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Hey, I have a question, so a group of construction workers has recently built a nest outside my home and seem to want to spend the summer months there. They've already started construction on a project, so I assume they're healthy, but is there anything I can do to make sure they get the nutrition they need throughout the hot summer months? Do I need to have a steady supply of beer or energy drinks?

construction workers are expert foragers and don't take well to interruptions, so the best you can do is leave them be.

if you want to encourage them, however, you can spend three to four hours on the street watching their project with your hands clasped behind your back. this makes them feel like they are doing a good job

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This may be the worst use of LLMs anyone has attempted, ever. Up there with recognizing mushrooms.

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Show some respect, people.

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disabled people are worth the extra effort it takes to accommodate them. it's worth going the longer route together that's wheelchair accessible. it's worth the time and effort to research places to eat that work with specific allergies or food intolerances. and it's worth the price if those places or that food is more expensive. it's worth going further to buy something gluten-free or nut free or dairy free for your party or get together. it's worth adding extra travel time, or planning an overnight stay instead of a day trip. it's worth learning how to administer medication for people who need it. it's worth learning how to call ahead to check if somewhere is accessible. it's worth the whole friend group going to the film screening with captions even if only 1 person needs it. disability often means having to do more work, more planning, take up more space, more money, more time. it's false to say it's as easy as having an abled companion, but that effort is worth taking. it's not wasted because it's all spent in favour of a disabled person, and that's always worthwhile

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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there's a thing where someone will hear a disabled person talk about how awful it is to be unable to get out of bed all day, and they'll think "I wish I was in bed all day." like there is a disconnect.

why aren't you in bed all day? because you need to work, to keep up with your responsibilities to other people, to bathe and exercise and move your body, all sorts of reasons.

disabled people still have all those things going on. they also need money and have responsibilities to other people and want to feel clean and move their bodies. they suffer the same consequences you would for not doing them.

you know that keeping up with all those things, even when exhausting, works out better for you in the long run than staying in bed all day, which is why you do them. it's such an obvious choice it doesn't even feel like you have a choice.

there is a difference between not needing to do all those things and not being able to do all those things. that's disability.

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If you're a disabled young person, you've most likely been hit with the "pfft you think you're in pain now? Just wait til you're my age" bullshit from older people at least once. Everyone talks about how invalidating it is

But I haven't seen anybody mention how it's terrifying, too. Yes, I know health deteriorates with age. I know that old age is a disability unto itself. I know that the healthiest person alive will start getting aches and pains past the age of 40 and may even need mobility aids

I know all this stuff. And it always makes me think "yeah, if I can't walk without joint pain even while using mobility aids AT AGE 21, how painful will life be for me at the age where it gets painful for everyone?"

And it's hard not to feel like I'm doomed, y'know? Where most people get a period of health that they wish they appreciated more when they start to lose it, my starting point was a body that doesn't work properly and it's only gonna get worse from there. It's worse every fucking year.

TLDR stop telling disabled young people that their pain will only get worse to the point of being unimaginable as they age, WE FUCKING KNOW

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so hard not to become the most annoying person on earth if you're a little excitable and just learned a little about a topic literally no one around you has any interest in

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I have only watched five episodes of WoT and know nothing about Lan and Moraine’s backstory but OHHHMYGODDD this glance exchange made me feel everything that’s passed between them. “There is no bond like that between an Aes Sedai and her Warden” like you can’t tell they aren’t both thinking “This could’ve been me if she/he had died”

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never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"

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the color signatures of various elements when ignited

FB image credit: Ceres Science

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It's Off Topic Tuesday again already, and this week I think I want to talk about something that my followers might find interesting: the naming system in Iceland.

Iceland has a really unique naming system in the sense that we don't have "family names" here, we use something called patronyms. So let's say your father's name is Jón, that means that if you're a girl your last name will be Jónsdóttir (daughter of Jón) or if you're a boy your last name will be Jónsson (son of Jón).

