26 queer they/them - gender fluid - non bianary - Almost 3 years married - aspiring to be that witch living in the woods who puts up weary travelers for the night and sends them on their way with a full belly and a basket of homemade jams and cheeses.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo weâve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and itâs revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
>First, weâve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, thatâs about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey weâve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so Iâm happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTĂ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of âAre you not stealing the internet?â Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>Iâm afraid I passed the You Wouldnât Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad companyâs wish to profile them.
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Havenât tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesnât have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
Calling all chronic creatives - here's how to up your crochet game!
I'm an avid crocheter, but holding the hook for long periods of time became exhausting and painful. Being chronically ill, losing the ability to enjoy my hobbies was tough for me accept.
My husband took me to the craft store and we purchased a ergonomic crochet handle. This handle needed to fit my criteria;
able to hold a variety of hook sizes
hold up to high tension crochet projects (I do a lot of amigurumi crochet, which you need to complete with tight tension)
reduce my wrist/hand pain
reduce the amount of grip strength needed to hold the hook to avoid fatigue
This ergonomic crochet handle *seemed* to tick all these boxes. It was quite an expensive purchase and to be honest, I was disappointed in it in all aspects.
The purchased handle uses small rubber stoppers to hold the crochet hook in place, but as you are crocheting the hook works loose and spins around inside it. The handle itself was too small, making it painful to hold. I had to use a lot of grip strength to keep it in my hand, which is what I was trying to avoid by purchasing the darn thing. The little knobbly bit at the end really dug into my hand and hurt. It was so annoying to use and I gave up on it altogether after three days of using it (not to mention one of the rubber pieces broke apart within hours).
I expressed my disappointment to my husband, and he decided to come to my rescue! Over the course of a week, he designed me his own ergonomic crochet handle in a computer program called CAD. He then printed it out using his 3D printer. I can't even begin to tell you how much I love this new handle - its a game changer!
During the design process, he took into consideration all of my complaints about the disappointing handle and my criteria that I had listed. The handle he designed is bigger, so it uses less grip strength to hold it in place which also reduces my pain.
Instead of using rubber stoppers like the other handle, he designed a 'lock and key' system for keeping the crochet hooks in place and it works fabulously! The hook never moves and I'm really rough with my crochet hooks. It holds up to my high tension crochet projects and I have completed many amigurumi with it, even small, intricate items. Since it is designed with the lock and key system, my husband was easily able to print different keys to be able to hold multiple sizes. I've got keys ranging from 1.25mm all the way up to 6mm!
I can now crochet for hours on end and I swear my crochet skills have gotten so much better.
After expressing my delight at the crochet handle my husband designed for me, both him and I want others to be able to experience the freedom that I now have when crocheting. With chronic illnesses, its important for you to be able to continue with your passions as much as possible, so we have decided to make this crochet handle a sellable physical item for others to enjoy.
Here's the link to purchase one if you would like to give it a go!
A 3D printed ergonomic crochet handle with interchangable hook sizes.
The design uses a 'lock and key' system for keeping the crochet hooks
Each crochet handle will come with the hook sizes;
1.25mm
2mm
3mm
4mm
4.25mm
5mm
6mm
If you want other hook sizes, send us a message and we can design one.
The cost of the handle and keys covers the cost of the 3D printing material, we are not making a profit off of this because we want as many people suffering from chronic illness to be able to enjoy crocheting again. We are happy to post internationally as we are based in New Zealand, send us a message before purchasing so that I can get you the cost of shipping.
I hope you will love this crochet handle and hook set as much as I have!
Thinking about how my mom tried to âseduceâ my dad when they were in college together by sneaking oranges into his backpack, because she grew up food insecure and feeding someone/sharing food was a big deal with her upbringing with a lot of emotional meaningâ
and meanwhile my poor dad is just convinced that heâs been haunted by some citrus poltergeist because why the fuck are there always oranges in his bag he swears he did not put there???
