#natural methods

[the-prophesied-disco-gay]

"I'd love to have hobbies but I'm too broke"

"Yeah sounds fun, if you have that kind of money"

"Lol out of touch. Like people just have the money for craft supplies laying around"

My loves. My beautiful humans of all varieties. I am kissing you on the forehead so gently and begging you

Do. It. Poor.

Humanity has existed for around three hundred thousand years. Money as we know it has existed for about five thousand of those years. Humans have been doing stuff without money for most of our history as a species.

Find out what resources are available in your area and get your hands on some and create something with them.

This can include things like "buy nothing" groups and construction rubbish and lengths of carpet in the dumpster behind the local flooring place. Free pallets and broken tiles and scrap fabric on marketplace and craigslist.

It can also include natural clay deposits you teach yourself to refine for pottery, and plants that can be turned into fibers and spun and woven, and minerals and husks and berries and roots and a thousand other things that can be used to make natural dyes.

I have made paper from the wood of a neighbor's tree that they had to cut down. I collected a good bit of it for my mom to do woodturning with as well and she made wooden cooking spoons and spatulas, and wooden hair pins, and pens, and some chairs.

I have knit bags made from yarn I spun from local cottonwood fluff I collected off the ground.

I have dyed paper and fabric and soaps and wood and hair using dyes made from local plants and kitchen scraps and mineral pigments I collected and ground and mixed myself. I have made my own paints and inks and paintbrushes and canvasses as well.

I have made beautiful mosaic topped side/end/coffee/bedside tables with broken tile bits and scrap wood or sometimes scrap metal.

I taught myself how to make butter and jams and bread and jerky and a plethora of other things from scratch through mostly trial and error and bothering people's grandmothers

I taught myself how to make fishooks from a variety of materials

I've made cat trees from carpet scraps and junk wood, and cat toys from feathers and fabric scraps and sticks and string (I did sterilize the feathers to avoid illness and mites and such)

I have made soap from scratch using table scraps and lye I extracted from wood ash. I have similarly made lotions, salves, balms, and tinctures from scratch from collected materials. I have made candles from both tallow and beeswax acquired for free or very low cost, acquired from local apiaries and butchers.

I have made clothes for myself and others, as well as shawls, bags, scarves, quilts and whole host of other things from free sheets, blankets, clothes, and other "trash" fabric people were either giving or throwing away because of holes or rips or stains.

I taught myself leatherworking to make bracelets and bag straps and sandals and fetish gear from scrap bits of leather, usually sourced from ripped or otherwise damaged leather jackets that were being thrown out.

I taught myself to weave wreaths cause we have pine trees here and what the fuck do you mean eighty dollars for some pine boughs and ribbon???

I spent 6 months travelling without purchasing a single night in a hotel room or purchasing a single travel ticket of any kind, picking up odd jobs and selling things I crafted from materials found along the way and ride sharing and camping (yes there was an element of danger there, but travel is always dangerous. Being alive is dangerous. Being a fat neurodivergent disabled queer afab poor person is hella dangerous. I refuse to spend my precious life isolated and afraid)

Sand paintings can be done with pine resin, natural dyes, and sand.

Makeup can be made entirely from things you can find around you in most parts of the world.

Felting can be done with pet hair.

Carving

Whittling

Cooking

Metalworking/blacksmithing

Hunting and trapping

A canoe can be made from...a tree

Please, please look at the world you are part of and realize *it will not charge you money for joy*

Look at how the native peoples of your area did the thing you want to do. Look at how other cultures have historically accomplished that thing. Pretend civilization has fallen and there isn't anyone to pay for materials and supplies. Pretend plastic doesn't exist. You are so much freer than you realize. Do it poor. Live your life. Your desire is the only permission you need in order to create, in order to have hobbies (Victor Frankenstein and Hannibal Lector I am not talking to you).

And for those of you worried about whether this applies to you, I am both poor and heavily disabled. I cannot stand or walk for longer than ten or fifteen minutes. I cannot lift more than ten pounds without *fracturing my spine*. My glasses give people migraines. I am AuDHD. You learn to work around your limitations, and accomodate yourself. I learned how to make myself a folding stool with 3 decent sized branches and some strips of leather or canvass. It is lightweight but holds all my medically obese self without issue. I put a strap on that sucker and now I have place to sit whenever I need, even if it's every few steps. I'm not on anyone else's timeframe when I am doing this stuff, I'll sit when I please for as long as I need. I learned how to make a travois for dragging stuff I can't safely lift. I got a cheap immersion blender because my shoulders can't handle the level of stirring required for soap making and several other things. I do almost everything, including furniture making, sitting down, often in my wheelchair (which I got for free and made a seat for cause it didn't have one and I couldn't afford an intact, functional wheelchair). These things can be adjusted for disability, for neurotype, for location (including inner city), for limited available time (I was working 3 jobs and raising toddlers for a good portion of this time, before I became too disabled to work). Human creativity is near limitless. Use it!

