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pixel skylines

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@toastydehmer
on being yourself
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had to share this
In every way this is set up to be a joke like any other short video, it even uses the trope of main character in a wig to represent their mom, but it isn't funny at all. It's just sweet and nice
Honey, it's pollen season
nothing here to run from
INSANE!!! BEAUTIFUL AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE
friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly
like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices
Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.
The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.
The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.
There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.
The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.
I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.
The Klamath River Runs Free
#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies
As a European, I knew Americans have been asking for walkable cities but i had no idea it was literally this hostile
WHERE DO YOU WALK YOUR DOGS!?!
lol yeah
Its to the point where most Americans can’t conceive of a walkable community because everywhere is like this and several generations have now grown up in a world like this. There’s hardly anyone that can conceive of a world that isn’t like this. Most people either cave in and get a car or end up isolated. I live in a city that’s mostly walkable by North American standards and I still end up walking in the dirt on the edge of a stroad a lot of the time.
And don't forget, we can't get decent public transportation either.
As of TODAY Twitch has quietly added the Generative Ai Training model into your account without your permission.
For the time being it is TOGGLEABLE and you can TURN IT OFF!
However, we do not know if Twitch will force this to be on at all times like some other platforms, like X/Twitter, have previously done.
Regardless of IF YOU STREAM OR NOT you should TURN THIS "TRAINING FOR GENERATIVE AI" SETTING OFF IMMEDIATELY!
To do so you must go to: https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security
And then scroll all the way down near the bottom.
There you'll find the "Training for Generative Ai" setting, toggle it to OFF!
Be sure to keep sending messages to Twitch that you do NOT want this to exist.
And another reminder that if you do stream on Twitch, like I do, you should start preparing you and your audiences to migrate elsewhere ASAP.
The evacuation prep poster is done! This poster is designed primarily with wildfires in mind, but the tips can apply to preparing for any much any disaster.
If you share this image outside of tumblr, please link back to my website: www.Katy-L-Wood.com
[[Image ID: A poster including a layered graphic showing what items to have ready to prepare for evacuating your home based on how much warning you have that you need to evacuate. The inner, red, level is labeled “No Warning.” The next, orange, level is labeled “Less Than an Hour.” The next, yellow, level is labeled “More Than an Hour.” The final, green, level is labeled “General Preparedness.” The items associated with each level and the text are included below. /end ID.]]
———-
Evacuation Prep:
As the world changes, it is important to be prepared to safely and efficiently evacuate your home, potentially with little or no warning. Preparing ahead of time can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and help you evacuate safely if the time comes.
Red Level (No Warning): People | Pets | Keys. Human life matters most. If you can’t rescue your pets, let them out to give them their best chance. If evacuating by car, don’t forget your keys.
Orange Level (Less Than an Hour): Crucial Meds | Important Papers | Money | Paper Map | Pet Vaccination Records. Crucial meds and medical equipment. Papers including passports, birth certificates, medical records, etc.. Multiple forms of payment. Paper map with marked evac routes in case of signal loss. Phone. Most evac centers require vaccine records for pets to be allowed in.
Yellow Level (More Than an Hour): Photos | Hard Drives | Computers | Chargers | Irreplaceable Items | OTC Meds | Pet Supplies | Pet Food | Clothes | Weather Gear. Family photos. Hard drives and computers. Make digital backups ahead of time. Charging cords. Irreplaceable items such as collectibles and mementos. Over the counter medical supplies such as Aspirin and tampons. Pet supplies such as bowls, crates, toys, and litter. Pet food and treats. Clothes. If you are running out of time grab your laundry basket. Weather gear if needed.
Green Level (General Preparedness): Food | Water | Radio | N95 Masks | Multitool | Power Pack | Gas | Stove + Fuel | Flashlight | Toiletries | Emergency Contact Info | Bedding | First Aid | Can Opener. Easy prep, shelf-stable food. Water. Battery powered/rechargeable NOAA weather radio. N95 masks for smoke. A multitool. Rechargeable power pack for phones. Keep your car at least partially fueled at all times. Portable stove and fuel for cooking food without power. Flashlight and spare batteries. Toiletries including hair products, toothbrush and paste, etc.. Emergency contact info for friends and loved ones. Spare pillows and blankets. Dedicated first aid kit. Can opener.
