There's more TB cases in Kansas than NCAA trans athletes.

Shoutout to those who can't get rid of chametz this year.

Those who can't clean as thoroughly as they'd like, either from sharing a living space with others or just not having the energy or ability to do so.

Those whose safe foods aren't kosher for passover.

This has been such a stressful year, and I know for me cleaning is exhausting when I'm at my best (and this year I Am Not)

So if you're stressed and anxious about cleaning, struggling with the idea of losing access to safe foods for a week, experiencing the anxiety inertia of "oh no why haven't I done anything yet and why can't I bring myself to", or just don't have the energy needed to clean, know that you're not alone 💛

regular reminder that Jewish law orders you to prioritize health in every instance.

This does include and always has included mental health.

If the traditional observance of a practice is harmful to you, there is no religious imperative that you observe. It’s ok.

Also reminder that this includes physical health. Some people cannot get rid of chametz due to very restrictive diets and/or the inability to eat matzah.

We never got rid of chametz growing up because my sister would have starved. Her protein shake where most of her calories came from (that went through a g-tube) wasn’t kosher for Passover and she got a lot of her eaten calories from bread/baked goods. She had trouble swallowing and matzah was not great for that, so she could only have a little unless it was prepared a certain way (matzah brei was okay).

I didn’t even know it was a tradition to get rid of it until maybe middle or even high school. We just knew what not to eat during Passover. We didn’t get rid of stuff she didn’t eat, either, because we left her foods in the house, so why bother with the other chametz?

As an adult with autism, depression, and ADHD, who has been too poor at times to get rid of food, and who sometimes has goyishe roommates, some years we get rid of it, some we don’t. I keep kosher for Passover even when we have it in the house because I grew up doing that. My (also autistic) spouse grew up not keeping kosher for Passover and these days sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, depending on spoons, stress, anxiety, etc.

If it’s medically necessary (including mental health) it’s K4P.

Pikuach Nefesh means that one is obligated to "break" Halacha to save a life. It is not that you are allowed, but rather obligated to.

Pikuach Nefesh does not just include the physical, but it also includes the mental aspects of one's health and self.

If for reasons either to do with physical health, mental health, or both you not able do to aspects of Pesach completely or in totality I again remind you that you are obligated to put your life and wellbeing first, be it physical or mental or both.

I would lastly just add that if you can try to do The Pesach, Matzah, and Marror part. It is one of the most important parts of the Seder.

Like I said if you can. If not firstly there is always next years and secondly I firmly believe that Hashem understands the reality of people's lives. That for many of us wanting to do something does not always mean we are able to. We can only try to best of our abilities, situations, and realities.

Finished my buttonhole tutorial video! It's 22 minutes long. Here's a link to the blog post, with a written tutorial for the basic buttonhole (the video has a lot more than that) and source links for all the photos I used in the video, plus a few that I didn't.

Dammit, I made a mistake in labelling one of my reference images! That beige 1720's coat from The Met has a functional buttonhole at the very top of the centre front as well, and I did not label it as such, even though I did the exact same buttonhole arrangement on my 1730's coat. Shame! Oh! Shame and embarrassment!

Reblogging again because two people have expressed envy at the buttonholes on the shirt I just posted, so I hope this is helpful! It takes a lot of practice to get them nice and even but you'll get better eventually, I believe in you!!

(Also the ones in my shirt were the kind where I do machine buttonholes and hand sew over them, mainly because that adds a lot more stability and it was a really thin fabric.)

Just got perhaps the stupidest, most baffling mean comment on any video so far. Someone called this video, this 22 minute hand sewn buttonhole tutorial "More of a showing of skill than a tutorial. Empty, clout driven content".

What the fuck????? What the???? what????

That kind of comment might make sense for like... people doing ridiculous publicity stunts on tiktok or something, not a 22 minute hand sewn buttonhole tutorial!!??

It's extra annoying because I knew that this video wouldn't get a ton of views when I made it (and it didn't!) and I still really wanted to make it because I DO want to show people how to sew things! It's even weirder considering I do have multiple much more flashy videos on my channel, like the Werther's waistcoat video, which could arguably be called a bit gimmicky even though I still put an unnecessary amount of hand sewing into it.

Mean comments can be upsetting, but when they're mean and objectively wrong & incredibly stupid it's way more frustrating.

