"There are situations in life where we find ourselves holding our breath, and getting the fists clenched, or the shoulders come up, or the jaw gets tight. It actually isn't doing anything for anyone, that tension. As soon as you notice tension - in jaws, shoulder, neck, hands, belly, those are kind of key places - as soon as you notice it, why not just let it go, and then see what happens? Actually you can deal with situations of stress much better in a state of relaxation than in a state of tension. It's no good relaxing in a relaxing atmosphere - I mean, yes, it's nice to relax in a relaxing atmosphere - but that's not what the relaxation awareness is about. We're discovering relaxation through noticing unnecessary tension, discovering how to let that tension go, so that when things get tough we can stay relaxed. And you're relaxing in order to do something, so the tension that gets held in tense muscles redirects... If that emotional content stays in the holding muscles it's doing nobody any good. It's pointless. So you might as well relax and then see what happens." - Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice with Kristin Linklater on The 21st Century Creative podcast

doodles of my fav sillies

anton belongs to @poicyss

I really don't like our brain's ability to jump from "I'm going to organise all this stuff and catch up with a bunch of tasks" to "it's time to get stuck in an increasingly distressing thought spiral for several hours, accidentally trigger yourself, then feel like shit because you haven't done anything but also haven't managed to rest".

like please can we maybe have like a nice middleground where we do a few things and then rest for a while and don't experience the full range of human emotions over the course of about 3 hours

what do you recommend for dying with beets? Use raw fiber, batts or already spun yarns? Cotton or wool? Do I have to shred up the beets or can I use the juice in the can and eat the beets myself ? Does it smell like beets? Use color fixer or something more natural? Dyou tbink I can like speckle it on an already commercially dyed pink yarn for pops of darker pink? or dip dye it for pink gradients?

Tbh I would recommend absolutely none of this, for the sole reason that beets, like red cabbage and tumeric, do not produce lasting dyes. The colors you get from them don't want to stick to things and even if you do manage to transfer color from the dyebath to your fiber, it will come out pretty quickly (within months at best) and usually the end result is something that kind of just looks stained.

To attempt to answer most of your questions though (which are very good questions, but would be answered with an unequivocal No if you're asking them about beets specifically):

I personally prefer dyeing things as washed fleece (not raw--you need to remove the dirt and lanolin or no dye will stick). It feels safest to me and I enjoy the extra freedom it gives over dyeing as yarn--with dyed fleece I can alter the color just by mixing other things in as I card it, or I can pull out the most vibrantly dyed sections and process them separately for different effects, etc. But it's entirely personal preference, and you can dye either yarn or fiber using natural materials without much difference.

I would not recommend dyeing batts using any traditional dyeing methods (except perhaps solar dyeing, which is very gentle), as the likelihood that you come out of it with a batt that's still spinnable, at least without reprocessing, is definitely lower than with fleece. I have heard of people dyeing batts by cooking them in a tray of dyebath in the oven, but I've never tried it and can't speak to how well it works. Batts should be alright with acid dyes, but natural dyes are (for the most part) not instant and require more time, heat, exposure, etc.

Wool is much easier to dye than cotton. I would always recommend testing new dyeing ideas on wool rather than a plant based fiber if possible.

Dicing or grating the dye material is not strictly necessary but is a good idea for larger or less permeable materials--for example, I don't bother shredding avocado peels because they just don't need it as they're very thin. But I do always chop avocado pits into small pieces, because cooking whole avocado pits is not very energy efficient, and possibly would not get all the dye out.

I definitely would not recommend trying to dye things using cans of food (especially the juice or canning water from said foods). You will get better, more vibrant color with fresh dye materials than with dried or frozen dye materials, and I have to imagine that extends to canned goods as well. Generally you also want to use both the juice and the fruit/vegetable/whatever, as you'll get a lot more color that way. I suppose if you were only dyeing a tiny amount of fiber, just using, say, blueberry juice and keeping the blueberries to continue cooking into jam, you'd be fine. Same if you had tons of blueberries and could easily amass large amounts of blueberry juice. But a definite limiting factor in natural dyeing is the amount of dye material that you can get your hands on, so people usually use all of that material instead of trying to reserve parts of it for eating.

I have never found that the smell of the dye material transfers to wool when it's dyed. Once it's dry it just smells like wool. Not necessarily the case with plant fibers, but I would generally not worry about making your wool smell like food permanently.

I don't know what color fixer is (the only thing with that exact name that came up was a laundry detergent for colored clothes that may have fugitive dyes--definitely do not use this in the place of a mordant), but the majority of natural dyes need things called mordants to adhere the color to the material. The more natural types of mordants are minerals (copper and iron are very commonly used) or tannins (such as from soaking acorns or from walnut hulls). Unless you are using a dye material that doesn't need a mordant (indigo and woad, for example, are well known for not needing mordants--although you also can't just throw them in a pot with water and simmer for a while to extract the dye from them, it's more involved than that. So there are trade offs), you will always need to mordant your fiber to get a good and long lasting color. For example, if you want to dye some wool with yellow onion skins and you don't mordant the wool, you will still end up with dyed wool. But it's a very light wheat color. If you want rich colors, you need to use a mordant.

Natural dyes are not suited for speckling yarns. Acid dyes work great for that, but natural dyes usually require you to fully immerse the fiber in the dyebath, and then expose it to heat over a long period of time. I do know that you can get speckled yarns using resist dyeing methods--essentially, if you take a skein of yellow yarn and tie sections of it very tightly and then dye it all in a red dyebath, you would get a primarily red (or reddish orange, perhaps) yarn with yellow speckles wherever those ties were. So that is one method that you could use to get a speckled yarn with natural dyes. But the method you're suggesting (just speckling it with a paintbrush or your hands for pops of different colors) is not suited to natural dyes. The most likely outcome of that would be no obvious change whatsoever. The second most likely outcome is probably just yarn with intermittent and random stains.

