This IS a feminism blog.
"Das Wesen der Schönheit sei die Harmonie zwischen sinnlichen Trieb und dem Gesetz der Vernunft."
-Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805).
"Jedes Bluten heißt, wir leben; jede Träne, dass wir fühlen."
-Kontra K.
I will mash that Reblog button every single time this shows up on my dash. I spent a lot of years martyring myself for “the needs of the business.” Young people? Don’t fucking do it. They don’t care about you, you are a “resource,” not a human being. I can’t say this strongly enough: see to your self-care!
We talk a lot about how to tell if you have a bad boss… Here is how you know you have a good boss:
My boss would verbally kick my ass if I logged in or communicated voluntarily about work while on vacation. And if I had to log in, absolutely no one else could do my thing and it couldn’t wait? He would refund my time off and make me take it the following week.
Time off is Time Off. Take it. Unashamedly. Unabashedly.
Time off is Time Off.
Take it. Unashamedly.
Unabashedly.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
there’s an episode of malcolm in the middle where he just shuts up and stops complaining for awhile and it immediately starts to significantly improve his life but also it causes him an ulcer and by the end of the episode he is literally spitting up blood and i have always deeply and unshakably believed that is exactly how the situation would play out for me too
Sharing space is nothing new. Sharing bathrooms is nothing new. The reactionary outrage is so manufactured.
The parking lot? As in the gender neutral parking lot? As in a place where you have no privacy?
These are the bathrooms at the airport in question:
As you can see, complete privacy for all waste-expulsion activities. You only encounter other people around the sink.
This just proves a point that I’ve repeatedly noticed and it’s that every time a bathroom goes gender neutral it gets about a hundred percent safer.
I distinctly remember coming back from college to find that they’d converted the two of the bathrooms into all-gender restrooms. Among the changes were doors that went all the way up and down, a locking mechanism within the door, and actual door handles. Even the single-occupancy bathroom got a wall for extra privacy.
In contrast, I remember the women’s bathrooms in my old school. They were broken as shit. Some doors needed to be held by a friend, some doors you held with your foot from inside. The wheelchair-accessible bathroom straight up did not have a doorat all. And yet we all pretended this was okay because hey, the womanly honor code. You think that shit would have flown if there were two gender-neutral restrooms?
All I’m saying is that if I were fleeing a predator or wanted to be absolutely sure I was private, which one would be the better option? The one that assumes that a “no penises allowed” sign will be enough? Or the one that actually, physically protects me?
…How did it ever occur to someone that this was edible?…
I mean, I’m guessing some variation of “hey that tree I used as firewood sure had some good smelling smoke and made the food we cooked over it better, I wonder what else we could do with it … ”
Yea, that or
I mean. There’s foods out there that if you don’t cook them exactly right they will kill you. Humans have been trying absolutely everything to see what they can eat.
there is a shark. The greenland shark. It lives in the ocean where humans naturally die. At depths that would crush a human. In water so cold it would very quickly kill a person. It’s a big shark, 20ish feet. Several have been found with polar bear in their stomach. They live hundreds of years. To keep from freezing, their blood is full of anti-freeze chemicals that makes their meat poisonous to humans.
They are considered by humans living near them to be… a delicacy.
Of course you have to bury it for six months to let it ferment the poisons out.
i swear to gods, if it’s on this planet, we will find a way to eat it.
did you know, the first scientists to find a whole frozen mammoth out in the tundra … cooked some and ate it? Like, they found it and excavated it, and while still on site these 2 professionals with degrees said to each other, oh we gotta eat some of that. It was like 17 THOUSAND years old. They said it tasted bad. No shit. But that’s humans for you.
anyway, the cinnamon harvesting is awesome, never saw that before
Humans are one of the most accomplished omnivores on the planet.
Two things. The first is that huh, I guess you kinda coppice cinnamon, which makes a lot of sense now I think about it. The second is that we eat almonds and cassava, both of which are, in their wild state, hilariously toxic.
Both contain copious amounts of cyanide, or more accurately, compounds that release cyanide when you eat them. And yet? Cassava became a staple for people in the Amazon and beyond, because despite the fact that eating improperly prepared wild cassava will straight up kill you, people worked out that if you grind it up into a wet paste and leave it covered for several hours to offgas its cyanide. Though some domesticated varieties can be detoxified just through proper boiling and discarding of the water, a lot of domestic strains still require this whole involved process to not fatally poison you.
