i don't want a career, i want to do crafts

While I understand this is probably venting, I have some thoughts I wish to share.

If you don't want a career, you want to craft, maybe look into the trades. I've started working as an elevator mechanic recently and, holy shit it's changed my life.

Like, seriously. While the work is tiring, it's deeply satisfying too. To me, very similar to getting a pattern in crochet or sewing figured out. It involves using your hands, using your brain in a similar way crafting does, and it can also pay incredibly well (meaning you can use your left over pay from making things in your day job to making things just cause you want to with your evenings and weekends).

With fewer and fewer people going into trades, there's more and more demand, making it easier to get in. My province is currently paying eligible students to become trade workers, so you can see if you have a similar program where you live. (if there are any Quebecers here interested, check out Operation Main D'oeuvre and call your local Emploi Québec office for information).

And for Mentally ill people, I've found construction insanely helpful for managing my conditions. Like, regular exercice helps the management of so many conditions, right? But I've always hated exercise for the sake of exercise. But now my work has me moving every day, making my depression and ADHD way easier to manage. Nothing like beating a recalcitrant rail support into place to help work off the nervous energy creates by anxiety either. I've been struggling with my mental health for well over a decade and I do not have words to describe how good it feels to wake up and have no dread about the work I have to do today. I might be tired and grumpy, but even then, there's no soul crushing dread.

I've also found it empowering and it helps me with my crafting (it teaches precision and gives you a really good eye for measurements, depending on the trade). It gives you financial power as well as power over your space (I've changed all the switches in my apartment for dimmers, easy peasy).

So yeah, TLDR, don't want a career, want to craft? Maybe manual trades are the route for you. I know they were for me

Computer repair was easily the best most fulfilling work I ever did. Just me and a little puzzle I knew how to solve.

if you have autism please look into welding. you get earplugs and gloves and a cozy helmet. you do the same shit the same way every day. you are surrounded by the weirdest and most dysfunctional men ever invented and you don’t have to respect any of them. you go to your little horse stall and glue bits together until it’s time to go home. it’s exhausting and sometimes painful work but i have worked retail and i have sucked dick for money and i can say with my whole chest that welding is significantly less stressful in terms of time, effort, pain, and dealing-with-people.

if you have ADHD i do have to warn you that welding gets boring after awhile and you are discouraged from making little bugs out of scraps. you can do it anyway. but you have to hide them from your boss.

Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn't have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you're caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???

My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:

-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird

-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching

-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to

@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅

That's pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.

Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had "found it while exploring an abandoned house."

The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.

If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.

Im surprised every time people think it's a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground

Wait, poaching wasn’t about the meat, it was about the feathers?

The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.

At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generation's chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.

Beyond hats, the gentleman's art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one's rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.

There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.

Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal that's found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn't where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.

The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you don't see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)

And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people won't buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.

Even though feather hats aren't popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.

So, in the off chance you find one, what....do you do with a feather? Leave it? Report it to local authorities?

You take a picture of your cool find and leave it on the ground

thr funniest part of therapy to me is when you first come in and you're exchanging niceties and they say "hello! how are you" and you say "im fine how are you :)" and then 30 seconds later they put on their therapist voice and say "so how are you doing?" and you go well lisa. believe it or not im doing Bad

Long covid has derailed my life. Make no mistake: It could yours, too.

Because it is not mentioned by name in the article!:

If any of you develop “violent new food allergies” after having covid — even allergies that present as migraines, malaise, nausea, irritability rather than swelling and itching — you need to get checked for mast cell activation syndrome. It is staggeringly common to develop from long covid and is often treatable.

Aging is hot. Gray hairs are hot. Smile lines are hot. Get with it.

Baldness is also hot. Literally get with it.

Everyone reblogging this post to add that people don't exist to be hot and bodies can be neutral: you're right. Make your own post about it. This post is about signs of age being hot. I am an adult attracted to other adults. People don't exist to be hot but if you have these traits you are hot, perhaps against your will. Sorry. Happy milf monday.

