductive rights include more than just the right to decide if and when you get pregnant; transfems without uteruses can still be subject to eg coercive sterilization, and deserve to be remembered and included when we discuss reproductive injustice.