Anyways, enjoy my empty clout driven buttonhole tutorial! That's the way to get attention on the internet, yessiree, longform highly detailed videos explaining one specific sewing technique! All the cool youths are doing it! Why, any day now they'll put me on the cover of Hand Sewn Historical Buttonhole Magazine and I'll get millions of new followers and oh so much clout from having posted about this very popular subject that the general public really cares about!

(I kinda think maybe they're just a jealous hater who's bad at buttonholes. I know a lot of people blame things on "jealous haters" but that is honestly the only explanation I can think of that makes any sense at all.)

(Sorry I just needed to shout about that because it made me so mad. I'm calmer now.)

Fuck that noise. I used this tutorial to up my buttonhole game and it really helped. You go into such depth which I appreciate.

Historical context is of course very useful for important things like Politics and Science and everything, but will also open your eyes to things like, uh... the way the clothing/textile/crafting industries try to use the word "natural" as an excuse to sell shoddy and bad quality goods and make you think that's normal.

God knows there are worse things going on in the world, but it really pisses me off when I see companies advertising "Real Shell/Pearl buttons!" like that's supposed to be some upscale selling point, and the buttons in question are the thinnest, roughest, most crudely-made buttons in existence... 🙄😒 "But they're made from Natural Materials! You can't expect Natural Materials to look refined and consistent like synthetic ones!" They are lying to you. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! And I know this because I've seen "real shell buttons" from 100 or even 50 years ago. And most of them are sturdy and smoothly polished, of a consistent thickness, and sometimes even finely carved. The buttons on nice men's dress shirts? Those are the cheap, plastic IMITATIONS of what people expected actual mother-of-pearl buttons to look like! "Natural" isn't an excuse! Your product is cheap and badly and lazily made! And I'm so sick of this, because I see it EVERYWHERE. "Linen-look" has become shorthand for "coarsely woven fabric with visible slubs" and that drives me CRAZY because do you KNOW what kinds of linen I have seen??? Antique linen so light and fine and smooth you can't even SEE the weave unless you magnify it!!! A fragment of a linen damask tablecloth so smooth and glossy, it looks like SILK? 😭 (On that note, "dupioni silk" is so roughly woven that it would have been considered hardly fit to sell a century ago) "This fabric is woven of Natural Materials, so imperfections will be inevitable!" 🙃 No! 😀 You just made it cheaply and sloppily, and that was your choice! 😊

also "handspun" does not need to mean rough and uneven. It can be very fine and even and frankly historically (where people had MASSIVE amounts of practice at it, and also it is ALL THERE WAS! (see linen so fine you can't see the weave in above post) people would not have accepted the shit we get today! (My personal hate boner for the fact that I cannot even find an online source where I can be sure they're selling actual high quality fabrics.)

May i profer up the following sources that my historical costuming buddies like to use (forgive me if you already know these). Most of these are just natural fibers and/or historical designs around the 1800's, but yeah...

To save you all a painful scroll, links are below the break:

I'm not importing anything from the USA under current conditions, but that looks like some lovely stuff! My personal pet pieve though is the fabric quality itself, beyond "just" fibre content. But I don't have any experience with the above sources! My "favourite" anecdote for this is that when they were making Phrine Fisher's costumes (in Australia) they had to import Kimono fabrics from Japan to get the fabric quality you'd expect for a rich fashionable lady from the 1920s...

adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

none of us are making those appointments huh

Which is why it’s important to not be mean.

Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.

I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.

It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.

It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.

They are not your enemy. They are victims.

They aren't being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.

You being mean to some teenager isn't sticking it to anyone, you're doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.

PLEASE READ THIS.

Please read this.

Don't do the church's work for them.

If you're kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.

They were such sweet kids, they'd turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I'm me, so, I fed them.

Then it was one of the wee 'elder's' birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.

One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we'll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they're still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I'd.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.

The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he's not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).

The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I'd get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.

I still think very fondly of that time.

Many of those boys still email me now and then.

Most of them aren't Mormons anymore.

Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.

I was blacklisted, for kindness.

So there you go, if you don't want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit

Hate is really easy; love is one of the hardest things to show a stranger. Your neighborhood atheist here, asking you to be gentle with these poor kids.

