Resource: Domestic Medicine.

Dec. 3rd, 2025 03:36 pm
full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] little_details
https://domestic-medicine.com/

This website is an unromanticized purview of historical health care, with an emphasis on household and community practices shared and recorded by women and the overlaps of medicine and cookery.

Author Stephany Hoffelt’s credentials: Continue. )

(Content note: Hoffelt, with her lived experience, research into historical context, and insistence upon practical results, has a whole catacomb apiece to pick with both the patriarchal medical establishment and the proponents of a Magical Pagan Witch Sisterhood who got burned by the millions for providing safe and reliable herbal abortifacients.)
pauraque: drawing of a wolf reading a book with a coffee cup (customer service wolf)
[personal profile] pauraque
This is the fourth and final part of my book club notes on A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. [Part one, part two, [part three.]

I missed this meeting because I was totally exhausted and doubted my ability to form words. I did read the stories, though!


"Daughter of the Sun" by Shevta Thakrar

This love story had a lot going on and I didn't understand it well enough to summarize it. )


"The Crimson Cloak" by Cindy Pon

A dawn goddess falls in love with a human. )


"Eyes Like Candlelight" by Julie Kagawa

A kitsune falls in love with a human. )


"Carp, Calculus, and the Leap of Faith" by Ellen Oh

[Note: This story is included only in the paperback edition, not the hardcover or the ebook.]

A girl whose mom is pressuring her to become a doctor gets support from her dad. )


the end

There were some really cool stories in here and I'm glad we read them. Not everything was to my taste, but the quality of writing was high. It was great to explore folklore outside of Western traditions and see the connections and contrasts.

The group will continue with As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, which is a title that might be relevant to the interests of a few of you here! It's a brand new collection that just came out this year and I'm really looking forward to it.
goodbyebird: Baldur's Gate 3: Shadowheart with a soft look on her face. (☆ my precious)
[personal profile] goodbyebird
+ Armored worms and death-ball sponges among array of life newly documented from the deep sea. Some really cool pictures here.

+ Unearthing The Hidden History Of A Singular Trans Punk Zine.

+ Scientists discover sperm whale ‘phonetic alphabet’.

+ Do you really know Art Nouveau?. A very interesting journey into the political side of Jugend.

❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
Rec-cember Day 3


Baldur's Gate 3
Karlach's Reviews by [archiveofourown.org profile] ACrowsRockCollection (1k words). Boy oh boy do I love me a proper drabble, and this? Is ten quality drabbles in a row! Karlach ❤️❤️❤️
A hug:

Now, I want to be clear, that very first moment, where you're not sure, stick straight and skittery, that part sure isn't worth a damn.

But when ya melt into the person's arms?

And then,
Gods, then they melt back? Because maybe they trust you or maybe you're just nice and warm, but the why don't exactly matter.

Because maybe when they melt back, maybe that's when you start thinking it
is worth it all. Every bit of bullshit and all the gold in the gate too. For a moment, at least.

Five hundred million out of ten.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I have the distinct impression that Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't like Donald Trump.

Read more... )

December Days 02025 #02: Sidestep

Dec. 2nd, 2025 10:27 pm
silveradept: A head shot of a  librarian in a floral print shirt wearing goggles with text squiggles on them, holding a pencil. (Librarian Goggles)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

02: Sidestep

If you asked me, I would tell you that I'm not good at art. I realize this is a subjective qualification, but we insert here Ira Glass's commentary about taste versus skill as an explanation, and then we spin backward in time to my childhood again.

You see, art is and is not part of the core curriculum of my schooling. There's plenty of art and craft time, yes. Much of it works on a principle of following a set of directions to produce something that looks like the example, and that's not something that works for tiny me, because I either get very invested in trying to make my version look exactly like the example, or I get sufficiently frustrated at not being able to do this that I stop caring about whether what I'm doing is within tolerance of the example, and that is only going to create greater difficulties down the road.

The bigger problem, of course with visual and other arts, is that we come into the world with plentiful examples of things that are high quality and good taste, and we do not have any kind of advantage conferred with experience, genetic memory, or other such things where being the descendants of other people provide us with obvious advantages in the creation of art.