Iâm very much a proponent of âfood not lawnsâ but Iâm also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. Iâll excitedly encourage it but if people canât or even just donât want to then thatâs FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like itâs as simple as âjust grow your own food!â is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take
i watered my garden every single day it didnât rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didnât use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didnât really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasnât fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didnât harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat oneâthe slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.
then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. iâm still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.
your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff youâre not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.
i love gardening! itâs great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but itâs SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.
Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesnât have to be food -for humans-Â
You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-
The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where Iâm from:
Reblogging for excellent suggestion and recommendations for North American folks! I have a native pollinator garden and even my 3x8 (soon to be expanding) patch brings in so many different small bees and other pollinators Iâd never seen before. I can confirm they need very little care, and a lot of native solitary bees are so so little and amazing.
(somewhat related note, if you are planting a non native ornamental, RESEARCH and make sure it isnât invasive to the area! Down with Japanese honeysuckle.)
the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that ânice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to thinkâ is possibly the funniest character ever devisedÂ
I feel like the modern equivalent is that guy you think is super well put together until you find out exactly how much red bull he ingests on a regular basis.
Modern Sherlock is that very nice English Professor-seeming guy who you bring a problem and while walking from the door of his office to his desk he starts explaining the entire solution you need
And upon reaching his desk heâs like âExcuse me one moment.â and pulls out one of those huge Monster canisters they legally arenât allowed to make anymore, cracks the whole thing, chugs it, takes a deep breath, and then nods at you and is like âAlright, and then what you need to do isâŠâ
why even modernize it to energy drinks??? coke didnât go anywhere. we still have coke. energy drinks arenât NEARLY chaotic enough.Â
Its is more like you hiring some guy to do private investigation about how your husband maybe cheating on you and Sherlock comes to your house high as fuck. Walks into your living room and without taking a moment to even talk to you or sign any paperwork, he turns aroundâpupils as big as godâand just says
âIts your best friend Brenda. Iâll email you the invoice.âÂ
Because when it was written cocaine was legal and even considered healthy and useful by some laypeople, even though doctors knew it wasnât, and Watson was always trying to stop people from encouraging Sherlockâs addiction because HE KNEW BETTER.
So consider this, Holmes, at 2am, desperately searching the flat for the stashes of NOS cans, only to keep coming up with passive aggressive pamphlets about the dangers of caffeine overdose.
Watson wakes up to a stench like Satanâs ass to find Sherlock sitting by his bed with a re-heated pot of cold brewed Deathwish Coffee that had been hidden in the back of the toilet tank (brewing) for five months. Sherlock is trying to say heâs proud of Johnâs cleverness in finding most of the stashes, but heâs passed into the fifth dimension and all John gets is a creepy vibrating grin and a sound like a shaken cat.
TLDR, Sherlock did die when he fell off the Falls, but he was so coked up his body didnât stop moving until like a decade later.
Sherlock as one of those cryptid types the baristas talk about (thereâs a post floating around somewhere) who comes in and orders a venti with as many shots as they are legally allowed to add, plus a few more for good measure (and a hefty tip) and then adds energy drink on top of it before chugging the whole thing, to the absolute horror of the cafe staff.
