i think maybe my new favorite category of roman intaglio art is "insects doing human things" because it's so indicative of the human need for whimsy. now take a look at this 1st century BC/AD intaglio of a grasshopper in a chariot pulled by butterflies
Did you see the Midnight Channel last night? 📺
Baby's first cross stitch, now with the matt, frame, and all the details finally, finally done. The last image is to show the slight bubble of the tv screen
”genetic” girl WHATEVERRRRR
much to be said about the fact the costume designer for heated rivalry said that shane and yuna are both wearing linen in the coming out scene on purpose. because she wants it to be obvious that yuna buys shane clothes. and then shane subsequently makes active choices to wear those clothes when he is around her because he wants her to know that he loves her. but he also wants to show that he can be what she wants him to be by wearing what she wants him to wear. not sure if i have the strength to say it. in fact i need to lie down
The Winter Sale!
Here at the Habadasheress, we have some great big discounts available in our winter sale! Here's the details:
45% off our medieval bag sewing kits, available in slate, red, dark green, light green and brown until Februrary 11th!
40% off all embroidery borders, embroidery patches, collar embroidery, and our DIY embroidery pattern transfer sheets available in various sizes until Februrary 11th!
30% off sewing kits, needle cases and thread wax until Februrary 11th!
20% off all other sewing supplies until Februrary 11th!
And last but not least, 5% off everything in our clothing and home & living sections until January 30th!
That's a grand total of everything on sale.
it is my experience that people with dermal implants and eyeball tattoos and 34 visible piercings are the sweetest people you'll ever meet and will cry if they see a pigeon with a broken wing. it is also my experience that clean-cut people in polo shirts with perfect smiles will vote against your rights and say the most disgusting things imaginable once they think you're out of earshot.
This post brought something up for me, I decided to talk about this in a separate post because I didn't want to derail the OP.
This is a point that OP made about mutual aid networks, and why they're not a substitute for public policy:
forcing me to be vulnerable to my neighbors' whims for my survival is not justice and it is not liberation.
I feel this. This is how you get toxic cults, hyperconformity, and witch hunt culture.
I might have answered "yes, let's go for it" 25 years ago, when I was 21 and still lived in a big city and still knew other Jewish people besides my own aging family, didn't have chronic pain, and had more economic privilege than i do now.
The irony is that what made me say things like this was not having to actually depend upon mutual aid networks outside of my own family. (And lots of us don't even have that.) It's easy to say "we can all rely on mutual aid" when 1) you don't actually have to do it and and or 2) you're accepted enough to have access to it.
Basically you're saying that only someone totally accepted by an informal group of people, is entitled to survival. If you're a minority or a pariah relative to the space you're stuck in, what then?
I don't like the idea of turning survival into a middle school popularity contest.
Yeah, there’s this attitude that if you’re a Good Person (tm), then you obviously won’t have any trouble finding an accepting and supportive community, and well, *laughs bitterly in neuroatypical*
Yeah
Also, I originally thought I should leave this post alone, but I have changed my mind so I will now add.
I’ve been in supportive communities full of well-off, approximately or largely neurotypical people which completely, comprehensively failed in a crisis for the simple boring reason that we collectively needed more person hours of care than usual... but we also collectively had fewer to give. And I cannot even begin to imagine how much worse that would have been if we were more marginalized or less abled.
I was a little bit involved in putting on the north east regional Rainbow Gatherings, the first couple of years. These gatherings were generally held in the national forests, which means the mountains. Over and over again, there would be clashes in Council where a wheelchair user would ask for an exception to the No Motor Vehicles rule because their wheelchairs weren’t up to the challenge of the steep terrain. There were always purists who objected to the exception and usually one purist would volunteer to push the wheelchair user wherever they wanted to go. Then after a couple of hours, the person doing the pushing would get bored and just abandon the  wheelchair user beside a trail, forcing them to beg passers-by for help getting back to their camp.
The Rainbow Gatherings were just about the most mutual-aid-based events of their time. They worked so well for most of their attendees that FEMA studied them as a model for disaster response, but there were always these glitches around accessibility. Maybe in a culture that has always had a strong ethic of mutual aid, where people were brought up in it, there wouldn’t be these glitches, but most of us are products of late capitalism. We just aren’t formed for it. We are too used to self-indulgence. We’re not there yet.
arghh tumblr fails forever there is a lot of good discussion and points being made about community, anarchy, and networks but there’re all in different sub-branches of this post
No one’s survival should be dependent on other people’s [strong and sustained; see example above re: wheelchair users in Rainbow Gatherings] goodwill.
As a Gen Xr with a lot of Gen X friends, I've seen this experiment play out with all of our Boomer parents, and with the seniors my parents are friends with.
Many of them -are middle class [1] in particular, and many never had (and thus gotten burned by) the "let's all live together as a bunch of buds" experience in the 60s/70s. So they may still harbor some utopian ideals about what a mutual aid community and single-generational household will be like.
And they always seem to find out that these community situations rely on 1) none of them actually being too old, 2) none becoming disabled, 3) none of them being poorer than anyone else. Even if they can save money by combining households, there still gets to be a point where they're all collectively too old to provide the kind of support they imagined over the long term.
I'm seeing enough where my mom's friends end up moving away because they have to move in with their kids, and nobody planned for this. (Gen Xrs may be anticipating this issue more than our own parents are.)
