This is literally the most heart warming story I have read on Twitter so far.
I think this is exactly what friends should do, and I feel everyone deserves people like this.
A barn rasing: a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.
because you cannot, you CANNOT, build a barn on your own, and without it, you will not be able to survive.
What a fuckin’ gem of a sentence. “What we did today was a barn rasin”
i think that very last line is what a LOT more people need to fully digest. there’s this romance around friendship that it should be perfect and smooth and unproblematic at all times but that isn’t what being a friend is. that isn’t what a normal connection with another human being is. sometimes you NEED to do things that might not end well for you personally, in order to be a friend to your friend. sometimes you’ve got to be willing to face serious consequences to help, to save your friend’s life in the way they need saving at that moment.
being a friend takes commitment. a willingness to take that risk.
My dad grew up in a rural Greek farming village and their farm had sheep but they were taken care of by this guy they hired that was kinda the “village weirdo” in that he seemed to be a misanthrope that disliked other people and lived in a shack by himself interacting with others as least as possible (so sheep herder was actually a really good job for him) and he seemed to spend a lot of his time taking care of this cloak he hand-made out of porcupine quills and he’d wear that when tending the sheep to protect from wolf attacks bc any wolf that lunged at him would get a face covered in barbs and you know that guy sounds like he was kinda cool
I keep thinking about that one post that was going around talking about the potential origins of cheese and everyone immediately jumps to it must've been rotten milk that they ate out of desperation. But I'd like to posit that the first cheese was probably someone adding an acid to warmed milk and realising it splits it. Like it's not that big a stretch of the imagination for someone to think "oh I like warm milk but I also like this acidic fruit, I wonder if I can mix them". From there a little experimentation on separating the new curd from the whey and you've got a simple fresh cheese.
I dunno I think the reason I wanted to make this post is just that we tend to desscribe a lot of discoveries around food as desperate acts of starvation and not genuinely thought out experimentations based on observations like every other form of human knowledge. Ancient people weren't stupid starving unwashed masses and it's important to remember that. They were people who could think and deduce and logic their way through things as good as you or I.
there's this narrative I've encountered several times about our early ancestors figuring out that cooking food makes it good, and it goes "some meat probably fell in the fire and then when it cooled down they tried eating it and that's how they found out food could be cooked."
which, I do not accept. I have seen humans. I would like to propose an alternative explanation.
Cooking is the result of an early scientific experiment entitled "Does Meat Burn?"
(It was part of a wider research project considering such questions as Does Antler Burn? Does Hide Burn? Does Hoof Burn? and the oft-repeated Does My Hand Burn Ow Fuck Yes Actually It Does)
Yeah there's this weird tendency to assume that past humans were not smart. They were just as smart as we are, they just knew less stuff.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years (we think "modern humans", as in no major physical differences, have been around for about 200k, and Homo Erectus go back as 2 million years, and it's not like they were just unintelligent monkeys). That's a lot of time to try out stuff just to see what happens, and if something turns out to be a good idea, you're gonna keep doing it. You're gonna tell your friends and kids "hey this is a good idea!" and they're gonna keep doing it.
Yeah they didn't have science and writing but that doesn't mean they didn't try out stuff to see what happens. There's always this assumption that our ancient ancestors must have stumbled into all kinds of ancient inventions and discoveries, but I think it's just as likely that they were like "hey what happens if you do this? Anybody know? Nope? Well I'm gonna try it then" and everyone else was like "oh Steve, you're always such a clown." and then Steve is like "hey this is good, guys! Try it out!" and now we have cheese.
Same thing with fire and the wheel and domestication of animals and plants and so on. We probably did a lot of that stuff on purpose, because someone wanted to find out what would happen. Someone was like "hey this seems like it'd be a good idea, let's do it!" and then it was. And conversely there's been plenty of people going "hey this seems like a good idea" and then it wasn't and they are why we know not to tickle rattlesnakes or eat nightshade.
But it's not like humans started being smart in like 1425. We've been like this for ages.
Also, I'm guessing that food experiment might be more common in times of plenty. With a lot of different options at hand, it must feel more compelling to mix different stuff together
Food experiment is a conscious act by people who have a lot on their plate literally
this stuck w me i jokingly was like i have nothing to offer i am aimless and broke but then my coworker said something like "but ur happy right? accepting the pace of life and finding happiness in it is something a lot of people can't offer and i think u can make people comfortable in any situation cos u have a steady vibe. thats offering a lot" nevermind im ballin
Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit
“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.
In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.
…
When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.
Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.
The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)
All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.
Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.
But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”
There is an animal-size hole at the center of modern life. Some of us will search the world to fill it.
one can instantly free oneself from the chains of identity discourse by simply conceiving of sexuality as something that is dialectical and not metaphysical
your sexuality does not exist within you, nor does it exist as an immutable wholly external ideal to be discovered. your sexuality is locatable only within your interaction with and relations to the world around you
Okay but legit, if you're not in a Buy Nothing group, seek out your closest one. We literally got a free washer and dryer once. We've gotten groceries, craft supplies, pet supplies, clothes, and all sorts of shit. It's awesome.
