knitwitcrone

[knitwitcrone]

She hates the rain and lightning so we're just curled up in bed holding each other and watching rat videos on YouTube.

It's a good life with Fancy.

[knitwitcrone]

Most of our fridges will produce both water and ice and are hooked up to a waterline in our house. I do love cold drinks, especially juice. But if your drink isn't going to go bad and you can store it at room temp, an easy way to make it cold is to add ice. Also, I feel that it's important context that a lot of places in the US have very hot summers. Where I live there's months we're sitting between 87 and 99F (30 to 37C) and a lot of people have it worse.

usamericans do you realise that a stereotype we have about u is that you really really love ice. like the amount of ice you put in your drinks and all your ice machines are really silly to us. do your fridges genuinely produce ice????

[knitwitcrone]

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

[knitwitcrone]

When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren't really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind "travel the world" vacation before deciding to come live with me.

And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.

I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That's obviously not surprising to you if you've followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it's important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection... at some point, she went missing.

I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn't entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn't there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anyway.

And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other "childhood junk" while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.

Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just... tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?

I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could knit me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

So my mom found the next best thing.

The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had "met" her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn't Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can't stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn't mean we have to leave it behind.

And yeah, I decided to believe it. That's Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it's a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than... whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that's Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.

...

Flash forward... Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn't, but do you know what I found instead?

A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.

She's not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she's far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child's affection. And, more importantly, she's not Chelsea because we've already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea's younger sister, Cici.

And if I could find another of Chelsea's kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.

[knitwitcrone]

This is a sculpture created by Michael Vivona.

via Minor wind

[knitwitcrone]

fuck you, fuck that show, and especially fuck jkr

[knitwitcrone]

Justin of the Timber Lake: A mythical figure revered in the early 21st century as the Harbinger of May, thought to be the name of a deity, or possibly some sort of messianic figure

Excerpt from A History of Pre-Contact Earth, published 2903

[knitwitcrone]

Hello! Worked in a cancer center on patient case management. If you have a hospital bill, any hospital bill, I would recommend three things: call your insurance company (which it seems like you are already doing), ask for an itemized bill if you don't have one, and ask for a financial assistance application. Even if you don't think you'll qualify, I would really recommend applying anyways, and all hospitals are required to have them pretty much. good luck!!!

This is good information for others to have and unfortunately everything I already know and do after years of being in ever increasing medical debt. 😞

[knitwitcrone]

hey, just a heads up, ao3 got scraped by a huggingface AI user. no idea if your fics were in the dataset, but paperdemonarpg put out an info notice on bluesky with a link that goes to their website, which details more info on the specific datasets. folks whose rights were infringed upon need to issue DMCAs separately, it sounds like.

figured it'd be good knowledge for you to have, and since you have a large following, it'd be far more beneficial for you to spread the word than i.

Ugh, it feels like it's getting scraped every few months for profit at this point. I hate this timeline. Thanks for the heads up.

[knitwitcrone]

Julius Caesar is hosting a party,

Reblog to invite others to the party

[knitwitcrone]

Abolish Tesla.

[knitwitcrone]

Haкoнeц-тo кoвep co cтeны пpигoдилcя.

https://len.org.ru

[knitwitcrone]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

[knitwitcrone]

Sadly, this is AI. Hugely disappointed.

By prismofpixel

[knitwitcrone]

This project is collecting zines for queer incarcerated people! It would be cool if anyone could share to get the word out.

Share with TranzmissionPrisonProject@gmail.com

[knitwitcrone]

[knitwitcrone]

Queer, ADHD, & AuDHD folks: You ok?

the original post goes on to offer some ideas on how to emotionally regulate when we're feeling like this:

1) Understand the mental processes taking place so you can be in charge of them instead of them taking charge of you. (Proactive vs. Reactive)

2) Take a LOT of deep breaths and drop into your physical senses. Smell/taste/touch/look at/listen to nice and soothing things to get grounded.

3) Remind yourself or ask others to remind you that there is much beyond your control and no one can or should attempt to carry the weight of the world on their individual shoulders. Try to set some solid boundaries around what issues you're willing and able to pay attention to and:

4) Combat paralysis by making a list of small, doable actions that contribute positively to people or projects around you and LET WHAT YOU CAN DO BE ENOUGH. Pace yourself.

5) Recognise that your peace and joy are as necessary for your survival as air and water and that no one is good to any fight if they crash out. Joy and Rest are NECESSARY.

6) Did I mention deep breaths and grounding? Do that more.

Lots of love to everyone.