crow tapestry! he big

shop update on july 8, 2pm cst

yeah fireworks are cool and all, but do you know what’s even cooler?

having ten fingers.

and I oop

Cackling.

In case the original goes away:

Text version:

Washington State Department of Natural resources tweets:

(Falling to my knees, begging, pleading)

Please.

Folks, seriously.

PLEASE.

Do not - and I can’t emphasize this enough - set the state on fire this weekend.

Fire danger is abnormally high this holiday weekend.

URGING you to consider firework alternatives:

- screaming “bang! boom!” at the sky

- dropping a stack of large books on the floor

- wrapping a toga around a candle

- play America the Beautiful while combining Coke and Mentos

Follow up:

I've decided to use the term "convenience food" instead of "junk food."

I think it's more honest, and less loaded. It's all food, some of it is more appropriate when you don't have the spoons left for food prep. It takes slightly more energy to peel a banana than to open a bag of chips.

We try to save the convenience food for days when we need something easy, so eat a banana.

ENNH! WRONG ANSWER

All food fuels your body. If it contains calories, it is fuel. Some foods are denser fuels, some foods have nice additional benefits, but all foods fuel you.

Some foods are really good for building muscle, or supporting your bone health, or giving you energy. Some foods are really good at tasting nice. All of them fuel your body.

Good food/bad food is just puritan dichotomous thinking in service of the Shame Industrial Complex- let's get those "should" hooks intob everything you enjoy.

Food is fuel. Your relationship with it is personal. Almost all dichotomies oversimplify beyond utility.

So, I had to do a bunch of therapy as a kid because I had anorexia. My dietician drilled into me "food has no moral value. there's no such thing as Good Food or Bad Food; if it's edible and you're not allergic to it, then it has a use in your diet, even if that use is just 'enjoy eating it'. Enjoyment is part of your diet and happiness is a vital nutrient." Basically, even if ice cream "isn't healthy," if it helps you feel better after a shitty day then it's fulfilling one of your basic needs: happiness. So eat the fucking ice cream and feel better. ENJOYMENT IS PART OF YOUR DIET AND HAPPINESS IS A NUTRIENT

Moderation, in all things. Eat too many carrots and you can die too.

my disordered eating experience is that the only true junk food is the food I can’t bring myself to eat. nothing you actually swallow is wasted (unless you have a more specific situation). sugars, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, the body can turn it all into Being Alive. virtue? not so much.

First things first. Permanent alimony was a life changer in getting a lot of abused women out of awful situations. Don't forget no-fault divorce only became the legal standard in the US in 1970, and was by no means accessible by all until considerably after that. There are plenty of women alive today who were abused housewives until their 50s-60s, who were abused in ways that didn't pass fault-based divorce standards in their state, who literally couldn't escape until that age. They were never allowed to hold a job, never allowed to manage their own finances, and already approaching retirement age in states in states which did not have the social safety nets to enable basic survival on social security alone.

Without permanent alimony, as compensation for their decades of domestic labor and childcare and the horrible abuse they endured, those women would have lived the rest of their lives and died in horrible domestic abuse. And like ... I really cannot emphasize enough how horrible this was. Still is. My mom's a couples' counselor and she keeps some pro bono slots open for women who need support during the process of leaving but don't have resources. I grew up hearing the anonymized echoes of their stories, every month at the dinner table. Just ... gods. The fucking horror that thirty years of that kind of abuse can do to a person. I can't describe it.

I want this to be the context for how fucking evil it is what DeSantis has done. How fucking evil these women are for going "got mine, fuck yours" about this. How much has been unmade and how much awfulness there will be going forward.

I drew this image as a reminder to be worn during Pride month!

[Image ID: A cartoonish drawing of a walrus on a rock in a pink sweater and matching bow. The walrus is saying “Marriage equality isn’t achieved until disabled people can marry without losing their benefits.” End ID]

Ideas for this 4th of July:

Consider making a donation to the National Indian Child Welfare Association in light of the Supreme Court challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Buy something from the IOWAY Bee Farm, owned by the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. They offer products such as raw honey, lip balms, beeswax candles, and more. My favorite product is their creamed honey that comes in multiple flavors. This year I bought one that's blueberry flavored. It's good stuff! Here's their Instagram too.

Stay safe and watch out for your pets tonight!

前のお宅のエアコン外機の前に、

色鮮やかな一輪の花。

なぜか、「和」を感じてしまう、

シチュエーション。

I’m taking pottery lessons right now… and my teacher said “the kiln gods are being kind to me right now.” And that made me stop and think. Is there a god of pottery? I tried to look it up but it’s hazy.

In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.

In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.

I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.

But I wasn’t able to find anyone else. Pottery being such an important part of daily life all around the world, it seems like there would be more. Does anyone know of any other gods of pottery?

kiln gods are also A Thing!

they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything

I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery

here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)

the head of the ceramics dept learned his wood fire techniques in Japan, including a Shinto take on the kiln gods.

wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.

everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln

and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).

cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering

he also opened the firing by sharing some sake with the kiln before lighting it

we have so little control

the kiln can finish our work

and make them functional

or it can destroy it all

so we make offerings

and protectors

and pray

- Clay Pigeon

So @susanontherocks, as someone who nearly dedicated my life to studying the history of porcelain, I love this question!