That said, it's a remarkable feat of every human that they manage to figure out what sounds (or gestures) are the important ones, and what combinations result in intelligible conversation or getting things that are desired. Which happens after a very long amount of practice absorbing those things and eventually experimenting with them until the right combinations come into existence. And then, just to up the difficulty, after we've mastered the art of communication by sound or gesture, we introduce younglings to squiggles (or bumps to be felt), where squiggles or bumps of certain forms represent the sounds that have already been learned, and the combination of squiggles or bumps in the correct order and style allow us to convey those sounds and meanings to other people who know how to interpret the squiggles as sounds and words. Babies and children accomplish an impressive feat of art by gaining both of those proficiencies by themselves, and they do it through a boatload of observation and practice.

Yet, with babies, we seem to be encouraging and accepting of the amount of time that it takes for them to gain the proficiency needed in communication, both lexical and auditory. As we get older, there's not always as much support for collecting new skills, or patience for the necessary practice of them, either from ourselves, or from the people around us that could fill that role. By third grade, I could make a smiley, or perhaps something of cartoonish proportions and the feel that you get from those childhood drawings on the refrigerator, and a friend of mine could make detailed drawings of superhero action sequences. That friend did a lot more drawing practice than I was doing, because I was more interested at the time in exercising my reflexes and my puzzle-solving abilities, and learning how to play strategically at board games and card games. But rather than framing this as a choice of "I have chosen to allocate my time differently," I instead absorbed the message "I'm not that good at art."

While I've played a musical instrument from grade five all the way through my undergraduate university experience, and a little bit beyond that (including gigs that I got paid for playing that instrument in a band), I have not considered myself much more than an untalented amateur at the instrument. I can hear what others are doing, and how much more refined their tone and ability is, and I do not have that. My taste exceeds my ability, and I have probably made as much progress as I can at this point without perhaps some additional instruction to improve further, or significant practice devoted to the instrument. That said, I'm not putting my time and energy into that particular pursuit at this time. Mostly because there's still a highly communicable disease going about, and playing instrumental music where you have to move air through the instrument makes it very difficult for you to mask or otherwise take precautions against infection from other people who are also outputting a lot of air. Also because the group I was playing with at a local college became a group where the community members needed to pay for continuing education credits, rather than volunteering themselves, and that's not happening. Again, I am choosing to put my time and energy elsewhere at this point.

The Geocities site I created as an exercise in learning HTML never became anything other than a personal site for learning HTML with. Perhaps I had some hope somewhere that it would become something and people would visit, but it was never a developed enough hope for me to try changing things to turn it into a website for others. I still have no great ambitions of creating a website that everyone wants to visit and see everything about. When I learn programming and scripting languages, it's usually to accomplish some project that I have in mind, or, in a very recent case, to get better at playing a game. (It's a powerful motivator, what can I say?)

When webcomics were the thing everyone was doing, I ran a comic for several years on a lark. And in that comic, I mostly leaned into the idea of the drawings being simple and crude and trying to let the writing carry things. It never became a great popular thing. It was something I did because I wanted to do it, and while the fame and fortune would have been nice, I didn't expect it to happen. Randall Munroe proved that you don't necessarily have to have intricately detailed drawings to have something that's funny and enjoyable. So did Ryan North. But I did the thing I wanted to do, and it was enjoyable, and then my life fell apart sufficiently that I couldn't keep up with it. I'd have to do a fair amount of resetting passwords and the like if I wanted to revive it, but I always could. I'm sure there are more jokes hiding somewhere, and more stories to be told from that space.

Writing and essaying is one of the spots where I can admit to long practice at the skill, although if my goal is set at creating the Great American Novel, then clearly I'm not good at that, either. But I am certainly practiced at many forms of writing. Mostly essay, a lot of fanfiction. Any success that I have in fanfiction kudos and comments is, for me, attributable to the size of the fandom that I wrote the work in, rather than something that specifically I created that has people wanting to read it. Although I do have some user subscriptions and some regulars in the kudos columns, so there's something there.

What really bowled me over, though, was that while my numbers have never been great in terms of kudos or comments, someone else mentioned, when I took a look at their book club readings, that they were impressed with my having done my book club readings for thirteen years. Which is true. I have been doing weekly posts on things that I'm reading for that long, usually with a spork firmly in hand and at the ready. I ran the entire gamut of the Dragonriders of Pern (at least until some new Pern novel comes out) and that's a great accomplishment that I didn't really think I would finish when I set out on it. But I kept doing it, and eventually I went all the away through. It turned out to be a matter of persistence rather than any kind of extra-powerful talent or any external motivator from fans to keep things going. And I sit in sufficiently relative privilege that I don't have to beg for dollars in each of my posts, or set them behind paywalls so that I make income off my writing, having amassed a large amount of people following me for my writing. I have probably amassed at least a million words of my own writing, over these topics, and the book club posts, and some things that I have had published in real publications, in my professional life. (I am, in fact, a published author several times over. Just not of the Great American Novel.) The point of much of my writing is that I enjoy doing it, and when I stop enjoying it, I'll stop doing it and do something else.

