actually when i was a strapping young dyke of only 2 years old i grabbed hot chocolate from the microwave, which had been boiling this beverage for 5 minutes straight, and spilled it all over me. severe burns but i was a really cool two year old and swagged through it. anyway when i got older my mother told me they had used pigs skin for the graft and so that’s what i told my friends in school. ever since then my nickname in highschool had became hotdog skin. only once i was a strong and hearty lesbian did she reveal to me that it was just normal skin not pig skin and they were joking with me. i was out here telling people i had pig skin as an interesting icebreaker my entire academic life. my entire world upturned. ah well yet again i swagged through it. for women everywhere
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like “I’m not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it.” Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won’t let you copy and paste:
[ID:
A public Facebook post by The Curiosity Curator that reads as follows:
When the washing machine arrived in 1925, she sat on the kitchen floor and cried for three hours—not from joy, but from grief for the fifty years she’d lost.
Mary Richardson was 62 years old when she turned on an electric washing machine for the first time. Her daughter found her sobbing, surrounded by soap and laundry, and asked if someone had died.
Mary looked up, tears streaming down her weathered face, and whispered: “All those Mondays. All those years. It didn’t have to be that hard.”
For fifty years—every single Monday since she was twelve years old—Mary had done laundry by hand. Not the romantic version you see in nostalgic photographs. The brutal reality: waking at 4 AM, hauling 50 gallons of water from a frozen well, scrubbing clothes in boiling lye soap that stripped skin from her knuckles, bending over washtubs for ten hours straight until her back spasmed and her hands bled.
2,600 wash days. 26,000 hours of backbreaking labor.
Her diary entries, discovered by her great-granddaughter a century later, tell the truth history books sanitize:
“Monday again. My hands are so raw I can barely hold the pen. I watch Father reading while I scrub his shirts and think: why is his comfort worth more than my hands?”
She was only fourteen when she wrote that.
There was no “bonding” over shared labor. There was exhaustion and silent resentment. There were no songs—only groaning, water splashing, and women too tired to speak.
The washing machine had been invented in the 1850s. Electric models existed by 1900. Wealthy women in cities had them for decades. But Mary was born poor and rural, so she scrubbed on a washboard until her hands became gnarled and her back permanently bent.
That’s a 25-year gap between technology existing and Mary being able to afford it. Twenty-five years of unnecessary suffering.
When the machine finally arrived, it did in fifteen minutes what had taken her two hours of brutal physical labor. She watched it fill with water automatically, agitate the clothes without anyone touching them, and she understood—truly understood for the first time—how much had been stolen from her.
She cried for three hours. Not tears of gratitude. Tears of grief.
Her daughter Alice wrote: “Mother grieved for all the Mondays she’d lost. For her ruined hands. For the life she could have had. I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? She was right. It didn’t have to be that hard.”
Mary lived fifteen more years. She never did laundry again—not because she was too elderly, but because her daughters understood intimately what fifty years of wash days had cost her.
At her funeral in 1940, Alice said: “My mother’s hands were destroyed by laundry. Her back was broken by it. Half her life was stolen by a task that should have been mechanized decades earlier. We’re told to celebrate women like her for their resilience. I think we should be angry instead. Angry that she had to be resilient at all.”
The women in attendance—who’d lived their own decades of wash days—applauded. Because they knew. They all knew.
The washing machine didn’t just save time. It liberated women. It gave them back their hands, their health, their Mondays, their lives.
When we romanticize “simpler times” and “family traditions,” we erase the reality: women were trapped in systems of domestic labor that destroyed their bodies and stole their futures.
Mary Richardson never got to pursue education, travel, or develop talents beyond domestic skills. Because every Monday was wash day.
She was 62 when a machine did in fifteen minutes what had taken her fifty years. And she grieved for every Monday she’d lost.
Sometimes progress isn’t about losing tradition. Sometimes it’s about ending suffering we mistook for virtue.
Sometimes the “good old days” were only good because we’ve forgotten who was hurting.
And sometimes the greatest gift isn’t resilience—it’s liberation from ever needing it again.
You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?
So it was with this desktop greenhouse.
I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.
I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.
I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.
I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…
Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.
I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.
This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.
I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.
Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.
In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…
I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.
Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.
Very explicitly, in the video, the regular police straight up lie to the couple, telling them they will go to jail for harboring a fugitive if they dont hand the doordasher over, and that it doesnt matter if ice has a warrant for her arrest. NEITHER OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE. You CANNOT be harboring a fugitive if the person you are haboring doesnt have a warrant out for their arrest! The warrant is what makes them a fugitive!
If ice wants access to someone on your property, do NOT hand them over unless you are shown a warrant signed by a judge! Make as much noise as you can to attract bystanders - it was the fact that a crowd gathered and started yelling at them that made ice leave in the video. And DO NOT expect the regular police to help you - they are just another arm of the state and will only do or say whatever they think is necessary to make you comply.
And make sure you film everything so you have evidence of what really happened if ice tries to enter your property illegally.
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don’t work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
[video description: a Dalmatian following a horse that is white with black spots. end description.]
this is, btw, probably extremely fulfilling for this dog.
Dalmatians were supposed to be hunting dogs at the founding of the breed, but what they mostly became bred and used for was carriage dogs.
A carriage dog is a dog whose job it is to run alongside a horse and carriage and prevent anyone from interfering with it. They were excellent carriage security. Nobody could reach up and grab the horses reins, nobody could try to open the carriage door - you could even park with peace of mind
This is also how they became known as firehouse dogs, because fire trucks used to look like this
and i imagine having a carriage dog was very useful to prevent even well-meaning members of the public from doing anything stupid to the equipment or horses while you fought a fire.
So the dog in the video is probably feeling very Job Well Done about his activity
This is the sorta segment I wish still existed in kids’ shows. Soothing voiceover, mellow music, no flashy graphics. Just a calm behind-the-scenes look at something you might call mundane but that most of us would never have a clue about if no one pulled the curtain back to reveal its inner workings.
Okay but imagine being in kindergarten and seeing something like this, you would absolutely change your mind about wanting to be a fire fighter or teacher or whatever Job you’ve been told is cool and possible to grow up to do because wait a minute it’s just like play-doh, there’s so much it’s kept in trash cans, you can use your hands to smear icing everywhere? It smells like cinnamon buns all the time?! Yes please!
I vaguely remember having a field trip to a bakery in kindergarten and thinking croissants were magical and that I wanted to make them in the future cuz kneading dough looked fun.
This is way more engaging and easier to watch than those sped-up videos with no voiceover and trashy pop music playing over the top.
It actually does make me remember similar segments in shows I watched growing up, like that one program. I don’t remember what exactly the segment was about but it followed a young boy, and he briefly mentioned stopping at a friend’s house and trying goat milk for the first time.
Very little else stuck with me but it sure made me curious about goat milk.