If you don't know where to start or how to find the info you need or how to accomplish your hobby for free or low cost, ask! Ask me, ask other crafty people, ask people with an interest in anthropology, ask local groups of indigenous artisans, ask the internet. Don't expect folks to construct a detailed, start to finish set of instructions for you, but they can usually point you in the right direction in terms of finding the knowledge you need, or to get you past a point you're stuck at (an affectionately exasperated older lady once emailed back with just "you didn't add vinegar to fix the dye did you?" I....had not). Not every craft or hobby will be able to done low cost (I do not know how to make a telescope sorry) but many can, more than most people think.

Capitalism is a cage for the human spirit. Slip the bars baby.

[totesmag]

The Future of Sustainable Agriculture: Innovations and Best Practices

Agriculture is one of the largest industries in the world, providing food for billions of people. However, the current state of agriculture has a significant impact on the environment, from soil degradation to water pollution and loss of biodiversity. It is crucial for the future of our planet that we transition towards sustainable agriculture practices. we will explore the latest innovations…

[hyakunana]

A Wizard and a Rogue walk into the Archive

[siyelius]

lynxy redesign !! wanted to adjust her a bit to better fit an actual explorer/survivalist used to subzero weather

[thefugitivesaint]

George Varian (1865-1923), ''The Natural Method Readers'', 5th Reader, 1918

[huariqueje]

Landscape with Deers - Nathalie Mannaerts , 2021.

Dutch, b. 1967 -

Pastel on paper, 120 x 150 cm.

[staticymaticyyourlifeisatravesty]

*Sometime after 1475 in hell*

Satan: Yo, Luci, has Vlad Tepes showed up yet? He died like three months ago, and he's not heaven

Lucifer: What? No. He hasn't showed up at all, the fuck do you mean he isn't in heaven?

Satan: Yea, some angel was asking if we had him, because we didn't. There's also like an ungodly amount of souls missing aside from that one. I think there's like over four thousand souls that are also missing as well...

Lucifer: ....There's four thousand souls missing?

Satan: Yes.

Lucifer: Well, I guess we should see what's going down on the Mortal planes than....

_____

*Dracula doing as Dracula does and devouring his own people*

Lucifer: Ok, who the fuck allowed that to happen? Who the fuck green lit that? Who let Vlad Tepes turn into a goddamn Eldritch abomination??

Satan: I think the humans are calling it a vampire

Lucifer: A vampire? That's what that is? I'm sorry, that still doesn't answer my question of who in the seven layers of hell green lit that thing!!

Satan: We didn't. The blood choose for it happen.

Lucifer: The fuck do you mean the blood chose for it

Satan: Too many people died in one place, and Vlad was too angry to die.

Lucifer: .....God allowed this to happen didn't he? He fucking let this happen, didn't He, the fucking bastard

[bitchapalooza]

The idea of (trans) Zoro doing voice training by himself makes me laugh thinking of what his feminine voice must sound like and exactly how Zoro could use it to fuck with Sanji somehow

[blue-eli]

Ink October day 11: Firebreak

A strip of land that has been cleared, plowed, or planted with fire-resistant vegetation to prevent a fire from spreading.

[alexhatessupermarketcola]

Chaotic Alex Rider is my favourite.

One of my most favourite scenes is where he gets mad that his old friend started taking, stalks the drug dealer by bike then decides, yes, a logical option here is to play hook a duck claw machine with the drug production boat (people and all) using a crane to drop it off gently in the police station car park like you do.

(which of course ends up meaning instead being dropped from height through the conference centre next door's roof)

It's remarkable that Alex is even somewhat surprised at what happens next 😂

Truly top tier chaos.

[greenerteacups]

not asking for spoilers but just wanted to let you know I am SO excited to see whether you'll be including any aspect of the golden trio's van life™ treasure hunting in the woods segment of DH in your story. I know you've talked about how silly and irrelevant it is for them to be off and away from all the other characters and action for so much of the last book, so I'm looking forward to seeing the changes you make and what kinds of new experiences they'll have if they remain more tethered to the plot. but c'mon. neverending geocashing group camping trip from hell. it's kind of hilarious.

