the ocean as a metaphor ALWAYS slaps. the ocean as a hungry force that wants to consume you? the ocean as something vast and unknowable, like a god itself? the ocean as freedom and liberation? the ocean as the mysteries of the self? the ocean as love? never fails to get me
all cops are bastards because all cops are just doing their jobs
“I’m just doing what I’m told. If I am ordered to remove gold fillings from refugees theeth then that’s what I’ll do”, says police officer Michael Hansen.
Just thought I’d add this since not a lot of people outside of the nordic countries seem to have seen it. This is a danish police officer discussing a new danish law that says the police should seize the possesions and money of refugees to finance the integration.
people be fucking normal abt ftm bottom surgery challenge.
None of the commenters are gonna see this, but! If anyone’s interested in meta or phalloplasty but is kind of on the fence because they’ve only heard Terrible Wretched Things about the surgeries and results, you should try to find a copy of Hung Jury by Trystan T. Cotten! It’s a collection of testimonials from FtMs who have had bottom surgery, including their reasons, details about some of their procedures, and individual satisfaction ratings, and it includes testimonials from several trans men of color!
This is the book that convinced a buddy of mine to go through with metoidioplasty! I pinky promise, the surgeries are way way way better and safer and more effective than we’ve been made to believe they are. If it’s a procedure you want/need for your health and happiness, it’s a procedure you deserve!
Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.
Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you're in pain, but you don't get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone's life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn't look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the "fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there's been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you're not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she's probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I've heard lately but she's far from the only person in emergency services who's frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn't want you filming and the cop who doesn't want you filming.
The paramedic who doesn't want you filming is trying to protect someone who is hurt and vulnerable and maybe going through the worst day of their life. That is worthy of respect and if you film someone in medical distress you are a pustulent asshole of a human being.
A cop who doesn't want you filming is probably trying to violate someone's civil rights and you should absolutely record away.
Super fucked up! wtf is wrong with these people? #IamWithMili!
What is every little girl supposed to have long hair in a ponytail? So happy to see all of the support going her way.
Everybody remembers that we absolutely knew this would happen, right?
Like, trans people predicted this from the start. Everyone was SO SURE they could identify us on sight, and we said “If you run with that assumption you’re going face-first into a goddamn wall” and here we go.
It’s like people forget women with short hair exist.
In the six years that this has happened, Milli has continued to play soccer, is on track for joining a national team, and still keeps her hair short.
Read this and take it in.
Even if you have your papers.
Even if you are fortunate to have your gender match your sex.
Even if you were assigned feminine at birth.
They can still tell you to your face you’re not a woman if you don’t conform to a patriarchal standard of skinny Anglo with long hair.
They can just deny you for no reason at all.
THIS MAKES ALL THOSE SPORTS BANS LAWS USELESS AT PROTECTING CIS GIRLS! The very thing tbey were supposed to do!
Let’s get one thing right.
Sports bans, bathroom bans, ANY type of ban on trans people in public places were NEVER meant to protect cis girls or women or women’s sports or any of that crap.
They’re about control and forcing ALL people to conform to stereotypical gender norms and eradicating trans people in the process.
It’s (christo)fascism and genocide.
we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.
when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.
the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.
my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.
when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.
and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.
in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.
I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.
In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.
By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?
I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.
I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.
Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.
people who leave their phones set to military time are fuckin war criminals how do you look at 16:05 and go wow i can understand that . fucking bootlickers whats next? you gonna go join the army??recruit me?
americans be like ok i cant count past 12 actually
americans calling the normal way of measuring time ‘military time’ is always so cute to me. like theyre gonna start calling kilometers ‘army miles’ next or something
I'm kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn't colonizer bullshit, it's what everyone does. It's just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:
"Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A's word for thing. Say, what do you call it?"
"Oh it's [language B's word for thing]."
"Got it, it's [language B's word for thing] variety [language A's word for thing]"
added to which it is LITERALLY JUST LINGUISTIC SHORTHAND for
[item] the way [culture] makes it.
If you don’t want sliced bread, you want bread the way Eastern Indians make it you ask for Roti, not bread. Because Roti is bread THE WAY [EASTERN] INDIANS MAKE IT. Like fuck, it’s not that complicated a concept.
OF COURSE it’s not colonizer bullshit! It’s just linguistic shorthand!
Anonymous asked:
In context of whiteness as you discuss a lot in your posts and I guess more the "white-ish-ness": How would you relate the experience of "Third Culture Kids" in the States to this topic?
decolonize-the-left answered:
I was someone thrown into the foster system and handed over to white families when my own is native on one side and Mexican on the other and I think that experience was a TCK experience if not Very similar to one.
Mexican stuff was relatively easy to participate in because my area growing up had a lot of South American ppl but the native stuff? Much harder.
That said, ICWA exists specifically because of the known relevance and damage caused by sending kids to live outside their culture and adopting someone else’s. It makes it harder to have a sense of community when you aren’t tied securely to any community.