Save yourself time and stress by preparing an evacuation bag ahead of time and keep it in an easy to access place. At the end of every season rotate out the perishable items within such as food, water, and medications. The more you can keep in the bag, the more time you’ll have to grab everything else. Remember, it is okay if you can’t do everything. Some preparation is better than no preparation.
If you are in the U.S.A. and experiencing disaster related anxiety call the Disaster Distress Hotline at 1-800-985-5990 for support and resources.
———-
If you share this image outside of tumblr, please link back to my website: www.Katy-L-Wood.comf
Putting this back in rotation. Sigh.
Sharing this bc I am actively using it. Evac orders are a street away so we started with orange and have moved to yellow. OP, I didn’t have this printed out but I remembered it existed and was able to easily find it. Thank you.
Oh no! I hope things turn out okay for you. I’m glad the poster was able to help!
the human brain is so cool, if you're tired and stressed enough, your brain will go, "don't worry, I got you" and shadows will start moving
and what's the genital situation on the shadows
oh this is my post
I made an informative post for fonts used in Don't Starve (and Don't Starve Together). Maybe it will be useful to people who like design like me :9
I’m an addict rn
So a wizard and an ancient construct walk into a tavern.
it's definitely my predisposition to extreme frugality+redneck engineering, but i'm now obsessed with creating things literally without buying Anything. no supplies no tools no nothing, only the stuff you can just find outside, like Plants, Sticks, and Rocks.
I'm making textiles with nothing but foraged plant materials using no tools except sticks. Nature allows you to do this! There's no rules! I mean okay well maybe there might be some rules sometimes but they're just weak human rules! The plants themselves? They're like "Why sure! You can make yarn with nothing but fibers from the dead stem I don't need anymore, a couple sticks from that tree over there, and your own body and mind! Why not?"
Plants like to give us gifts! And nobody has the power to stop them!
Once you know the ways of the plants, the ways of our capitalist society become silly and hard to understand, sometimes even instilling you with a sense of dread.
I was looking at the textile books in the library to try to learn about plants you can make textiles from. I was shocked to discover how incurious most books are about the origin of the very matter from which textiles are made!
For one thing, there were whole shelves of books on how to weave, how to knit, and how to quilt, but barely a single complete volume on how to create yarn or thread to begin with.
Of the books that did cover how the yarn is created, many of them discussed only wool, and those books didn't concern themselves with how to get the wool off the sheep, or how to find such an organism and enter a mutualistic partnership with it in the first place...
If you know the ways of the plants, you will be almost offended when a book about how to make a thing, starting from the beginning of that thing, tells you immediately to buy something. You don't mean "one or two steps further back in the process of a thing being assembled"—you mean the BEGINNING beginning. You seek to learn how the thing is born from the living Earth, not where to buy a Product in a less assembled form.
Where do Products come from...?...According to the capitalist, consumerist way, they come from other, simpler Products of course, which ultimately are born from Industries. I found a book or two which made some attempt to give a more exhaustive list of possible textile materials, with sub-section for plants, which included: Flax, Cotton, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, and some allusion to other possibilities such as Nettle. This of course is a list of plant fibers for which a Huge Industry exists. Regarding plant fibers for which there is no huge industry, the books either said nothing or said something like "...but sadly, there is no huge industry based upon these plants (so they are not worth talking about any more)"
I found a few cryptic statements saying that the range of plants that could be used for textile purposes is theoretically limitless...but none of the books were interested at all in those theoretically limitless plants.
It's not that only those few plants are really good for textiles and the other ones are inferior, either. I have learned from my delves into the Internet, that many plants now considered totally useless to humans and not investigated for their potential applications at all...have actually been used by some human culture on Earth for thousands of years as a fundamental part of everyday life.
Native Americans for thousands of years utilized plants native to this region for textiles. These ones are among the plants I have been gathering; they are plants that naturally grow here and can be harvested sustainably, in fact in many cases they benefit from being harvested.
Apocyonum cannabinum, also known as Dogbane, is essentially a North American analog to hemp or flax; you extract the bast fiber from the stem by beating it until the woody part breaks into pieces and falls out and the outer bark flakes off. This plant is native to all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii and I reckon that's because of its importance as a textile plant.
I've collected big bundles of the stuff by picking over fields that have been mowed already by a brush cutter; it's so easy, because the fibers are so strong that they are not broken by the brush cutter. Instead, I find mats and bundles of fiber 1-2 feet long stretched out over the ground or trailing from the stubs of stems, often with the woody parts and outer bark already beaten out by the mowing. Simply mowing a field where dogbane grows essentially pre-processes the fiber so your work is half done for you.
