Paperwhite Narcissus @paperwhitenarcissus - Tumblr Blog

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catsbeaversandducks

“Bran our Ravens idea of having fun this morning, he holds on just enough to keep hold without hurting me.”

Video/caption by Lloyd & Rose Buck Bird Specialists & Handlers

maramahan

Please turn on audio it’s adorable

helianthus-annus-thoughts

@joy-and-whimsy-official

joy-and-whimsy-official

Joy and whimsy detected! This raven is joyful and whimsical!

linguistness

No, actually, i want cables and not bluetooth, i don't want touchscreens, i want buttons and knobs, i want to be able to take the battery out of my phone, i want to charge my phone and plug in head phones at the same time, i want a cd drive in my laptop and not have to buy an external drive, i want a car without a display, i want to turn on the lights with a switch not with my voice, i want to have a paper cinema ticket not a QR code, i want to listen to illegally burned music on a 00s cd player, i want to watch movies that i actually own, i want to read news once a day on paper, i want to aimlessly flick through magazines and not doomscroll on social media, i want to write emails and not talk to chatbots, i want to own stuff without hundreds of digital subscriptions, i want

curlicuecal

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I’m always like “why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.”

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you’re inside the car, inside the situation, it’s easy not to notice all the extra work you’re doing just to maintain the status quo.

There’s all sorts of type of work that we think of as “free” that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you’re tired from “nothing”, consider instead that you’re probably in situation where you’re doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

ceekari

opening my body’s task manager to see what’s taking up all my cpu

mikkeneko

Also, just to add: we should not lose sight of the fact that the mammalian brain is a ridiculously energy-hungry organ. A human brain makes up 2% of the body’s weight and volume and 20% of its caloric requirement. Thinking is physical work.

hasufin

Competitive chess players carb-load before tournaments. And lose weight in the process.

headspace-hotel

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that thinking physically takes up energy. I would be like “why don’t i have energy I’ve been sitting inside studying all day” ma'am it’s because the phrasings, evidences and vocabularies in your brain are eating the energy

jabberwockypie

If I’ve been really focused on crafting or something, there will invariably come a point where my brain is just like “Warning! Warning! Out of Energy!”.

Getting a snack usually fixes it.

kipplekipple

I get post-exertional malaise from just… Going places. I sit in a wheelchair, I take one bus and spend some time in a different building… And when I get home, I’m sick.

This post helped a little cause I always feel bad about it.

aniseandspearmint

leaving the house is abso-effing-lutely EXHAUSTING and it’s okay to BE exhausted after having to do stuff

draw-blog

On Shopping While Fat 2: Son of Fat

callizinc

Did you know that you can waste your free time by not knowing which activity to do so you do none of them

hamletthedane

I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.

rhube

I tried to let this go past without comment, but it's stayed with me throughout the day. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

Not for the positive sentiment that serving others can be a positive thing - precisely because no one was ever saying it couldn't be - but for how badly it mangles what it purports to be responding to.

No one ever said that the men who were only able to produce art because of other people labouring for them had had no pain or done nothing good. And no one ever said that those who supported them were always resentful and unwilling.

The point is that when people who weren't men had great tragedies and great powers of creativity, they were not supported to go off into the wilderness and explore their creative impulses and philosophies to their greatest depths.

And then we are compared to those works. And those works often PRESENT philosophies in which great works can be achieved on their own. This post is so... dishonest about what is being argued for.

Some of y'all haven't read A Room of One's Own, and it shows.

Shakespeare had great tragedies in his life, such as the death of his son Hamnet, and those obviously inform his work. But what, Virginia Woolf asks us, of Shakespeare's sister?

What would have become of the middle class woman with Shakespeare's upbringing and talent? She certainly would have been laughed out of the theatre.

We know that. Not just because of the remarks made by men of the time that a woman acting would be like a dog standing on its hind legs. But also because we can see the few, very few examples of women DID manage to write at the time, and how hard it was for them

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with all the privileges that brings, was a philosopher and writer. She wrote the first science fiction novel. And she wrote plays. And she was ridiculed for it, and men tried to bury her existence. Despite a very supportive husband, she was widely regarded with derision as the Mad Duchess. While I wouldn't say her plays are remotely as good as Shakespeare, it's not as though she had the advantage of friendship with Kit Marlow. To be a playwright in Shakespeare's time was a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas and lines off your actors and other writers. We can see in the folios how much the plays changed from performance to performance. They weren' static. That was a novel concept just starting to be introduced by the printing press. But who collaborated with Margaret? Who batted frenzied ideas around with the Duchess?

Not Shakespeare's peers. And likely not many of her own class either.

Or try Aemelia Lanyer on for size. First woman poet to be published in the English language and her poems BLAZE with talent and pain and power.

But it was only possible because she had a female patron who supported her work, and they were both cut adrift in an inheritance dispute. You can hear it when you read The Description of Cookeham - the country house in which she and her patron briefly lived and for a while, she was free to write as men were. But it's a poem of loss.

