As someone with fibromyalgia severe enough to have me on a walker or bed-bound, it took ten years (beginning about age 15) for diagnosis because I was told I was being dramatic or just needed to try harder. In that time, with no alternative, I worked and suffered through numerous intense manual labour jobs.
Because I didn’t listen to my body, I have long term damage that can’t be repaired. I was only taken seriously when I ended up in hospital for a week about two years ago. It should not have had to go that far.
I’m telling you, one spoonie to another:
“Push through the pain,” isn’t an option when your body trying to tell you something.
Chronic pain (even without a diagnosis) is real and serious and needs to be treated as such. I hear you, I believe you.
There are plenty of Neo Nazis in black metal, which is unfortunate. The genre is still fantastic. But here’s a few bands that you can check out that are most definitely not Nazi garbage and aren’t even European!
ASIA:
Rudra
Salem
Melechesh
Arsames (they’re death metal but apparently it’s illegal in Iran but Iran has a LOT of good metal)
Chthonic (blackened death metal but they’re awesome and from Taiwan)
Gallhammer
AMERICA (not just the states):
Agalloch
Wolves in the Throne Room
Alma Negra
Brujeria (more death metal but they need an honorable mention)
METAL BANDS I KNOW FOR A FACT ARENT NEO NAZIS BECAUSE THE BAND MEMBERS ARE CHILL PEOPLE:
Primordial
Enslaved
Isengard (tbh if it is named after something Tolkien, we are in the clear)
Immortal (Abbath is a good dude!)
Dark Funeral (they’re more Satanic so)
Gorgoroth (Gaahl is openly gay and they’re lyrics are also Satanic)
Darkthrone (also Satanic and Ferniz is a good dude)
Falkenbach (solo project and it’s more about Germanic paganism. I haven’t heard anything problematic yet)
Myrkur (a solo project ran by a woman!)
Behemoth (Nergal is pretty anti-Christian and critical about the Polish government)
Wikipedia and other sites are a good way to check on whether or not their political affiliations are concerning. Unfortunately, a lot of Nazism is in the beginning of black metal (thanks, Varg) but also strongly anti-Christian.
Black metal is diverse, thankfully. Rudra’s lyrics are sometimes the Vedic scriptures and then Wolves in the Throne Room is more about the environment. Black metal exists in a lot of countries and it can be politically critical of their governments (Chthonic) or it is a tool to express yourself when you can’t always (Arsames). It’s grown, people experiment with it, and people don’t stay in the box that Mayhem wanted to be in.
A good book to read to is “Lords of Chaos” that gets into the nitty gritty history of black metal. HAVE FUN.
The exploitation part of Capitalism isn’t just that your boss profits by taking most of the results of your labour (you know, the ‘having to bake a loaf of bread in order to be able to afford a slice of bread’ thing) but also because your boss carries no responsibility for depleting your resources (energy, health, joy, etc).
Your boss can assign you a job that drains you physically and emotionally and how and whether you recover is not his concern. If you need to use your weekend to work a second job to pay the rent, that’s not his concern. If the weekend isn’t actually long enough to overcome the intense stress of your job, that’s not his concern. Even the most basic physical safety rules had to be fought for tooth and nail.
Your boss doesn’t just exploit you by taking what you make and taking time from your life, but also by exhausting and damaging your body and mind and taking no responsibility for it’s recovery.
This last thing is something we often overlook and as a result we reproduce it in our own community and activism. Think about it: how often have you done physically and emotionally draining activist work and not talked at all about the recovery after that action or taken responsibility as a group for the recovery of the bodies and minds that you use?
reminder that the 8 hour day is no longer necessary due to advances in production (most people get a day’s worth of work done in four hours anyway) and a lengthy work day is designed to prevent poor and working people from having the means to fight back, organize, and improve their working and living conditions.
The 8 hour day has never been necessary. It was what unions could achieve at the time and as a huge step forward it was hard won but ‘necessary’ had nothing to do with it.
thinking this also applies nowadays to white collar corporate frontliners working unofficial 60 and 70 hour weeks exempt, who might potentially decide to utilize their strategic and executive skills to push back if they weren’t fed lies about passion and kept in a routinely exhausted and depleted state.
Absolutely. White collar workers, especially in creative jobs, are told a flattering individualist narrative about how lucky they are to be able to ‘do what they love’ no matter how draining it is.
Working 70 hours a week coding video games and have no energy left to do anything? But you’re doing what you love! Organising your whole life around working for that NGO and still can’t make rent? But you’re doing what you love! Accept that unpaid overtime, skip lunch to meet that deadline, cancel dinner plans, abandon all quality of life, you’re the lucky few who do what they love! And nothing else matters.