It is amazing to me that a person can see how the fibers do that if you mow the plants in the fall, and not immediately think, "We should be making string or rope out of that." Early colonial texts call this plant "Indian hemp" and say it is superior to actual hemp. Likewise what few resources I can find on Native American textile plants, list dogbane as one of the main ones.
So I gather the dogbane. It is astonishingly strong, fragrant when you handle it, and beating the fibers is loads of fun, just a great way to blow off steam. The fibers range in color from almost pearly white to cream to peach to beautiful shades of orange and copper, and have a lovely sheen to them.
After I've beaten the fibers and gotten them to mostly separate I tease them out with my fingers and scrape out all the remaining little bits of bark, and pull them through a plastic comb until the soft and lustrous fibers are separated and all that's left is some nubby bits of lint.
The last picture is what it looks like after combing and cleaning. The color looks more washed-out than it is for real because of my white lamp.
These fibers weren't quite as well-processed so the end result was kind of rough and scraggly, but I experimented by making some string:
All I used to spin it was a stick with a notch in the top so I could twist with my fingers, holding the other end of the stick steady and pulling the strand back towards myself. Whenever I finished a little more I would just loop it over the bend in the top of the stick and keep going.
The other fiber I've been experimenting with is milkweed seed fluff. This one is an interesting one because it was the first material I became interested in spinning, and the first I experimented with to the point of making a yarn. It took a long time to figure it out, I have quite a bit of single-strand seed fluff yarn now, and intend to spin this into a three-ply yarn to make it strong.
I was so happy! My first yarn! Spun with nothing but a stick. It's delicate but it holds together and handles being unwound and rewound just fine, and I think making a 2 or 3 ply yarn would make it pretty workable.
So imagine my surprise when I begin reading about textile arts and the possible uses of the plants i'm working with, and learn that spinning milkweed seed fluff is impossible?
Milkweed bast fiber has been used, like the dogbane bast fiber, but according to the internet, spinning the seed fluffs into yarn is something that cannot be done, because they are too short, smooth, and fragile. Many have tried! It doesn't work!
That was news to me.
As I read more about spinning the more conventional plant fibers, though, I consider what a deep knowledge humankind has cultivated of the ways of wool and flax and cotton, and think...is my total lack of knowledge about spinning yarn, the reason I was able to spin the milkweed fluffs?
Normal people would have armed themselves with the proper tools for undertaking a new activity, but I didn't even bother to look up what I was doing, because MacGyvering cool stuff out of materials from nature you can find anywhere outside is basically half my personality at this point, and makes me feel unreasonably powerful. As a result, I made a technological approach to spinning yarn that was designed specially for the challenges of spinning milkweed seed fluffs, and only later realized that 1) this is not a normal way to spin yarn and 2) i'm not supposed to be able to spin this stuff at all.
And it's because I came at it backwards. Instead of trying to use existing technology to spin milkweed fluffs, I became determined to spin milkweed fluffs and developed my technique based on what would work to do that, without any knowledge of what I was "supposed" to be doing.
If I had been normal about it and thought "Hmm, I should buy the right tools to do this" or even thought "Hmm, I should start with fibers that are usually used to make clothes" this would not have happened.
I'm coming at everything backwards: instead of "Where can I purchase Thing I Want To Work With?" it's "What does Nature provide, and what cool stuff can I do with it?"
I didn't even set out to work with textile materials. It's just that the plants kept giving me textile materials. This hobby absolutely snuck up on me out of nowhere this was not my idea
People have had success blending milkweed fluffs with other stuff, so I'm going to try to blend it with the dogbane next! I am fully going to go all the way and make like clothes or bags or blankets out of this stuff. There is no turning back for me, the euphoria of creation and the profound wisdom of the plants have inflicted a fascination with my task.
What's the staple length of that milkweed please? I am fascinated by it.
You mean like the length of the individual fibers? They're like an inch on average, the biggest seed pods have fluffs a little longer.
Basically the reason it works, I think, is that I'm twisting the strand with my fingers, pulling back toward my body and using the other end of the stick as an anchor point/leverage. There is something about the warmth and moisture of touching the fibers so much that makes them want to bind together more.
