Michael Parkes "Dante and Beatrice" 1993

not to be pretentious, but a lot of stuff you guys complain is being ruined by capitalism/the algorithm/whatever can be solved by consuming something else than the most basic mainstream stuff that's thrown in your lap. "songs nowadays are getting shorter to fit entire tiktoks and it's ruining music" have you tried listening to something else than Spotify's Top 100 my dude? "fanfiction-to-publishing pipeline is churning out mediocre books and it's ruining literature" have you tried reading something outside the NYT bestseller list my dude? This is not a post about how algorithm based industries give visibility to the lowest common denominator art at the expense of actually creative and meaningful art that struggles to make itself known, which is a valid discussion for another time, this is about people actively not giving this kind of art their visibility because they won't get out of their way to discover stuff outside the mainstream radar and prefer to be passively fed what to consume while bitching that is not up to their tastes.

I LOVE that!!

I’m so glad you had a good doctor who was looking at the complete picture of your health and not just treating your symptoms. It takes a lot of determination to make lifestyle changes like that, but 9 times out of 10 the effort is worth it.

Nutrition and good health (and mental health!) go hand in hand.

pre menstrual sadness beats my ass every month and I can't do anything about it

You consider regulating a woman’s hormones to be “hippie shit”? That’s frightening.

Meds have their place, but no good doctor would prescribe them prior to confirming whether a person’s basic health is what it should be. And when a woman is experiencing severe mood swings during her period, that points to a problem with disregulatee hormones, not brain chemistry.

pre menstrual sadness beats my ass every month and I can't do anything about it

For those of you who weren’t able to get 100% of the total solar eclipse today… I gotchu <3

Lazy Afternoon by Biederer Studio

Just wanted to say I have been internet-less for a while now, due to damage from a thunderstorm, and it's not clear when the problem will be fixed! Hopefully by Monday but that's also what they said last week. At first I was able to find some 3G here by sitting perilously on the very edge of that one specific window on the 1st floor of the barn >

—but this no longer works for some reason. That's too bad because while I waited 5min for websites to load like it's 2001 I could watch the llamas bounce about and the chickens scour the pasture for insects, it was like having a real life Windows screensaver. But this week was very windy so I assume the elusive airborne internet in this corner of my barn has floated away elsewhere.

My next solution was climbing up to the plateau through the woods with my laptop under my arm to go sit in a pasture that's famous (to me and 1 neighbour) for having inexplicably good cell reception. It's funny because I sat nowhere near the road but Pandolf kept patrolling all over to check for enemies while I checked for emails so people driving by kept stopping their car and crossing the pasture to come say hi like, "I recognised your dog from afar!" I've had better luck keeping in touch with people I know via this great new social network called DogRun than via modern means of communication.

The guy who owns the pasture also came to say hi and when I told him what I was doing here, he looked at his phone and went like, wow, there /is/ great reception here, better than at my farm, I could come check my email here too. So this cow pasture is poised to become a trendy new coworking space.

But then I had to make a video call and that exceeded the capacities of even the great 3G Pasture, so I had to drive several km to sit under a tree a few hundred metres away from a village so I can leech their amazing urban 4G.

This is probably how a mediaeval peasant would make a Zoom call, once a week riding their donkey across the countryside to go sit in a field near the ramparts of the nearest fortified village and enjoy their feudal lord-sponsored high-speed connection.

Yes, hands down, one hundred percent. Each school should have its own community garden and green house that every class tends to regularly — and certain teachers and families sign up to oversee for a week each during the summer — and then all of that food should be served in the school cafeteria. I have thought about this a lot and I feel very strongly about it.

Why?

Because the food that kids are served in school cafeterias is all sugar and refined white flour, it’s AWFUL. Don’t even get me started on those school provided breakfasts. And then we wonder why our kids have attention problems and disregulates nervous systems that then require medication, or why heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are so prevalent. It ALL starts with what we eat, and we eat like trash in the U.S..

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde.

Emotional and energetic changes are normal throughout our cycles, but they shouldn’t be so severe that they give us whiplash. Sounds like you may need to balance your hormones so you’re not crashing at the end of every month. Start gently with something like seed cycling, regular sun exposure, and exercise for several cycles before reaching for pharmaceuticals. Our bodies can often right themselves if given the opportunity.

pre menstrual sadness beats my ass every month and I can't do anything about it

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function