Natural dyes are not suited to dip dyeing, either. I think you could potentially get it to work, or at least get similar effects--you could mordant a piece of fabric/hank of yarn and then cook it in the dyebath like normal except leave part of it sitting next to and above the pot, which would then remain undyed. But whether the yarn would felt or get weird or whether there would be any unforeseen complications, that I don't know. It sounds like a good thing to experiment with once you already have some foundational knowledge of natural dyeing. But I wouldn't recommend it as a first project, for sure.

It sounds like the parts of dyeing that you have an interest in are better suited to acid dyes, so that might be a better route for you to go down ! If you do want to try natural dyes, I would recommend starting out with some good beginner dye materials, such as onion skins (by far the easiest and least bad-smelling dye material I've ever used, this would be my firm recommendation). Another good option would be powdered madder or other powdered dye materials (I specifically say madder, though, because it yields beet reds) that can be done without much fuss.

I hope this was helpful !

Since Alastor doesn't want to spend time with Vox, the hotel probably throws Vox to Pentious, so he will be his problem. He would be like, " Now I need to baby prof not just for my eggs but also taller people :{ "

In the end, he could be able to help a little (when you bother teaching the person what to do[cough cough Alastor is a bad teacher cough ])

Vox is actually able to interact with the Egg Bois pretty well; he’s not clumsy in most respects, his electricity is just super volatile. As long as he doesn’t turn up the heat too much, he can’t really hurt them (they’re raygun resistant, after all), which is a nice change of pace for him. Doesn’t mean there aren’t still some incidents, but regardless.

Yeah, Pentious is really good for Vox. He’s willing to be patient with him due to the respect he has for (ex-)overlords and the fact that keeping an eye on him/potentially rescuing him was the whole reason he was sent to the hotel in the first place. Vox’s retention may not be great, but if you can keep him calm and on task, he’s actually pretty decent at his job— it just takes some wrangling. It’s convenient that Pen doesn’t have any particular responsibilities at the hotel unlike a lot of the other residents, so he can basically help Vox full-time. It’s with Pen’s help that Vox goes from constantly frying things to only doing so in moments of high emotion or if he spends too much time on/in something.

...

taking my dog to the vet is always annoying as fuck cuz they just assume im a Shitty Pet Owner right out the gate. yes i forgot on his last rabies vaccine but remember My Cat Died in Y'alls Facility In December. im sorry i was preoccupied with my Cat Dying of Kidney Failure. its only been like a year & 6 months since his last vaccine & i know he does not have fucking rabies. im not some anti-vaxxer freak !!!

success: navigated several conflicting tutorials to open up my old laptop and remove the hard drive without, apparently, breaking it.

not such a success: opened the magic portal on my new pc that is meant to allow me to plug hard drives into it without opening the case and. hm. I think the "3.5 inch hard drive" thing refers to width and not length. the laptop hard drive is much too small to fit.

conclusion: I'll be using a pen drive for today to bring over my stardew valley save files and mods etc, and figuring out something else - maybe just giving up and getting a portable hard drive - later.

(okay, yes, I installed SV on here yesterday to get photos of my li'l farmer for the trans gaming avatar survey thing and realised that SV on a big screen and a good smooth computer is a thing that makes my heart very happy. it might take a while to actually get around to the games I bought this computer for. what a shame.)

(edit: bonus farmer avatar, because I'm feeling fond about it)

putting together an outfit for work has become a hellish infuriating task for us recently literally spent the last 2 hours trying to put something together that didn't make us feel like shit & FAILED!! did not even find something we literally just gave up

Trying to trouble-shoot a customer over a phone is always an exercise in "stick to Norwegian you gremlin" for me. I so badly want to use English lingo for things, but my poor customers barely understand what I'm saying in Norwegian, let alone English! The amount of times I end up apologising because my explanations are shit are numerous, and most of the time my customers are really nice about it.

Although, I do loathe having to trouble-shoot networking over the phone. It's a pain in the ass, and it's difficult to find the problem when there are so many moving parts to a network.

At least the customer and I can joke around a little and make the process more pleasant for the both of us. Especially when the problem may have been a wonky cable, and not something much more expensive that must be replaced.

Today is the first day I've had any lasting free time and my brain is just. a rock. a smooth polished stone. I can't even get myself to read new fanfic now that I have the time, I'm just... sittin here

I am not giving you the option of never doing dishes lol I'm sorry, this is for folks who do dishes at least every once in awhile

(^ that's no shade on anyone who can't/don't do dishes, I just need opinions from folks who deal with dishes in general xD)

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went downstairs and immediately saw a tiny moth. fuck yeah

unethical life pro tip for my fellow adult autistics who also have ocd or other anxiety disorders that make your texture reactions Worse: the Perfect amount of alcohol actually acts as a Mental Shield that will protect you from the Texture Induced Bad Times. But Watch Out

"Challenging emotional experiences in our own lives are frequently accompanied by anxiety because we know the effects of those experiences will be ongoing and we'll continue to have to deal with them. However, research by Thalia Goldstein has shown that when we watch television and movies that depict similarly challenging emotional experiences, while we still feel the same emotions we would in real life, we do so without anxiety. ...They called this the distancing-embracing model, and it explains why we can actually enjoy the negative emotions we experience when we consume art. According to the model, art keeps consumers at a safe distance from the suffering it depicts but is simultaneously attention-getting, emotionally involving, and memorable. So, while we feel the emotions art conveys, the distance it offers provides us with power and control, allowing us to feel safe to experience those emotions."

-  Finding Truth in Fiction: What Fan Culture Gets Right--and Why It's Good to Get Lost in a Story