if i look back, i am lost
we're not kids anymore.
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Love Begins
Three Goblin Art
styofa doing anything
ojovivo
izzy's playlists!
Peter Solarz
#extradirty
Janaina Medeiros
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
No title available
occasionally subtle
RMH
Game of Thrones Daily
sheepfilms
@theartofmadeline
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Today's Document
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@tired-tinyteapot
when people who want to be vaguely progressive say 'nature' all secular style but it's painfully obvious they mean 'god' while thinking they don't mean god
"natural behaviour" "the natural body" "nature intended" "nature created" no da fuck it didn't
Pet peeve of the day is the way many fiber artists use "carpet wool" as a catchall derogatory term for any wool that is coarse and scratchy, with the implied meaning carpet wool=garbage wool. That is not what carpet wool is.
Carpet wool, as the name implies, is a term for the wool from sheep specifically, intentionally bred for centuries to produce wool that is ideal for carpets (historically meaning rugs or, less often, heavy outer blankets, not just carpet like the modern stretched kind stapled to the floor.)
The ideal fiber for an item that is going to be put on the floor and walked on needs to be durable and easy to clean, therefore each strand needs to be long, relatively thick (yes, that means coarse,) and not prone to easily felting.
What it DOESN'T need to be is particularly "soft." The long fibers will make a smooth enough surface to not irritate the soles of your feet and you're not generally going to be wearing a rug right against very sensitive skin all day where you can feel the prickly ends. "Carpet wool" breeds, also known as longwool breeds, have wool fibers that perfectly meet those criteria.
A rug made from wool from a hair sheep or some meat sheep that is coarse but also brittle and short is going to wear out and fall apart ao quickly it's not worth the effort to make it. Therefore, despite being coarse and "scratchy," it is NOT CARPET WOOL. Use that for stuffing pillows or compost it for fertilizer.
A fine, soft, Merino rug is also going to be a felted, pilled, worn-out mess in such a short time it's not going to be worth the effort to make. Save that for a beautiful lace scarf that's going to be directly against the skin of your neck all day. Judging by what's best for rugs, Merino is actually the "garbage" wool.
Anyway, humans spent millenia developing different fibers for different applications, and also words mean things and don't mean other things. Can we please stop calling Lincoln or Wensleydale wool "garbage" because it makes scratchy socks and can we also stop calling Katahdin or Dorper hair "carpet wool" please.
Also, the sheep that grow the wool are absolutely rocking the look.
Imagine telling these lovely Wensleydale ladies their hair isn't glam!
I share this peeve - and I may go awandering far afield in a highland meadow later - but I have opinions about opinions.
A fiberist who causally dismisses any breed for its inherent genetic qualities is an indication of inexperience. A novice doesn't have enough data to make an acurate judgment on anything other than their preference. Which, we all have preferences, but being enthusiastically loud about our preferences doesn't make us right.
In a culture fixated on the seductive qualities of soft, our western idiom has been coddled into the false equation of soft=best leading to the unsustainable environment nightmare of microfibers. The first fail in that soft equation comes from comparing hand spun yarns with commercial yarns. The loud opinions tend to get ramped up here, especially when an novice hasn't reconciled the equation:
[Great Yarn = (characteristics of breed or breed blend + preparation method) ÷ spinning technique (± ply)] all influenced by fabrication method of the final project.
Now that☝️equation gets shit done!
Because even though wool is a multifaceted fiber -
It isn't a one-size-fits-all fiber. it's a spectrum of fiber solutions to a variety of situations & needs, producing both textile & non-textile uses
Yes - carpets & rugs are one of those needful situations that specific wools fulfill. However, the same breeds used reliably for industry also have functions in garments & home decor not associated with feet. And, to the experienced fiberist: you don't dismiss wool for not being softy-soft
✨️Fiber✨️ Bruja✨️
As part of a rare breed study, I had the opportunity to spin an Old-World UK Herdwick.
The fleece was the same color of the stones in its native range. It was coarse, full of hair, & kemp. It was tough. The twisted single cut a groove my flyer's wood. The staple was 3-4" (7.5-10 cm) & it held twist perfectly even when spun super-fine.
Plied back upon itself it made a stable 2-ply lace weight.
Despite it being from one of the cutest sheep to grace the hard-knock fells - it was a beast of a fleece.
Our Guild chairperson called the rolags “Godzilla’s pubes” - and he wasn't wrong. It was akin to a natural steel wool pad.
Together, our Guild tried every preparation we knew.
We de-haired, hand carded, drum carded, hackled, & combed. Spun on wheels & hand spindles making singles, & multiple plies. The yarn was crocheted, knitted woven, needle felted, needle punched, & even used in nalbinding. It was deemed filler wool - not even worthy of rug making but the fleece was far to clean to compost.
And - alas - with the same fiber someone spun their sample as cobweb weight and made a square shawl/lap cover - maybe 40" by 40" (a meter square ). Because of the fibre characteristics it held its structure in an open lace that was beautiful. The charcoal gray was stunning - it caught the light here and there where the lighter shades of kemp and hair reflected. It was a most beautiful piece of work
And it is not soft. But it is very lightweight & warm.
And that combination is hard to find in commercial yarns.
The variety of textures in the fiber category of Wools is astounding. There just might be a wool for every need:
Cormo for baby layettes.
Alpaca for the cowl around your neck.
Merino for the colorwork sweater pattern from Ravelry
Shetland for mittens and hats.
Wensleydale socks that will wear well in boots and keep your feet warm.
Lincoln Long wool that - if spun as lace weight or cobweb will make an heirloom lace baby blanket -
Or Herdwick . . . to make a lap warmer for someone whose circulation can't stand the weight of more than a sheet but still needs to stay warm.
All of these could be carpet wool - the last three being far superior & more durable to the task than the others - but they can also be much more.
Seriously. Don't discount a wool for being itself. Look at your skillset, add to your knowledge, try something new. Also - and i mean this - do a fucking breed study.
then conversely some men need to be hit back
This bus company in my area has taken to giving its vehicles names. This one could have used a bit more constructive criticism.
this is the vibe i bring to the party actually
More of you need to learn about these ☝️
More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"
I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.
I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).
By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.
Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.
i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.
the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.
in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!
(via @prisonhannibal )
-Leslie Feinberg, from Trans Liberation Beyond Pink Or Blue
important! this is from Feinberg's book as cited, but these are not Feinberg's words.
this is an excerpt from a letter by I *think* Dragon Xcalibur, though I don't have the book in front of me - feel free to double check me on that. but Leslie Feinberg didn't write these words, zie just included them in hir book.
writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months
Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.
You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.
This is GOLD! You just saved me like thousands of therapy costs lmao
When I was writing my fic last few months the strategy I used was "just skip all the scenes I don't want to write" and it worked great in my opinion
Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).
I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.
out of the tags with you
I don't want a Career I want to Fuck Around
And not find out. I cannot stress enough how much I do not want to find out.
In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.
so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.
This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.
And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.
Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.
Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.
Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.
My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).
But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.
So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?
Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.
In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.
And they flinch every time.
Here have a newspaper comic from 1993
my father, who is not a misogynist by any means and therefore surprised me by revealing this, DESPISES Saffron from Firefly (conwoman who seduces her predominately male targets)
in a series with multiple instances of men beating, humiliating, and occasionally killing female sex workers, including at least one main character and several sympathetic side characters. and two other main female characters being threatened with rape at various points
but the worst character, to him, is a woman who preys on men’s attraction to her
long distance friends pets feel like celebrities because you can only be parasocial with them