That was my experience. And looking at some job that create TCK like military… Yeah I’d say it’s that. It’s that othering from society. And you can Feel that you don’t fit anywhere really. Your social cues or words or jokes you make to fit in with a certain group don’t land quite right because you did not grow up around them and lack the same tone, mannerisms, or accent. Communities you belong to feel like they don’t belong to you because the people in them Feel you are an outsider even if you’re not.
To an extent I’d say most mixed kids could probably see this too and relate.
To me being able to See people with healthy cultural ties and knowing I should have the same ties and knowing that I would if not for colonization makes it Very Hard for me to view introducing Whiteness as a culture as anything But ongoing colonization tbh.
It’s destroying cultures and community to this day. And yeah I think TCK can see it way and understand it that way if they tried. If they wanted to. It’s not so different.
twitter: currently owned by techbro pissman
tumblr: actively removing functionality and bloating the interface with things nobody uses
discord: being retooled by ex-Meta management who don't understand the appeal of the platform
youtube: neutered by advertisers and algorithms and also tiktokification
reddit: half of the site is down due to protests about the outrageous monetization of third-party API support
facebook: my mom is on there
having sat down and spent a bit of time spinning on all the wheels, i have thoughts on them!
our first contestant: a sheridan scandanavian. kinda.
ALTsheridan was an australian manufacturer in the 70s and early 80s, and this particular model is often mistaken for an ashford traditional. one tell that it isn't is the spokes on the wheel—a traddy has eight, and a scandanavian has six.
another tell is its tension knob, which i actually love—this is a lot easier to get a grip on than the ones that are just balls.
ALT...there's also a nameplate identifying the maker and the model. but that's kinda where things get weird, because this? this is not what a scandanavian is meant to look like.
eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed that it's a double drive wheel, which is weird, because the scandanavian was only ever made as scotch tension. sheridan made a similar wheel, the macarthur, that was a double drive. my understanding is that these wheels were sold as kits, so as best i can guess, someone must have had a scandanavian and a macarthur, and at some point, for some reason, they dropped the macarthur's workings onto the sheridan's stand.
whatever she is, though, she spins nicely—works exactly like you'd expect, even after what was clearly a number of years of neglect. i'd like to get some more oil into the leather bearings, but she's in good shape. this one's a surprisingly slow wheel, even on the highest ratio, but will be great for plying and—more importantly—for @binchickencrafts to learn to spin on.
next up is the tarra...something. maybe the evelyn, but maybe the agnes?
ALTshe's beautiful, right? another tilt tension, too, which i like. lovely matching orifice hook with a little storage hole, and integrated bobbin storage, which i absolutely love.
so why's she weird? well. the evelyn was the evolution of the agnes, basically. agnes had a block for a mother of all, evelyn was shaped. agnes had a four-part drive wheel, evelyn had six. agnes had eight spokes on the drive wheel, evelyn had six.
this wheel, though. she has a shaped mother of all, an eight-part drive wheel, and eight spokes.
she also has a really neat flyer.
ALTthe flyer is part of what attracted me, to be honest, and no regrets. it needs shined up some more—i was eager enough to try her out that i cleaned off the worst of the rust with some vinegar, but it needs some more attention. those hooks, though, are fantastic. i think that they're a curse for a lot of people, because if one's lost, replacements are almost impossible to come by, but if you have them, they're so good. the screw loosens the hook and lets you slide it as needed, and you can get very close to either end of the bobbin—you can use the stationary hook to wind on right at the front, and the movable hook covers the rest of the bobbin easily. all my treadle wheels have been fixed hooks, so this was a new adventure.
this is the wheel in the worst shape, i think. she needs oiled up, but also needs to have the rear maiden reseated—it's loosened and has a fair amount of horizontal play, which doesn't give the best experience. i feel like when that's fixed, which won't take more than a couple hours and some wood glue, she's going to be a sweet spot of a wheel. even with the movement in that back maiden, i can get from worsted down to cobweb on her, so i'm really looking forward to seeing what she's like when she's been patched up.
finally: the pipy saxony.
ALTplease clap.
i can't overstate how small this wheel is. she weighs less than five kilos. that's like. a cat. that's a cat of weight. that's how much this wheel weighs. i knew when i bought her that she was a small wheel, but i hadn't realised how small, so i was a little concerned that she wasn't going to be very effective.
turns out joke's on me, because this teeny tiny wheel is an absolute powerhouse—as long as you want to spin finely. which is perfect for me, because i almost never use or spin yarn that's thicker than a light worsted, and even that's kinda pushing it. i'm the kind of person who knits jumpers out of sock yarn and owns multiple pairs of 1.5mm (size 000) circular needles.
this wheel wants to spin fast and wants to spin thin, and I *love* her. the wheel is weighted so it always stops ready to turn clockwise, and it's a string footman, and something about the combination of the two makes this an absolutely amazing experience. i spun for several hours, and my breaking point wasn't knee or ankle pain, but hip pain from sitting in that position too long.