Meanwhile almonds, wild almonds, are also deadly poisonous. It takes about 50 to kill and adult but as few as 5 bitter almonds can be fatal to a child. Thing is, wild almonds occasionally produce plants that aren’t stuffed to the gills with cyanide. But still, it feels insane to me that people who lived off the land in the places where wild almonds grew found out that some of these plants wouldn’t kill you, because idk I feel like my instinct there would be to not even try And yet? Almonds are a thing. (almonds were a very early domesticated fruit tree and there’s some features of almond propagation that make this even more insane)
If something is potentially edible, and I really do mean capital-P-Potentially here, someone, somewhere figured out how to eat it, even if figuring that out involved a truly ludicrous string of steps and/or luck to not just fucking die from it.
I feel like it’s worth drawing out explicitly that there’s a very simple reason for this: for the vast majority of human history, there would be regular patches of time when at least part of the population would go through a state where “I might die if I eat this” took back-seat to “I will die if I don’t eat something.”
We also ported knowledge forward, mind, from our pre-human ancestors. Other primates are more than smart enough (while also going through “I gotta eat SOMETHING” phases) to know about That One Almond Tree That Doesn’t Kill Us, and to pass that knowledge on through generations; other primates may even smart enough to figure out through trial and error that the smushed up cassava under the leaves didn’t kill me, so maybe if I smush it up and leave it under the leaves for a bit I can eat it later.
So are other animals, mind, and we got really good at watching what other animals got away with eating, which is I suspect how you got the shark thing: other meat-eaters eat the fresh shark, they die! Then the famine hits and you notice that the fox or the whatever else is digging up that shark that washed up that you buried ages ago except now it’s NOT dying and you figure, what do I have to lose? Especially since by that time you’ve got thousands and thousands of years of cooking science behind you - of the collective knowledge that fermenting, cooking, freezing, drying, and doing other things to potential food makes it more or less poison or edible.
For Greenland shark specifically, “bury it in the sand with salt and let it ferment” is also a way of preserving fish that are edible in their unfermented state. (This is how gravlax gets its name–literally “buried salmon.” It isn’t generally prepared that way any more but that is the traditional method.)
“Let’s see if the technique that makes edible foods tastier/more digestible makes poison ones edible” is a pretty obvious experiment.
Oh good point!
There is also the fact that in between “poison” and “food” there is “medicine”
Back when contracting parasites was more of a regular thing, people would eat a bit of a poisonous plant to basically flush out their digestive system and get rid of the parasites, and since poisonous plants can have a variable amount of poison, it makes sense to develop means of reducing the potency so you can just eat more for a higher dose
Doesn’t even have to be a purgative/laxative, the main concept of most abortifacient plants is “poison you just enough to cause your body to reject a pregnancy”
Generally if you eat too much of a medicinal plant, that’s poison baby!
Sooner or later someone figured out “hey, if you boil pokeweed 3 times and replace the water every time, you can actually just eat it” and poke salad became important food for poor people
Side note, but it’s really interesting to me how so many medicinal plants have such a wide distribution e.g. Yarrow, makes me wonder if they might have been spread by humans tens of thousands of years ago
I used to assume that gaining knowledge of dangerous or medicinal plant life was basically a lot of russian roulette, won by massive amounts of bodies and time. But I’ve changed my mind after reading some stuff from naturalists. In Botany In A Day, Thomas J Elpel had a great paragraph that was really enlightening for me personally. He said that lots of plants share chemical components which can be detected by distinctive tastes and smells. So to identify a plant with a particular medicinal property you don’t have to go in blind trying it for every condition to see if it works and hope it doesn’t kill you. You can relate tastes and smells to other plants you’ve already seen and tried, and have educated guesses about their edibility and medicinal properties.
I think the example he gave was about tasting astringency in a certain family of flower being a good indicator it contains a certain home remedy for stomach pain. But in my own words, for example, I think arums (family of plants) have a particular sickly-sweet smell and a certain kind of thick stem and leathery leaves. If I ate almost any raw arum I would chew on thin nedele-like calcium oxalate crystals, which would lead to swelling in my mouth, potential numbness, etc. Say I try boiling the root of one (like taro), and am able to eat it without issue. If I found a different jungle plant which smelled the same, had leathery leaves, thick stem, etc, I would be able naturally hazard a guess that eating it would suck. But I might be able to get away with eating it’s boiled roots.
