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I feel FATIGUED like send her to the seaside for her health type fatigue

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Carp Cast bronze By Ōshima Joun (1858–1940) Gift of Mr. Tamura Kin'ichi Tokyo National Museum

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I think one of the best things I've learned since getting into fiber arts is that something can be absolutely not my taste and I can still be impressed and delighted for the person who made it and people who love it. Almost every time I look through patterns or projects, I have a thought like, "I hate that and it's magnificent" or, "I wouldn't wear that, but HOLY CRAP it's amazing that you made it."

We need more of that.

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Can we please get one thing straight?

Nobody should be giving Mao Zedong any ups. None whatsoever.

This is a man who accidentally killed tens of millions of his own citizens (look up Great Leap Forward) and then killed or brutalized millions more on purpose while also decimating his country’s intellectual and artistic landscape in ways that took decades to recover from (look up the Cultural Revolution - and if you could stomach that Neil Gaiman article, you may be able to stomach firsthand accounts from survivors of it).

I LOVE what’s happening on 小红书 right now! I am SO EXCITED for more Americans to realize the lies they’ve been sold about modern China and to discover this rich cultural, historical, and linguistic landscape that many of us in Chinese fandoms have become obsessed with.

But do not romanticize Mao or the devastation he wrought. The only reason he’s still venerated there is that the CCP felt like admitting he was wrong would undermine people’s trust in The Party and so after his death they managed to blame most of the worst of his shit on his wife Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four.

There are other issues, obviously - it will be interesting to see what happens when TikTok refugees run up against CCP censorship, which tends to be harder to get around than just saying “unalive” - but this is one that I’m truly worried about. Don’t forget that capitalism and communism are economic systems, not systems of government, and they can both be paired with many types of government - yes, we’ve got a guy who wants to be a capitalist dictator, but that doesn’t make Mao less of a communist dictator.

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^what he said

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"SURVIVING"

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Make steampunk and wasteland style charms with screws

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Btw you do NOT need to read the news to help people

You can do all of these things without reading the news:

Go to protests

Volunteer

Join a mutual aid network

Write to your representatives

Donate

Clean up trash and pollution

Curate and provide resources for your community

Citizen science/citizen history projects to help the environment/etc.

Much, much more

Reading the news is not a moral obligation. Following people whose posts make you spiral is not a moral obligation.

I am more able to help people when I don't regularly read the news. I volunteer more. I go out early to go weed invasive species at a nature reserve. I have more capacity to support my friends and the people I care about.

I have more energy to work on this blog, for that matter. (Obviously I regularly read a lot of good news. Which I recommend. The rest of this post is about normal news, which highly rewards negative content.)

You cannot pour from an empty vessel.

What matters is doing something to help.

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Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too

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BE MAD BE SAD BUT DONT U DARE GIVE UP

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your unreliable narrator fucking bit me