Hebridean Sky

My first ever quilt is still going strong. Entirely hand sewn because I didn't even own a sewing machine at the time.

We love every aspect of this quilt

"Grooming means to train or prepare a person for a specific purpose.

In sexual grooming⁠, abusive people build a relationship⁠ with someone through manipulation with the intent to sexually abuse⁠ them. Sexual abuse can be physical sexual⁠ contact but also can be other things like someone exposing their genitals⁠ to you, showing you explicit photos or videos, or asking for or taking intimate images of you. Both grooming and abuse can happen in person, online or both.

Learning about the stages and warning signs of grooming are important for two reasons: to prevent sexual abuse and to help people heal from past abuse and other kinds of exploitation. Abuse can damage a person’s life and mental wellbeing, but trauma⁠ is not a life sentence. By understanding grooming, it may be possible to avoid the pain of abuse. For example, if you're messaging someone you met online and the conversation turns inappropriate, you can recognize the danger, be empowered to seek help, and remove yourself from the situation or help another person who is at risk like this. That being said, abusers can be very clever and crafty. If they succeed or have succeeded, please know that it was or is not your fault."

Every actor should be this loud about their characters' homoerotic relationships with other men. Rip to the only real ally.

A Roman marble head of a Celtic hound Circa 2nd Century A.D.

@grison-in-space In case this is up your street

hate how this 1) manages to make fun of Belgium without bothering to mention us 2) every single person in the notes knows this 3) it's true

CEO of Gumroad apparently now works at DOGE, saved up loads of money 'cause he fired everyone and replaced them with AI

abandon GR if you haven't already. fuck capitalism.

@copperbadge @thebibliosphere

Uuuuugh, I didn’t think he could become even more of a scumbag and yet here we are. I need to harass them for my money they still owe me from 2021 and delete all my shit from there.

Okay okay okay so I’m changing like every recognizable detail of this for privacy purposes but yall need to appreciate this

So I know how to retain CCTV footage, right? It doesn’t come up everywhere but I know my way around- and if someone gets jumped in a parking lot or whatever I can go backwards and see whodunnit

So I’m at this one place, right? And I get a call that an older woman in a wheelchair got hurt somehow and we need to see what happened.

Nobody remembers the exact time, because of course not, but they tell me she was wearing like a massive hot pink jacket and she’s in a wheelchair and she left with a medic round 09:45ish, so I figure I’ll start there.

So I find the incident itself no problem, but they need ALL footage for liability and insurance and stuff, so I have to keep going

And about ten minutes backwards, I lose her. She comes into view past a single shelf on one of the worse cameras and vanishes.

like. VANISHES. Hot pink jacket, big bulky black chair, gonzo. No idea where she came from.

So, I pull up entry cams. Zoom backwards till I see her come in… at like 06:15.

THREE AND A HALF HOURS EARLIER.

So first off, this is gonna take me like two hours minimum to write down, forget retention. And I’m kind of dying in my soul a bit but I start over there, watching her come in and meander and whatever.

At about 08:30ish she disappears.

Doesn’t leave. Doesn’t head to a bathroom. Doesn’t take her coat off. Her trail just stops.

Now, I’ve done this before. Typically, a location only has the mandatory minimum amount of room for a chair or walker to get around, so a person using one can only go forwards and it’s hard to 180. That limits options and makes it easier to follow, whereas a little unattended and fully mobile kid will zoom around in circles and shit and go who the hell knows where.

Then I see her again on the other ass end of the building, and I have to go back again to see how she GOT there.

My guys.

Her two and three-point turns are INCREDIBLE.

She’s popping on the wheels, flip, zoom, she’s out somewhere I didn’t think she could even GET to. I’ve been planning my search for places that fit a wheelchair or least-resistance fast-paths from A to B and she’s like… doing some Tokyo Drift shit.

I don’t know WHY. The whole place is basically completely accessible so long as you put up with having to reverse, but no. No, she goes where she wants.

I’ve been at this for half the day, and I still have no idea where she went for like an hour and a half.