In the last year or two, I've taken up trying to mimic other people's drawings with my own hand, using the medium of dry-erase markers on a whiteboard. Some efforts turn out better than others. There are compliments about the drawings, which I mostly want to deflect away, because it's not like I created this drawing by drawing what was in my head onto the whiteboard. I tried to draw what I saw, and sometimes I succeeded. (Whiteboard is a very forgiving medium for certain types of mistakes.) I'm likely improving at this through the practice, which is nice, but I'm mostly doing it because I want to do it, and because nobody else has yet told me that I'm forbidden from doing it. I think it makes a nice decoration for the programming offerings. There are compliments. I have not yet figured out how to phrase an answer to the questions "Who drew this?" or "Did you draw this?" that conveys both that what you see is an attempt at copying what someone else has already done, and that yes, I did make the marks on the whiteboard for this. If there is something praiseworthy about the endeavor, it's in accuracy of replication, in the thing looking enough like the original to be recognizable. It's not "I drew the thing in my head," because when I try to do that, it doesn't turn out like what I envisioned in my head. So I need more practice, and possibly more instruction. But the same rule applies to this as does to the writing parts: if I stop enjoying it, I'll stop doing it.

This rule is, in fact, the secret to me getting me to do the things that I'm doing. If I start thinking about monetization or professionalism or growing the readership or other such things, I'll start having greater amounts of anxiety for chasing a goal that I may never get anywhere close to. So long as I can believe that the things I'm doing are most for me, or mostly for the practice that I'll get out of doing them, then I can go forward with making the attempt. I have to avoid thinking it has to be perfect, because if it has to be perfect, that taps into an entire well of trauma and terrible feelings that generally ends with "if I can't make it perfectly, I won't make it at all." And because I'm doing it because I think the idea is funny, or because I want the practice, or because I've learned some new technique and I wanted to make something that put it to use, I can sidestep the idea that it has to be perfect, and therefore bring it into existence.

This rule also permits me to deflect praise for it, since "I'm copying someone else's art," or "I did it because I thought I could. An Actual Computer Toucher / Programmer / Artist / Essayist would be able to do it better than I can." There is often an immediately-deployed counterargument to this that comes in the form of "you did the thing that I am looking at, accept a compliment." The people deploying those counterarguments are often more stubborn than I am about the matter in the moment, even if I can be more stubborn about not accepting that I have practiced the skill sufficiently to make neat things in the long term.

The person who created it can see all the flaws, the person observing it can see all the strengths. Taste. Skill. And the whole thing is still subjective about whether or not something is good, and who it is good for. And whether the person doing it is any good. Because lots of people will say "That's better than I can do," and while that's a true statement, and better than "Oh I could never do that," or "I don't have any talent at that," I think the most accurate thing to say is "That's excellent. I appreciate this, and I am choosing to spend my time on other things."

And so, for now, I spend my time on things I find enjoyable.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
1. Dear Carolyn: My fiancé and I got engaged on Jan. 1, 2024 — so, almost two years ago — and then my sister and her fiancé got engaged this past summer. For a whole host of reasons, my fiancé and I have not gotten far at all in the wedding planning, but my sister and hers set a date and booked a venue pretty quickly — for the first weekend in July.

Recently, my fiancé sighted a local, family-owned venue and has started saying he wants to get married there in mid-June, around our anniversary and after school lets out because there are kids in our families we want to be there. If we did that, then it would be back-to-back weddings, which I — I cannot stress this enough — do NOT think is a great idea.
My sister and I have very overlapping guest lists, for one thing. Plus, I will be in her wedding (and hopefully she in mine), and I think we would each like to be able to focus on that without worrying about the details of another big event around the same time. Also, we are from a close family, and it just feels like squeezing too much juice out of one summer. Our mom is not super healthy, and I know she wants to be there for both of us.

