One humbling thought is
how our sun, too, is part of
some constellation.
—Red Leaf Haiku by © John Clark Helzer
(via owlslovecatmint)
here’s a tip to trans girls: if you’re trying out new hairstyles, get some barrettes, hair clips, or bobby pins. regardless of how long or short your hair is, wearing hair clips of any kind is feminine-coded and using hair clips gives you a lot more options in terms of how you want to structure your hair.
(via genatrius)
Hey if u r kemetic or a witch and not racist/transphobic or generally nasty please rb so I can follow you
(via owlslovecatmint)
In the book “The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris, Clarice Starling misremembers and adapts a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” to act as a personal mantra when she begins to spiral out of control and lose her ability to stay calm.
“Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to be still.”
She repeats it internally throughout the book, steadying herself in hard times and even aloud when she needs to hear herself say it.
The actual poem reads as this;
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
I’ve stepped back from Tumblr because I have been too surrounded and infected with isfet to be a proper member of the community. Poking my head in again every now and then has reassured me that there’s not much I could add; the tags have gone haywire with both false threats and real instances of racism, misogyny, and other unfortunate situations. The community I know and love is still around, hidden under a layer of crawling infection that makes me a little sick to see. So I’ve stayed quiet.
Besides which, I’ve been distracted. Between the end of close friendships, self harm, suicidal shit rearing its ugly head, a breakup which shattered my heart, and general misadventure I’ve been a mess. Nobody much has kept in touch to check in on me from the community, and while that’s okay and I’m entitled to no more, it was a little disheartening.
But for all the struggles I’ve had in the past year, I know many more have suffered as well, just as blind to me as I have been to them.
So this is my attempt to offer what small lifeline has kept my faith and passion for my relationship with NTRW alive, in the hopes it might help somebody else.
To Hethert-Sekhmet; teach me to care, to open my eyes to the sufferings of others that I may extend to them the help that I am capable of and lift them out of isfet into the light of Your love.
To Set; teach me not to care, to look inward and focus on what is best for me, to let go of pettiness and that which I cannot change, and find the peaceful calm in the eye of the storm, cradled in Your arms.
To Heru-Wer; teach me to be still, to control myself even when the worst I’ve feared has come to be, to be strong and steadfast, and to stick with the truth even when it hurts.
To Anup; pray for me and lead me with Your love and wisdom through the isfet I am responsible for, and with Your forgiveness be with me now and at the hours of my many deaths as Your child grows into the man You guide me to be.
Megasus Horserunners are a scam.
Sorry bout it.
Folks keep sending these “Megasus Horserunner” plastic clip-on horse shoes to me all excitedly, so I’m gonna rant about it for a second. Please keep in mind I am NOT annoyed with anyone who’s posted it or PMed it to me; y'all are great and I appreciate you thinking of me! I also am not an expert on horses, I am simply an intermediately experienced lover of them. So take all this with a grain of salt.
These shoes are massively popular on social media sites and faux-news corners of the internet, where not a high percentage of people are super well-versed on farriery, horsemanship, horse husbandry, or riding. Want to know why more people off the internet aren’t talking about - or USING - them? It’s because they’re unrealistic and based on the general public’s knowledge of the anatomy of a horse’s leg and foot, which is about 2% of what there is to learn. They’re just a money sink. Intended to steal your hard-earned cash with a gimmicky slogan and a bunch of floaty videos of horses worth more than your and my car put together, this company is the first…and only…one of its kind.
AND THEY AREN’T EVEN IN BUSINESS YET.
Think about that for a second. It’s 2017. Humans have been riding horses for SIX THOUSAND YEARS. Do you see the source of my skepticism yet?
A big part of my problem with Megasus Horserunners is that they feed on this idea that traditional shoes are problematic for reasons that really do not exist. Like saying they allow for ‘hoof movement’…uh, the hoof isn’t SUPPOSED to move. Hooves are made of keratin! If it’s moving, you have a real problem. Now, the legs and hocks certainly move quite a bit, but traditional shoes don’t inhibit this whatsoever. And any concern about that is pretty much alleviated already as far as products go - all sport/hoof boots, bandages, wraps, etc., are designed to provide support without inhibiting movement to the horse’s leg.
Also, they claim to be shock absorbing and made of plastic…okay, but plastic is brittle. It actually gets MORE brittle when under impact, which is exactly what these shoes are made to do, so I don’t understand how they can tout them as shock absorbing, unless they’ve got rubber layers inside. Even then, I can’t see how these would last more than a few weeks, especially with heavy work…which means these are going to be WAY more expensive than the average iron shoe. Either way, horse hooves are built to be shock absorbing - otherwise they’d break a leg every time they run to the gate at feeding time. So this is really a bit redundant to even use as a selling point.
Oh, and, the 'patented Mega Lock system’ they talk about every other word in every video and every paragraph?
It’s just velcro.
Literally. It’s just heavy duty velcro.
Anyone who’s ridden horses for a significant amount of time can tell you that velcro gets nasty in a barn environment, very quickly. Again, the durability in these shoes leaves a LOT to be questioned. And what happens if something catches the shoe just right to tear off the velcro? Or the tape on the side that sticks to the horse’s hoof (holy shit that does not sound stable at all in and of itself…) stops being sticky? Or a hundred other what-ifs?
I’m also really uncomfortable (as an obsessive hoof picker) with the amount of gaps it’s probable to create between the hoof and the shoe, especially as the hoof grows. Horses need their feet trimmed every few weeks, because just like fingernails, hooves grow hella long hella quick, are super uncomfortable, and look like crap if they aren’t maintained. They seem to be one-size-fits-all, and as we all know horses’ hooves are VASTLY different in size and shape…again, kinda like fingernails! If you’ve never seen the inside of a farrier’s trailer, they usually have dozens of different sizes and shapes of shoes, and those are just the basics. On any shoe, you want an airtight fit between the hoof and the metal. With these, that’s borderline impossible.
