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@scarlettgauthor
dont store a knife with the point facing down, it damages the blade. no, dont do that either. when you store it with the point facing up you might accidentally hurt yourself when you try to grab it. dont store a knife at all actually. your blade must never leave your hand, always ready, ruthless and waiting. you know deep down that ever since you learned the stench of blood you will never be able to cast it aside. or just get a sheath for it i guess.
“potentially mature content” yeah that’s my pervert friend i hope it’s mature content that’s what i followed them for
the state does not need to assign you a sex, nor does it need to keep inalterable record of it btw
a very interesting terf objection to this one boils down to "but how would the state know who to protect?" because it speaks to the incredible privilege of being in a class the state actually ever remotely wants to protect. most oppressed groups do not want the state to have a registry of them, lol
the patriarchy has done a great job convincing white cisgender women that it's in their best interests to maintain it
Researchers can do studies that track disparate impacts across genders just fine without the government storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They do this with race and orientation and disability and so on just fine.
A census can understand population level trends just fine without storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They can ask for this information in the census. The census tracking population level data is not the same as your assigned sex being permanently part of your legal identity. (At least, the way my country does a census.)
Your doctor can know your anatomy by you communicating it to them if/when it is relevant. There is never a time when they might need to know something that could only be conveyed by your assigned sex being officially relayed to them via government documentation. You can just use your words. The same way you tell your doctor any other part of your medical history.
People respond to "the government doesn't need to store your assigned sex as part of your legal identity" as if they are hearing "no one should ever acknowledge gender or sex at all" but that's not what's being said.
Your birth certificate conveys important legal information about you. Your name, as a designation. Your parents, as they have a legal obligation to you. Your place of birth, as that place has a legal obligation to you. Date and time of birth, since age is important for application of some laws.
And sex. That's on there too. But what is the legal relevance? What laws is the government going to apply to you differently based on what sex is on your birth certificate? I can only think of one thing my government really uses that for, and that is to determine who has to sign up for the draft. And guess what, fuck that shit anyway. The government also used to use this to decide who is allowed to marry who. They don't do that anymore. For now.
There is literally no reason my assigned sex needs to be part of my legal identity. My government is not using that for anything (important). It doesn't matter. If the gender markers on everyone's IDs vanished tomorrow nothing (except maybe the draft) would be significantly negatively affected. Data collection for research could continue as usual since researchers usually have people self report these characteristics rather than checking their government IDs. My doctors would still know which organs I have and if they forgot, I could tell them. I don't want anything to be part of my legal identity that doesn't have to be.
so our doctor's notes used to have a 'patient sex' marker but changed it to 'sex at birth'. which. fun fact since i changed my legal sex designation. it now says my 'sex at birth' is 'male', which i think is really funny for a lot of reasons. mainly because it highlights how fucking pointless the marker is in the first place AND despite the “progressive” language there's no actual accounting for trans people in the system, even though the wording was very clearly changed because of us.
turns out the only relevance it has is now the pharmacy techs call out 'monsieur transgothmog?' instead of 'madame' which hey. hey. i also have a first name you could use. just a thought.
my general opinion on what people should be "allowed" to portray and what topics they should be "allowed" to explore in fiction is that you can make whatever art with whatever themes you want but i'm also allowed to think the way you handled it was tasteless and should've been done differently. my negative opinion on your handling of sensitive topics is the price of admission for publicly showcasing your work. this is not a pro-censorship stance because i am not The Government
this is getting really popular so i’d like to add the important caveat that your criticism of a work is no more unassailable than the work itself. just as one is entitled to be critical of something someone else is entitled to disagree with that criticism. i add this because some of you pretend to give a fuck about thoughtful analysis and then when someone points out flaws in your argument you declare that all criticisms are valid. this is untrue. the status of a hater is no more sacred than that of a liker. get off your high horse and engage in the thoughtful discussion you pretend to believe in or perish by my blade
Equiping an armor tutorial
i'll prob make more bc i love talking ab armors
This just pissed me off so baaaad 😂
shocked and appalled at the lack of bisexuality merch that uses hydrangeas
look at this thing
it already has the right colors and everything! this should be everywhere! we already have the lesbian violets and the gay green carnations, so why not the bisexual hydrangea?
so far I have scoured etsy and found one pair of socks with a nice hydrangea gradient (and it has bees, 10/10), an enamel pin with hydrangeas and a bi flag (not terribly subtle, 7/10) and a sticker that says "bi-drangea" (I am SO MAD that I didn't think of that pun myself, 11/10) AND THAT'S IT.
