Untitled

[longseasons]

[gwydionmisha]

Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.

[atrusovaartist]

Today I want to show you a very special painting.This place is part of my childhood and some of my happiest memories. I painted it after a trip to Russia in 2017. It feels like a lifetime ago. My oldest son had just turned one, and my husband and I traveled to visit my parents.My parents have a big off-road vehicle, and they love exploring places where ordinary cars simply can’t go-deep forests, marshes, hidden lakes, and quiet rivers. They took us on many adventures, and this was one of those places. We spent the day fishing there and even caught a few large northern pike.This landscape is near the village of Kholuy in the Ivanovo region of Russia.Although I painted it years ago, it isn’t for sale. It is the only painting that was permanently damaged during the catastrophic flood that hit my gallery in 2021, After days of heavy rain in Belgium and Germany, a dam had to be opened overnight to prevent an even greater disaster. Nobody had time to prepare. During the night, the water rushed into the building. The flood reached almost 2.5 meters (over 8 feet) high, nearly touching the ceiling. My paintings floated in muddy water for many hours.Afterward, I washed and disinfected every painting by hand. Many survived surprisingly well, although several wooden stretcher bars warped as they dried. This painting was less fortunate. It must have fallen in just the wrong way, and part of the thick acrylic paint layer detached from the canvas. It now has a small but visible scar, and I still don’t know the best way to restore it.So it hangs in my home instead.People often ask whether it’s okay to touch my textured paintings. I always say yes you can gently touch them with your fingers or even wipe them with a damp cloth if needed. After seeing paintings survive a flood, floating in dirty water for hours, it’s hard for me to imagine that even thousands of curious fingers could do more damage than that one night did.

Sometimes a painting carries not only the memory of the place it depicts, but also the memory of everything it has survived.

acrylic, linen 100 * 120 cm “balance” 2019

[mariacallous]

[bundibird]

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

[alwayswasalwayswillbeourland]

OP's tags

[crimethinc]

The US Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis has charged fifteen people with “conspiracy to impede federal officers,” accusing them of defending their neighborhoods from ICE.

Working with anarchist artist NO BONZO, we've made a support poster to inform people about the case. Please print these out and post them everywhere!

https://crimethinc.com/posters/support-the-minnesota-15

[transandrogyny--turtlebug]

being a woman isn't a feminist action btw

[transandrogyny--turtlebug]

being a lesbian isn't a feminist action either. It's just a thing

[badwolfdogbutch]

There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about how masculine or feminine you are and I wish people would stop acting like one is better than the other. The way you act and speak as a person says more about what kind of person you are than your gender presentation. There is plenty of people capable of being horrible people and there are plenty of people that are capable of being good people. It's a choice, gender has nothing to do with it.

[deramin2]

Despite being a foundational principle of feminism, it remains incredibly controversial that people are people. They’re not programming objects with defined characteristics inherent to their object class. They’re unique individuals with their own capabilities, bodies, behaviors, and reactions.

The moment you start treating people as Classification A with Characteristic x, you’ve completely lost the plot. That’s just a person. Some people are great, some are awful, most are a bit of both.

Women are just people. Men are just people. They have control over their behavior, not predestined programming.

[turnipfritters]

My scorching hot take on Christopher Nolan Presents Homer's The Odyssey is Tom Holland having his mind blown while filming this, then going back to Marvel to and being all "Why did no one tell me that you can, like, have a finished script before you start filming and a cinematographer who has all the shots planned before filming instead of figuring it out in post, has anyone else heard about this?" is pretty funny

[turnipfritters]

Visionary Director Christopher Nolan's controversial directing style of "telling actors what's happening in a scene when they're filming"

[gaydiation-poisoning]

It would kill half the 19-25 year olds online to realize "I can't help it I have trauma" is one of THE quintessential abuser excuses

[gaydiation-poisoning]

Like there is a difference between "My trauma creates impulsive urges and has changed my instinctive reactions to be irrational, I need to relearn shit." vs "I'm traumatized so I Can't Help It and you're not allowed to expect better of me"

[fandomsandfeminism]

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man

As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...

Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.

Brutal.

[fandomsandfeminism]

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material."

[fictionalauthorityii]

Finding out AI companies are chewing through - literally, they’re pulping and burning them as they go - millions of books often including 1/1s and old texts that cannot be reprinted

Meanwhile there’s always some dipshit telling me AI is the future and we’ve got to just let companies erase human history and literature so they can train their abomination machines to pretend to think like people because a judge said it’s fine

[wageronancap]

[odessa-edmundson]

'Modern Poisoning Tools': AI Firms Buying and Destroying Thousands of Books To Feed AI Models

AI companies are buying and scanning printed books for training data, raising copyright and cultural preservation concerns as rare volumes a

[caseyscraftycorner]

watching my husband get diagnosed with and treated for sleep apnea over the last year was not the thing that radicalized me re: weight and healthcare but my goodness it has solidified my stances.

sleep apnea is more common in people who are fat.

society decided for some reason that this meant that being fat causes sleep apnea. its often difficult to get referrals for sleep apnea treatment if you are fat, because some PCPs will tell you try losing weight first.

turns out!! having untreated sleep apnea causes weight gain in a not-insignificant number of people. it also makes it fucking impossible for many people to lose weight.

my husband worked out the same amount before he got a cpap as he does now. there have been no major diet changes either. yet he has been losing weight -- and gaining muscle tone -- consistently since he started using a cpap in january.

also, his blood pressure -- which was high, which docs blamed on his weight/diet -- went down significantly within one month of starting cpap treatment, before his weight changed significantly.