This is of course bullshit. The ‘do what you love’ workers are not lucky, they’re just exploited through a different narrative.
As someone who works for a nonprofit, this is 10000000% true and accurate and no matter how “radical” your nonprofit is, none of them actually want to talk about labor. Ever.
TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Non-profits are some of the worst in the “do what you love sacrifice your whole life and yhour mental health to us for shit pay and still answer to a boss like every other worker” game.
There do exist jobs that require full time sacrifice of oneself to the job, but those are raising children or livestock. Working too hard damages your ability to work in future, reducing net work ability. Don’t. Do not
You’re making some thinking errors here:
–
‘jobs that require full time sacrifice’
can be separated into smaller work loads with shared responsibilities
– while it is true that working too hard
damages your ability to work in future, it is far more important to note that
working too hard
damages your ability to have a life that is worth living, now and in the future. We don’t live to work. Our quality of life is far more important.
– telling workers ‘Do not’ give their all to the job isn’t worth much, because the reality is that workers have no control over how much they work. ‘Know that this is exploitation even if you work in a creative field’ and ‘unite with other workers to collectively resist this’ would be better advice by far.
Telling employers that they are damaging future assets is an effective way to reduce their damaging behaviour. Change their thinking and they will change their behaviour. Examples of jobs that require full time sacrifice and cannot be further subdivided reasonably includes running a family farm in a community of similar farms. You will potentially be called on by or calling on a neighbour at three in the morning because your cattle are having calving troubles or something is on fire. Once hay season starts, you don’t stop working each day until you have no light, and you pray to any gods that are in the neighbourhood that the rain doesn’t come in. In winter you have to check the animals, clean the pens and yard, and feed the animals. And gardening is a perpetual war against weeds and vermin. Could you hire help? Sure! Then all of you work that hard anyway.
Telling employers that they are damaging future assets is a useful thing to do if you are talking only to an employer and want to change nothing about his worldview except for the immediate effect of shorter working hours for employees.
In every other context, you are reinforcing the incredibly damaging idea that workers are ‘assets’ defined by their productivity instead of human beings forced to sell most of their lives, physical and mental health to survive under capitalism and employers are making money of our stolen lives.
The idea that a family farm is a life of full time sacrifice is true only in the context of capitalism, where farmers are extremely underpaid for their product and are forced to work themselves to their limits to get by. The family that works themselves close to collapse every harvest is a family that has been forced by capitalism to work far beyond their capacity.
Popular images of the past tell us that we used to work much harder but this is a lie. Before the pressures of capitalism, farmers had an abundance of leisure. Medieval farm work was interrupted by meals, naps and rest breaks even at the height of harvest seasons and holidays were plentiful. The medieval worker worked less than 8 hours a day and had a lot of resting days and holidays, having far less working days in total than workers today. http://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/171513139023/one-of-capitalisms-most-durable-myths-is-that-it
If we got rid of capitalism, no one would have to sacrifice their life to a job. We need to call this what it is: exploitation, the theft of our very lives for profit.
Yes! Stretch your imagination! Imagine a hundred people who all turn up and get the harvest in, not for the pay, but because everyone depends on the harvest getting in. And these hundred people who show up, they are willing and able to do so because their needs are getting met-they are eating, thier emotions are being held, they are connected deeply to community and know that when they have the equivalent problem the community will show up. People say it’s not possible but it’s actually the way humans have organized themselves in many ways, through many different mechanisms throughout time. (Sources? Debt: The first 5000 years. Also, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, same author).
Break out of the box! We could do it differently. Really we could. We can, maybe. Maybe just in little clusters at first. That’s why it’s so vital to educate yourself and keep passing it on.
Yes.There are so many other ways too in which we would have to work so much less if we shared our resources, our tools, our time. The ‘self-sustaining farm’ existing on the edges of capitalism does not provide a good model at all for how our lives would be outside capitalism.
Remember our history. Our discourse cannot be sound without it. This is our legacy.
i’m pretty sure i’ve reblogged this before, but i’m gonna go ahead and do it again because the late ‘80s / early ‘90s were fucking terrifying. queer rights was literally a life and death struggle.
there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll – step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
I hate this. I have always hated it.
