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New Rorschach test just dropped.

does anybody want to match my sneep

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(Lenin’s wife, for those that don’t know)

can’t believe nothing’s changed in over a hundred years

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I am fucking sick of seeing man haters that call themselves feminists

Stop.

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Tfw when men do that thing where they pretend they have no control over their temper. LOL It’s so funny like am I supposed to pretend that I don’t know you’re completely self-aware and present during this rage performance. Or should I pretend you’re the tortured hero in a movie, possessed by a series of fabricated flashbacks of the war and your father

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I can just imagine saying “lobotomies are bad” in like 1949 and having someone say “you’re wrong, the science is settled, lobotomies are the best way to treat mental illness” and guess what? In 1949 I might be the unpopular and socially wrong one. The person with the backwards, conservative thinking. That is the year that António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomies.

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Schiller couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.

Lobotomies were bad the whole time.

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If I’ve learnt anything from my contact with the bdsm community, the poly community, the geek community and the atheist community is that any social group who claims to “not to be like other groups” and to be"accepting and safe for all" is going to spend a lot of energy hiding the predators within the community and silencing abuse survivors.

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I think it was seeing how “the system” treated abused women in real time that broke any kind of prison abolition for abusive men for me.

A friend’s husband killed himself after trying to kill her, he had 22 guns stashed in the home and piles of bullets, and she was trapped because divorce laws in our state require that moms stay with husbands for at least 6 months after filing divorce to give them time to “reconcile” and judges “don’t like to hear he said/she said abuse stories.”

If you have that many guns in your home unlocked around kids, you immediately get carted to prison for 20 years and mom gets your social security payments while she’s locked up as if you were a dead parent.

Lock these men up, I’m sorry.

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I will just never take men seriously when they complain or they're upset by "it's a girl or an abortion" because sure, okay, let's say it's hateful, hurtful, that it's "murder" even, if you want. Let's just say it's misandry, it's bigoted, sexist, whatever you want. Say "men are oppressed", anything.

But where were you when we were discussing the (at minimum) 20 million missing baby girls in china? What do you call that, then?

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HOW RURAL AMERICA STEALS GIRLS’ FUTURES

By Monica Potts

https://archive.ph/kdtxE

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The backlash against female-only gatherings and consciousness-raising forums such as those found in Mumsnet's feminism section is frequently absorbed into male-default narratives focused on cancel culture, pitching left against right. This is the wrong story, erasing the enormous history of male opposition to female speech and allowing age-old objections to women forming connections with one another to be justified using misplaced analogies with Holocaust denial or shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre. There is a line that can be drawn from sixteenth-century images of the "virtuous woman" who has no head with which to speak, through anti-suffragette propaganda showing a woman with a padlock on her lips, to memes describing superglue as "lipstick for TERFs." Free speech does not mean for women what it means for men. There is no male equivalent of the scold's bridle, no history of women using "nagging" as an excuse for slaughtering their husbands, no stories of great civilisations in which women forbade men from speaking at political assemblies. Anxiety over "gossiping" women and the need to control them is ever-present, even when it masquerades as progressive politics.

-- Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

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To make a pond + Earthworks!

I've been enamored by the idea that I could build my own pond in the future, but when I started looking into it (typing 'how to build a pond into youtube'), all people did was put a big plastic tarp into a landscape and add water inside. That wasn't what I wanted. I wasn't about to bring a plastic tarp in my environment, and it was obvious that once the tarp gets damaged and punctured, the water would drain into the soil and the pond would be no more. That's no fun.

Unable to immediately find a better way, I turned to my own brain to figure this out. There were natural ponds in the world, and somehow they didn't need a tarp to hold all that water in. Artificial lakes existed, and for sure there weren't any tarps holding the water in. Rivers don't drain easily, and they usually have a lot of sand on the bottom – but sand is a very drainable material, so that's probably not it.