There is a lot of twist to the yarn, but it's not a problem, in fact if you twist until it kinks up, you can just...mash the kinked part between your fingers really hard and it'll flatten out and you can keep going. The fiber is springy and pliable in a way that lets you do things like that with it.
Where a lot of people messed up was they tried to card it. All you need to do is spend some time gently pulling the fibers between your fingers to separate the individual fibers in each "tuft" that attaches to a single seed. If you're too rough with it, the fibers will just break and that's not good. But you do kinda have to play with it in your hands? I don't know if it's the oils in your hands or what, but touching it a lot makes them want to mold together to each other more.
I can really see how this material is totally different than anything else you could spin in many ways.
Top: Dogbane bast fiber
Bottom: Dogbane bast/Milkweed floss blend
On a different note I went thru mom and dads closet to find really old clothes to practice sewing and embroidery on, and I am so mad!!!!! at how much more sturdy and robust clothes from the 1990's are compared to today.
I am just staring in fascination at these clothes from a few decades ago like "Wow they are so strong and sturdy...the fabric is such high quality...." What HAPPENED?
Inner bark fibers of first-year grapevine twigs. They can be processed into incredibly fine strong soft strands with soaking, stripping off outer bark and gentle crushing by rolling a round rock over them
Thank you for this.
I have been on a personal quest (that is now in stand by due to life events) about flax. I live in a village that was famous for its flax, hemp and wool fabrics. Its name is literally related to the hemp-farming. And currently, nobody ever grows any of these plants and what I find surprising, with my very limited knowledge of botanics, is that... there are no rest of them either? Even in the first half of the 20th century some people still worked the flax in the traditional way, and now there aren't any carried-by the wind rests anywhere? no abandoned farms where it poorly grows anymore? no decorative reasoning to have them in your garden?
People don't remember, they don't even know. Linen was an estimated fabric and this village had enough to dress its inhabitants and sell the left-overs around. Same with the wool. Only the old people remember because they still worked it. Other villages, with larger textile industries, also have lost this memory.
The moment you look at things the way op mentioned, with the "how do you get this done?" mind, things change. Its value change. I only wish I had more time and more health to really make myself a linen tshirt, from scratch. To make myself a woolen blanket, from scratch. Particularly, I have the wool because my parents have sheep. I could do so many things if I dedicated every bit of time off and energy to it, but alas I can't. I do it when I can, little by little. I envy you, op. Please, keep us posted of your progress.
I'm thinking of this one time time I was bored while catsitting... I went out on my friend's property, found some sticks and rocks, improvised a spindle, brushed the cats, and spun up some yarn. One cat has slightly darker fur, and they are both long-haired and very soft, so I was interested to see what the yarn would feel like.
My original spindle fell apart, and they must have just cleaned the yard because I couldn't find sturdy enough sticks for replacement, so I did admittedly use borrowed bic pens instead of purely natural supplies...
I ended up with a few strands of 2 ply cat hair yarn! It was kind of scratchy and felt like twine. It wasn't the easiest to spin compared to the wool I've worked with, but boredom is a powerful motivator!
I left the yarn with my friend as a memento, but I'm considering making more the next time I catsit so I can try actually knitting something with it.
@headspace-hotel
I have another dopey question about your milkweed experiment if you aren't out of patience yet.
Did the books that claim milkweed is unspinneable mention what tool they were using (drop spindle, wheel etc)? Because I just reread the post and it sounds like you had the spindle in your hand the whole time, rather than letting it hang freely in the air?
That's a specific style of spinning I'm currently failing to learn: supported spinning, and its specifically often used to spin short, delicate fibres, and/or very fine delicate thread, but its not done very often in anglo-european traditions, so I'm wondering if there was some Distinct Cultural Biases in the books you were referencing.
I also wanted to ask how your cat yarn and milkweed yarn have held up? I’ve spun with cat hair “fresh off the cat” before - I just groomed my resident beast and then pulled the hair out the comb and spun with a drop spindle - but I’ve found it’s not held up very well. I knitted a teeny tiny swatch with it and it’s fuzzing and sort of slowly edging towards either felting or just sort of falling apart :(
might have worked better if i plied it, or I might have underspun it bc I was very new to spinning when I did it, but… I do wonder also when people say “you can’t spin with that” whether they sometimes mean “the yarn falls apart very quickly so don’t bother”
Two very good questions from @dr-dendritic-trees and @makerandbean !