If my mom's friends can't even keep a writing or game group going because of this or that person moving away and into assisted living or in with their kids, then imagine an actual mutual aid network trying to survive *every person in it getting old.*
[1] this is important, because it's a middle class specific issue at a point in history where aging middle class no longer have pensions/robust health care/have lost their retirement savings. If poor, they are more likely to already live in a multigenerational household or may have never *not* lived in one. (Or they may have nothing at all... which sucks.) If rich, they can afford assisted living or the support required to remain in their own same-age community.
It’s one thing to volunteer to get someone’s groceries once a week. It’s quite another to help them use the toilet twelve times a day. The latter is absolutely not sustainable on a volunteer model. Someone who is doing that has a full time job, and deserves to be paid for it.
And people in need of care are often not sweet, polite, people. Some of them are. Some of them aren’t. Some of them are in pain, find reviving help humiliating, have other frustrations in their life, and will consistently take that out on the people supporting them. Some of them are appalling, and cruel and verbally abusive.
Those people, the ones who hurl racial slurs at support staff, who make cruel comments, who hurt people, also deserve care. There’s no level of awful a person reaches where they deserve to stave to death or sit in their own faeces for hours on end.
People who will volunteer to spend hours a day with someone who is cruel to them are very rare. People who have the time to do an 8 hour volunteer night shift even one day a week are very rare.
This should be paid work. It’s impossible to provide care to meet essential needs without paying carers. People whose communities hate them, for good or bad reasons, deserve to have their basic needs met, and you can’t do that on goodwill.
my parents have been part of the same church for almost 40 years. They have a close group of friends near their own age, and a bunch of people younger than them who have joined the church at one point or another. they have a phenomenal network for mutual aid, for which as their daughter living several states away I am very grateful.
They also have Medicare and Social Security. Because while a mutual aid network is great for bringing casseroles after open heart surgery, they aren't going to be paying for the surgery or doing the skilled nursing care you need when someone's cracked your ribs open and rooted around in your internal organs.
intergenerational networks of friendship, support, and mutual aid are amazing and I wish more existed outside of churches (I am an agnostic 42yo queer woman - I have plenty of reasons I am not part of a church). but they are a complement to an institutional social safety net, not a replacement for it.
so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator
this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke
this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.
instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”
of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that
because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job
my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together
I thought if I shattered enough, someone somewhere would find a piece of me soft enough to keep.
oh Bingzu..
You nailed it!
I’m begging all my mutuals to pay attention to the wildfires in Argentinian Patagonia. Almost 10.000 acres of unique Patagonian Andean forests, with South America tallest and world’s oldest trees, burned and they were all intentional. The worst part is that back in December, the government announced that they would lift the ban on foreigners buying rural land, and on changing the land productive activity after a wildfire for 30-60 years. Firefighters are crying because they don’t have enough resources, the government cut their budget by 70% for this year, while they wasted 300 million dollars on F-16 jet fighters. It’s not just trees, it’s animals and people’s lives, whole towns, that have been endangered, more than 3000 tourists had to be evacuated. The climate catastrophe is worsening the fires, with less rain and more wind this summer.
My art for @mxtxfoodzine! Check out the FREE PDF with lots of great recipes ^w^ I collaborated with @tboesart to share this White Rabbit Milk Candy Pudding recipe and fic with LWJ, JC, and WWC
Read here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71452096
Someone talk to me about the fact that Jin Guangyao got up to the tippy top of the cultivation pyramid and chooses not to carry the same sort of sword as everyone else.
there's a lot of good stuff in the tags about how it marks him as someone who is not able to pursue an orthodox cultivation path but another related thing that's interesting to me is that like, not to be crass and not to get too freudian with it, but swords are some really conventional phallic imagery. and i'm taking wei wuxian in that extra as blanket permission to read mdzs with that in mind. so having this soft floppy sword is not *just* about how it can be worn concealed, it's also an emasculating image, right? it calls to mind sexual dysfunction and reminds me of the malicious gossip from the end of the book about jgy and sisi that says as much. i've also heard from many other posts on here that he's like the most transmasc character to be demonstrably cis, or the most eunuch-like character to be demonstrably not castrated, stuff like that. part of him being an eternal outsider to cultivation society is that he is denied even the manhood part of what i would inadequately describe as full aristocratic manhood. like he's a man when it comes to his relations with women, but when he's interacting with or discussed by other men, he's shunted down into an intermediate category. it doesn't matter that he can and does have a child or that hensheng is actually a pretty powerful sword that notably is able to shatter other swords or whatever it still stands as a visual demarcation of inability to adequately perform this gendered role in the eyes of others. it probably has something to do with his background as specifically the son of a sex worker but rn i can't do more than vaguely gesture at the connection.
oh also the other guy who memorably shatters others' swords is wen ruohan. and he does it to nmj and nhs's father. not quite sure what to make of that but it is interesting :3
rather than a film adaptation of Frankenstein that's a conversation with other film adaptations (that are already a conversation with the 1931 film anyway) what I think would be interesting to see is an adaptation that's a conversation with the differences between the 1818 and the 1831 editions 🫣
What I think would be interesting to do is, to use the 1818 character descriptions in flashbacks and the 1818 manner of writing in Victor's narration up until the moment of creation.
And after Henry nurses him back to health, to switch to the 1831 manner of writing (as if now Victor tries to convince Walton that it was an inevitable fate); and now whenever Victor mentions Henry or Elisabeth he describes them in the same way as in 1831, often contradicting the backstory we got earlier (eg remembering Elisabeth in an idealised manner, or conflicting her and Henry, attributing any discord she'd had with his father to Henry quarreling with his)