I would strongly prefer to postpone our wedding until perhaps next spring, and honestly since we (especially my fiancé) have dragged our feet this much so far, there doesn’t feel like much of a hurry anymore. My fiancé is upset by this and says it feels like I’m letting my sister delay our marriage. Am I being obtuse by thinking we should get married a few months later than he wants to? We have been together for almost eight years, if it matters!
— Sister


Read more... )

********


2. Dear Carolyn: How do you navigate co-parenting a teen who is wicked smart but seemingly without motivation? My 17-year-old junior signed up for four AP classes this year, even after a good conversation about the amount of work they are and his not-great track record of turning in schoolwork. He thought he could handle it.

Here we are at the second quarter, and lo and behold, he’s struggling to keep up. I’m not in I-told-you-so mode, I promise! I am trying to be collaborative, asking how we can handle things here at my house to make it easier for him to focus (should probably mention ADHD). Those conversations always feel productive in terms of treating each other with respect, but … less effective at actually getting work done.

I am solidly of the opinion that, within reason, he should reap both the rewards AND the consequences of his decisions, and if an F is the consequence of not doing the work, well. His dad is much more aggressive at his house, and frequently my son comes back to me after a row with his dad over his lackluster performance.

Dad and I manage decently well at co-parenting except for this one area. I feel like Dad is worried more how all this reflects on HIM and not as interested in who his child really is. I can relate to my kid’s struggles, having had similar problems — and also possibly being neurodivergent, too — but Dad thinks if he just lectures enough, it will finally sink in.

My son can completely articulate what will happen if he fails a class and what will happen to his college and job prospects if his GPA tanks. What’s the point of repeating it ad nauseam? I am also trying to be a safe place, but his dad thinks I’m doing absolutely nothing. I’m fine telling Dad to stuff it about the “nothing” I’m doing, because I’ve been advocating hard for my kid since kindergarten — but any thoughts on navigating this? I use what few levers I have to encourage getting the work done, but he’s 17, and I can’t exactly tie him to a chair.
— Co-Parent of an Unmotivated Teen


Read more... )

*********


3. Dear Carolyn: I have always found the holidays to be a massive pain in the neck, and I have little interest in participating. This is not a new thing; I’m 30, and I’ve always felt that way. Like Scrooge, I’ve always been happy to let others keep Christmas in their way and for me to not keep it in mine.

Two years ago, I was married. Our engagement happened over a Christmas season, so my wife was well aware before she married me that I’m not the Christmas type.

Well, you guessed it, she is insistent that I help pick out and decorate a tree, put up Christmas decorations, attend holiday events, and buy a bunch of Christmas gifts. I’ve told her point-blank that I will not do it. I’ve told her SHE is welcome to buy and decorate as many trees as she wants, but I’m not helping with it. This has led to a couple of arguments, tears and claims that I’m selfish. She’s not speaking to me after I told her yesterday that I wasn’t planning to be home for the big party she’s planning to throw.

To me, Christmas is like religion: Practice it if you want, but don’t nag other people to practice it with you, and don’t try to change people who are (or were) happy with their lives as they are. So who’s right here?
— Scrooge


Read more... )

***********


4. Dear Carolyn: Two years ago, my in-laws asked me and my husband if we wanted them to help us buy a house. They had asked before and we said no, but at this point we were ready to start building community roots, so we said yes please. With their help, we bought a house we love(d), a cozy four-bedroom house in a progressive suburb.

On a visit a few months later, my mother-in-law tutted over the two bedrooms we turned into our offices, commenting that “it will be hard to repurpose these for babies when it’s time.” At no point have we ever indicated that we plan to have children, and in fact we do not plan to, which we had to tell her then.

Carolyn, she was so upset that it was shocking. Though my father-in-law helped defuse, she bawled violently at this news and informed us that she felt like she had bought us a house under false pretenses. She eventually collected herself but was subdued for the rest of the planned visit, another day and a half.

It has been about 18 months since then, and our relationship is now chilly. I feel uncomfortable inviting them to our home because now I feel like they think we don’t deserve it. I find it hurtful to know they wanted us to have a nice house not so that we could enjoy our own lives, but to enrich their grandchildren. And at some level, I feel like we stole from them, even though it’s ridiculous.

Every week, I tell my husband I think we should sell the house, give them some of the proceeds and go back to apartment living. He says I’m nuts and to ignore his mom’s dramatics. But did we do something wrong here?
— Hurt


Read more... )
silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
Let's begin with finally understanding how the Dresden Codex is able to calculate eclipses with exacting accuracy.

