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i used to be like “oh i want a boyfriend with a fluffy hairdo and broody personality,” but then i realized that a silkie chicken has those things without any of the negatives that come from human males

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My intention in posting this is not to announce a return to tumblr, but rather, to provide a “where is she now”-esque update and most likely disappear back into the void.

Don’t worry – in the time since I last posted, I have been completely fine, and in all honesty, probably better after doing some of the work to unplug more compared to before. I am posting this to share my own experiences in detoxing from social media, in the hopes that someone finds even just one of these ideas useful. You don’t have to quit tumblr in order to benefit from this advice – I just personally don’t have much of a reason myself to try making tumblr work for me.

The main reason I joined tumblr in the first place was to try and find a sense of community, especially considering that I felt a void in terms of connecting with other feminists after quitting Discord due to privacy concerns with it as a platform. However, I haven’t been able to actually connect with people here on tumblr, and I think this is just a matter of the fact that I find it much harder to start and participate in conversations here. Additionally, I found that I was quickly falling back into old habits of obsessively scrolling through recent posts without really getting much from what I saw, just on my dashboard instead of channels in a Discord server. If there is enough demand for it, I might consider starting similar communities using Matrix or XMPP-based messaging services to allow for the sense of connection I had without the same privacy concerns as Discord – I would want to see if it’s possible to strike the right balance of allowing for a sense of community without falling back into the pit of eternal scrolling. On the one hand, I crave this sense of connection that I had on Discord, but on the other, I desparately want to make some sort of real difference that feels much harder to achieve over the internet. (If you’re interested in reading more about organizing over the internet and reclaiming our control, I recommend checking out this post of mine).

That being said, tumblr still has its things that kept me around for some time. I enjoyed having an outlet to write longer posts. In school, I was one of those students who always did well with essays, but didn’t actually enjoy writing them – having a tumblr blog, and even some other experiences since I left, have slowly shown me that I can enjoy writing argumentative and informative works when I actually get to choose the topic and I’m not stressed out from dealing with my poor time management skills.

The real thing that kept me around, though, was seeing well-crafted arguments from other users. Every so often within my dashboard, I would come across a post that articulated a specific issue very clearly or shed light on a novel perspective. On the one hand, it felt like these posts were Expanding my Intellectual Horizons and allowing me to Witness the Forefront of a Force of Change, but on the other hand, these hits of satisfaction would fuel my addiction and motivate me to slog through countless other posts that would be forgotten within a few minutes.

A short side note – if you’re like me and want to have access to YouTube for video tutorials that are genuinely useful, but you’re concerned about Google’s privacy practices and the addictive UI patterns, I’ll talk about my solution. I use Invidious (usually the yewtu.be instance, but there are many URLs that run Invidious) to watch YouTube videos without having as much of my information being set to Google, and a few browser extensions to cut back on distractions. I use Invidioucious to custom-tailor the UI and have these changes actually be consistently applied between browser sessions (specifically, I set the “other arguments” field to “&related_videos=false&comments=[]” to turn off related videos and comments), I use Redirector to automatically change any Invidious “popular” or “trending” feed page to redirect to a blank search page with no videos shown (I redirect both “*/feed/popular*” and “*/feed/trending*” to “$1/search$2” – note that in all of these, the quotation marks are not included in what you actually enter), and I use LeechBlock to automatically give me a 30-second delay in accessing the pages for YouTube channels on Invidious (blocking “*/channel/*”), since browsing through all of a channel’s videos is a way that I personally tend to fall down binge spirals. If you still want to use official YouTube instead of Invidious, then DF YouTube is a browser extension worth checking out for changing the UI.

During this stretch of time when I wasn’t on tumblr, I got back into reading. In the case of political theory, this allowed me to find a concentrated stream of the High Quality Takes that I only found in fragments here, often by going to the source in finding books that I saw frequently quoted. I was an avid reader as a child, but stopped reading as much in 2018 or so. I’ve read 41 books to completion in 2022 (with a few more I’ll probably finish by the end of the year). Most of that reading took place in May or later, and the majority was non-fiction – this was by far the most non-fiction reading I’ve done overall. I feel like this shift has had a distinctly positive impact on my mental well-being, by allowing me to become more informed without external distractions and by training myself to rebuild my attention span and think. I mention this so I can provide some advice for others looking to pursue this as well – the rest of this post is reading-related advice.

Firstly, I recommend knowing where you can get free books. You can definitely get far with resources like your local library or Project Gutenberg, which provides free e-book versions of books that are old enough that their copyright has lapsed. Also, as devastated as I was when Z-Library was shut down, I am not going to publicly endorse downloading books that were not properly authorized with regards to copyright, even though I personally think that copyright law is, to put it politely, a load of bullshit. (Whatever you do, though, don’t go to Library Genesis, unless you want to get eaten by the copyright monster or whatever…)

I’ve been developing a to-be-read list for a long time, probably a few years now. However, I found that even after I acquired a large hoard of free e-books through completely legitimate means and definitely not piracy, actually convincing myself to read them was a different issue. This brings me to my next piece of advice – know what format works for you and use that to your advantage. For a while, I tried getting back into reading just using my computer, only to find that it was an absolute slog. Reading dense text on a bright computer screen and hunched over my desk in an uncomfortable position doesn’t really work for me. I ended up purchasing a used Nook Simple Touch from eBay that cost me less than $20 USD, including tax and shipping, and its e-ink display and portability ended up being a fantastic match for my physical comfort.