Further discourse! Everyone is missing the fact that Sherlock used cocaine to âescape from the commonplaces of existenceâ when he didnât have a case. The drugs are a substitute. Which means that when you hire him heâs stone-cold sober and JUST AS WEIRD.Â
So itâs more like realizing that your flatmate with the caffeine/sometimes drug death wish will only chill the fuck out when he has some strange mystery to unravel, so you spend your free time scouring reddit posts that might actually feature a real missing person. Or a ghost. You really donât care which at this point. When you finally find something your flatmate is THRILLED and straight up stops eating because he thinks he can survive on intellectual curiosity alone, and yeah thatâs not good, but itâs better than what he was doing to himself before. Your success is comparative, okay? You stick around for the meeting partly because youâre curious, partly because this is your home too remember, and partly because youâve found that writing up these insane excursions helps pay off your student loans. Your Patreon is thriving. The entire time your flatmate is interviewing this poor SOB he keeps breaking into manic grins and youâre kicking him under the table, trying to help him remember that others arenât happy about a death in the family. Halfway through he pulls a cigarette from a stash in his smelly bedroom slipper, offering the client one and yeah, thatâs very nice, but⊠no. No thank you. Heâs dressed impeccably and has a violin worth millions just lying on the floor, but the flat as a whole looks like a tornado just blew through and thereâs something growing on the walls beside the makeshift lab. Is he rich? Dirt poor? Impossible to tell based on the surroundings. The entire time he rattles off observations about the client not at all related to the case and his continuing good mood depends entirely on how impressed the guy is. If he mentions âmagic tricksâ or âI saw that on Youtubeâ youâre prepped for damage control.Â
By 8:00pm youâve finally convinced your flatmate to look up from his research and go half on a pizza, but the second it gets there he shrieks in excitement and runs out the door, demanding that you follow with your legally dubious gun. You apologize profusely to the delivery guy and double his tip, begging him not to call the cops. No, not because youâre afraid of arrest, you just know the head of the local precinct and heâs a pain in the ass.Â
You run after your flatmate knowing damn well you have to be up early tomorrow because despite maintaining a private practice you still donât make enough to get your own apartment.Â
Personally I see Sherlock as ADHD and no one will ever convince me otherwise
I mean â itâs textbook hyperfixation/understimulation right there â I Also forget to eat and sleep and do Human Things when Iâm vibing with whatever makes my brain go, and I Also take (medically prescribed) stimulants when I need to think. And Also adhd understimulation makes mundane existence an agony that one will do nearly anything to escape but at least in the modern day we have things like video games and netflix so itâs a little easier to actually get that escape without yâknow completely self-destructing along the way (Sherlock Holmes plays Among Us to fill the void between cases change my mind)
And while itâs entirely legit that a modern ADHD sherlock might self-medicate with energy drinks and home-brewed toilet-tank-coffee, Iâd LOVE to see an adaptation where Sherlock just. has a prescription?
So instead of hunting down his secret Bad Habit Stash, John could be like âhey, sherlock- the pharmacy called, your meds are readyâ and then sherlock would be all âLATER JOHN IM ON A CASE RN I DONT NEED THEMâ and Johnâd be like âsherlock no thatâs not how that worksâ
And then later once the case has been solved and the existential agony of understimulation sets back in, Sherlock could be like âhey John pass me my medsâ And John might be âsherlock you already took them this morning I saw youâ âyeah but theyâre not working yetâ âdude it takes time for them to kick inâ âsure sure OR I could just take more. I missed some days yâknow I gotta catch upâ âsherloCK NO I am a DOCTOR thatâs NOT HOW THAT WORKSâ And then sherlock heaves a gigantic sigh and grabs a can of RedBull thatâd been stuffed between the couch cushions and John like swats him with a shoe or something because SHERLOCK NO do you KNOW what that stuff DOES to your HEART PLEASE STOP
True story: many undiagnosed folks with ADHD self-medicate without realizing what theyâre self-medicating for. Andâsurprise, surprise!âthey often reach not for depressants but for stimulants. The trouble is that itâs a lot harder to guesstimate the right amount of cocaine to bring an ADHD brain to optimal (which is what prescription stimulants are trying to do).Â
Another interesting side note: a lot of ADHD people donât have the ânormalâ reaction to, say, coffee or tea. It seems counterintuitive, but sometimes caffeine just makes them sleepy (and weâre not talking caffeine crash hours later. No, weâre talking âimmediate post-coffee naptimeâ). The same thing happens with prescription stimulants. If your dose isnât right, itâs just as likely your Adderall (or Ritalin, or variants) will just make you tired. Itâs REAL WEIRD.Â
What Iâm saying is, you could absolutely have a Sherlock who has been using/abusing illegal stimulants until Watson shows up, then have Watson diagnose the ADHD and desperately try to find the RIGHT MED at the RIGHT DOSE (a mystery even Sherlock would struggle with), while Sherlockâfull of ADHD impatience and depressingly dysfunctional dopamine receptorsâinsists, âThe cocaine was fine, John. This mucking about with ineffectual tablets is worse than the bloody boredom!â
If itâs just filled with regular juice, a successful hit refreshes the target as the item Cup of Juice.
