Blogspot - I used to post on there more often, and I really would like to get back into it. Mostly longform sewing posts about how I made a thing.
Youtube - Mostly sewing videos, with each step of the project explained in thorough autistic detail. New videos come out whenever I finish making one (which is not super often) and they are however long they need to be to contain all the relevant information.
Patreon - Started out as just extra @pterribledinosaurdrawings but now I also do monthly behind the scenes updates on the sewing video stuff I’m working on, and have done a few unscripted bonus videos. (I also have a ko-fi but I haven’t really posted anything there.)
Instagram - Occasional photos of stuff I’ve made, much the same as I post here.
Facebook - Same stuff as instagram. I don’t look at my feed on either of those places but I still post.
Pinterest - Where all my beloved reference pictures live. Wanna see pictures of extant 18th century waistcoats? My board for that has over 1,400 pins!
went to the pittsburgh aviary yesterday and this little beast’s name is Elizabeth. the docent said she loves wheels and jewelry. Elizabeth walked up to my wheelchair & tried to eat my ring off my finger. we love a predictable queen
Not apocalyptic levels of OhFuck unless you’ve sat through a Cat5, but shit’s been like this for a long time now. We just put up with it for far too fucking long:
Me: I need to go home. There’s a hurricane coming and my basement apartment is on the coast, so I’m worried about my cats. (To myself: And maybe needing to evacuate.)
Boss: Is your house and your cats more important than this job?
Me: YES.
Boss: …oh. Okay. Uh…see you tomorrow…
Different boss, several years later, a conversation that happened multiple times:
Me: Hey, it’s starting to really snow outside, I live on a steep hill, and I only have 2-wheel drive. If I don’t leave now, I can’t get home.
Boss: Is getting home more important than getting your job done tonight?
Me: Considering I value my life more than I value this paperwork being digitized? YES.
Boss: ….
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Uh, yeah, okay.
Different atttempt:
Boss: Why don’t you just get a hotel after work?
Me: Do I get a raise so I can afford it?
Boss: No.
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Is getting home
more important than getting
your job done tonight?
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Haikubot aside we should normalize saying those things to bosses absolutely. It’s only going to get worse.
What’s crazy is how the bosses are so conditioned to guilt trip and then when they don’t get the response they expect, they don’t even follow through on the demand, like “oh, uh, I guess that’s okay then.” They’ve been trained, but when you break the training, it turns out they’re kind of real people.
At work there used to be a sign on a few things that would say like “if this bubbles, run for your life” and “if you hear thumping run for cover” and “bears can and will kill you” and really in general I wish the park service was more willing to say “you are not at home, you are not at disneyland, you can die here and you can die so badly your family will have to bury an empty casket because no one will risk their own life to collect your idiot corpse.”
If we’re gonna make people more scared of something, it should probably be cars, infections, and heart conditions, not “outside”.
THESE FACTS WILL BE RELEVANT I SWEAR:
Boiling point of water: 212°F
Crock pot temperature: 140°F-180°F
Crock pot depth (commercial, 100 gal): 3 feet, could not submerge most humans.
Meat begins to cook: 105°F
Water burns skin within 3-6 seconds: 140°F
Steak/chops/roasts are safe to eat: 145°F
Collagen melts into gelatin, meat “falls off the bone”: 160-180°F
Average tourist: 30% collagen
Stomach acid: pH 1.5-3.5 (lower is more acidic)
YELLOWSTONE FACTS!
Max recorded temp of a Yellowstone pool: 280°F in Norris Basin
Depth of spring that dissolved a man: 10 feet, Norris Basin, could and did submerge an adult human
Lowest pH (most acidic) pH of a Yellowstone pool: pH 2-3 in Norris Basin
Yellowstone pools:crock pots full of stomach acid
I think if people ARE outside – say, tourists near a spring – they should be warned that the spring will cook them, then dissolve what is left. Because you CANNOT tell by looking.
We should be a LOT more afraid of some parts of Outside, actually.
When you say you're anti-CAM what does that mean? Like what does CAM mean in that context? I genuinely haven't seen that acronym before and I'm assuming you aren't anti-camming as in like the form of sex work
I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.
I have had real life fights with people I genuinely love about this and I do not regret it. I will absolutely not regret shitting all over someone’s $500 herbalist certification.
Warding spells are real, if you want me to stay far away from you forever tell me that you practice reiki.
The nice thing is that I will probably never bring this kind of thing up. I’m never going to go out of my way to figure out if the people around me are, like, really into homeopathy. The less nice thing is that if you bring it up with me I am never, ever, ever going to shut up about it and if you attempt to show me a *study* on the healing power of prayer or the use of chiropractic to treat asthma we are forever enemies and I probably won’t talk to you again but I will use the several hours of furious debunking that I did after our conversation to make arguments against your beliefs in the future. You are already a lost cause to me but other people are less stupid about the way that ice crystals form and I can work with them.
I *loathe* medical woo, it kills people and the people who engage in it are shitty human beings who are hurting other human beings.
RE: Herbalism
I don’t think that there’s a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn’t understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.
But “medicine from plants” and “herbalism” are not the same.
The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you’ve got a headache.
What you can’t do is control the dose. You can’t do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you’re measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it’s not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.
That’s not a huge deal if you’re using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you’re using aspirin as a bloodthinner.
And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn’t* a big deal. The example they *don’t* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that’s a medicine from a plant that you can’t fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it’s done wrong it’ll just straight kill you.
And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn’t diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn’t on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.
And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).
There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for “Hema Ketha” for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)
One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than “allopathic” medicine. They think “it’s better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea.” But midol doesn’t interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they’re taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.
There’s this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John’s Wort tea that has “NOT FOR PREGNANT” on the label. It’s good that they’re recommending that pregnant people don’t select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.
But it’s just tea. And what could just tea do, right?
(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That’s what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn’t steeped as long doesn’t hurt, so you drink it and you think it’s fine, it’s not a problem, and it isn’t a problem until it is but you don’t know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)
This is also why I’m extremely leery of the “you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor’s care and you do what the doctors say” thing because that is relying on:
Doctors being aware of all of these possible interactions (which is a stretch; pharmacists are likely to have a better handle on it but even then, there are all kinds of supplements being labeled all kinds of things all the time; medical woo scammers LOVE to rebrand their supplements)
So long story short I’m not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you’re recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.
Because that’s the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren’t held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don’t have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that’s in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they’re not committing malpractice because there’s no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there’s no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.
If you want to replace your elderly parent’s NSAID painkillers with clove oil, fuck you.
for people on the other post who are not familiar with my position on herbalism.
“Oh but herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years old.” Indeed it has. And then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became ‘medicine.’ - Dara O'Briain
Finally got some pictures of the finished red waistcoat on me! (By which I mean I took some video clips and screenshotted them, because I don’t want to sprint across the room 50 times using the self timer.)