Alice Wong, ceaseless activist and person who wanted us to really look at not just the body, but the person behind it, and who often wanted us to know about things that weren't necessarily meant for "polite company" about it, has died. She knew it would happen eventually, but we were always hoping she'd pen a few more things for us to chew upon.

Having banned them completely outside of research studies for the under-18 crowd, the UK is announcing a large-scale clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers in the under-18 cohort. Presumably so they can have their own conclusions about how safe and effective they are, even if that kind of conclusion is unlikely to be tolerated by the ministers who want to use it as a further cudgel.

We must once again stress that all things that are natural are not necessarily good for you, and that people who want to charge you money to give you no information about how to safely have birth, and who will actively encourage you not to seek appropriate care and assistance in the case of complications or emergencies are not trustworthy nor should they receive any kind of money at all. Of course, they're not advertising themselves that way, so it can be harder to spot the fakery until you're in it, and since it also preys upon the vulnerable, it may not be something that you notice is fakery or a problem until something terrible and tragic happens.

Even if the way that can be named is not the eternal Way, being able to identify and label your emotional states can go a significant way toward regulating them.

The usual: USPol, technological terrors and failures, and the rest )

Last out, the right to say no, and how the increased automation of things that need a human touch continues to erode that right, not the people directing the greater automation necessarily believe that the people they're automating were human in the first place, and the way that tools become integrated into the human experience, and how accepting things like the stochastic parrots in their current form only benefits the people who want to continue the dehumanization process.

And, of course, the Dreamwidth December points sale is on! Support the site with paid services, get 10% of your order in points that you can use to make a later purchase cheaper or free. And if you already have paid services and want Dreamwidth to continue as the best LJ fork created, and to also routinely assist in punching governments in the nose when they try to impose poorly-thought-out laws and rules under the guise of protecting children from adults, consider wither turning communities into paid accounts, adding icon slots, or playing Paid Account Fairy and using the function that allows you to gift paid time to a specific person or to a random active user of the site.

(Materials via [personal profile] adrian_turtle, [personal profile] azurelunatic, [personal profile] boxofdelights, [personal profile] cmcmck, [personal profile] conuly, [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] elf, [personal profile] finch, [personal profile] firecat, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] jenett, [personal profile] jjhunter, [personal profile] kaberett, [personal profile] lilysea, [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] rydra_wong, [personal profile] snowynight, [personal profile] sonia, [personal profile] the_future_modernes, [personal profile] thewayne, [personal profile] umadoshi, [personal profile] vass, the [community profile] meta_warehouse community, [community profile] little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

GenPrompt Bingo Card Round 29

Dec. 2nd, 2025 06:00 pm
senmut: Obi and Qui on either side of a saber (Star Wars: Jedi OTP 2)
[personal profile] senmut
Housewife / Househusband Tragedy Freestyle crossover Vignette Women Being Awesome
Five Things Contemporary AU A Moment of Understanding / Clarity A Strange Friend First person narration
Steampunk AU Horror Wild Card Second person narration Drama
Crossover: TV shows and movies There is No Escape A Test of Worthiness Reality is Illusion Taxes
High School / College AU Humour Teenagers A Blessing is Bestowed Furnishing the Home

[ SECRET POST #6906 ]

Dec. 2nd, 2025 05:57 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6906 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 17 secrets from Secret Submission Post #986.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Our 6-year-old is about to lose her first baby tooth, and my wife wants her to put it under her pillow and do the whole Tooth Fairy routine. I think this is idiotic. When I said so, my wife called me a killjoy and accused me of ruining a “sacred rite of childhood.” It’s 2025, and I’m pretty sure even little kids don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy anymore. Do I really have to play along with this?

—Dad Living In Reality


Read more... )

It's giving giving tuesday

Dec. 2nd, 2025 11:18 am
jadelennox: its the story of an ice cube but every time he feels happy it make him melt a little bit more (story of an ice cube)
[personal profile] jadelennox

For this week, for everyone who makes a donation to the BIJAN Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund, I will write a drabble about some character or show I know enough about to write. Since I've only written one fic since 2014 it's going to be rough, but BIJAN desperately needs the money and I'm going to try.

The Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund (the Bond Fund) raises money for immigration bonds to free people in ICE prisons in Massachusetts and Rhode Island or those detained elsewhere who are from or returning to MA.

Donate.

Tell me you made a donation and give me a prompt! If I don't know the source material we can negotiate.

(If you can't give money to a US org, make a donation to an org in your country that helps refugees and undocumented migrants stay.)

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