"True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don't need to regularly escape from." Brianna Wiest.

so can we start hunting down white liberals now or what

The full picture is even more heart breaking after you open the uncropped version. Just a heads-up, it's rough

Nah let’s post it. Let’s feel it. Don’t look away.

I notice alot of my followers on here skipping these posts just to mess with my lgbt ones, suspiciously the white popular ones.

Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.

Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.

Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.

They were CHILDREN.

They were murdered in cold blood.

I’d like to add this photo I took last night in Victoria of the statue of Captain Cook. Though I myself am not indigenous, I 100% agree that these murderers, kidnappers and rapists shouldn’t have huge statues and plaques that decorate them and say how “great” they were.

Here’s another photo of the legislative assembly from yesterday. Later on there were more items, candles and signs at the memorial, as well as a big poster with 1505 painted on it but I didn’t get a picture

People need to see this. Not just quickly glance at the photos and keep on scrolling. They need to see this.

Reblog this or just stop following me

I had seen the first picture of the church, but not the second.

I went to a “Cancel Canada Day” event and burst into tears - not because I was surprised to learn of the unmarked graves (survivors told us they were there. Our government pushed it aside, and we let them), but because seeing all the people gathered in mourning drove it home: They. Were. Children.

This is my country’s legacy - and it’s not history. The last schools closed during my lifetime. My Father went to school with students who lived at the local residential school, after it was changed to a boarding house (read: holding centre) for indigenous youth who went to local schools.

They were all children, injured, abused, and killed in my country’s attempt to erase them. I want the world to see this and hold the state accountable to *active* reconciliation> I mean we could at least truly adopt UNDRIP in action instead of words for god’s sake.

here you can read an article about a survivor of the church and some of the things he experienced to help put into perspective how awful and just how recent it was

this is the memorial at the vancouver art gallery. 215+ pairs of children’s shoes (as well as stuffed toys and flowers) cover the steps…

Hi! This is a rickroll. Please visit youtube dot com, type "never gonna give you up" in the search bar, then click on the first video that comes up. Thank you for your consideration.

Wait hold on gotta look something up

as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds

There’s discovering that you have a kink as in learning something new about yourself, and there’s discovering that you have a kink as in you always knew you were into it, but you didn’t realise it was a kink because you honestly thought everybody was into it, and of the two, the second one is much, much funnier.

It’s like the boner-based equivalent of folks with undiagnosed food allergies going “I just thought bananas were supposed to be spicy”.

Please… you CANNOT HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS

> #you never see foot fetishists talking about how all men naturally crave toes as part of the human condition

Not only have I seen that, I have seen it in a power point at a conference

You’ve seen in a what now

did i stutter

Throwback to that reddit post about the guy who learned exercising doesn’t make everyone incredibly horny and realized he’s come across as an asshole to every partner he’s ever had

Time shifting

––

I wanted this but the original poster is transphobic

This is called the "analog loophole" and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. They can encrypt and copy-protect all they want, but eventually the file has to be sent to a speaker and/or screen, and it has to get there in a human-readable form because that's the whole dang point

The simplest way to exploit the analog loophole is just pointing a camera at a screen or a microphone at a speaker, but direct recording is also always possible and always will be. Anything that can be displayed can be saved and displayed again

let's draw a horse

Legs are looking a little weak at the moment

final moments left to take part in horse creation!

Good job, everyone!

Regarding some of the terminology posts people have been reblogging, I want to share my experience growing up as an older millenial.

My entire school career, from K-12, saying the word "gay" was formally banned.

As a younger kid, this was because homosexuality was considered a completely inappropriate subject for children in any form, even just acknowledging its existence in a neutral or negative way, let alone a positive one. By the time I was in high school, it was also because people were using "gay" to refer to anything they didn't like. "Ew, we have a pop quiz? That's so gay!" "Parking costs $30? That's gay!" There were absolutely still some homophobic people who wanted to ban all mentions of gay people for homophobic reasons, but by this stage there were plenty of more liberal teachers and administrators behind the ban to curtail the rampant casual homophobia.