Fuck me, I’m taking a lunch break

This is barely an exaggeration

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

I'm sorry, I know you weren't actually looking for an explanation but I always have a rant about this locked and loaded.

As far as I can tell the reasons that this happens are:

Anyway, in conclusion: it sucks, I'm sorry.

The fun flipside of this is that I've seen people who are more right wing become aggressively pro regulation and pro accommodation when they or their family members have to suddenly take on the individual burden of making up for a society that doesn't include them by default.

US specific:

Is your ham made with vinegar? Does your ham have the generic word "spices" on the ingredient list? Does your ham include "smoke flavoring"? Does your ham include caramel coloring?

Because malt vinegar has gluten in it. "Spices" may include wheat products in a mix. Smoke flavoring may be made with barley flour. Caramel coloring may be made with wheat or barley syrup.

If the label says "gluten free" that means that the "spices," caramel coloring, vinegar, and smoke flavor are certified to contain 20ppm or less of gluten.

If the ham is cured in any way, it may include gluten. If the ham was marinated, it probably includes gluten. If the ham was prepared in a facility that processes wheat in any way, it might be cross contaminated with gluten.

There's a company out there called "Gluten Free Water" that makes water in plastic bottles, poking fun at the idea that too many things have a gluten free label. I fucking hate that company. Because that company is functionally saying "lol, people are so sensitive and over the top about this, let's be a little silly and laugh about how crazy people can be with their 'gluten free' nonsense."

Did you know that there are sustainable food containers and straws that contain wheat? And that you don't have to label them? There are definitely people with celiac who have been sickened by biodegradable plastic straws in their "obviously water is gluten free there's no risk here" water.

"It's over-labeled so it looks trendy" just means you don't know how foods are made or what foods contain gluten. Gluten is ridiculously common in foods in general, and also in packaged meats.

Your ham has to say gluten free because it distinguishes it from the hams that do contain gluten, which is a fucking lot of them. And you're annoyed that your ham has to say gluten free and I'm annoyed that I'm standing in the grocery store calling a ham company to figure out where they source their caramel coloring so I can figure out if the damned ham is safe to eat.

"lol, oats don't have wheat in them, are people so stupid that they have to be told what is and isn't wheat? why does this oatmeal have a gluten free label?" Cross contamination; gluten free oats are not grown near wheat and are not processed in facilities that process wheat.

"lol, rice doesn't have wheat in it, why is this rice labeled gluten free, all rice is gluten free" Cross contamination; the rice isn't processed on equipment that processes wheat.

"lol why does this turkey breast say gluten free, it's just fucking turkey" read the ingredients on your "just" turkey, lots of packaged meat is packed in broth, some of which contains modified food starch, which may contain wheat.

"lol why are these strawberries labeled gluten free? they're fucking strawberries" WAX, BUDDY. SOME FRUITS ARE COATED IN PRESERVATIVE WAX FILMS BY THE MANUFACTURER AND SOME OF THOSE FUCKING FILMS CONTAIN GLUTEN.

I think that part of the reason that people are so irritated by g-free labels is because it exposes them to just how vast and alienating their food systems are.

"Ham should just be meat from a pig, maybe with sugar and salt; what on earth is happening that there might be wheat in that process? Nothing in that process should involve wheat." And then you might have to think about it for a second, might have to wonder what "sugar" and "salt" mean when someone is producing a million hams to be delivered thousands of miles away. It's not just sugar and salt; it's preservatives and nitrates and batch cooking and getting corn syrup instead of sugar and getting smoke flavoring instead of smoking the ham and turning your "whole food" into all the ingredients that make up the ingredients that make up the ingredients.

A "gluten free" label says "you can eat this" to somebody with celiac disease, who has already pounded their skull against the shittiness of the medical system and the food system.

But to someone who doesn't have to worry that their food is going to disable them, a "gluten free" sticker on ham takes a known quantity and turns their sandwich into a hyperobject that contains animal agriculture and industrial additive production and shipping pollution and the ongoing assault on regulation.

If it doesn't have the label, you can just eat your lunch. If it does have the label, you are haunted by the specter of RFK junior imploding the FDA.