Because they lost Cookeham. Because there is never the same financial security, and thus peace and room to work unburdened, as there is for men.

And no it's not the case that all men have it perfect and easy, but a fuck of a lot more of them have mothers or wives or sisters who will support them as they pour out their pain into the pages than there are fathers or husbands, or brothers who will do the same for a woman or non-binary person.

Woolf notes that you can see it in the cracks of the work women write. A moment in Jane Eyre where Jane thinks longingly of all she might do if she were free like a man that Woolf sees as flawed because it is not the character speaking, but the author, pouring out her pain.

Because women were always forced to write AROUND their duties, often in fear of getting caught. They could never polish freely to the same extent as men. Even Jane Austen had no study to retreat to, but would cover her pages with embroidery to hide them when she was interrupted by visitors.

It's not merely ignorant but insulting to be told that in critiquing the circumstances in which men wrote, partly supported by the labour of women, we are in some sense dismissing THOSE WOMEN. That in acknowledging that labour we are disparaging it.

This is some trad wife bullshit.

NO.

Noting that the labour of women that supported the great works of men has gone unrecognised is NOT to dismiss that labour. Nor is it invalid to critique a man who wrote ruggedly individualistic works while quietly supported by a woman, just because he had also supported others and suffered grief. That argument DOES NOT scan.

A person - anyone - needs a room of their own and a place of safety in which to write to fully explore their creative ideas.

As I lay in bed too sick to either work or write I feel this more strongly than ever.

Privilege is multifaceted, and it has never denied that those with one privilege may suffer in other ways, nor that they can do good works and support others. The critique of privilege is DOUBLY important when this is so, because those people STILL benefit from the STRUCTURES that support them over and above those who suffer the same tragedies without that support.

When Shakespeare is thrown into depression by the loss of his son he is still held up in all the myriad ways that a comfortably well-off, educated, middle-class white man in Elizabethan England can be. When Aemelia and her patron are set adrift because she and her patron are of the wrong gender, they have no one to turn to. No salvation. And we have far fewer poems by Lanyer than we do by Shakespeare, for all that many speculate she is the dark lady of his sonnets (I know, there are other speculations, but she is one).

With all the wealth and prestige of a Duchess, Cavendish's plays were only performed at home. It's not that she wasn't known in the theatrical world - it's said that when Cavendish went to the theatre to watch a play, everyone else in the audience was there to watch Cavendish, because of her eccentric reputation, but she could never be one of the Lord's Men. She could never see her works performed at the Globe. Never drink Kit Marlow under the bench.

Massive structural machines were (and still are) in play to see that it is far easier for men to have what they need in order to think and create handed to them.

THAT is the critique. THAT is the point.

Not that no one should ever support their loved ones while they write. For the most part, that's the only way for creatives to get started in having a career as opposed to a hobby.

The point is that it is MASSIVELY more common for women to quietly support men without recognition while they go off and write books that ignore the existence of women than it is for women or non-binary people to be supported by their loved ones to go off and do something creative.

It's always worth checking, when you're hot and angry that someone is beating down on your fave, that YOU are in fact beating up a real opponent, and not a straw person.

shayvaalski

When Bronson Alcott -- Louisa May Alcott's father, himself a friend of Thoreau, and I do not argue that he too played a vital role in the philosophy and reform of the time -- began his experimental Utopian community at Fruitlands, his wife Abby May was asked if there were any beasts of burden.

"Yes," she said. "One woman."

lizleeships

How I picture Angel transport... (was just in the mood for some chibi fluff, you?)

(Don't repost please, reblogs are great!)

jimkerk

the least realistic thing about star trek is that starfleet uniforms don’t have pockets and nobody complains about it

crisisoninfintefandoms

My instinct is to agree with this, but like, when I really think about it…

No money, no credit cards, identification is all vocal/fingerprints/retinal, so no wallet.

Again, doors are voice activated, or just unlocked by entering a code. No keys.

Communication devices are tiny and stick onto clothing starting in Next Gen. TOS had bulkier communication that they carried around or kept in, like, packs and stuff, so the arguments for pockets is a little more valid, and if I remember correctly, those costumes did have pockets, tho I could be wrong about that. But anything post TNG, the point is moot anyway.

Tricorders and phasers are really the only thing anyone’s carrying around, and that’s usually on away missions where they’d be bring their packs/holsters or just have them out. I mean, who wants to stick a phaser in their pocket?

So, yeah. There’s not much little stuff people need to carry around everywhere. And if they are preparing for a longer journey or want to bring bulkier things, well…just bring a bag. It fits more anyway.

jimkerk

what if i find a cool rock and want to take it home with me

fair-itself

Every time a member of the USS Enterprise has found a cool rock and taken it home, it has resulted in eleven deaths, six temporal displacements, the holodecks breaking again, and somebody getting turned into a lizard. Pockets are a privilege, not a right.