there is meaning in the dirt

dom | adult | he/him | art blog @knotenkunst

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[blade-bird]

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL

“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”

[raginrayguns]

My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old

[manyblinkinglights]

My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.

[tell-the-stars-hello]

The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.

[emoracreations]

For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars

and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:

https://www.lifeprint.com/

[milfcastro-deactivated20251208]

Some people look better with less clothes and some of us were born with the painful absence of a Soviet era military winter overcoat

[cosmonautroger]

[radioxra]

I WANNA ROCK OUT IN MY DREAMS

[plastiboo]

[metanirax]

art study. poor baby.

(speedart here)

[maliciousmixer]

The rose bride and her knight

[hope-for-the-planet]

New study: food banks divert a whopping 1.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions a year

Supporting your local food bank doesn’t just help your community — it helps the planet.

From the article:

Their metrics showed that — in addition to providing over 1.7 billion meals to 40 million people in need globally — food banks also diverted an estimated 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. By intercepting unspoiled food destined for the landfill, and redistributing food from local farms and wholesale produce markets, the 2023 report offered evidence that community-led solutions to addressing global hunger can also help protect the globe itself.  “Nearly a third of the world’s food is lost or wasted at the post-harvest, retail, and consumer levels, never reaching the people who need it,” the GFN team wrote in the report. “Food loss and waste proves costly for producers, takes up space in landfills, and emits harmful greenhouse gases, intensifying climate change.”

Reading this was one of those "oh duh!" moments for me. Despite being aware that food systems and food waste are major sources of emissions, I had mentally placed food banks in a "addressing non environmental problems" category. But of course, food banks make our food system more efficient and less wasteful by making the most out of the food we have already produced.

This is just another example of so many of our problems being connected. Donating to a food bank doesn't just address food insecurity, it's also a powerful force for reducing food waste and carbon emissions.

[taigacryptid]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[goth-queen]

[azrielsshadows42]

There are two types of writers:

1. 'It's fiction, it doesn't need to make sense!'

2. 'I didn't account for the rotation of the planet and how that affects the constalations while my characters stargazed at different times of year, I have failed as a writer, and this entire thing is trash'

[dragon-in-a-fez]

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it's immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like "yeah so this is going to happen to the internet" and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don't even get paid for it

[dragon-in-a-fez]

as much as I would love for y'all to read my dissertation it would obviously doxx me to post the link/title here, so I probably won't share (unless a longtime mutual messages privately about it). BUT what I can do is tell you about my academic idols - Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and danah boyd - and tell you to go read their stuff, starting with a book they co-wrote called Participatory Culture in a Networked Era

[nohoperadio]

You know that thing would eat you if you died, right? *pointing to the false image of you that others perceive*

[sailor-arashi]

[byjove]

Cemeteries are not wastes of space. Historical cemeteries ESPECIALLY are not wastes of space. The fact developers are continuously foaming at the mouth to destroy them and put a strip mall up in their place should make you even more determined to help maintain them. In urban areas, they are a haven for wildlife. They are a green space. If you are too afraid of death to utilize them for that purpose, that is on you.

[zooophagous]

Thank you. Historically cemeteries were treated as parks, and it wasn't uncommon to see people not only enjoying the grounds but actually playing games and having picnics there. Somewhere along the line we decided that these activities were inappropriate and that cemeteries were off limits and now people see them as wasted space because they feel too awkward to enjoy them.

They're not only beautiful green spaces but excellent public displays of history and art history, and if you care to look closely you can find out a lot just by studying stones.

For example- notice how few modern headstones are dedicated to young children versus the ones erected before vaccines were widespread.

The cemetery near here has the state's largest silver maple crowning its grounds. Many of the trees in older cemeteries are some of the largest and oldest trees in an area.

Cemeteries are for the living, not the dead. Enjoy them. Go birdwatching in them. Don't be stupid in them sure but don't be too afraid to touch them either.

And for the love of God don't mindlessly support turning them into parking lots and ""luxury"" condos.

[base-and-superstructure]

Just saw a petition in a group chat about "don't bring ICE to Europe!" and I felt insane for a minute. We already have militarised borders and concentration camps for migrants and we let people die in the sea and we banish people to unfamiliar countries and we brutalise them and we terrorise them and we detain and deport them!! The UK and the EU are not the liberal paradises we pretend they are!! Our borders kill people!! We don't need a petition to keep US violence away, we need to organise against the European violence we already have!!

[deadbirds-and-daydreams]

The amount of pictures of people dying in boats trying to get to europe. and the amount of few survivors who then get denied put into prisons (remembering the harlem panopticon where we put immigrants for a while. and i do mean like an actual literal panopticon.) or camps and then send back. and why? because some europeans are so fucking racist and xenophobics theyd rather see their fellow men die than to have absolutely nothing change in their lifes to help these people survive. Words will never be enough to explain my rage for how EU has treated people like absolute fucking cattle. all my life the news here. the politicians. the US is a shithole. the EU is a shithole but tries a lot harder to hide it. theres so much blood on these hands. its sickening.

[dykepuffs]

I keep remembering that fucking post about "Uwu look at Europe's beautiful open borders!!!!" With pictures of a little boundary stone in a field in Belgium or a line painted on a road in Luxembourg, that was circulating around the same time as yet another overloaded boat had been turned back by Greek or Italian coastguards in the middle of the Mediterranean and the International Community(TM) had collectively shrugged when bits of it started washing up in the Greek islands.

The way that Europe has sold itself as such a fluffy woo Good Vibes Only Continent should be studied.

[bmoreisapunkrocktown]

I just want to add this, because I think it's immensely important in these conversations and because it took me 45 minutes to track it down.

How Europe Outsourced Border Enforcement to Africa

The European Union is militarizing Africa's internal borders to curb migration, with little regard for human rights.