Also, I probably should have said that each successful hit uses up some of the contents, but I didnât, so thereâs nothing to stop you from just filling it with water and reusing it constantly instead of having to refill canteens if you have one of those campaigns where the DM makes you account for dehydration
Being an American right now is so fucked up. Like hi I'm living my life. I'm gay. I'm doing great. My government is trying to take away my human rights. I can vote but it might not do anything because of gerrymandering. Sometimes people here deliberately spread deadly viruses because Freedom. We're told this is the best country in the world. I can't escape. I don't want to leave. I want to escape. I love the land itself. The government is like five steps from actively trying to kill me. We have brand new lawmakers who better understand the will of the people. The highest court in the nation is rigged to side with fascists. I'm graduating soon and I have an incredible life ahead of me. My planet is dying.
Like. This sounds overdramatic but you know that scene in the two towers where theoden looks out at saruman's army and realizes he made all these warriors just to destroy Rohan which is full of innocent people and his people and he says "What can man do against such reckless hate?"
That's how I feel on a daily basis
I don't think I CAN do anything except keep doing what I'm doing. Keep myself alive. Make stuff that helps other people be happy. Encourage activism and change. Plant flowers. I have to focus small. There ISN'T anything I can do against the big pharmaceutical companies causing millions of deaths from covid (among thousands of other medical ailments) because they refuse to release the patents on lifesaving medicine. I can't do anything about it I literally can't
All I can do is fucking write stories and posts and run stupid little dragon RPGs and plant flowers and hope. But if it helps other people too, what I'm doing, then it's worth it.
I am very small. I need to remember that and not try to pick a fight with an enemy that's much bigger than me. It's not selfish to say it's probably for the best if I just focus on my life and immediate vicinity. It's realistic and I think I can do more good this way.
There's a lot of pressure to like, fight for every problem ever but I think I need to remember I can't do that and I shouldn't do that and I need to limit myself to what I CAN do
Idk, it's clear a few other folks were also Feelin' This. I guess we all have to scale down. It feels gross because like... Obviously I care about shit that's happening, but I literally cannot deal with emotionally and intellectually engaging with all the awful news I'm bombarded with.
Being an American right now is still fucking awful, but being me doesn't have to be
I think a lot of the time people get overwhelmed by everything that's going on right now, and sometimes I do too. I was thinking about that the other day, and reached a place where I was trying to fold my mind around accepting all the things I can't possibly do, because I'm only human, and only one human.
In thinking this over, I remembered reading the fable of the Crow and the Pitcher as a kid. If you've never read it, a crow finds a pitcher full of water, but can't reach the bottom, so, after failing to knock it over, he piles pebbles into it until he can drink from the pitcher.
I've heard various morals for this, from "thoughtfulness works better than brute strength," to "necessity is the mother of invention," and "little acts add up." But like... I started thinking about being a pebble, rather than being the crow.
I don't have to be the whole solution. I don't even necessarily have to be the one person who finds the solution. I just have to be willing to help as much as I can and raise the water level, and help the solution happen.
I'm sure some people will say that sounds weak and defeatist or whatever, which, you know, first of all, fuck you. But this is - in all seriousness - one of the ways in which lasting change is made. Not by big singular dramatic gestures, not by one person burning themself out by somehow doing everything all of the time, but by the dogged and continual persistence of people being present and doing what they can do, over and over, raising the water line.
It's okay to be a pebble. It's okay to raise the water level a little, in concert with all the other pebbles, and get your comrade a little drink of water. Do what you can, when you can, the best that you can, and find your peace with that.
Everyone please pay respects to your local Chinese-American restaurant for being the direct heritage of Chinese laborers coming over and learning how to make dishes that resemble home with limited resources as well as trying to cater to more and more white people who were eating at their restaurants