On top of that, Instead of donating our old unwanted stuff to places like Goodwill, which wildly mistreat their workers, Buy Nothing lets me donate things directly to my community, without the risk that the sorters at the thrift shop will just throw things in the trash. I've passed along open things of hair care products that I didn't wind up liking but that had nothing wrong with them. I've passed along snacks we didn't like, pet food we didn't wind up using, and all sorts of perishables that would have otherwise gone right in the garbage.
My local group even has regular meetups where people bring all their stuff at once, and it's like a giant garage sale where everything is free.
They have a damn near global presence, so check out the website if you're looking for a local group!
you have to pretend to be a wizard sometimes, for your health. the obvious method is d&d, but you can also open the dishwasher on cold mornings and raise your arms dramatically as you're enveloped in the steam, or you can find a really good stick to walk around in the woods with, or you can run a bizarrely dedicated rp blog on tumblr. but it's an important component of human well being to occasionally pretend to be a wizard.
I feel like im watching a wedding ceremony from a country i didnt know existed. Like, I have no idea how all this stuff is important but good for you?????
btw she gave him a single which can be made in a matter of minute depending on pattern and size but he gave her a giant cuff which can take hours or even more than a day to complete based on just how complex the design and materials are. she wanted to trade something small and simple and he gave her a massive token of his love and respect for her as a fellow raver (and possibly his junior in the scene)
It’s so incredible how there is simultaneously diet culture that says only eating the way of our ancestors is healthy while there are also areas of diet culture that says you can’t eat an apple because an apple = sugar and sugar bad. Meanwhile the people who think it’s only healthy to eat the food of cavemen are drinking their protein shakes they found in the wild.
One week there will be a news headline about a study showing that eating chicken eggs is bad for cholesterol. The next week there’s a news headline about a study that shows eating chicken eggs helps you fight cancer. Both of these news articles made for clicks conveniently don’t mention that the collective sample size of these two studies was fifteen people over a course of five months.
This yoga instructor says you can’t eat between noon and 3 pm. This doctor who had less than ten hours of training on nutrition says you shouldn’t eat after 6 pm. This Instagram dietician says intermittent starving fasting is good for you. This celebrity fake doctor with a TV show says you should only eat on Wednesdays and if the weather is overcast.
Your mom who grew up hating her body because people would judge her for her appearance is on her 20th juice cleanse, but it’s for health, not because a lifetime of discrimination made her feel worthless. And hey, you should do this juice cleanse with her! And then the included three hour workout videos! And this new keto diet meant to help children with epilepsy looks good, let’s try that together! Oh, you don’t want to eat at all anymore? Well, at least not eating is good for you!
You should only eat meat. No, you should only eat vegetables and fruits. Scratch that, fruits have carbs. You should only eat cold-blooded mammals and seaweed. Wait, it’s actually okay to eat fruit again! Does this protein bar have omega-3 fatty acids? Wow, you don’t eat fat-free, dairy-free, carb-free, sugar-free milk? Do you even care about your health? Things without gluten taste worse, so that must mean they’re healthy! I can’t believe you actually ate a whole bag of chips. Yes, it was a single-serving bag meant for one person, but you still ate a whole bag of chips. I could never. Oh, my weekly supply of diet food arrived, and only double the cost of regular food from the grocery store! What a steal!! You actually feel pangs of hunger when you don’t eat and then listen to those hunger cues? What a fat ass. You know if you eat a single piece of cake you’ll get diabetes, an illness that is very complex and is actually extremely based on genetics, right?
been thinking about diet and gym culture and what nutrition is natural and veganism and jordan peterson and ed and generational foodtrauma and where were at right now as a society. i will keep thinking.
Something deeply painful is the fact that seasons, especially fall, dont feel the same. Not because of individual maturity but because climate change has impacted the weather patterns so so so much that we cant even experience the same annual shifts that our ancestors have for centuries
I feel displaced, i yearn for the spring, summer, fall, and winter that i can barely remember experiencing
To make things worse, if you’re under 50-60 years old, you can’t even remember what normal seasons were like because you weren’t alive to experience them
In the graph above, you can see how there’s a clear tipping point in the late 1970′s, which is when global temperatures first began to really skyrocket.
I was born in 1997, so about 20 years after this shift occurred. There is an immense difference between the climate now and the climate I remember growing up in, but the way I experienced the seasons in my childhood was already fundamentally different from what the seasons were supposed to be like! My parents were pretty much the last generation to experience a normal climate, and that’s just... incredibly sad
i remember obsessing over the forecast in during winter because 1 2 3 °c might mean snow stays overnight. now i dont even bother anymore. now snow is a welcome surprise but a shortlived one.
also this is a part of my religion actually.
bissi hexisch @satisfied-cone - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
