I am a Midwest USA-based artist and mother who has done a little bit of everything, including science. Currently, I am most active in costuming and collaborating with my husband to design and produce performance jewelry for American Tribal Style (ATS) Belly Dancing. Attempts to get me out of the kitchen have been largely unsuccessful, unless you count smoking meat in the backyard as “out of the kitchen.” (Apparently you can take the girl out of the Texas panhandle, but a little bit of that dust and mesquite smoke always sticks.) I dabble in making my own bitters and liqueurs, and experiments in fermentation are ongoing. Not to mention putting dinner on the table most nights. Neither Christian nor atheist, I find the philosophies of Sir Terry Pratchett* to be most helpful in navigating day-to-day life. You can never go wrong listening to the Grannies, but the important thing to remember is, “If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.” ** Admittedly, as a descendant of both Irish immigrants and American Southerners, my story is always going to be part of a large and deeply interconnected family web. This is purely a stuff-I-like blog, and I am not the most advanced tumblr user. Things I like include feminism, Star Wars, in-depth media analysis, pretty dresses, popular witchcraft, Thor, and herbalism. Or whatever else catches my eye. Attribution for the avatar picture can be found here. http://www.shadowscapes.com/image.php?lineid=46&bid=1218 *GNU Terry Pratchett ** The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"
the fact that this reference was that fucking precise was something they went on to tell people about for years.
24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. It is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing. As an advertising exhortation it decrees the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment. The absence of restraints on consuming is not simply temporal. We are long past an era in which mainly things were accumulated. Now our bodies and identities assimilate an ever-expanding surfeit of services, images, procedures, chemicals, to a toxic and often fatal threshold. The long-term survival of the individual is always dispensable if the alternative might even indirectly admit the possibility of interludes with no shopping and its promotion. In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruptions of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid
the role of the person in the passenger seat is not only navigator but secretary as well. you have to type up the drivers messages to random ladies on facebook about cbd cream & google whether that billy joel song was the theme song for that show or not
having anxiety is like being given permanent unwanted custody of a halter arabian. like okay buddy is it panic time again. cool you probably need more exercise and an apple and then maybe you'll calm down.
thoroughly enjoying the notes on this post because it's equal parts people with anxiety going "yeah that's what it's like" and people with arabians going "yeah that's what they're like"
being an everything crafter is great but also sucks. like i want to get my watercolors out but i need to put away my microcrochet first. i want to do some leatherwork but my oil paints are on the table. i want to whittle but i'm using the bucket i catch wood shavings in to hold my papermaking mush. i want to write my book but my hands are too busy knitting a sweater. i want to code another video game but i'm too busy studying nalebinding. do you see my problem. the problem is that i need more hands
The rise of AI slop & the endless waves of books that feel written to spec by people who are terrified of their own audiences has given me a new appreciation for Anne Rice. It's not even that she didn't give a fuck; she cared passionately and was famously, publicly hurt by the reception of at least one of her novels, but she never let that distract her from her mission of writing whatever the fuck she wanted. No one could write Anne Rice's books except Anne Rice. They are singularly, entirely hers and while I won't pretend she was a perfect person or it's wrong for readers to be offended or uninterested in spending their one and only life on earth reading something that offends them, I also think her work is valuable and humane and also often hilarious and it's not a crime to have a muse you adore.
So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.
They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.
And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.
Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.
The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.
Heads up that the RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND ebook is on sale for £0.99 until June 17th, so if you want a fantasy book about pirates, with bawdy comedy of a Terry Pratchett flavor (including the quiet anger about systems of institutional oppression), check it ouuuut, it is your Pride summer read AND IT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH ON EVERY PAGE I PROMISE
#the reason that lab safety regulations are the way they are is because literally all chemists are like this #as in 100% of them #no exceptions (via @prokopetz)