Plus, if you’re taking your horse through water during a nice long trail ride, there is no way for the hoof to naturally dry out with that movement and I imagine it’s possible for moisture to get trapped in there. Thrush city. Yuck. For the record, this can happen with regular shoes too…but it’s a lot easier to catch and treat, and doesn’t happen because of the shoes.
Now, let’s look at the few positives of these types of shoes; they offer (or claim to offer) all-terrain grippiness for safer out-of-arena work, they don’t require nails, they’re flexible enough to give some relief to horses that DO have sensitivity issues in their legs or feet, and are supposedly less stressful for the horse (although if you’ve never seen a horse being treated by a farrier, a good comparison to a hoof trimming and shoeing is getting your hair and nails done…at least for any animal that’s well trained/treated/kept. For traumatized animals it can understandably be a less pleasant experience). Okay. Cool.
1) A good grip on all terrains in all disciplines - grip is easily attainable in one of three other methods. You can either buy hoof boots (a flexible cup-like boot which locks around the hock and protects the hoof without any permanent or semi-permanent connection), look into barefoot trimming (which is NOT intended to be suitable for all disciplines!), or buy the right kind of shoe for your terrain and discipline. For example, these would be garbage shoes to put on a reining horse; they need supportive shoes for sliding stops to avoid risk of injury.
2) Ready to remove and go barefoot any time - Sweet, you can do this with regular shoes too. Pulling a shoe takes about five minutes and isn’t hard to learn to do. Now obviously it’s a little harder to get them back on, especially since the horse’s foot has probably grown, which brings me to the next point…
3) One size fits all/DIY fit - Horse hooves are not one size fits all. They just aren’t. Getting a custom fit is VITAL to maintaining the health and performance of the animal in question. There is too much margin for error here for me to endorse a product which encourages the layman to just chop off a few slices after cookie-cutter stenciling their horse’s hooves with magic marker and then stick their creation on the horse.
4) Sensitive horses adjust easier to them - This sounds great, but the facts of the matter are that:
- A) all domestic horses need to have their feet trimmed regularly. Period. End of story.
- B) horse logic does not work like people logic. When you think about how to avoid traumatizing a horse, you can’t think of the horse’s brain anthropomorphically. "The hammer and nail are scary noises to me, so sticking this brightly colored thing to the outside of his foot will be less scary to him!“ will turn into mayhem before you can say "pony”. Most horses grow up having their feet messed with and trimmed regularly, and view it with the same sort of indulgent boredom that you might think of when having the girl at the salon trim your fingernails. Most of their wiggling or avoidance is out of wanting to go do more fun things, rather than fear of the farrier.
Now, physical sensitivities are another bag of worms, but those really need to be considered by a professional farrier and/or veterinarian. Pulling your aluminum shoes and replacing them with plastic will not help almost any of those issues, and may in fact make them far worse.
Anyway I’ll end my rant now. I don’t think it’s likely anybody’s going to really read it to the end, but I had to say something, because it makes me super mad to think about someone hurting or ruining their horse with an uneducated belief in these sorts of feel-good convenience products. They don’t work in the 'as seen on TV’ aisle in Walmart, why would they work on your four-legged partner in crime?
TLDR - don’t believe everything you read/watch on the internet, even if it has slow motion videos of gorgeous ponies doing pretty things and is on Kickstarter so it must be run by somebody just like you.
Not that it matters anyway, because they’re still taking money and not selling their product.
as a KO remetj, I get those regular e-mails from the HoN, and my personal favorites are the RPD notifications. Not really sure why. But my favorite favorites are the ones where someone is announced as a child of Heru-wer. I don’t talk about this much (not seriously, anyway) because, I dunno, it feels weird at best and downright presumptuous at worst, but I mentally frame my connections with my deities as familial–H-dubs is Father, Nut is Grandmother, Set is my oddball Uncle, Heru-sa-Aset is Cousin (…and, as a shard, so is Shezep, in a way…sorry, Shezep). That’s just my way of interfacing with them. So whenever I see that KO’s RPD has named a new child of Heru-wer, my immediate thought is ‘hello, sister/brother/sibling!!’ And I kinda wish I could approach them that way, you know? Like, I sometimes wish I could roll around the KO forum and say hello to my fellow H-dubs kids like I’m one of them. But I feel like I wouldn’t be accepted as legitimate, not like they are.
Which brings me to the main point of my rambling: I’m a lil jealous of KO’s RPD practice, guys. At least they’ve got outside opinions on their relationships to the gods. They’ve got that Validation™. I try to communicate and build my relationships to the gods, and sometimes I feel them so clearly, but my imagination is strong and my self-doubt is even stronger, undermining my attempts, and I wish I had something solid to fall back to like the KO shemsu do with their RPDs.
Violent panic
I have 12 hours to somehow borrow $400 so I can get into a new house and not be homeless when my lease ends on Friday. If I don’t make the 12 hour window then my application gets tossed out and we lose the house we got approved for.
If anyone is willing to lend me some money (any amount; I will pay it back WITH INTEREST by September) please let me know ASAP I’m losing my mind over here
PayPal and email -> spotteddogtarot@gmail.com
Anonymous asked: I just wanna quickly apologize for my inability to put my words together but I wanted to say I'm glad you're still with us. I really care about you and I can only hope things improve for you. If you need someone to talk to I can come off anon 💖
That would be nice, thank you.