However, I have explored other options for reading e-books without needing to purchase a new device, and I still had some good findings, even with the e-reader being my favorite. I tried using speed-reading software, which displays one word at a time at the same position, allowing you to read very quickly without moving your eyes. The fact that it is much faster, and in my case, a dark background with light text as opposed to the other way around, mitigated some of the discomfort in my eyes. However, I was unable to find software that actually saved my place in the book, and skipping to the place I wanted to read was a major pain because there was no function to skip a chapter at a time, so I had to hold down the arrow key to get to the specific place I left off at. There is probably software that does have this function, I just didn’t find it – even if there isn’t, this is still a good option for something you know you can read through in one sitting, such as shorter books and articles.

I have also tried reading in conjunction with text-to-speech software, and the combination of audio and visual input turned out to work well for me. This actually also allowed me to read at a much faster pace than one might expect – I usually gradually ramp up the speed in the text-to-speech software to 5 or 6 times the default speed, and I know that it’s working best when I feel myself fall into a rhythm with the way my eyes move through the text. Not only does this allow me to read faster while using text-to-speech, but I’ve found that it actually serves as “training wheels” to help me read faster without the text-to-speech. On a similar note, I recommend doing research on speed-reading techniques. There are many techniques that can be used together to do this, but the one that I think has helped me the most is learning to read with my peripheral vision and keeping my eyes towards the center of the page, mainly moving my eyes vertically and much less horizontally. To help with this, I recommend making sure that the overall column width of your e-book isn’t too wide, if you’re using a digital format.

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I keep seeing people being shocked and bewildered about airbnb being so crappy to use now

and it’s giving me the impression not everyone knows that is by design- all of those “disrupter” startups operate exactly the same way. So let me lay it out:

First the company starts with an enormous amount of seed money, and they enter an established industry offering the same product but dirt cheap and with the feel of luxury. They operate at a loss for years. They offer their product at such a reduced rate that they literally cannot profit off of it. They rely on their seed money and investment from other wealthy friends to get by. They do this until the other established companies in the industry are on their knees and begging to be bought out. Once all of the competitors have either collapsed or been bought out, the new disrupter company is safe to jack up its prices and reduce services/perks to get to a level that is profitable. It might end up being much more expansive than the industry was to start with, because now that competitors are gone the disrupter business has more room to squeeze customers dry without fear they’ll go to another company instead. The “we’re shaking this industry up to bring high quality products direct to the consumer” pitch has nothing to do with consumers and is entirely about eliminating competitors, particularly long standing well established ones.

This is how uber works, airbnb, all of those. It’s the same game the laundry mat chain in my neighborhood who offers free drying is playing- driving out competition so they have more freedom to price things higher.

Individual consumers often don’t have the luxury to be so choosy about what companies they buy from, but just be aware going in and don’t get taken by surprise later on.

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The way bi women have been talking about this for fucking years. Been yelling and screaming that we don't magically escape homophobia or misogyny just because we're dating, married to or fucking men and it was met with the vilest shit on this very fucking site. The way we provided study after fucking study. They way we said we deserve and need lgbt resources in case our cishet partners are abusive and it was treated as us being liars and invaders. The way we've spoken about how common biphobic beliefs (which inform why people refuse to even associate with the term "bisexual") has led to our high rates of ipv.

And we were ignored. People called us bihets (peep the url). People made it seem like were were just sluts that performed lesbianism for men (so much to unpack there). We were continually called liars and selfish and self centered and told that we were just trying to center our cishet relationships in lgbt spaces. People genuinely harassed bi bloggers for simply stating that bi m/f relationships were not cishet.

And now a bisexual woman who was abused for years because of her ex-husband's biphobic, misogynistic, jealousy, and she's just been told "Yes you were abused. No, you're not allowed to talk about it."

The fact that the biphobia is merely a footnote in most of the conversations surrounding the abuse (as if it can be neatly separated from JD's motivations behind his violence) is not lost on me either.

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Gender is all fun and games until you’re actually a woman

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If you’re new to gardening, then you’ll hear a lot about hardiness zones, but there’s more to it than that.

Hardiness zone *only* tells you about how cold you can expect your coldest temperatures in winter to be, but people try to use it for a lot more than that. Here’s one example for the US:

Another thing that’s important to know if you want to grow perennials, particularly things like gooseberries and apples, is how many chill hours (iirc, hours between 45f and freezing) you get, which is shown in this next map:

I’m guessing North Dakota is in that little bubble because they spend so much of winter below freezing, which doesn’t count toward chill hours.