I stumbled upon an interesting piece of information when I was learning about rocks. By some definitions, ice is also a type of rock, so there was a lesson on icebergs. I found out there that sometimes icebergs split apart and travel in the water, and when a huge chonk ends up in a non-icy landscape, it eventually melts and it turns into a lake. There were pictures of lakes that looked like they had no business being in that landscape, but were there because an iceberg had melted there. The water didn't drain or ran off, why? I assumed it was because the iceberg was so heavy it compacted the soil underneath, and the compacted clay was enough to hold the water in.

So I started playing with the idea that if I locate a soil with high percentage of clay, and then dig a pond, and then line the bottom with the highest-density clay I can find, and then I redirect all water from the landscape to go towards that pond, maybe I could make a little pond in there. Possibly it would dry out during the summer but for the rest of year, having a natural pond would be very nice. I wasn't sure if this logic would hold but then I also couldn't see why not. Clay doesn't drain easily and there's lots of it deep underground. I would grab a shovel and try.

I got an additional piece of information reading a book about collecting and filtering rainwater to make it drinkable; the book recommended before you do anything about this, you need to learn about 'Earthworks', a system of modifying the earth's surface to keep as much water in as possible, and to redirect it to where you want it. I immediately liked this, because I had already planned to do that, but I was interested in tried and true methods. So I looked it up, and one of the first videos I've found, was of people deciding to make a natural pond in the forest. They found the most dense clay-rich ground, dug to see if it was super dense and non-draining deep in. Then they created a dam to stop water from flowing past the pond, and redirected all rainwater that would fall into the forest, towards the pond. And it worked. It filled out within a month or two. It wasn't draining away.

I felt so vindicated, the logic I had put together in my head was real and I could see how other people did it in real life! And I learned about berms and swales; they're methods of making your ground uneven, so it could take in and hold more rainwater. Berms are little hills you make that have good drainage, and swales are shallow canals you make inbetween the hills; they hold the rainwater, stop it from flowing away from your property, and redirect it to where you want it to, for instance to irrigate a garden, fill a pond, or to water a big tree you want to grow.

The methods of keeping rainwater from evaporating are currently relevant, because the climate is getting unstable, and rain is no longer as consistent as it has been in the past. I've noticed that we now get tons of rain in the spring, winter and fall, but next to none in the summer, creating a drought. The forests and the animals feel it too; they struggle to survive the summer, and a lot of plants and animals die from lack of hydration, which they didn't need to deal with beforehand. There's also less ground covered by old resilient trees and foliage that keeps the water in the landscape; clean cutting forests means dry ground, water evaporating, streams and canals drying up, trees drying up because of no water supply.

The people who were building a pond in the forest were not doing it for fun and giggles; they noticed the natural streams of the forests have dried up as a result of cut areas and lack of consistent rain. The forest was in danger of drying up. So by building a system of swales (or trenches) to redirect rainwater, and ponds to store it, they've managed to revitalize parts of the forest. The forest around the pond was visibly greener within months, wildlife was multiplying around the pond where it could get water, new flowers and native plants were flourishing next to the pond.

Slightly modifying the landscape to keep water in is something people do to prevent the spread of deserts; digging half-moon shaped holes in the ground to hold water has enabled trees to grow even in the driest, sun-heated areas. I've been fascinated by the methods of growing trees in the desert! And right now we need to make sure other livable  green areas don't start turning into deserts, because the climate is threatening it, and the animals are unlikely to survive it all on their own.

And if you build a little pond, you're gonna have more birds in your backyard. There's gonna be little frogs and turtles and tiny critters coming to drink from your pond. Maybe a little lizard or a snake. You're gonna be able to plant flowers around it, your trees will be happy, and if you want a great big willow, she's going to enjoy that water too, and purify it with her roots. I'm still putting it together in my brain if I could make a little swampy area and plant rice in it, that would be the ultimate success.

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RIP Joann, now what?

