Reblogged phoenixyfriend
Reblogged thebibliosphere
5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.
But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.
Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.
For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.
But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.
Happy.
It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.
Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.
It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.
A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.
5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.
It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.
Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.
I’m a Rescue.
She gave me a Home.
And, so, I gave her a Family.
It seemed fair
This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.
don’t give up yet, ok?
It could get good, even.
Reblogged thebibliosphere
my fav genre of fanfic is "ship i have not ever considered but the author is insane abt it in a way that intrigues me immensely"
Reblogged roach-works
Cosmic alignment…
Fuck all of the good luck posts out there. Reblog this to immaculate your vibes
Reblogged sanctusoctopodus
In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…
And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…
Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.
He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.
It's incredibly sad people have to resort to this, but it's a damn good resource. Use it. Spread awareness. Maybe one day people with physical disabilities won't need DIYs like this. But until then, reblog and share.
Reblogged sanctusoctopodus
Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.
Reblogged aeyriabird
So yesterday I was thinking about how femme clothes fit my sibling weird sometimes cuz of their lack of tits and then I randomly remembered this nonprofit that knits and crochets prosthetic breasts for cis women that have had mastectomies due to breast cancer (knittedknockers.org lol) and their patterns are free! So I am knitting them some tits which I find very amusing.
For those that want breastforms, the patterns are free. Takes sport or DK yarn. There's a DPN version and a knit flat version and a crocheted version. You can find them on Ravelry under the name Knitted Knockers but make sure you have mature content enabled
@orig-suckamunch absolutely
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "gonna crochet myself a neon green cock" I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it never occurred to me that it might happen twice. Go you funky folks. Make the neon green dick of your dreams.
Reblogged cleolinda
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.
Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."
Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.
And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.
I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.
I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.
On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.
It's been 16 years since I took that test.
I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.
But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.
The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.
My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?
I was, today, to my immense disturbance, introduced to something ChatGPT is actually apparently not, at a glance, awful at. On the train I listened (brain wouldn't let me tune it out) to someone explain to her seatmate that she'd learned a lot about excel by working ahead in her coursework, and asking ChatGPT how to do certain complex things, and then like, putting that knowledge and experience together into her own skill until she didn't need to ask anymore. This is clearly not someone who is trying to get *out* of doing work. And I was like (internally) "But if you are capable of synthesizing useful learning from instructions, why go to ChatGPT for it instead of looking up a guide?" and realized that thanks to increasing search engine (and especially google) enshittification, looking stuff up has gotten a whole lot more complicated. I've certainly started to fuck around in the menus of LibreOffice to figure out how to do a thing before trying to google it. If this is you - if you are going to ChatGPT because several search engines have enshittified and you need to get shit done - please learn both how to fuck around (in say, the various options of Office Programs) and how to do the research yourself anyway. If your goal is to learn more about the program you have to work with, You will learn a lot more, and more quickly, by at least *trying* to figure out where the function you need is hiding first, because it increases your understanding of how that program organized things. Even if you have to resort to looking it up, you will still have learned things that will come in handy in further usage. (and you may also find that it has an internal guide. the microsoft office programs at least used to have those, though I am not sure if they still do.)
If you find a guide that explains something in a way you understand, chances are very high the source also has other information presented in a way that is relevant to you! Next time, you won't have to go to google or duckduckgo or your search engine of choice first. Next time, you would still have to ask chatgpt how to do this thing, but if you've hunted up that guide last time, you can just search the guide itself for the thing you need to do, and I promise, it will be quicker! (The search in site function is on ctrl+f on keyboards, no idea on mobile I'm afraid.) And even if the thing you want to ask ChatGPT how to do is something you never need to use again – effectively using search engines is also a skill (even though we've all been nerfed - wringing useful information out of search engines is intensely frustrating these days even for those who learned how to do it properly) - and an immensely valuable one at that, because so few still bother!
Reblogged bidet-of-evil
“Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So, the Nothing grows stronger.”
The Neverending Story (1984)
This is exactly why speculative fiction is important
This is why taking a break for downtime is important
This is why being able to daydream and wander, is important
Without hope and dreams, we can’t even consider that a better world is possible
And that is exactly the point of overworking and underpaying us.
Michael Ende, who wrote The Neverending Story, also wrote Momo, where the villains are little grey men who convince you to “save time” by cutting out everything fun and meaningful in your life. But you never get the saved time back, the little men smoke it.
Momo should be vastly more well-known than it is, IMO.
Reblogged bidet-of-evil
Or you use a plastic/silicon spatula?? Or a silicon whisk?? go to literally any dollar store they have shitty plastic/silicon kitchen utensils you can scramble eggs with without scratching up your pans
Now that’s what I call
@rpepperpotshipssciencebros please forgive me for this one
Reblogged bidet-of-evil
to anyone missing my writing please know i am also missing my writing
Reblogged bidet-of-evil
Reblogged audacityinblack
Reminder: you can always just stop hating and being an asshole. You'll probably even feel better about yourself.
I am 100% there for people who stop being an asshole.
To be honest they usually make the best allies because they've fucking learned how to unlearn toxic beliefs and behaviors. And they're usually good at a) nonviolent conflict resolution and b) other means of conflict resolution.