A third consideration, which comes in handy when someone who’s used to Texas thinks you should be able to grow papayas near Seattle because it’s also zone 8 for hardiness, is the heat zone you’re in. Heat zone measures how many days above 85f a location got, historically. Either last year was a huge anomaly (let’s hope) or this desperately needs to be updated:

When you combine these three, it gives you a better idea of what you can grow, and what will thrive in your area.

By the way, here’s a Chill hours chart from One Green World nursery:

Keep reading

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Thinking about all of the young gnc girls convinced that they must men because they don’t perform femininity. Buzz cuts don’t make you less of a woman. Body hair doesn’t make you less of a woman. Trousers don’t make you less of a woman. The image of womanhood that you’ve been taught is an impossible fantasy. Wearing boxers is womanly. Kissing girls is womanly. Liking “boy stuff” is womanly. Everything you do is womanly, because you are a woman.

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Someone just asked me for a source on “women have vivid internal lives that do not rely on men”. Buddy, if you need an academic source for that, that’s your problem right there.

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not to be Like That, but I feel like people should know that I have a siteblocker to limit my own access to tumblr (and other sites that count towards the timer as well), and I recently switched from 1 hour a day to 3 hours a week of allotted time. I know that I have the tendencies to spiral out of control when I don’t have something to stop me, so I gave myself something to stop myself. I know I’ve been terminally online but there’s things you can do to mitigate it if you know it’s a problem

Also, as for YouTube, the UI design is also a big part of why I get sucked into rabbitholes. There’s an extension called DF YouTube that you can use to block certain parts of the page and customize it (such as not showing comments or recommended videos on the screen) - it worked when I used YouTube’s website itself, but now that I use Invidious (a third-party viewer), I just use a different extension to redirect the homepage with a bunch of videos on it to a page that only has the search bar - that way, I only ever see the blank page with the search bar until I look up videos. The UI can be customized more (but it doesn’t stick for some reason in my browser), however, the fact that the default UI just has the video + title on the main part, and you actively have to scroll down to get to the other videos, already makes a huge difference.

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I don’t knit too much, but I crochet some, and do a bit of embroidery and sewing too! I love my fellow fiber artists

is "knitters of radblr" a thing? i want that to be a thing 🧶

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My top 3 choices, roughly, would be 1. human composting, 2. a natural burial, and 3. alkaline hydrolysis (noting, however, that 1 and 3 have yet to be legalized where I live, both would be covered under the term “natural organic reduction” when it comes to legislature).

For me, the main appeal of a dedicated human composting facility is the fact that at least in my head, it seems like it might be more feasible by modern-day standards (that is, assuming it is legalized at my time of death) to fulfill one idea of mine than natural burial: If possible, I would like my remains to fertilize my own garden. These days, it seems as though natural burial is restricted to certain land uses, and whatever residential/agricultural land I probably end up having my stuff on probably won’t fit that.

(And yes, I’m one of those people who probably watches too many of Ask a Mortician’s videos.)

question: how would you like your body to be taken care of after you die?

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Reblogging for the folder, but also, I’m very interested in permaculture/food forest style gardening, and eventually hoping to go off grid and provide a lot of my own food in the future.

I haven’t had the chance to look through everything in the folder yet, so I don’t know if this is already covered, but I do want to mention “alternative” construction (such as earthbag construction, earthships), along with passive solar design, and rocket heaters for heating and stoves/ovens.

I don’t post a ton about this kind of thing, but I’m very interested and want to post more.

Hey!

If you’re a radfem into agriculture, homesteading, hunting, fishing, raising animals, living off grid, forestry, building (construction, plumbing, electric) can we get a follow train? I need more of y'all in my life.

I’m into farming btw

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I'm afraid whether or not the jury votes in favour of Amber Heard won't change the huge damage to the feminist movement and women's rights that this trial will cause. If Amber losses it will be horrible for many different reasons, and it will inspire male abusers to follow Depp's steps and torment their victims through litigation abuse. But if Amber wins, people will say "see? no one cares about male victims, the system is rigged to favour women, feminism has gone too far, etc, etc" - people won't believe she's the victim, people won't believe she's innocent, they will cling to this trial as the ultimate proof that confirms their anti-feminist conspiracy theories

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People are all like “the world’s population is growing too fast!” and idk how to tell you this but the actual best way to fix that is global and total women’s liberation…. because women actually don’t want to be pregnant their entire life if they can avoid it and have access to birth control, ability to tell men no, and abortion on demand and without stigma :/ 

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females who hold radical feminist beliefs, unhinge yourself from identity politics. Do not swap out gender identity for “radfem identity” it’s a capitalist scam!!!!!

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We celebrate David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Prince for their gender-nonconforming amazingness as we should, but let us not forget

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

Please add if you like, i do not own the photos