Loch Nest Farm @lochnestfarm - Tumblr Blog

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Loch Nest Farm is 1 acre in South Carolina where 2 queer, fat farmwives live, along with an assortment of rescue dogs, Too Many Chickens, and some endangered geese.

We design things, and you can get them on Redbubble or Spoonflower. We make and find things, and you can get them on Etsy.

Farmwife C likes to make paper doll games and you can play them here.

#pinned post #poultry farming #surface design

eliotheman

”This portrayal of a marginalized group was wrong then and is wrong now” and “This portrayal of a marginalized group was very progressive for the time period and paved the way for more representation while likely limited by factors outside of the creator’s control” are two statements that can and should ABSOLUTELY coexist and be kept in mind when interacting with older media

lemonylemus

Great example

marcelshorjian

anatomy of a humiliation

#wow um #so I'm comparatively comfortable in my fat body these days #but FUCK this really captures what adolescence was like #fatphobia cw

cloudy-skyscape

Teen Wolf is so fun because at one point the comedic relief character stops being comedic relief and starts having a kill count

lochnestfarm

This suggests to me that I may need to actually sit down and watch Teen Wolf, due to my affection for True Blood, a show where the character with the highest kill count stops having a kill count and becomes comedic relief

txttletale

or to be a little less pithy, groundedness means a sense of internal consistency, the idea that events and traits of a story or world are grounded in a coherent set of logics.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

there is of course nothing wrong with wanting realism in a story, but 99% of the people who say they do really want groundedness. like the vast majority of dumb arguments about asoiaf/got are its fans saying "its realistic" when they mean "its grounded" and people ridiculing them because it is in fact not very realistic (and not just because of the overt fantasy elements)

prokopetz

In my experience, another big part of the problem with talking about "realism" in fictional milieux is the product of a specific Type of Guy employing the term as a sort of semantic bait and switch, sometimes without consciously realising that this is what they're doing.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

It's basically treating those silly "How [Media] Really Should Have Ended" YouTube videos as a legitimate critical lens, and in circles where this song and dance is common, it leads to a lot of people reflexively shutting down the moment they hear the word "realism" because they assume (often quite reasonably!) that oh great, it's That Guy again.

lochnestfarm

As a sample of "realism=genre tropes rule until I want my favorite PC to Win," I had someone tell me, with an apparently straight face, that the ending of The Long Dark would have been WAY more realistic if *checks notes* there was a sudden earthquake induced by the Aurora that dramatically separated Mackenzie (and only Mackenzie) from the villains surrounding him, pitching him through the rapidly closing door to safety.

When I started from the extreme basics there and delicately asked whether this person was perhaps misunderstanding just how the solar-radio-storm thing interacted with the this-is-a-geologically-active-zone thing*, I was accused of being an alt account for the game studio head.

*Their actual interaction: A solar storm happened in the game. The West Coast of North America is the setting for the game. Causation!!

#media literacy #realism #the long dark #types of guy

thisauthorisscreaming

Another sword, another cairn. Cut up an old necklace for the chain. The background fabric is scrap fabric from a thrift shop in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo doesn't do the fabric justice! It's very pretty!

(Also, yes - the sword CAN come out!)

#fiber art #embroidery #mixed media #arthuriana #this is SO COOL

going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi

I'm not a gatekeeper so yall. the best thrift stores are the ones that look bad. do not go to cool trendy thrift stores with hot alt twenty-something employees. (I mean you can if you want but enjoy paying $40 for a fuckass shirt.)

here's what you actually want in a thrift store:

in a rich town

run by a church

staffed exclusively by little old ladies

most of the clothes will be butt ugly. but they will also be 1) good quality and 2) cheap af. the 70 year olds running the shop think a thrifted shirt should be $3 and they are correct. everyone else shopping there is over the age of 45 so you won't have to throat punch any depop resellers over a cunty little top. you will get hyped up by old ladies and if you frequent the same shop they may start trying to set you up with their grandkids. everyone wins and who knows their grandkids might be hot.

#yeah I try to avoid the ones run by churches that are actively agitating against my human rights #(look I know my $40 does not make a huge difference to the Salvation Army but it makes a difference to ME)#but seriously in little tiny towns they'll have like ... rooms full of clothes and you can stuff a grocery bag for $5 or so #thrifting

anarchistmemedistro

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

link to story

midnightinshadow

twiststreet

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)