RV TRIP DEATHLY HALLOWS they will never make me love you RV trip deathly hallows... tho you are right and I fully grant it is the funniest thing that book could have done... it's like. The Two Towers if you're reading Sam and Frodo's trip to Mordor and you don't know what fuck all else is going on while they're doing it. And also none of the stuff with Aragorn or the actual war for the ring is on the page. And there are Hallows there, for some reason.

[goddessofroyalty]

but he reaches 38th week without going into premature labour would Viktor even stay on bedrest? won't he try to get up and shift his hips and let gravity work the baby's weight on his cervix and be OVER with the whole pregnancy? (keyword being "try"--i guess he can but the baby's weight'll pin him back down to the bed anyway. poor Viktor!)

Even though he's been on bedrest for a couple of months by that point Viktor still has gotten up if just to go to the bathroom or get food if Jayce and Ximena aren't around. He already knows exactly how much trying to stand just hurts and I think that would be a pretty big deterent for him to get up to try and have gravity help start labor.

On the other hand he's a stubborn bastard who would do it to get the pregnancy over so will deal with pain and discomfort if it means getting their child in their arms sooner. He would at least wait until Jayce was around so he can basically lean his whole weight on him while he does it.

I think whether he would or not really depends on whether medical induction is something that exists. Because if that exists he's just going to go that route without even trying anything else. If it doesn't he'd be much more tempted by the 'natural' options to try and get the pregnany over with.

[rigelmejo]

@earlgrey--tea you asked who learned French just by watching TV shows and I'm thrilled you asked.

Here is the paper Peter Llewellyn Foley published: Picking up a second language from television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning. Looking over the paper again now, he did 1500 hours of audio-visual French material for native speakers. He read toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours, and he talked to people in French similarly toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours. I read the whole thing, and I recommend anyone else who's curious reads the whole thing. Because my takeaways may not be the same as another person's. The paper includes what he did, how he studied, how he tracked his study, what study materials worked best (he found children's cartoons with a lot of visuals of what is being talked about were the easiest to learn from in the first few hundred hours - and adult television where they talk about things not directly visually shown as some of the hardest stuff that he used once he had more understanding of the language).

His paper shows at least 1 person could learn French by watching shows (with children's cartoons being best at the beginning stage until you learn more words), and trying to figure out what each thing means as you hear it. He did a lot of puzzling out the sounds he heard, using context and guessing what was being talked about (for curiosity's sake he did the opposite of what ALG Automatic Language Growth articles tend to suggest people do). He did not do any reading later sometime after 1000 hours, and it's fascinating how different he imagined French spelling was based on his guesses from the sound, compared to how it is actually spelled. He did use some graded readers for learners once he was reading.

He did not look any word translations up when watching all those shows. He personally makes the guess that if he HAD looked up words, if he HAD used French subtitles, and if he had focused entirely on children's shows at first, his progress might have taken less time. But his experiment did not do that, so it's only a guess, and actual success of people who've looked up words should be referenced instead for how successful or not it is (people like r/Refold learners look up words while watching shows), and he did not use any video materials made for language learners but my personal thinking is that Comprehensible Input type lessons at the beginning stage may have worked even better than children's cartoons.

To me, his level of understanding and ability to do things lines up fairly well with Dreaming Spanish's roadmap estimated hours to do X things. That makes sense to me as Peter basically studied with stuff made for native speakers, which eventually became more comprehensible. And Dreaming Spanish is designed to be fully comprehensible to a learner, until they can comprehend stuff for native speakers. I imagine Peter had a harder time initially, but as an English speaker learning French, with all the cognates, maybe he didn't have to learn as much to cross the threshold into comprehending children's shows as someone learning a language with no cognates.

I wrote my in depth thoughts about his paper here but it's mostly just rambling.

[gauzestarr]

Look I love Jet too but I'm honest enough to admit he would not be ACAB because of some deeply held leftist philosophy or emapthy for others. He would be ACAB because he doesn't like being told to stop stealing shit

[zytes]

black static, forbidden magic

[essektheylyss]

re: the fiction/nonfiction kinsey scale poll. just know that I am barely restraining myself from giving nonfiction book recs at all times. there is SO MUCH FUN NONFICTION THAT IS SUPER READABLE AND INTERESTING take my hand we can go pick out some books together