That Healey Girl @thathealeygirl - Tumblr Blog

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wizardshark

99% of queer discourse stops right before they define the true difference between bisexual and pansexual!

saspitite

FOR THE LAST FUCKING TIME

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

PANSEXUALS GROW FROM THE CEILING

elizapad

Happy Pride, cave dwellers 🦇

myfootyrthroat

It is wild talking to people online where you'll be like "Hey, you're kind of being an ass," and they'll rant about how as a member of a marginalized community... oppression and violence... societal forces... lack of opportunity... and it's like "Ok, people who share some demographic with you are pushed into homelessness and sex work but they are not being assholes online. You are a grad student at Reed who works part-time as a paralegal and you are a real dick."

fozmeadows

Genuinely one of the worst things to happen to online discourse in the past 15 years was the popularization - and thus the chronic watering down - of the term tone policing. Originally, it was coined by Black women to describe the tendency of privileged white women, when called out by WOC, to attack the way they'd spoken as a means of diverting from the substance of what was said: a literal DARVO tactic. It pointed out a specific, extant pattern of white women weaponizing their discomfort to stave off accountability and how WOC in general and Black women in particular were thus expected to speak with a servile sort of gentleness, not just as a matter of course, but particularly in situations that merited anything but. What it soon became, however, was a catch-all justification for marginalized people to act like fucking assholes.

People started saying the most aggro, edgelord shit at the drop of a hat, and if anyone pointed out how shitty it was, the culprit would immediately turn around and claim they were being tone policed. The levels of toxicity this resulted in were through the fucking roof, and the result was multiple left-wing online communities fostering the presence of utterly vile trolls because any attempt to curtail them was met with a combination of defensive retreat into marginalization ("Oh, so [members of X marginalized group] aren't allowed to be angry?" "You wouldn't blink an EYE if a cishet white man said the same thing!") and a lambasting dogpile on whoever had dared to point out their bad behaviour. This reached a fever-pitch in around 2014, at which point a bunch of shit happened that collapsed the established troll ecosystems across various online fronts. Since then, things have calmed down somewhat, but the impulse towards treating "hey, stop being an asshole" as a species of microaggression remained, such that it has now metastasized into - or at least significantly contributed to - the "UWU I am a Smol Bean 26yo minor and therefore I can't be held accountable for anything I say or do because I'm PRACTICALLY a CHILD" phenomenon. At base, what all this bullshit ultimately reflects is the desire of a certain type of person to act like an asshole without consequence, which in left-wing spaces is achieved one of two ways: either by situating their target as having more privilege than them, such that they're fair game to abuse (because if they don't take the personal attacks or scathing denunciations of the entire category of person to which they belong in "good humour," then they're proving themselves to be one of the bad ones); or by situating themselves as having a unique right to never ever be criticized or held to account (because they're marginalized or disabled or having a mental health crisis or a MINOR, YOU GUYS and making them feel bad about the shitty things they said is basically abusive).

How do I explain Plato's allegory of the cave to my cat?

sexshopshenanigans

gato’s allegory of the fishtank

moniquill

Let me tell you a story about media representation and how it informs creativity.

When I was a kid, I wrote a (terrible, rambling, thoughtlessly colonialist) sci-fi story with a huge ensemble cast. It was a hugely diverse cast too, with tons of (problematically described) POC. I even had characters with disabilities and non-binary genders. This was mostly because my ideas about what sci-fi was and what characters could be in it were largely informed, at the time, by Star Trek and the Star Wars prequels and Independence Day and The Fifth Element and Men in Black and The Matrix. Stories with lots of POC in them, characters with disabilities, characters who were from disparate cultures and had disparate identities and ways of being.

When I was a kid, I also wrote a (really fucking terrible, even more rambling, preachy as fuck) fantasy novel. And there was not a single person of color in it. Oh there were oppressed groups – represented by light-skinned or animal-featured nonhumans. This was mostly because my ideas about what fantasy was and what characters could be in it were largely informed, at the time, by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, by Disney and Don Bleuth and Jim Henson. Stories with NO POC in them, where everyone was able-bodied and white and usually thin and pretty (extra points for ‘pretty’ being described as ‘fair’) unless they were EVIL.

I am an NDN woman, and none of my characters ever, EVER, were.

Because until I actually gave it direct and attentive thought, before I considered the ramifications of setting and characters and who could be in what stories, my ARTISTIC VISION and my creative process was hugely affected by the stories I’d been told my entire life. I did not imagine POC characters in fantasy stories, but I did imagine them in Sci-fi stories. Because I’d been told by the stories I’d been fed from early childhood that POC could exist in the future, but not in fantasy; fantasy was set in mythical whitelandia not really resembling Europe, and if POC were even mentioned they were from exotic foreign lands to the south and the east (and they were seldom characters, certainly never core characters).

I say this because I am tired of hearing writers say 'well I just didn’t imagine the character that way! You can’t fault me for that, it’s my story and my inspiration!’

