Zero Farad Nerd Lob

mr sandman was playing in this gas station and the cashier and i both sang “man me a sand” at the same fucking time without hesitation

My boyfriend and I regularly recite this one to each other

dude we've GOT to start buying shit from niche specialist sites that look like they were made in 2004 again. i just got some tape for repairing books from this ugly ass website geared at libraries. tell me why they also sent me a free (really nice!) pen, a business card with an overexposed picture of a guinea pig standing on a book with the text "smile :-)", and a LOTTERY TICKET???

I found an antiques website called Don & Chris’ Old Stuff that looks unchanged from ca. 2001, and it was like slipping into a warm bath.

One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health."  Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?  What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?

Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.

For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.

For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.

Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.

One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.

Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.

By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.

The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.

Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.

But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?

Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses. So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.

As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."

The other side of this is the insistence by many people who work with unhoused folk that they are “too mentally ill” to even want housing, that, when given the option, they will choose to remain on the street.

When interrogated a little further, you find out that they aren’t being offered housing as the rest of us understand it. It’s not an apartment (or room) for which they have the key, a bed, bathroom and kitchen(ette) that is only theirs, security for their belongings and the freedom to come and go when and as they please. There are always rules, and hoops to jump through and limitations on their ability to live freely, and the sword of Damocles intentionally hung over their heads: break the rules and we will gladly put you back on the street.

Of course that is going to be rejected by people whose entire lives demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to live within other people’s (or society’s) restrictions and imposed expectations!

“They don’t get better” is ideologically not even a millimeter apart from “they don’t want to get better” as an expression of a completely parochial and controlling perspective on how unhoused people must demonstrate their eager willingness and ability to live like healthy, abled, capitalism driven workers in order to have basic human necessities.

Just give people housing, dammit.

Right, they aren't "refusing housing" because they aren't being offered housing. They're being "offered" incarceration with extra steps.

more people would exercise if this culture didn't make it absolute hell

I teach martial arts. we play games with the little kids. they swordfight with noodles and throw foam balls at each other. in the summer, we take them out into the parking lot with water guns. in the winter, we have snowball fights.

the teenagers get swords and staffs and practice knives. we teach them moves from marvel movies that they ask about. they get squirt guns and snowball fights too. we let them goof off and climb the support beams and charge directly at each other in padded suits.

sometimes parents say they miss doing things like that. I tell them, "stay for an adult class. just try it out." we build obstacle courses and let them mess around with training rifles. they chat while sparring. we scream and cheer for them when they're in the middle of a circle. and then we send them out to the parking lot with squirt guns and snowballs.

it's exercise. it's healthy. it's an important life skill. and it's fun as fuck.

I’m not anti-technology, I just think there’s something deeply sick about a society where robots make art and children work in factories.

The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play.

(Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn, c. 1910.)

Plus ça change.

Well I would give a medieval peasant some spaghetti.

1. They don’t have forks. I would hand them a fork with it and see what they do.

2. They don’t have tomatoes. This is something they can never experience again

3. I would let them keep the plate because it’s a nice plate and I think they’d like it

i love it when a post comes with its own FAQs

what the fuck do you mean they didn't have tomatoes

Tomatoes are not native to Afroeurasia and generally wouldn’t have been available on that continent before the Colombian exchange. When we refer to medieval peasants we’re usually referring to the poor of Europe and west Asia between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. A time before the so-called age of exploration and colonization brought food such as tomatoes, maize, and potatoes to Afroeurasia and domesticated animals such as pigs and chickens to the Americas. European cuisine of the poor and rich alike before the Colombian exchange would still have been tasty with their wide selection of game meat, herbs, vegetables, and grains, but tomatoes would not have been available to them and that’s why I want to give a medieval peasant a plate of Italian-American style spaghetti with marinara sauce just like dad used to make

wait so. italy? i guess it’s not called afroeurasitaly, but…so “italian” food used to not have tomatoes? until they came from the americas? and they they what, decided “hey let’s just rebuild our national identity around these tasty christmas tree ornaments”? centuries of italy were lasagna-free and i’m just supposed to accept this

They had lasagna. It just didn’t look like what we think of lasagna today. It was more like layers of flat noodles with spices and cheese on a plate that you ate with your hands rather than a baked dish.