I'd argue that ceramics are so important for humanity that they're often connected directly to creator gods more generally. Even when there aren't Kiln-Gods specifically in some mythologies/cultures, that gap is often filled less directly by having Gods-as-Potters (in place of, or in addition to Kiln Gods).

actually for an example I'm familiar with as a Jew, this is definitely a running theme in the Hebrew bible! It's one of those things that I think a lot of people haven't thought about, or don't realize when they read in translation but it's sort of everywhere and enough that I would say YHWH is - if not specifically a god of pottery, then definitely a God frequently titled as a potter!

The earliest positioning of YHWH as a creator-potter is Genesis 2:7, where YHWH forms the first human from the "dust (clay) of the earth." The verb used is וַיִּיצֶר֩ which...literally is the word for forming/molding something out of clay as a potter! And that is hammered home by the first human being 'adam (the word for ruddy red, like clay) made from ha-adamah (the soil). In psalms, the first time the word "golem" is used is as "golmi" ("my golem,") which is referring to the unfinished human before god's eyes as like, raw material (which is what golem means and why Golems are made of clay!).

Then this continues:

Isaiah 64:7

Plus in Jeremiah 18:6 "just like clay in the hands of the potter..." And again in Isaiah 45:9 which compares YHWH to a potter and humans to a potsherd of earth.

Job 10:9 refers to YHWH fashioning him from clay, echoed again in Job 30:19. And in Job 33:6, Job makes an argument for the basic equality of humanity, again comparing God to a ceramicist: "You and I are the same before God; I too was nipped from clay."

Isaiah 41:25 implies that the kinds of power that YHWH can grant those who invoke their name can "trample rulers like mud, like a potter treading clay."

This parallels with your example of Khnum, even with the implication that unborn humans are first formed in clay by the deity before they end up like...in the womb).

Other creator deities as potters would be like:

There's a billion more - I think loads of creator gods are potter-Gods, but maybe aren't necessarily the same as Kiln-Gods although arguably a potter might have historically valued a potter-God all the same, since ceramics and pottery are often directly tied to the mythology of the most fundamental creation of humanity. These also sometimes overlap in the domain of fire or lightning gods. The Italian Renaissance artist Picolpasso does describe christian ceramicists praying specifically before lighting the fires of a kiln.

Also related: there ARE demons of pottery in Greek myth! The Daimones Keramikoi: Suntribos (the Shatterer), Smaragos (the Smasher), Asbetos (Charrer), Sabaktes (Destroyer) and Omodamos (Crudebake).

Someone wrote a dissertation on the influence of Chinese Kiln-Gods on American ceramicist rituals: Pathways of Transmission: Investigating the Influence of Chinese Kiln God Worship and Mythology on Kiln God Concepts and Rituals as Observed by American Ceramists by Dr. Martie Geiger-Ho, but I'm not familiar with them or their work, tbh.

I have read William Fairchild's writing before though, and he has an article from the 60's which argues that Japanese myths replaced clay with metal in relation to deities of fire and lightning, which could be related/interesting.

And in Chinese, a pottery/kiln God is called 窑神 (Yaoshen, literally Kiln God). I'm having trouble verifying specifics with simple online searches and it would take me a looonggg time to go through all my book-PDFs but I suspect there's a fair amount of overlap there with Chinese folk religion, and especially daoism since there's a concept of the internal furnace, and alchemical concepts often overlap with ceramics in various ways.

~ Gold Oak Wreath with a Bee and Two Cicadas.

Culture: Greek

Period: Hellenistic

Date: 350-300 BC.

Place of origin: Turkey, Marmara Region: Çanakkale (province), Dardanelles

Medium: Gold

Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

@corvid-on-the-rock​ you were saying?

7. the "COVID-19 emergency" not actually over and may never be. this is our polio/bubonic plague/smallpox now, we just got lucky for a few decades between endemic infection periods. it is the third most common cause of death in the world and will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future

Play of Sunlight, Los Angeles, 1912

1493 Albrecht Dürer - Self-portrait of the artist holding a thistle

(Louvre Museum)

collecting stars

Native Plant Info Masterlist...2!

This will be a USA centric post sadly, mostly focused on the East, since I am unfamiliar with resources outside of my area.

iNaturalist lets you upload pictures of any organisms and get them identified by the community, but if you don't want to upload, you can still lurk and look through all the photos being posted in your area to develop familiarity with the plants

Wildflower Search lets you toggle between photos of leaves, flowers, fruits etc. of each plant, gives loads of links to other sites that provide info, lets you search by flower color, plant type, time of year, and about a dozen other search criteria- very cool site

Wildflower.org is another very good site- has a search function where you can search plants by various traits and qualities

Find native plants by the number of butterflies that use them

Butterfly host plant list

Keystone species for every USA ecoregion for butterflies and bees

UNC Chapel Hill's 2022 Flora of the Southeastern United States. The ultimate EXHAUSTIVE compendium of plants. You can download it but beware it is over 2,000 pages long

Illinois Wildflowers is an excellent resource for plants found throughout the southeast and Midwest

Virginia Wildflowers

Northern Forest Atlas Awesome high quality photos of trees and leaves, buds, etc.

Name That Plant is a great resource focused on the Carolinas and Georgia

Maryland Biodiversity has much information on plants and many other creatures

Sarracenia.com is all about carnivorous plants

Native Beeology is focused on native bees of New York State

Also try looking up "[your state] native plant society" as many states have one! It could be a great way to find opportunities to get involved.