ANYWAYS. this is getting long. two final thoughts.

- I Want To Strangle Medical Fatphobia With My Bare Fucking Hands

- if you are exhausted constantly for "no reason", and especially if you snore, you should probably ask your doctor about getting tested for sleep apnea. it is extremely common -- estimates are around 1 in 10 people -- and is also wildly under-diagnosed. like, some estimates suggest that 80% of people with moderate-severe sleep apnea are undiagnosed.

[star-anise]

Yeah sure Tumblr is a hellsite but I know someone who wrote a fanfic in the 1990s that someone else didn’t like, so when she was selling printed copies of the zine with the story in it out of her hotel room at a convention, this other woman STOOD IN FRONT OF HER DOOR TO REFUSE PEOPLE ACCESS. Because the story featured a ship she disliked. And I feel like somehow, 10,000 Tumblrs still can’t compare to that level of Extra.

[ineptshieldmaid]

Your periodic reminder that the technology and the scale of distribution changes, the basic impulse to fandom wank does not

[themarchrabbit]

I’ve actually heard about this event [or a similar event, which I can believe] from someone who was trying to get into the room to either buy the zine, or visit with the writer, or just see what was going on [idr]. Apparently it was quite the talk of the bar that night, and resulted in several heated [re: drunken] debates over whether Door Stander was violating Writer’s free speech, or if removing Door Stander would have violated Door Stander’s free speech.

Me, at the time, a 19yo with very little understanding of the law: “I mean…was it?”

Fandom Friend, who was a 40-something lawyer: “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone in that bar. No one was violating anyone’s free speech. Bitch was just being rude, and worse, obnoxious about it. You ever act like that in public, be aware you’re not changing anyone’s opinion. You’re just giving them a brand new opinion about you.”

It was a very formative conversation in my young adulthood.

Same person also told me to never mix coke and acid. Which was also pretty solid advice.

[itsrainingshadybitches]

[tygermama]

“We heard youse are behind on your payments to Fat Tony.”

[luna-azzurra]

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

[spiralmindz]

what im learning from my years of being one of the annoying woke black people on here is that a Lot of white and nonblack people really do not understand what racism is and what it has done to African Americans. like when we learn abt it in schools they dont really tell you abt the mass rape and genocide and torture of Africans by white slave owners, they dont talk abt the murder of babies and the cannibalism either. its all in The Past so we should just get over it, lol. and then when nonamerican's colonial past gets brought up they start throwing tantrums too, because antiblackness is a global thing, many countries have exploited Africa and its people. this isnt unique to one nation. its so funny how all these Smart Communists are so ignorant abt racism in america and globally, and then when black leftist/progressive tumblr users try to say anything abt their real actual Lived Experiences as Black people its met with dismissal and hatred and condescension and Um, Actually, im not from america, can you talk to me like im 5 about racism please :) and if youre anything but Nice they will call you a slur

[tarragonthedragon]

idk i just feel like "it is more acceptable and in fact encouraged to mock anything enjoyed primarily by women" and "being enjoyed primarily by women does not make thing feminist and righteous" are thoughts that can and should coexist

[tarragonthedragon]

oh and also "even if the thing is bad your criticism of it can come from a place of patronising misogyny"

[pangur-and-grim]

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

[ms-demeanor]

I'm sorry, I know you weren't actually looking for an explanation but I always have a rant about this locked and loaded.

As far as I can tell the reasons that this happens are:

The interpretation of disability accommodation as wokeness - a lot of the same people who are shitty about food limitations are also shitty about sign language interpreters and ramp requirements (also building regulations relating to the latter) because they view any accommodation as capitulation to a group they think should "suck it up and deal with it" (quietly exist without named or obvious accommodations). The conversations around peanut-free or milk-free classrooms to accommodate children with allergies are similarly unhinged and possibly more horrifying.