Just a little insight; there is not some magical age when you suddely stop being interested in things you’ve always been interested in. There’s no magical age where you suddenly feel old and say, “fuck it, I don’t enjoy things anymore, better start preparing for imminent death.” I was a child in the 80’s, I grew up on Nintendo and cartoons and anime after school, like the original Voltron. I never stopped liking these things. I still play video games, I still watch anime and read manga and books and fall in love with movies. The first “fanfiction” I ever wrote was a story based off Grimm’s Fairy Tales when I was eight, scribed in cursive in a composition book. I’ve been drawing since I was a wee tot, I can still draw fanart if I want. I’m not going to stop doing what I enjoy and find an “acceptable” hobby.
I’ve been involved in fandom one way or another for almost two decades, and I watched people far older than me carve out this space. Middle aged women built this. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve watched purges, lost stories when FF.net decided to change its rating system, saw the wankiest of wank on LJ, tiptoed through the mine field, and watched AO3 thankfully become a thing. I’m not leaving.
There also seems to be a tone of sexism in this line of thinking. Fandom, which has generally been populated mostly by women is seen as something immature and frivolous and stupid, whereas hobbies and interests that have been traditionally populated mainly by men are fine. It’s totally okay for a fifty year old guy to play fantasy football, paint his face in team colors, and guzzle beer on a Sunday while yelling at a tv screen, but we can’t write fanfiction or draw fanart once we aren’t teenagers anymore?
And what would be a more acceptable use of my adult time? Knitting tea cozies, baking, cleaning, having my girlfriends over for lunch so we can gossip about Betty’s new hair style?
Seriously, fuck that. You can pry fandom from my cold dead hands.
My favorite fanfic ever have been written by a women in her 30’s. So thank’s God fandom isn’t only for teenagers because she wrote a masterpiece, and I’m glad I get to read it.
I started writing fan fiction when internet was not yet real. Best we had were 4044 and 8088 computers without hard drives back then and BBC boards were all people could use. Only one in 20 households even had computers back then and my family was among the first to get one. When the 486 enhanced tray machines hit the market, internet exploded as did the number of computer owners as it had a hard drive so you did not need shelves of 5 inch floppies to save everything and having to swap out disks every 15 minutes to do any writing.
So teenagers giving older writers a problem need to realize that people like me who are now grandmas invented their fan fiction genre long ago. I remember when Fanfiction.net started, and was one of the first authors on there. Left that site for a while, and then returned. Got kicked off because I thought there was a mature section that did not exist, and now I’m back a third time on that site and many others. So yeah, I was on the net when it was emerging, and I been fan fiction writing the whole time. I’m stomping 50, and my writing gets better with age.So if you ever cross paths with a snotty teen, remind them that the 50 year old writers invented their fan fiction, and the 30 somethings carried it forward so that so many fanfiction friendly sites exist for them to play with the newer characters that they love. ROFL.
@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???
I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.
The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.
Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.
Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.
To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.
This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.
However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!
On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.
The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.
Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*
reblogging for the line “Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety”.
Also: horses have very limited depth perception. You know that thing where you out your finger on the bridge of your nose and it disappears because it’s behind your field of vision? Now imagine your nose is as long as a horse’s. The blind spot in front of a horse’s nose is huge, four to six feet or so. When a horse jumps, it can’t see the fence, it has to be trained / remember to look for it and remember where it is and how high. They cannot tell if that is a spot of oil or a black hole in the road. It’s probably a black hole. Better avoid it.
Horses can’t see your hand, they smell the treat (and use very sensitive skin/whiskers to feel.) Some horses are garbage at doing this gently, just absolutely awful, but remember – they can’t see what they’re doing.
Horses also have partial color vision – they see horse relevant colors. Blue, yellow and therefore green. No red derived colors. If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip, ride it in an arena with alternating sections of purple and yellow seating. Grey grey YELLOW YELLOW HOLY SHIIIIIIIT. Every single horse would walk past the purple seats and go OH MY FUCK at the yellow ones. This is why the bright red (grey) bucket isn’t a problem, but oH my FfffffffffSHIttTTTT do they notice a stray yellow plastic grocery bag.
Last statement here is, instinct tells a horse that anything clinging to your back is going to eat you. That we spend so much effort convincing them otherwise is amazing and in general a testament to the human race’s commitment to Bad Ideas.
Thank u horse science side of tumblr
If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip is by far my most fav sentence
I was born in ‘77 so I saw this on TV a lot as a kid, and it always creeped me right the fuck out. I can’t even articulate why. It is objectively so innocuous.
The music was composed by Walt Kraemer, arranged by Ed Bogas, vocals by The Pointer Sisters (all 4 of them). It was recorded in 1976 and it debuted in Feb ‘77. A segment for number one was never produced.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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