Telephone Sheep by Jean Luc Cornec

Oh these are the electric sheep the androids dream about

ohhh “cable knit” i get it now

Daily reminder: Transphobia actively contributes to sexism. If you don’t fit the beauty standard and are seen as masculine in any way shape or form, you are seen as transgender and as a “problem”

I think it's incredibly important here to not overlook the fact that she is a Black woman. Transphobia, racism, and sexism overlap significantly because of the incredibly eurocentric beauty standards women are judged on.

Unusual but sympathetic paper:

Language Matters: What Not to Say to Patients with Long COVID, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Other Complex Chronic Disorders

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/275

More deceit from DOGE

*Scrolls past*

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

*rebogs*

Snufkin doing whatever the fuck he does during the winter

This is so cool but all I can think about is how if you tried this where I grew up you would just get 40 thousand ticks.

Useful tips for when you get stranded in the woods with nothing on you but your knife, your hatchet, your flint striker, several thousand meters of twine, your weatherproof jacket, a flannel blanket, a considerable length of high-tension nylon cord, four steel pulleys, a gopro, and your own deeply disappointing wits.

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

My mom was telling me about this YouTube video she watched (I can't remember the name, sorry) where the person shared a screenshot of some MAGA voter from Florida asking for help, because his wife had been hired for a nursing job with the VA in Texas, so they sold their house and were preparing to move. But they rescinded her job offer after Trump's executive order. The post from the guy was basically like "I already contacted Senator Ted Cruz's office, and they said they couldn't do anything about this. Please help me get this story to President Trump, we love him! We voted for him 3 times! And we know this was just a mistake and he'd help us!"

Just.................a part of me laughs, and another part of me thinks about how cult followers genuinely believe that the cult leader cares about them

This is the part about believing in universal human rights that can be a bit difficult: they're universal, and should never be denied anyone, no matter who they are or what they have done.

You can be – you should be – furious with people who voted for Trump, for wilfully trying to sabotage those rights and make them conditional, a privilege for the "deserving", a privilege they can deny the "wrong" kind of people.

And when the MAGA crowd are hit by the consequences of their actions, and denied basic human rights because it turns out their Great Leader doesn't actually include his followers among the privileged, it's tempting to say that they deserve to be denied those rights, because that's what they wanted to do to others.

But if you do that, you don't truly believe that those rights should be universal; you just have a different idea than the MAGA crowd about who should be included among the privileged.

You can still tell the MAGA who's crying that the leopards ate there face that you're angry with them for letting the face-eating leopards loose. But you shouldn't be fine with their face being eaten.

It took me ages to find this post again but. Yeah. Same energy

This is exactly it, thank you!!

Thinking about how wild it is that enshittification starts as a way for the rich to squeeze the populace for more money but ends up infecting everything so even luxury products decline in quality. They’ve got more money than fucking God now and for what? Literally they can’t even buy fun nice stuff for themselves because they killed craft.

Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.

guess it's time to post agha shahid ali's poem about dhaka muslin

Fun fact! Revival of Dhaka Muslin has been ongoing for quite some time. The headline of the above article is very very misleading, we know exactly how Dhaka Muslin was made. The process was very well documented. We know how it was made, but colonialism ruined the fabric's production area and devalued the skills needed to make it such that they no longer existed. But the process itself was not lost.

That being said, efforts to bring it back are underway, and they have been making amazing progress, and succeed in creating Dhaka Muslin yet again.

This is a pretty good updated article, it has a lot of the same info as the BCC one (which also discusses some of the revival efforts) but with more of a focus on that process, an update to the story, and it details some of the other ongoing projects working on the revival!

Here's the first weaver to manage to produce a finished piece in nearly 200 years, Al Amin.

His first piece was 300 threads, according to the article they have now been able to get into the 700s for thread counts, which is absolutely incredible.

Several projects are actually underway now each with different weavers and slightly different methods, producing fabric intended to meet or best the original!

And if you're curious, "okay but can it pass through a ring" yes! Yes they can!

All three of these photos are of pieces made in the modern century, photos by Wasiul Bahar!

It's a very time consuming process, and a very expensive fabric to purchase, but love and passion for it have been steadily bringing it back!

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

AND YET A TRACE OF THE TRUE SELF EXISTS IN THE FALSE SELF

this post is about plastic dinosaurs

cant beleive it. donasairs.

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.