So, did it work? Of course not. Queer kids were still bullied for being queer. But notably, it also didn't prevent people from using slurs. Kids couldn't say gay, so they used other words. The classic ones, like twink and fairy, were available, but just to cut back on pushback from adults even further, kids innovated. "Bundle of twigs" instead of "faggot." "Dam" instead of "dyke." "Happy" instead of gay.

And I stress that these euphemisms were frequently used unironically. People would be in dead serious, heated arguments, up to and including physical altercations, screaming insults like "twigs" and "happy" at each other. It was the equivalent of many modern teens automatically defaulting to "unalive" even in serious offline conversations about death. "Happy" was a slur.

Declaring certain words off limits accomplishes nothing. Ceding labels to the homophobes does nothing. All of our labels are slurs, and even if we stop using them, they'll just make more slurs. You don't have to like or use any particular label for yourself, but you accomplish nothing but censoring other members of the community and perpetuating in-fighting by trying to be the language police.

Okay, maybe we can bring that one back.

We’re winning.

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

Adult friendships be like “I miss you bro, let's hang out in November"

Check your conspiracy theory. Does it sound anything like this?

Literally all of these were claimed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an antisemitic hoax created by the Okhrana. It was used by Nazi Germany to justify the Holocaust, and today it still serves as the blueprint for most conspiracy theories - even if modern conspiracy theorists try to hide it, downplay it, or rationalize it with another, equally absurd conspiracy theory.

I've been telling people for ages now, it's virtually guaranteed that if you dig into it enough any given conspiracy theory will turn out to be antisemitic no matter how harmless or silly it first appears.

I am a fan of this version: There are two types of conspiracy theories, antisemitism and things that the CIA has admitted to doing.

And you gotta be careful with anything somebody claims a "CIA whistleblower" or "former CIA operative" said, because a lot of the time it's just another Protocols redux where "Jews" are swapped out for "the 13 Illuminati Bloodlines" or something.

“I’m not going to do the thing because I don’t view it as important.” ← Conscious decision made of your own free will.

“I want to do the thing because I view it as important, but trying to get myself to do the thing creates the same reaction as trying to put my hand on a hot stove would.” ← Executive dysfunction, a physical health problem that doesn’t answer to your own free will.

“Trying to get myself to do the thing creates the same reaction as trying to put my hand on a hot stove would. This must mean I don’t actually want to do the thing and I’m just tricking myself into thinking I do.” ← No, that’s still executive dysfunction, but you’re having brainworms about it.

ive worn heart shaped glasses for almost 4 years and they are just like my Thing and i love them so much and so often people will say shit like Oh Id Love To Wear Something Like That But I Could Never Pull It Off and like... babe no one can theyre heart shaped glasses u dont wear them to look flattering or stylish or whatever u wear them to make ur soul happy

stop worrying about whether u look Nice and start worrying about whether u look like You

i didnt articulate it well so i just wanna clarify. the point of this post was not "fuck the haters wear what you want" it was "fuck the idea that clothes and accessories exist to make you look good they should exist to make you happy"

I can't believe that we have to say this but horror genre is supposed to be fucked up, grotesque, disgusting and deeply unsettling. It is supposed to make you feel deeply uncomfortable and unsafe. And the point of it is that you reach catharsis through the negative emotions it makes you feel. It can also has funny, absurd or tragic elements but the heart of this genre is terror and disgust. it is called fucking HORROR and it is 100% understandable that you don't like horror genre but saying shit like "if you enjoy Saw you are abnormal" is just funny. Maybe YOU are the one who dislikes horror. Have you ever thought of that

As an example, I don't really enjoy slasher or gorn subgenres because they simply don't cater to what I look for in horror, as I lean into more psychological/paranormal subgenres. And this is MY PREFERENCE, and if I said "If you enjoy Cannibal Holocoust or Friday the 13th you are a freak :'(" just because I don't enjoy them, it would make me look like a dumbass. If you are looking for something silly and cute, then mayyyyyyyyybe horror is not the genre you are looking for.