I REQUEST, NAY, DEMAND MORE BI-DRANGEA MERCH. COME ON, PEOPLE.
“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
I would like to amend the above: spinning all day every day in order to keep your family afloat must absolutely have been terrifying back-breaking labour eventually. Or wrist-breaking.
In unrelated news, last year I got a repetitive strain injury from too much spinning, and had never been so grateful in my life that I can simply stop spinning and suffer no financial hardship from it.
One small issue. By zarzaliel
I think we are focusing on the wrong thing when talking about mainstream romantasy adult books, instead of shaming straight cis women for reading kinky books, we should tralk about how most of the newer books aimed at that demographic are just conservative propoganda, rebranding patriarchy as a kink.
There's nothing inherently wrong about liking the types of kinks that are present, control, power imbalance, dark themes, but when you really look at the top performing novels (which they are mass prodicing at questionable speeds) it's hard to ignore the ever present morally grey man, who's posessive over the heroine who starts off as otherworldly different from the 'regular woman' aka damsel in distress), is cruel to everyone except her, and the fantasy world revolves around the control of women, especially when it comes to forced pregnancy.
I'm seeing a lot of responses to this saying "this is why I read queer stories" but you're missing the point! You can relate to queer media because you're queer, cis straight women should also have material that aren't turning their opression into kinks in almost every. single. book. If they want to choose to read those stories, that's absolutely fine, again nothing wrong with exploring those dynamics, but the concerning part is how fast they're being made with the rise of booktok, and the looming threat to women's autonomy.
Remember when all mlm stories were borderine assault stories in the early 90s-2000s? and how long it took for other queer stories to be made? we all used our voices to make a change, it didn't magically stop we fought for it to not be the only type of story.
And the solution to this, for people who are wondering, isn't to try to suppress romantasy books because they're not "good for women." That's an old, old game and never goes anywhere good. The solution is not less kink and less porn. The solution is more kink and more porn.
Because when you think about it, the problem isn't that you can go to your chosen bookseller and find a story where Sparklia Special gets semi-forced to have babies for Broody McDarkenfay (it's okay, she's into it). The problem is that it is unnecessarily difficult to look a little further down the shelf and find a vampire princess domming the hell out of the hunter who knows he shouldn't love her. Reducing people's choices always serves the reactionary agenda one way or another. Expanding choices. That's where it's at.
(If this sounds like I am making a pitch that we should write porn to defeat fascism, that's…not entirely a mischaracterization. I mean, of course it won't defeat fascism, but I do feel that while we work to defeat fascism, we should at least have diverse and satisfying porn.)
I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory
Embroidered Sculptures Recreate Lifelike Mushrooms, Lichen, and Fungi in Thread
by Grace Ebert - Colossal, February 25, 2022
Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.
Currently, Cobbett is preparing a collection that will head to the Artful Craft exhibition at Make Southwest, which opens on April 2.
"For decades, wolf researchers believed ravens followed wolf packs to find food. Every biologist who flew aerial surveys over Yellowstone saw the same thing.
Wolves moving across the snow with ravens overhead, black shapes trailing the pack like a shadow with wings. The assumption was simple. The ravens were following the wolves. The wolves would kill. The ravens would eat. A study published in March 2026 using GPS transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens in Yellowstone proved the assumption wrong.
The ravens were not following the wolves. They were remembering where kills had happened before and flying over those locations looking for new carcasses. The relationship between the two species is real. The mechanism is not what anyone thought it was.
Bernd Heinrich, a University of Vermont biologist who spent years studying ravens in Maine and Yellowstone, first documented the scale of the association. His data showed ravens present near wolf packs 99.7 percent of the time during winter in Yellowstone. Not occasionally. Not frequently. Essentially always. On Isle Royale, researcher John Vucetich observed the same pattern from the air.
Every wolf pack had ravens with it. The birds were just always there.
The numbers at kill sites are staggering. The average number of ravens documented at a Yellowstone wolf kill is thirty. The maximum recorded at a single carcass is 135.
A wolf pack brings down an elk in the Lamar Valley, and within hours over a hundred ravens have materialized from across the drainage to feed. They do not wait politely. They land on the carcass while the wolves are still eating. They grab chunks of meat and cache them in the snow and in tree crotches for later retrieval. Research estimates that ravens can consume up to forty percent of a carcass, which means a wolf pack that kills a seven-hundred-pound elk may lose nearly three hundred pounds of it to birds.