So again, we don't use "family names" here that get passed down from generation to generation, every last name is a unique personal title that speaks of your parentage. Although there are some exceptions, a few Icelanders do have "family names" but this is rare, since back in the day when Iceland was still a Danish colony / shortly after being liberated from Denmark some upper class people would have Danish family names as a sign of social status, but that's also been dying out the longer Iceland is no longer a Danish colony. You'll also see that in the older generations they'll use Danish words since that used to be a sign of class, but the younger generation doesn't really do that anymore (instead the younger generation uses a lot of English words since now that's the cool trendy thing to do).

This has been known to sometimes cause problems when Icelandic families travel abroad. Let's say you have a family of four: a mom, a dad, a daughter, and a son. Everyone in this family would have a different last name, and this has been known to confuse customs agents abroad. Sometimes they even suspect trafficking when both kids have a different last name that doesn't match either parent. Luckily this is rare, but it's still recommended for Icelandic parents to carry birth certificates when traveling abroad, just in case.

Now you might be wondering, what about kids who don't have a dad? We do also sometimes use matronyms here, although they're much rarer to use than patronyms. Probably at least 90% of the Icelandic population uses a patronym, but of course there are lesbian couples who have children, or cases where the father isn't in the picture.

I did also have a teacher who talked about how back in the olden days it was traditional in fishing villages to use matronyms instead of patronyms. That's because usually the father was gone out at sea for months at a time + deaths by drowning were so common for fisherman that the women could become widowed at a moment's notice, so this resulted in the fisherman's wives being quite independent and often using matronyms for their children.

The same teacher also once said "back in the old days if you had a matronym this meant your father was a bad man, but today it could just mean that your parents are feminists." Because yes, matronyms have also been growing in popularity the past few decades for feminist reasons, even if the father is still present and in the picture. What's most common in progressive / feminist couples though is using both a matronym and a patronym. So let's say your mother's name is Sigrún and your father's name is Jón, if your parents wanted to be progressive they might give you the last name "Sigrúnardóttir Jónsdóttir" or "Sigrúnarson Jósson."

However, Iceland still has its fair share of staunch traditionalists who don't like it if you use a matronym unless absolutely necessary (like the father not being in the picture) because patronyms are more "traditional" and "true to Icelandic culture". I do know at least one woman who her and her husband gave their kids both a matronym and a patronym to be progressive / feminist, and she's said that this made a lot of her extended family and in-laws angry for "desecrating Icelandic culture and tradition" instead of just using a patronym. I'm hoping this attitude changes with time, since I see no reason not to equally credit the mother when it comes to naming a child.

Now the thing about Iceland's naming traditions is that it may be unique now, but actually thousands of years ago this wasn't so unique. You might be familiar with English last names like "Jackson" or "Johnson", and that's because in other parts of Europe last names were also personal titles, not a family name passed down through generations. That's also why you have English family names like "Smith" or "Weaver" because having a last name as your personal title could have either referenced your parentage, or your profession, or any number of things really.

At some point most of the rest of Europe switched to family names that get passed down through the generations, and this was for the sake of making record keeping easier. Iceland was just one of the few holdouts and never really made the switch. Maybe it's because Iceland is so far away from the rest of Europe that it was forgotten when the change was implemented, or maybe it's because the population here is small enough that you can still easily keep record without having to use family names.

Either way, Iceland is one of the few places to have preserved a much older and more ancient naming tradition.

This can be quickly tied into the theme of my blog actually, because this means we don't use terms like "Mister" or "Misses" even in highly formal situations. Even if you're a doctor or a teacher you are referred to by your first name, since your last name is just a personal title which says who your parents are.

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The solution to ableism isn't for me to "stop calling myself disabled", it's for everyone to stop treating "disabled" as a bad word

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the insane experience of missing a fictional character . like you can always go back and reread the book , replay the game , rewatch the show or movie , you can always go back & see them , but you can never experience them & their story for the first time again . its absurd to miss them because they'll always be there , but you'll miss when there were still new things for them to say .

for a small time they were real & growing and changing and you hung onto every new word, but now all they can do is repeat the same story forever&ever & they're not real anymore because you know everything they're going to do. & you miss them. its fucked man...

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No one tells you that one day you will get older and look around and notice that 95% of ppl who own a dog should not own a dog