If you look at ancient Roman food there’s certain things we’d recognize as “Italian” like olive oil or fermented fish sauce or cheese but the flavor profile is completely different and pasta isn’t anywhere to be found. They also had herbs and spices that have since become unpopular or even gone extinct.

A lot of things we view as unmovable and unchanging about certain culture’s cuisines are incredibly recent developments. Modern Indian cuisine for example can be traced back to a singular guy in the 16th century. And these days lard is considered to be integral to making tamales but that wasn’t used until the Spanish brought over pigs and cows.

Food culture is something that can change very rapidly. Sometimes within a single generation. People generally use what they have available and what’s available can change at a moment’s notice.

This feels like watching a clown get questioned by the crowd before they pull out a history textbook and proceed to whack the audience repeatedly with it

That sums up pretty well what it’s like to be me yeah

italians didn’t have noodles until they learned about them from china

the irish (and the rest of europe) didn’t have potatoes until they came over from the americas

dude we've GOT to start buying shit from niche specialist sites that look like they were made in 2004 again. i just got some tape for repairing books from this ugly ass website geared at libraries. tell me why they also sent me a free (really nice!) pen, a business card with an overexposed picture of a guinea pig standing on a book with the text "smile :-)", and a LOTTERY TICKET???

I found an antiques website called Don & Chris’ Old Stuff that looks unchanged from ca. 2001, and it was like slipping into a warm bath.

Welding is what seperates us from animals

- person explaining the fence at the zoo

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

I had this idea for a looping animation in which a single dot has a pretty long loop, but the animation as a whole is much shorter. Because of the repetition this animation is only 1 second long!

I added a little shadow thing

need to become a guy who exclusively does evil commissions. like this

WILL DRAW ✓ mecha ✓ gore ✓ furry ✓ nsfw

WILL NOT DRAW X ocs X fanart X simple backgrounds

great question and I'm glad you asked. in this case I would only draw:

Have you ever seen “hair ice?”  “Hair ice” or “bearded frost” is rare and occurs only in a small percentage of the world (it’s not Hoar Frost). Hair Ice grows specifically on the decaying wood of an Alder tree branch & is caused by a fungus living within decaying wood. The fungus “breathes” or releases its spores pushing the moisture out of the wood’s pores, causing it to immediately freeze. The small hole is as thin as a strand of hair thereby causing the hair-like ice to form.

Image - Matt Nichols

Always knew guinea pigs were made of wood inside

(but apparently we only figured out what makes hair ice in 2015!)

What the fuck is hair ice

Came Back Wrong from the gocey store

forgot something

my oanges

I... I just had to

You did god’s work.

Fossil of dragonfly larva or I don’t know.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Guess I died"

WIZARD COUNCIL 2024 BANNED SPELL LIST

Hold on i need to ask my friend Claudia, who is a college student and edits wikipedia something real quick...

THIS IS MY FRIEND CLAUDIA

the Star Wars universe is great because you read enough you eventually find out things like the fact that the Stormtrooper whose armor Luke stole in Episode IV was gay and in an affair with fucking Grand Moff Tarkin, which is a completely canonical fact that I am not making up.

this is him, by the way. His name is TK-421, and he is the star of the short story “Of MSE-6 And Men”.  He owns a mouse droid and is in an affair with a superior officer, who turns out to Tarkin.

The next time you watch a New Hope, keep in mind Luke is wearing the armor of a man who knew Tarkin sexually. The armor Luke is wearing when he says the iconic line “I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you” has more than likely been on the floor of Tarkin’s bedroom.

since I’m getting naysayers about this again!

I have this book and the Audible version and can confirm that nearly every word of this is true (note: the voice is, like, obviously not Peter Cushing, but it’s… pretty clearly Tarkin) except! There is one note here that is ABSOLUTELY incorrect.

That armor has never been on the floor of Tarkin’s bedroom. He is very proud of his carpet and the armor goes on the chair by his bed.

Note: the country hick accent thing is because this is their first in-person meeting and TK-421 thinks Tarkin will be into that.

You guys are never gonna believe this but the author was a marine biologist

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

eagle: so what do you think about stigmata

prometheus: you know we're in a pre-christian myth, right? like that word doesn't exist yet. your dumb joke is anachronistic.

eagle: stigma talons in your flesh