Conflating specialty diets as a result of proximity in the popular consciousness - you're a lot more likely to see something described as "vegan + gluten free" or to see vegan/vegetarian/g-free options grouped on menus than you are to see keto/vegan/gfree options so the "lefty" animal-free diets get grouped with gluten-free (it's also interesting that there are right-wing diets, and I wonder how many of these people remember when you used to be able to find "atkins-friendly" symbols on casual dining restaurant menus)

Gluten free diets became a fad fifteen years ago; tons of people read "Wheat Belly" and stopped eating wheat as a weight loss hack and when they went back to eating wheat because it's actually pretty difficult to get around a major staple grain they didn't experience any negative consequences; people saw this and basically think that it's a trend, that people are faking medically necessary diets as part of a fad. When questioned about this they always go "but, I mean, it's okay if you REALLY need to skip the wheat because you have a condition but most people are doing it because it's popular" when g-free diets haven't been a major trend for quite a while now. TO BE QUITE FAIR, I think that things like "Gluten Aware" cookies and beer and such, which contain a little gluten but not NO gluten contribute to this perception (these have annoyed me forever for two reasons: 1. They make people without celiac think that a little gluten is fine for people with celiac, which it is not; 2. fucking commit, companies. *I* want the cookies and beer and it's deeply annoying that these business will go to the lengths to create products with minimal gluten but won't actually make g-free foods - this is often because of the risk of cross contamination, they won't claim to make g-free things because they won't work with a dedicated g-free facility)

Anyway, in conclusion: it sucks, I'm sorry.

The fun flipside of this is that I've seen people who are more right wing become aggressively pro regulation and pro accommodation when they or their family members have to suddenly take on the individual burden of making up for a society that doesn't include them by default.

[ms-demeanor]

US specific:

Is your ham made with vinegar? Does your ham have the generic word "spices" on the ingredient list? Does your ham include "smoke flavoring"? Does your ham include caramel coloring?

Because malt vinegar has gluten in it. "Spices" may include wheat products in a mix. Smoke flavoring may be made with barley flour. Caramel coloring may be made with wheat or barley syrup.

If the label says "gluten free" that means that the "spices," caramel coloring, vinegar, and smoke flavor are certified to contain 20ppm or less of gluten.

If the ham is cured in any way, it may include gluten. If the ham was marinated, it probably includes gluten. If the ham was prepared in a facility that processes wheat in any way, it might be cross contaminated with gluten.

There's a company out there called "Gluten Free Water" that makes water in plastic bottles, poking fun at the idea that too many things have a gluten free label. I fucking hate that company. Because that company is functionally saying "lol, people are so sensitive and over the top about this, let's be a little silly and laugh about how crazy people can be with their 'gluten free' nonsense."

Did you know that there are sustainable food containers and straws that contain wheat? And that you don't have to label them? There are definitely people with celiac who have been sickened by biodegradable plastic straws in their "obviously water is gluten free there's no risk here" water.

"It's over-labeled so it looks trendy" just means you don't know how foods are made or what foods contain gluten. Gluten is ridiculously common in foods in general, and also in packaged meats.

Your ham has to say gluten free because it distinguishes it from the hams that do contain gluten, which is a fucking lot of them. And you're annoyed that your ham has to say gluten free and I'm annoyed that I'm standing in the grocery store calling a ham company to figure out where they source their caramel coloring so I can figure out if the damned ham is safe to eat.

"lol, oats don't have wheat in them, are people so stupid that they have to be told what is and isn't wheat? why does this oatmeal have a gluten free label?" Cross contamination; gluten free oats are not grown near wheat and are not processed in facilities that process wheat.

"lol, rice doesn't have wheat in it, why is this rice labeled gluten free, all rice is gluten free" Cross contamination; the rice isn't processed on equipment that processes wheat.

"lol why does this turkey breast say gluten free, it's just fucking turkey" read the ingredients on your "just" turkey, lots of packaged meat is packed in broth, some of which contains modified food starch, which may contain wheat.

"lol why are these strawberries labeled gluten free? they're fucking strawberries" WAX, BUDDY. SOME FRUITS ARE COATED IN PRESERVATIVE WAX FILMS BY THE MANUFACTURER AND SOME OF THOSE FUCKING FILMS CONTAIN GLUTEN.

I think that part of the reason that people are so irritated by g-free labels is because it exposes them to just how vast and alienating their food systems are.

"Ham should just be meat from a pig, maybe with sugar and salt; what on earth is happening that there might be wheat in that process? Nothing in that process should involve wheat." And then you might have to think about it for a second, might have to wonder what "sugar" and "salt" mean when someone is producing a million hams to be delivered thousands of miles away. It's not just sugar and salt; it's preservatives and nitrates and batch cooking and getting corn syrup instead of sugar and getting smoke flavoring instead of smoking the ham and turning your "whole food" into all the ingredients that make up the ingredients that make up the ingredients.

A "gluten free" label says "you can eat this" to somebody with celiac disease, who has already pounded their skull against the shittiness of the medical system and the food system.

But to someone who doesn't have to worry that their food is going to disable them, a "gluten free" sticker on ham takes a known quantity and turns their sandwich into a hyperobject that contains animal agriculture and industrial additive production and shipping pollution and the ongoing assault on regulation.

If it doesn't have the label, you can just eat your lunch. If it does have the label, you are haunted by the specter of RFK junior imploding the FDA.

Turns out that everyone in the US with celiac is already constantly haunted by the possible implosion of the FDA because food regulation is an up-close and personal part of our daily lives that most people would rather not think about.