First: Yes! I haven't posted photos of my spinning in a while, but yeah, I essentially use a stick with a side branch at the top that I use as a spool. I hold the stick in my left hand and twist the strand together, letting my left hand slide down the stick as I spin, then when the strand is as long as the stick I wrap it around the top and continue.
I'm actually really happy you brought that up, because I had no idea what the technique was called, and had never heard of it before despite it being a fairly intuitive, ridiculously low-tech way to spin that gives you a lot of control over the strand you're putting together.
You basically pinch a big thick tuft of your fiber between your index finger and thumb of your right hand and splice it into the strand you're working on, and as you work you pull the tuft downwards so it slowly distributes all the fibers into a long strand.
This is especially effective when you're working with dogbane bast fiber, which inevitably has a great number of fibers of just 3-5 centimeters, and a smaller but still significant amount of fibers 10-20 centimeters long. The long fibers give the strand a backbone and the short fibers give it more weight and fuzziness.
The staple length you could get from dogbane fiber if you processed it carefully is, I feel certain, longer than any other natural fiber that exists.
Using dogbane, I have figured out how to get an incredibly smooth even thread by twisting the strand, then scraping my fingers up and down the strand to make stray fibers stick up, and untwisting and retwisting it in short sections at a time so the stray fibers get twisted into the strand.
I think it helps the final result to alternate between holding the strand in the hardest twist you can manage and then letting it relax to whatever extent it wants to, and twisting again.
It's slow but I'm getting steadily faster and faster at it, and it feels plausible that a person using this method could produce enough string for weaving into a garment on a Neolithic type amount of free time.
On the second question: I havent actually tried turning the milkweed yarn into anything since I can't knit or crochet, however, I think it would be so clearly better to blend the milkweed fluff 50:50 with another fiber (possibly milkweed bast fiber!) that I haven't really tried experimenting with pure milkweed fluff much more. I will hopefully show y'all how the bast/fluff blend goes!
My experiment shows it's possible to spin milkweed fluff, however I think it wouldn't be sturdy enough for an item for daily wear unless blended. However blending the milkweed and dogbane has excellent results.
I actually did some research online into milkweed fluff, and the main purpose for milkweed fluff in textile-adjacent things is actually stuffing. It apparently makes amazing stuffing for pillows, blankets, and jackets—it is incredibly warm, hypoallergenic, and so buoyant that it can be used to stuff life jackets.
back to drawing them again
Mammal in a Sunday Dress, by Georgina M. Cox, 2026
Mammal in a Sunday Dress explores the uneasy relationship between femininity, civilisation, and the animal body. At first glance, the figure appears modest and withdrawn. Her posture is composed, her gaze seemingly lowered towards her bare feet, recalling the conventions of nineteenth-century portraiture where women were often depicted as passive objects of observation. Yet as the viewer moves closer, the illusion collapses. Her eyes are not lowered at all. She is looking directly back. The delayed eye contact transforms the encounter. The viewer approaches believing they are safely observing a woman; instead, they realise they have been observed themselves. The work refuses the traditional power dynamic of portraiture, denying the comfort of anonymous spectatorship. Looking becomes a reciprocal act. For Cox, the painting considers humanity's persistent desire to separate itself from the rest of the animal kingdom. The title quietly undermines this distinction. A "mammal" is not another creature—it is us. The Sunday dress, rich with cultural associations of femininity, morality, and respectability, becomes an attempt to distinguish ourselves from nature. Yet clothing cannot alter biology. Beneath lace and ritual remains the same vulnerable animal body. The work also reflects on the historical relationship between women and nature. Across art, religion, and philosophy, women have repeatedly been positioned as closer to instinct, emotion, reproduction, and the body itself, while men have been aligned with reason, culture, and civilisation. Mammal in a Sunday Dress does not reject this comparison. Instead, it questions why proximity to nature has so often been treated as something lesser. Chiaroscuro isolates the figure within darkness, allowing the luminous dress to symbolise the performance of civilisation while the bare feet quietly return the body to the earth. Neither is presented as more truthful than the other. The painting exists in the tension between performance and instinct, refinement and biology. Mammal in a Sunday Dress ultimately asks a simple but unsettling question: if every layer of culture were stripped away, what would remain? Not a king. Not a saint. Not a gentleman or a lady. Only another mammal, looking back.
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