ALThow the heck does a wheel that—again!—weighs like ten pounds manage to weight anything?
it's easy to miss, but in that first picture, there's integrated bobbin storage again, with room for one on each side of the wheel.
the tension system isn't like anything i've used, and can be adjusted both vertically and horizontally. the tension peg does what you'd expect and moves the slider block (and the mother of all on it) closer or further from the wheel, but you can also move the mother of all towards you or away from you to better align it with the wheel.
ALTshe's just really nicely designed. look at this incredibly tidy bobbin release!
for the specific things that i spin most frequently, i'm pretty sure that the pipy is going to be my go-to treadle wheel, though i expect the others will see plenty of use, as well. and my eel wheel certainly isn't getting retired—my somewhat broken body is never going to let me use a treadle as often as i'd like, and there's a lot to be said for the ability to spin while watching television in bed. but i'm really excited to have these, and to use them when i can, even if it's not as often as i'd like.
i know that a lot of people are really dubious about buying used (especially vintage used) wheels, but i feel like they're often underrated. there's a lot of cool wheels out there that are as good or better than what you can buy in a store, and it's worth investigating it, if you're able to. (it's also worth noting that buying all three of these cost us less than half of what buying a single new ashford traditional would cost.)
finally, you want to see my favourite thing about the pipy? i saw someone complaining about this the other day, that their wheel's prior owner had 'gouged' it. but look.
ALTthat little gouge means someone else loved this wheel so much that their yarn wore a channel into the wood. and as soon as i stop holding my yarn back, it slots straight into place.
ALTright where it's meant to be.
this wheel is older than i am—they're dated, on the bottom, and she was made in july 1972. she's only had one owner, a woman who used to teach spinning, but is elderly now and can't spin anymore. her daughter delivered it to me, and told me that this was her mother's last wheel—she'd gotten rid of the others, slowly, but held on to this until she was physically unable to treadle. fifty years! that woman spun on this wheel for fifty years.
i'm old enough that i don't imagine i'm going to get fifty years with it, but maybe i'll get lucky. either way, hopefully in another fifty years, someone new will be taking their turn, weirdly touched by the idea that this wheel has been so loved.
The wheels are lovely! And it's really interesting to see the comparison. I only ever spun on my selfmade one, so I have no idea if it's fast or slow or what differences there are to professionally made spinning wheels
first, you made your wheel?? my wife and i have admired it several times and wondered after the maker, but i felt weird messaging you to ask. do you have posts about making it? i would love to hear more about it, if you feel like sharing. it's a beautiful wheel and looks well constructed--i hope you're super proud of yourself!
but also, honestly, there's less of a gap than you might expect between homemade and professionally made spinning wheels. my weird niche obsession this year is wheels made in australia and new zealand, and it's fascinating how many makers, even relatively large ones (hundreds to thousands of wheels over the course of a few decades) started with someone making a wheel for their wife. there are also a lot of makers who made far fewer wheels--maybe a few dozen--but are still seen as wheel makers.
and of course, historically, making a spinning wheel wouldn't necessarily be an incredibly specialised task. many older spinning wheels are by unknown makers, some of whom were almost certainly local woodworkers or talented neighbours, which in this scenario is you.
all of which is to say that i think in this specific arena, the dividing line between 'professional wheel maker' and 'guy you know who occasionally makes spinning wheels' is less clear than you'd think it would be, and the differences may be less pronounced than you'd expect.
if you haven't already, please sign and date your wheel, and any others you make. spinners of the future will appreciate that you've made it a little easier for them to figure out who made their cool vintage wheel.
Yes, I made my wheel - and I did put my name and the year on it! There is also one post mentioning me making it, but uuuuh, maybe with one picture?
Sorry to everyone else, but now I HAVE to show you! I'd put it under a read more, but I have no idea how to do that, so there you go...
I'm a carpenter/joiner (the german word would be Tischler and the translations don't quite fit) and the wheel and the stool were part of my final exam. We can choose quite freely what we want to build for that and while everyone else made more or less normal furniture, I made a spinning wheel :D
I borrowed an old flax wheel from a friends grandma to learn how all the mechanics are supposed to work, but sadly there were parts missing, so I couldn't try spinning on it.
These were my first plans and a test version:
The drive wheel is mostly CNC cut (it took so. many. hours. to make that work), everything else was made with 'standard' tools and machines. I calculated the circumference of the drive wheel based on the whorls and flyer I bought from Kromski, so that I could have a few different speeds that weren't too far from a storebought one...
The height and tension adjustment on the flyer is made of wood. There are special tools to cut the thread, but it still takes a lot of time to make everything work smoothly
And a tiny friend because I can
Also - did you always want a lazy kate you can sit on? Here it is!
this is so, so beautiful and so impressive--i can't believe you even did wooden threading 😭
thank you so much for sharing it!!
