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(sigh)

@mere-vanilla / mere-vanilla.tumblr.com

Personal blog for fandom, feels, and the occasional serious post. Pronouns: they/them/their, and/or her/she. dreamwidth: mere_vanilla; AO3: Mere_Vanilla

white people please just purchase native artwork and jewelry from native people i keep seeing idiot white people be like “waaah i wish i could support native creators but its cultural appropriation” girl why would beaders sell you their earrings then. just dont get a medicine wheel or a thunderbird then like damn it is that easy

If Native folks are making it to sell to white people with the approval of their tribe, it’s not “appropriation”–its support and appreciation! So yes, buy that native-made dream catcher, but not the mass produced fakes made by white people. Like, you can go to a pow wow and buy native crafts there, too.

This semester in college we’ve been working with a company in an indigenous museum to help their sales

They work with native artists in all of Brazil, so the site is in portuguese

Buying from indigenous artists is not appropriation!

Also, if you’re a cosplayer or some other sewing person, I recommend sourcing your leather and fur from Native sellers. It’s in general more sustainable than fake-leather or fake-fur (which is often plastic and worse for the environment than just getting some real leather and using it forever). Not because Native people have some mystical spiritual connection to the land, but because of generations of research they’ve done on sustainable methods.

If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.

Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.

They are called "Lip-Ribbon" or "Commentator's" microphones.

They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.

They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.

First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.

That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.

Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence "lip-ribbon") in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.

That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.

There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.

But my favorite trick... a labyrinthian internal baffle system.

(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you'll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)

Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.

That is a very sciency way of saying... make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.

So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice's energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.

These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.

And even more amazing... this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.

Isn't that neat?

I think it is neat.

Oh, and there is a "nostril grille" on top so you can exhale through your nose!

SO NEAT.

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...I've always wondered what the story was with these things. :)

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What recipe do you use for beer bread? Most of the ones I'm seeing look like quickbreads, but yours looks yeasted (and yummy).

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It did take a minute to find a good recipe! I'm not a huge fan of quick breads so I definitely had to go looking to find a yeasted bread. I ended up with this one, sorry to link you to an ad-crammed recipe site. I've tweaked it, mainly that I machine-knead instead of hand-kneading, though I also adjusted the proportions to suit the 16oz beers I prefer for bread (don't use cheap beer or IPA, it makes the bread taste super hoppy). These days I usually make two loaves from the expanded recipe, for I am blessed with two cast iron dutch ovens :D

It's a solid and relatively easy recipe, so I can recommend it! It works especially well with the King Arthur bread and cake conditioner, which keeps the crust a bit softer and the bread fresher longer.

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Oh shit. No. Shit. Thank you

Just gonna reblog this out of gratitude because I actually did forget…

Fffffffff let me get right on that. 

and then reblog for the next forgetful son of a bitch

I’m so great full for everyone that is reblogging this. I totally forgot to take mine

I think that there is some sort of unspoken fairy godparent thing where you see this, realize that you forgot your meds, and rebagel it because if you forgot someone else must have. And in our turn we all take care of each other, even if we don’t know it.

Already 3.3 million hectares of land in Canada has been burning because of the extreme heat and dryness and it’s not even halfway through wildfires season. They’re actually predicting this will be the most destructive wildfire season in Canadian history. But most of what I’ve seen posted about these fires has to do with air quality. So I’ve decided to try and compile a list of resources to donate to help Canadians being affected at this time.

Alberta

Atlantic Canada

  • The Red Cross which if you donate to both the Canadian and the Nova Scotia government will match each dollar of your donation.

British Columbia

  • United Way BC supporting communities by giving them things such as food, mental health support, and shelter.
  • Food banks BC helping to feed those affected.

Canada as a whole

  • Unite for Change not directly donating to the fires but is working to make changes at a provincial and federal level to help fix the climate crisis which is directly making the fires worse.

Please tell me if you know of any other places taking donations to help either put out the fires or help the people affected. If any of these donation links are also donating to discriminatory policies or such like anti-trans legislation's please inform me so I can remove the link!

Quebec and Ontario links are especially wanted as I couldn't find anything for there and neither could my friend.

Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity. 

Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low). 

Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me! 

Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice. 

Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first. 

Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.

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i remember when we were in typography II and also editorial design I we got shown the fucking text hierarchy image

and I'm seeing more and more people not grasping this concept when editing so i thought that if for some reason you haven't seen this image i probably shouldn't gatekeep it. Text hierarchy is literally essential knowledge to make yourself understood. Try to have an order in your text, investigate, test things, show your edits to people and ask "hey what order are you reading this on?" because the golden rule is that your design should be easy to interpret most of the time.

Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific

This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.

Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.

I've only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It's hard to even put it into words. It's not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.

Especially if you have anxiety you'll know the difference honestly. It's so much worse. It's every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there's something horribly wrong in a way you've never felt. It's your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.

I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.

This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.

Just a reminder to anyone with kids, your small children do not have the same basis for things that you do! There’s a good chance they aren’t trying to be rebellious, they just simply have no idea what you’re telling them!!

When I was small, I used to get in trouble all the time for not “walking in the crosswalk”, I had no fucking idea what a crosswalk was, the lines on the ground didn’t stick out at me, and when I tried to walk right by the adults because surely being right next to them would be the right answer, it put me outside the lines and just upset them further (also going nonverbal when stressed and having a face that doesn’t properly show emotion didn’t help me out)

If you tell your kid to do something that seems really easy to do to you, and they don’t listen, try phrasing it in a different way, instead of “walk in the crosswalk”, try pointing out the two lines on the ground, and let them know to walk in between those lines!

(Separate from the crosswalk thing, but also sometimes if it seems like your kid is being rebellious for “no reason” and they have older siblings, just,, make sure their siblings didn’t prank them by giving them false information)