see: me, today. (it was worth it. I got to watch a mama deer and her twin fawns playing.)
I think thereās an even larger problem underlying peopleās dismissive reaction to heat wavesāsort of a ājust world phenomenonā or basic unwillingness to accept that innocent people are suffering. If I can look at someone in pain and come up with a story about how they did something to deserve it, or it isnāt really as bad as it seems/is all in their head, then I excuse myself from a sense of guilt or shame about my inability to help that person.
The popular meme about how being an onlooker to injustice makes you guilty of it probably has the ironic effect of increasing the sense of urgency behind the just-world phenomenon. Merely pointing out that heat waves are becoming more common, and people are suffering because of it, feels to some like an accusation that they are responsible, because they arenāt doing enough about global warming or whatever.
If you are bought into to this maximalist rhetoric that says everyone must be doing everything in their power to stop every bad thing from happening, then you really only have two permissible responses to a news story about heatwaves: Get performatively angry about it in order to reassure everyone that you are on the side of the victims and therefore in the moral right, or rationalize the badness as something that isnāt so bad after all.
Lotta politics lately Iām so sorry
I think this small CSS thing is pretty baller? In some internet circles, finding a way to do things without JS is a badge of honor and there are people who make a sport of it. I donāt have the link handy, but there is an artist who makes these clever interactive contraptions using just HTML sliders and CSS sliders where sliding one knob causes the whole illustration to move in surprising and interesting ways. Richard Stallman loves to shit on javascript, I think his spiel is basically āwhy are you running code on my computer without me askingā lmao.
I also really liked this post of yours: lying online It brought me a little bit of peace, especially the āprivacy/safetyā part, after a recent internet argument in which others were questioning my life experience/whether I was legit.
This sounds so cool! Please share if you dind this again!
Ditto. That sounds awesome, and might be an inspiration for me to make interactive work when physical space is limited.
A bit late, but I just read this blog post. I have fibromyalgia, which is also sort of in that hand-wavey āprobably psychosomatic, maybe trauma induced, maybe autoimmune? try vitaminsā space of a lot of under-studied illnesses.
Thank you for sharing this, even though it is incredibly personal and must have been difficult to write! This summer, my legs have been kinder to me; I havenāt needed to use a cane in a couple of months (though it would have certainly helped on some days)! Iāve been worried; both because of the classic āwhat if I was faking all alongā, and also āI KNOW it was horrible before; when is that going to happen again?!ā
For all Iāve read āthe body keeps the scoreā, a self-help book my therapist recommended, I never really connected the idea that trauma responses can only start after the event has passed. Your recollection of only starting to feel symptoms after a horrible thing has passed and youāve āgotten over itā is really familiar.
I know it will probably never get āfixedā, but i hope weāre both able to be more mindful of our bodies and minds and be kinder to ourselves when the unexpected happens. And for your sake, I really hope long covid and the illnesses that can develop from it get studied much, much more. <3
Ugh I hate that there is such a hand-wavy response to fibromyalgia - my mom was in bed with it for ten years before it seemed to spontaneously lift. I am glad you are having better days. I really struggle with expecting symptoms and not trusting my good days, and even when I was in remission for long covid I felt like I was gaslit by my own body and the rest of the world for the time I was sick. I have a gut feeling that studying what causes fibromyalgia will help with post-viral stuff and vice versa - thereās a big overlap in people that have both (or family history).
Short link dump: Day 5 of #smallwebjuly - link & idea dump | small cypress
your cbox isnāt loading for me, but! iām terrible at cooking and baking (the only things i ever bake are biscuits, box mix brownies, and these) and loooove making this cinnamon roll recipe! itās pretty time-consuming since it needs to be left to sit several times and ends up taking several hours, but it is not difficult at all and makes a very nice treat! they smell amazing when theyāre in the oven. you do need a biggish surface to roll them out on though, which can be tough depending on your kitchen layout
Life lessons from the Tour de France
If I get any ānot all menā in response I swear to god.
less snippy elaboration: iām a man, I know itās not everyone, but itās such a pervasive and concerningly large percentage that it doesnāt matter whether itās everyone or not, itās enough of us that itās a widespread issue
Reminds me of the time when our upstairs neighbor was surprised to find out I take care of shopping and making sure bills are paid on time. Likeā¦ Lady, this is more than you expect the average man to do in a household?! You mean a broken mess of a guy outperforms eighty percent of his peers in this hellhole of a misogynistic nation simply by not being a vegetable? Maybe I should brag more!
FWIW (as one of the women), this post doesnāt at all read like youāre trying to speak for women. It reads entirely like a man observing other men and thinking āif I, a dude, am annoyed and disgusted with how these men treat women, how bad must it be for the women they treat this way?ā
And I, for one, appreciate every single man who sees that and thinks āthis is not acceptable behavior.ā
(Incidentally, I have what I call the No Resentment Rule: I will not live in filth and I will not clean up after anyone I live with, because both will cause me to resent the other person and I refuse to do that. If they canāt or wonāt hold up their end of basic human chores, we are better off living apart. I will do things like swap chores - āhey, Iāll do the laundry if you vacuum the houseā - but I wonāt do stuff for another functional adult.)
and its only getting hotter and hotter in entirety of europeā¦ give it a few years and 45, not 35 will be the new ānormalā summer.
im used to 25-30C summers, it reaching almost 40 (its been 38 for a few days hereā¦) is also unreal, cant even imagine how 38 feels like if youāre used to 22 degree summer. i feel it will only be warmer and warmer. i understand why my country is hot, geographically this is southern europe. weāre only called āeasternā because of how it was in the past. but for netherlands to be that hot is rather insane
As someone who has a dad ā¦ love him dearly, as a dad he does his best and heās got a good heart, but as a guy I swear if me, my mum, and grandma werenāt here heād be struggling to stay above water with cooking, cleaning, and laundry (he canāt even get up to carry his plate to the dishwasher thatās a few feet away)
We basically do everything around the house for the day to day stuff so I understand the frustration all too well, so ā¦ itās a breath of fresh air to see other men also looking at it and seeing it as unacceptable behaviour
Bit of a more personal annecdote but in the sense that even the most well meaning (bodily healthy) men fall to the fallacies of relying on others to do the āmeanial workā even for the most barebone things like taking your dishes to the dishwasher and pushing your dinner chair back in place
(I could argue itās the ADHD that may be present in our family, but even I try to take care of not leaving junk behind for others to need to clean after me, or if I do, to keep it small like a cup I forgot to put away. Anyway, off-topic tangent but I do mean more towards men who do have the ability to take care of themselves without a struggle)
Very relatable.
I wrote an off the cuff response. A content warning for postpartum mental illness, domestic violence and abuse, misogyny.
The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include a 90ās TV show about what people were doing on the internet, a 16th century artist drawing insects and making them look beautiful and a small study on the generational differences in handwriting. I completed another cross stitch project and started playing Everquest 2 again! Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
Dogs! Animals taking public transportation! Feral pigeons! Skimbleshanks!