Your inspiration does not come from a perfect, unbiased void. Every story you tell is informed by every story you’ve ever been told, and you cannot divorce yourself from that. So if you want to be a thoutful, aware writer who is writing the best, richest story you can write, if you want your creative process to be as free and uninhibited as it can be, you need to stop and think about what informs your creativity and whether or not it is, in fact, problematic as fuck.

glitterary

tumblr staff, watching the userbase celebrate its beloved annual festival of frenzied stabbing: they seem like they’ll be cool with us unilaterally changing the way the site works without consultation or warning tomorrow :)

heedra

really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core

sttinkky

An overgrown light pole in Poland

moniquill

City forest god.

batmanisagatewaydrug

dropped an embroidery needle on my floor in the dark and couldn't recover it so hopefully a bug is about to use it as a sword and go on some adventures and shit

snailifier

🐌🪡 im so ready for the snides of snarch

julius-caesar-offical

... and why is that?

snailifier

*snabs you with my sneedle*

little-grey-dowitcher

So many people never learned to live with harmless discomfort at any point in their lives and holy fuck does it show

dragon-in-a-fez

a subset of these people have learned to process harmless discomfort as violent oppression and they get an even holier fuck

lostinurbanism

Quilters. Photographs by Henry Groskinsky (1971)

banji-effect

According to Getty, the woman wearing the pink cardigan in the first two photos is Mrs. Lulla Pettway, here together with other members of the all-Black cooperative at the Martin Luther King Freedom Quilting Bee headquarters hand sewing quilts, Alberta, Alabama. (Photo by Henry Groskinsky/The LIFE Picture Collection)

I'm developing a curiosity and interest in fiber arts, someone please stop me before it's too late

thepioden

Girl help the fibercrafters who live in my phone are calling out to me like the sirens of legend, entreating me to dash myself upon the rocks of Having A Yarn Stash

elen-aranel

fibe Crafts perfec t hobby for give tumblr user s\omething to do! yarn and fabric very Soft and Comfort tumblr user touch tumblr user do Fibre Craft. Tumblr User Do Fibre Craft. no problems ever with fibre ccraft because very Entertaining and Practical for tumblr user weak of things to do. Afibre Craft yes a place for tumblr user do fibre craft can trust fibre craft for pleasantly occupying tumblr user. friend fibre

pseudomantis

friendlyfrankenstein

needle/pin sharpener.

no really, squeeze it. Does it feel like it’s got sand in it? is’s sharpening sand. Stab the tip of your needle into it back and forth and it’ll help put a sharp edge back on a pin or needle that’s been blunted by use, or has a little bit of rust on it. It can’t fix anything worse then a little of either, and won’t work on something REALLY blunted, but its a lifesaver.

anais-ninja-bitch

also it is a pepper

vinceaddams

It's not a pepper and it's not for sharpening!!

It may seem like it should be a pepper, since that would go better with the flavour of a tomato (and the mass produced modern ones are admittedly more pepper shaped), but it is and has always been a strawberry. Here are some antique emery strawberries, which are much more strawberry shaped, and some of them have seeds.

(source)

(Home Needlework Magazine, 1899)

And it's for cleaning needles, not sharpening them. I can't imagine how jamming a blunt needle point around in a bunch of loose grit could possibly sharpen it in any significant way, and all the historical sources I've seen only talk about cleaning.

"Every sewer's work basket or work box should contain an emery bag, as shown in Fig. 2, through which to push a needle when it becomes rough, squeaks, or sticks in the material. An emery bag is usually shaped like a strawberry and consists of a rough denim bag filled with emery powder, which is a very hard material used for polishing metals. Such a bag may be purchased for 5 or 10 cents in any store that sells sewing materials. Needles often become rusted from the perspiration of the hands or from being left in damp places. The beginner may use a small emery bag to remove rust; or, a small piece of emery paper may be used instead."

-Woman's Institute Reference Library, 1916.

"Use an emery whenever your needle does not slip through the cloth easily."

-The Improvement of Educational Administration in Massachusetts, 1916.

"An emery bag is inexpensive and is useful to keep needles polished and smooth. If the hands perspire and it is difficult to push the needle through the cloth, running the needle through the emery will relieve the condition."

-Boys' and Girls' Clothing Club, 1915.

"It was very hot to sit and sew. The needle would get sticky in spite of all the little emery strawberry could give it, and Beth's fingers had never felt so clumsy and uncomfortable."

-The Unitarian Register, 1908.

"She polished her needles to nothing, pushing them in and out of the emery strawberry, but they always squeaked."

-Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1910.

This patent from 1873 mentions an emery slab for sharpening pins, which is quite different from a cushion, and which sounds like it actually would work for sharpening.

"C is a slab of emery or other sharp and fine grit, for sharpening needles or pins"

Then later down the page it also says

"E is an emery cushion, secured in the body of the holder A, and is used for polishing needles and keeping them smooth."

So. Strawberry for cleaning. Not pepper for sharpening.

elodieunderglass

Gentle reminder - modern sewing tools are made from treated or plated metal, or stainless steel. In terms of human civilisation, this is a wild advance of technology. Needles are some of our oldest tools; rust was formerly ubiquitous, and attacked every form of everyday metal. A rusty needle tears fabric, or worse, stains it. The luxury and technology of rustproof needles and pins - forgotten in a few generations of human memory - and yet it is remembered in the strawberry. Memory is stored in the strawberry!

hollyevolving

memory is stored in the emery

ode-on-a-grecian-butt

twomothsholdinghands

beggars-opera

I will never forget the flight I took to Paris in college and the tiny adorable child in the seat in front of me with his nose pressed against the window looking at the lights and squealing "OOOOOOH, C'EST MAGNIFIQUE!!!"

thefloatingstone

REAL!!!!

REAL!!!!!

toopunktofuck

my friend and i had to leave an ice cream shop once because a small child who sounded exactly like JFK ordered some rum raisin and we couldn’t fucking handle it