That loss is so significant that one study proposed a theory that reshapes how we think about wolf pack size entirely. If a pair of wolves can take down an elk, why do wolves hunt in packs of four, six, eight, or more? The per-capita meat return decreases with every additional mouth. A pair gets the most meat per wolf. The answer may be ravens. Two wolves cannot eat fast enough to outpace a hundred ravens stripping the carcass simultaneously. A larger pack can post guards, feed in shifts, and physically dominate the carcass long enough to retain a greater share of the kill. Wolves may hunt in packs not because they need more teeth to bring down prey, but because they need more bodies to defend the kill from birds.
The ravens pay for their meals. Heinrich documented in his book Mind of the Raven that ravens serve as an early warning system at kill sites. Ravens are more vigilant than wolves. They perch in trees overlooking the carcass and scan the horizon in every direction. When a grizzly bear approaches, or a rival wolf pack, or a mountain lion, the ravens see it first. Their alarm calls alert the feeding wolves to the incoming threat before the wolves' own senses detect it. The wolves get airborne sentries. The ravens get an animal with the jaw strength to open a frozen elk carcass that no raven beak can penetrate.
That is the core of the mutualism. The raven cannot open the hide. The wolf can. The wolf cannot see a threat approaching from a mile away while its head is buried in a rib cage. The raven can. Each species fills a gap in the other's capability, and the result is a partnership so consistent that L. David Mech, the most published wolf researcher in the world, wrote that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other's capabilities.
The play behavior is the part that makes biologists uncomfortable because it implies something beyond transactional mutualism. Wolves and ravens play together. Not at kill sites. Not during feeding. During downtime. Yellowstone observers have documented ravens diving at resting wolves, pulling their tails, and flying away. Wolf pups chase ravens across meadows. Ravens steal sticks from pups and hold them just out of reach. The interactions look like the cross-species equivalent of two bored kids messing with each other because there is nothing else to do.
Doug Smith, the retired lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had watched this relationship from the air for decades. Wolf researchers have believed forever that ravens follow wolves, he wrote after the 2026 study was published. Every wolf researcher has seen it. I have seen it routinely from the plane while wolves are chasing an elk in Yellowstone Park, numerous times. Ravens are just always there. This is an age-old observation. But it has never been rigorously tested until now.
The 2026 study, which used 2.5 years of GPS data from transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens simultaneously, revealed that ravens were not tracking wolf movements in real time. They were patrolling known kill sites. A raven that fed at a wolf kill in a specific drainage in November would return to that drainage repeatedly over the following weeks and months, flying over the exact location where the carcass had been, checking whether a new kill had appeared. The ravens were not following the wolves. They were following the memory of where wolves had killed before.
That distinction matters because it changes the raven from a passive follower into an active strategist. A bird that follows a wolf pack is reacting. A bird that memorizes kill locations across an entire landscape and patrols them systematically is planning. The raven is not tagging along. It is running a surveillance network across hundreds of square miles of Yellowstone, checking sites where food has appeared before, and showing up fast enough when it appears again that every observer since the 1995 reintroduction assumed it had been following the wolves the whole time.
The wolf and the raven share almost identical geographic range across the Northern Hemisphere. Everywhere wolves live, ravens live. The association is not a Yellowstone novelty. It is a continental relationship between two of the most intelligent species in North American wildlife, running continuously across boreal forest, tundra, mountain, and prairie, built on meat, memory, and a mutual awareness that neither species has ever needed to be taught."
Sources: Heinrich, B. "Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds." / Stahler, D. et al. (2002). Animal Behaviour. / Mech, L.D. "The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species." / Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Living Bird, 2020. / Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 2026.
translucent fabric sculptures by korean artist do ho suh
FABRIC HOLY SHIT
FABRIC?!
FABRIC??!!!????!?!!!
DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO GET PRECISION SEAMS AND CORNERS ON SHEER FABRIC??!?!?!!!
"bottom" please consider 🫵 whether the word you are looking for is in fact "submissive" ! because if we decide that taking dick means your personality & character r inherently subservient 😃 we might as well just throw in the towel on the most basic premise of feminism & 🔫 kill ourselves 🎉
Went to a fiber festival this weekend
I think I was pretty restrained, actually. (My credit card disagrees)
