ââWhen I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastorâs wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didnât believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spankingâthe first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, âMama, I couldnât find a switch, but hereâs a rock that you can throw at me.â All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the childâs point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.ââ
â Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)
In 1978, when she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Lindgren spoke against corporal punishment of children in a speech entitled Never Violence! After that, she teamed up with scientists, journalists and politicians to promote non-violent upbringing. In 1979, a law was introduced in Sweden prohibiting violence against children in response to her demands. Until then there was no such law anywhere in the world.
I'm sorry, is this... Is this implying there's no DYE in that rug? All raw wool in its natural colours? She fucking bred the sheep to get the colours she wanted over the course of ten years!? Holy shit.
Edit: this has gotten a huge amount of traction (fibrearts tumblr is a, uh, tight-knit community it seems!) so I am adding this note to state that I checked Lola Cody's website and can confirm: There is no dye in her work. She uses exclusively hand-spun Churro wool sheared from her home-raised sheep flock. It's all natural colours!
My favorite grocery store cashier died a few months ago. I know this probably sounds like a bizarre thing to be sad about. Her name was Judith and I only saw her once or twice a week, and only while I was paying for groceries. But even now, months later, I think of her when I'm at the grocery store. She used to save the ends of receipt paper rolls when they only had a foot or two left on them and give them to me, which I never asked her to do, but the first time she did it she held one out to me and said "you look like someone who would make a craft out of this," and I laughed because she was right. I do save them to put in geocaches and letterboxes. Our small talk was about the weather and the weekend and aren't those cookies good? They're so expensive though. But it's worth it.
I'm just saying. If you ever sit around wondering whether you'd be missed if you disappeared off the face of the earth, the answer is probably yes, very much, and probably by more people than you think.
Sorry to break it to you but you literally have to face your fears and slaughter them. Otherwise you will live a small life that you do not want. You literally have to view your biggest fears and attack them head on. You have to fall into the abyss to find your way out. The easy path does not exist. There is no get out of jail free card. You have to allow yourself to die a spiritual death over and over again in order to reinvent yourself into the person you are actually supposed to be. And you have to be painfully honest with yourself and the people around you. Itâs horrible but itâs truly the only way.
i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.
i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.
what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.
so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.
and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.
and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.
It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.
It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.
I think people want to help the environment in small but tangible ways, which is hard right now because of.. well... because of The Horrors. And being able to say 'wow! I helped this creature cross a dam' makes you feel good.
I also think that most people can relate to a small, helpless creature trying to get from one place to another and there's a FUCKIN WALL in the way.
But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.
Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:
Foldit (folding proteins)
Fathomverse (sea animals)
Project Monarch (butterflies)
Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time
Species Watch (animal species)
BOINCâs Compute for Science
Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects
Label trees in aerial photos
Count cells in fossils and modern leaves
Digitize Atmospheric Data
Count penguins
US-based Citizen Science Database
eBird (bird identification)
Merlin (bird identification by sound)
iNaturalist (nature identification)
MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)
KATHMANDU â Scientists have for the first time in 185 years confirmed the presence of the Asian small-clawed otter in Nepal, thrilling conse
Scientists have for the first time in 185 years confirmed the presence of the Asian small-clawed otter in Nepal, thrilling conservationists and researchers looking for clues to its existence here.
The last time the Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), the smallest of the worldâs 13 known otter species, was recorded by scientists in Nepal was in 1839.
âAfter years of speculation about its presence in Nepal, we can finally confirm that the small-clawed otter lives on in the country,â said Mohan Bikram Shrestha, the lead author of a short note published in the latest edition of the bulletin of the Otter Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.
Although historically three species of otters are believed to occur in Nepal, modern researchers had until now only confirmed the presence of smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata) and Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra), with a question mark hanging over the small-clawed otter. During that time, reports have come in, never confirmed until now, of small-clawed otter sightings in Makalu Barun National Park in Nepalâs eastern Himalayas and Kailali and Kapilvastu districts in the western plains...
âAs it was found in a fragile and injured state, the forest officers decided to feed and nurse it, but they didnât know which species it belonged to,â Shrestha. The forest officers, led by Rajeev Chaudhary, shared the images and video of the animal, known locally as saano owt, with the IUCN Otter Specialist Group. The members of the group then confirmed it to be a small-clawed otter.
The discovery comes after the species was confirmed for the first time in 2022 in the Darjeeling area of neighboring India, which shares a similar topography with eastern Nepal. âFollowing the discovery in Darjeeling, we had been keeping our eyes open for the species in eastern Nepal, but it showed up in the west,â Shrestha said.
There have also been reports of sightings of the animal in the eastern parts of the country, but none of them have been confirmed.
The Asian small-clawed otter is classified as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List. Its range stretches from Indonesia in the east to Nepal in the west...
As for smooth-coated otters, although their presence in the country has never been in question, sightings of them still excite conservationists. This was especially the case in Chitwan National Park, where their reappearance in September 2023 after two decades spurred calls for more research.
âThis is an incredibly significant finding,â Sanjan Thapa, deputy coordinator of the Otter Specialist Groupâs Himalayan region, said of the latest development. âWe had long suspected that the Asian small-clawed otter might still survive in Nepal, but without concrete evidence, its status remained uncertain.â
Thapa, part of the team that confirmed the 2023 sighting of the smooth-coated otter in Chitwan, said researchers tend to feel a bit edgy about a species when it hasnât been reported for more than 50 years.
âWe had received suggestions that we remove the small-clawed otter from the Nepal otter list as it hadnât been found for a long time,â he said. âHowever, we decided not to do so in the hope that it would be rediscovered sooner or later.â
The discovery adds to the challenge of saving Nepalâs otters as the country prepares to finalize and implement an action plan for otters, Thapa said. âNow that we have concrete proof that the small-clawed otter is also found in Nepal, we need to incorporate it in our policies and programs,â he said.
Both Eurasian and smooth-coated otters are protected under the countryâs Aquatic Animal Protection Act. The newly rediscovered species, however, isnât on the list. âThe first step would be to add the species to the list,â Thapa said."
âIf you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary. I ainât giving up. I swear.âÂ
I canât stop thinking about this message, so I spent a while trying to isolate just the writing and make it transparent. I might order a shirt with it
Whoever in Clackamas wrote this message on their bus stop, I love you
[ if you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary.Â
I ainât giving up. I swear. end caption ]Â Â