Turns out that everyone in the US with celiac is already constantly haunted by the possible implosion of the FDA because food regulation is an up-close and personal part of our daily lives that most people would rather not think about.

Hey, people with actual celiac who are seeing this in the notes, this is a great way to make yourself incredibly sick. There are no enzyme treatments currently on the market that will make it safe for you to eat gluten. There are a couple of treatments that are in trials but the otc jar of glutimase in the drugstore is not like taking lactase for lactose intolerance, and consuming gluten while taking otc enzyme treatments will increase your risk of malnutrition and intestinal damage and will add to your long-term colon cancer risk.

This isn't like lactose intolerance where your body gets mad at you because it can't break down and process a protein or sugar so you get gassy, this is an autoimmune condition that is triggered by tiny trace amounts of gluten and can cause vomiting, diarrhea, anemia, malnutrition, and intestinal damage that takes literal years to recover from and permanently increases your cancer risk.

Do not trust *your ability to absorb vitamin c* to an otc enzyme.

Also for folks with mast cell diseases, you might not test positive for celiac in the same way, but the mechanism by which gluten makes us ill is the same, it just manifests differently.

It can also be an anaphylaxis risk depending on the severity of your mast cell symptoms.

Which is also why having cosmetics labeled as gluten free is helpful because some of us react to skin exposure to gluten, even if we test negative for wheat allergies because mast cell diseases are a fucking nightmare.

Gluten free labels aren’t marketing scams to raise the price on things, they are a vital necessity for people with complex medical needs.

Also because not everyone knows this, gluten can stick to things like cast iron and non-stick surfaces so just in case you’re wondering why you don’t feel better after cutting out gluten, it could be your utensils. We had to replace Everything in our kitchen when I got my MCAS diagnosis to avoid remnant contamination. It sucks.

The Dabous Giraffes - neolithic petroglyphs found in Saharan Niger estimated to be 6,000 to 8,000 years old. The bigger of the two giraffes is 5.4 meters long and is the largest known petroglyph in the world.

I know this is a joke but like, yeah. It is. I promise you.

See, I had graduated early from highschool and then got my associates in Zoology. But then, from ages 18-23, I was medicated with antipsychotics and (for those last two years) a deadly combo of sedatives due to misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, and then a psychiatrist who was legitimately on drugs and just writing random shit that almost killed me.

Anyway, needless to say, my brain turned to mush and stopped working, and it took me 6 years to get some sort of bachelors degree (in fashion??) and I graduated at the bottom of my class.

And then I got properly diagnosed (the “psychosis” was just narcolepsy) and got off all those meds. And I was so afraid my brain was permanently fucked. And it is, cause of the narcolepsy part, but the narcolepsy doesn’t kill the parts of your brain where your smarts are.

But I went back to school. Got another bachelors studying sustainable tourism. Turns out my smarts hadn’t gone anywhere when my brain turned to mush. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA.

Now I’m getting my masters in biology studying the intersection of tourism and the conservation of the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. And doing well. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Your brain is not a muscle in the literal sense, but it is a muscle in the sense that the more you use it, the better developed it becomes. Not using it might make its usefulness dip for a bit, but that doesn't mean it's gone forever. You might have to work your way back up, start with easier exercises (puzzles, creative exercises, critical thinking questions) before jumping back into the stuff you used to do, but like a couch to 5k slowly ramp up the difficulty and you'll get there in the end. No one's brains are useless, you just gotta meet 'em where they're at.

The brain can literally rewire itself around MISSING PHYSICAL PARTS OF IT. Which is so cool! The brain is amazing in its resilience.

Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

"without modifying" how dare you insult the hard work of our landlords

bisexual worsties

Love those ads for fake puzzle games where the puzzle is blatantly unsolvable

Like

nah i got this bruv

dont just bring up ancient memories like that with no hesitation

I love talking with neurotypical people about my executive dysfunction because I'm like "yeah there's this invisible wall in my head that I'm incapable of getting past no matter what I do and it stops me from doing things" and they're like what the actual fuck

Meanwhile other neurodivergents are like

Seen it, you say?