I wanted to make a post I could copy and paste and or link when I see folks asking where to buy fabrics when Joann is gone. I sew a lot, generally between 100-200 items a year and I don't do it on a big budget. Stores are not in a particular order.

Notions:

Wawak.com - start here, mostly stay here. Wawak is a supplier for professional sewing businesses and have the prices that show it. I will not pay for gutermann Mara 100 anywhere else. I buy buttons, tools, thread, and most elastic here.

Stitch Love Studio - this is where I buy lingerie supplies https://www.etsy.com/shop/StitchLoveStudio?ref=yr_purchases

Fabric:

Fabric Mart - this is one where you want to sign up for emails and never buy unless its on sale. They run different sales every day and they rotate. Mostly deadstock fabrics but I buy more from here than anywhere else. Fantastic customer service and if you watch you can get things like $6 wool suiting or $4 cotton jersey. https://fabricmartfabrics.com/

Fabrics-Store - again, buy the sales not the full price. Sign up for the emails but redirect them to a folder because it is TOO MANY. They stock linen or good but not amazing quality. https://www.fabrics-store.com/

Purple Seamstress - This is where I buy my solid cotton lycra jersey. They have other things, but the jersey is what I'm here for. Inexpensive and very good quality. If you ask she will mail you a swatch card for the solids. https://purpleseamstressfabric.com/

LA Finch - deadstock fabrics with a fantastic remnant selection https://lafinchfabrics.myshopify.com/

Califabrics - mix of deadstock and big brands, easy to navigate and always seem to have good denim in stock. https://califabrics.com/

Boho Fabrics - good variety, nice bundles. I have also gotten some really great trims from here. https://www.bohofabrics.com/

Firecracker Fabrics - garment and quilting fabrics, really nice selection and great sale section. I've bought $5 yard quilting cottons here several times. https://www.firecrackerfabrics.com/

Hancock's of Paducah - Quilting fabric and some limited garment fabric. AMAZING sale section. Do not sleep on the sale section. This is my first stop when buying quilting fabrics. Usually the last stop too. Not particularly speedy shipping. https://www.hancocks-paducah.com/

Itokri - This is something a little different. Itokri is an Indian business with incredible traditional fabrics. Shipping to the US is expensive, but the fabric is so inexpensive it evens out. I generally end up paying like $30 for shipping. Beautiful ikat and block prints. https://itokri.com/

Miss Matatabi - this is a little treat. This isn't where you go to save money, but there are so many beautiful things in this shop. Ships from Japan incredibly quickly. https://shop.missmatatabi.com/

Lucky Deluxe - Craft thrift store, always has an incredible selection and fantastic customer service. I need to close the tab fast because I never go to this website without finding something I need. https://www.luckydeluxefabrics.com/

Swanson's - the OG of online craft thrift stores, but I find their website harder to navigate. https://www.swansonsfabrics.com

Honorary Mentions: I haven't shopped at these places yet but I have had them recommended and likely will at some point.

A Thrifty Notion - https://athriftynotion.com/

Creative Closeouts - https://creativecloseoutsfabric.com/ being rebranded to sewsnip.com on March 1 - quilting deadstock

Hawthorne Supply Co. - I just got this rec and I think I need to not look too closely or I'm going to slip with my debit card. https://www.hawthornesupplyco.com/

This is not an exhaustive list of everywhere you can buy fabric, or even a full list of where I shop. There are SO many options out there in the world. You also need to think outside the fabric store box. I thrift men's shirt fabrics for quilts and sheets for backing fabric. I don't do a ton of in person thrifting and my local stores don't get a lot of craft materials but every thrift store is its own universe and reflects the community it is in. Go out and find something cool.

Oh and final note: Don't shop at Hobby Lobby.

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Source

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i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

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I’m sick to my stomach at the level of self hatred you have to possess as a Woman for the attention and validation of men is insane and disgusting. I hope these Women wake up to the fact that these Men hate Women and their is no exception.