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Was talking to a coworker today who explained that her grandfather was like Snow White “but Californian. And an old man.” in that the creatures of the forest would follow him around and presumably duet with him.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

“Aww. They were checking on him!” I said, like a normal person. Internally, I thought “Maybe you could do the thing you do with dead pets, where you show them to the living pets so the living pet understands they’re gone. But I guess if you did that to a bunch of scavenging species, they’d be like “Well, that’s very sad but he IS food now.” So what you’d need, for human sensibilities, is some sort of transparent corpse barrier. Like a see-through coffin oh that’s what the dwarves were doing! You’ve stopped paying attention to this conversation about the loss of a beloved family member you gotta phase back in.”

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so I learned embroidery recently

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like I'm sorry but I will keep posting about this until people stop being cunts and shitheads so I think we'll be here a good while. every time I talk about the colonial framing of australia and how colonialism is at work in modern day understandings of this country I only need to count to ten before every european and usamerican in sight starts spouting complete bullshit. why don't you all take a deep breath and examine why the fuck you're so wedded to the idea of australia you have in your head

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“How can you call yourself a humanist and support Israelis?”

Well, you see, it’s really absurdly simple - Israelis are human beings and I’m against demonisation and dehumanisation and murder and rape and kidnapping being justified on the basis of where any human being happened to be born or calls home. That’s a pretty fucking baseline humanist position.

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We hooked up Loopin' Louie to a TENS unit that shocks you if you don't deflect him.

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Yoooooooo

So the government just defunded PBS and NPR which is fucked. That being said, the public can cover the damage if we orginize and donate.

Only about $1.60 of tax dollars per US citizen per year are spent on the public broadcasting budget. NPR and PBS offer beong able to make small monthly donations, some being 7$ per month or lower if you want.

If you want to donate 1.60$ per month to your local station, you can multiply how much funding they get from you by 12. If you do their monthly donation of $7 per month, your donation can equal the tax dollars of 54 people spent on public broadcasting per year.

If you want to donate to your local station, look them up by your town here to make sure your local stations get helped specifically:

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Every single person who's ever been associated with trek could tell me I'm wrong and I would still believe unwaveringly that this is Jonathan Archer's official Starfleet file photo

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Trump’s defunding of CPB means a massive loss to all local PBS and NPR public broadcasting stations. But based on their ability to get sponsorships, advertisers, other grants, private donations, state funding, and membership subscribers, some stations will end up hit a lot harder than others.

And some of the hardest hit stations, the ones who had been relying most heavily on this federal funding, are Native American and Indigenous Nations’ local stations. Radio stations in rural areas and on reservations can often be a really important source of locally relevant information—and publicly available media in Native languages.

Unfortunately, many Native American-serving public media stations listed on Adopt A Station don't have donation or support pages that I can find (KGHR - Greyhills Academy in the Navajo Nation in Arizona; KGVA - The Voice of the Aaniiih and Nakoda Nations in Montana; KSHI - The Voice of the A:shiwi in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico; KCUW - Umatilla Reservation Community Radio in Oregon; KTNN - The Voice of the Navajo Nation broadcasting from Arizona; KUHB - The Voice of the Pribilofs in St. Paul, Alaska; KDSP - Sand Point in Alaska... if you can find any, let me know! And certainly if you're in the area, show them some support!)

But one that's actively running a fundraiser that could absolutely use more support is KUYI - Hopi Radio in Arizona. Broadcasting from the seat of the Hopi government in Kykotsmovi, KUYI includes local news from the Hopi reservation and programming in the Hopi language. They're also set to lose 60% of their funding with the CPB funds rescinded. Donate to support them here—they’re aiming to raise $25,000 for their 25th anniversary, and as of the time of this posting have raised $1,660.

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ive been embroidering for nearly half my life and it still blows my mind how cheap it is as a hobby tbh. it can be as expensive as you want to make it, sure. I've definitely invested in nicer tools when I had the finances to do so. But relatively compared to other hobbies it's kinda nuts that a splurge on materials is like. 9 bucks for a pack of some of the fanciest needles you can buy. Silk thread for 6 dollars. The industry gold standard thread is the stuff already available at every single craft store in the USA. If you follow exacting patterns that require a lot of color changes it can add up, but those are often projects that require weeks or months of work. Let's say you had 50 color changes and the project uses most of each skein. That's months of hobby-ing right there, for about 50 dollars plus the cost of base materials which is under 10 dollars.

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mademoiselle hedgehog, what are your thoughts on ambition? it seems like such a harsh cutthroat drive, but at the same time, shouldn't we all have something that pushes us to be our best selves? is it possible to find a soft and gentle ambition within ourselves, like a slowly rising tide?

Thank you for this very interesting ask! I’d never really reflected on this, but my gut feeling is that ambition has done more ill than good in the world. If I were sitting my high school philosophy exam and drew this topic, my opening quote would be Minerva from the opera Daphné "How you torment yourselves, ambitious mortals—desperate and frantic—enemies of leisure, enemies of yourselves." But I like your water imagery—maybe you naturally have tides carrying you towards higher goals while I am stagnant water—the word stagnant comes from stagnum, a pond, I don’t mind it. Maybe some people are seas and enjoy tidal rising while others are ponds and enjoy pondering.

If I had to visualise a soft and gentle ambition I wouldn't picture a slow tide rising towards something greater but rather wavelets, setting small projects for myself that don’t disrupt too much (or for too long) the at-rest state that I am content with. (If I were not content with my at-rest state, then yes, a stronger, 'tidal' ambition would help change this situation, but even then I would tend to perceive this ambition as a necessary evil...) One such project could be learning a new language, which possibly fits your definition of a gentler kind of ambition ‘within ourselves’—but I don't know if I would see this as striving to be my best self. Am I a better version of myself if I spend my free time learning a language rather than doing a stagnant activity that doesn't rise towards a goal (like watching my animals live their lives, which makes me happy)?

If someone has an ambitious goal, say, writing a book, that they feel will bring something of value to themselves and/or the world at large, and the idle activities that take time away from this goal are of comparatively less value to them (or inherently less joyful or healthy—insert critique of smartphones here) then I would say ambition is a positive force that helps them better their life and their self. But I deeply value idleness and fruitless pursuits, I think they often bring us great joy and do no harm, and trying to infuse them with more ambition in the name of self-improvement can ruin them (like trying to master a hobby in order to monetise it).

At heart I am wary of ambition—of the way it is lauded as 'striving to be your best self' even when it brings us less joy, and is more detrimental to our health and the health of the world than being content with our current self and enjoying pondlike activities—idleness, contemplation, amateur unproductive hobbies. "Doing nothing is here intended as a positive proposal"—I just went in my idleness tag to fish out this Ruth Levitas quote—"Politicians may declare that ‘we need to do more and we need to do it faster’. The opposite is true. We need to do less, and we need to do it more slowly. Doing a lot more nothing, including sleeping, would reduce resource consumption, lower stress levels and enable social relations more conducive to dignity and grace…"

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I’m gonna be honest it could be any of these at any time.