Doom

I knew which rock I wanted pretty early on into the looking phase, but was worried someone else would take it first. So I spent the 5 minutes looking at every other rock and finding something nice about it, in case the one I liked was taken and also the other one I liked was taken and also-

There were maybe 200 rocks.

When I explained my process, I was told that sounded pretty exhausting.

Rise of a Mighty Pirate™ Process and less blurry pictures below

Spent the last couple days on this. Many a black tea bag was sacrificed.

If you want to make your own, here's the stuff I printed. These are 300dpi (assuming tumblr lets that happen) formatted for A4 paper.

Print in black, not in color.

Menstruation happens when the uterus built up some nice tissue for an egg but then there is no egg, so the tissue is flushed out with blood. Building up/removing tissue is a resource intensive process for your body. If it doesn't have resources, it can't do that.

While people throughout history weren't necessarily malnourished, humanity spent a lot of its time min-maxing calorie intake and physical labor. The massive conveniences we have in getting food today is, historically speaking, a super new development.

So. Limited Food + Hard Work = Very Few Resources To Spare For Reproduction = Less Periods (both in frequency and volume)

Back in the day, we also breastfed for much longer than we do today, which takes up more resources (we can group this under "hard work") and of course there were more pregnancies than we have today.

Su Hepburn of the Brighton Museum suggests that during the Stone Age, about 50 periods throughout life were typical. Today, that number is around 450.

Sidenote: "tens of thousands of years" is indeed a conservative estimate. We started wearing clothing sometime between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago, which makes them a pretty new invention in human history. The Stone Age lasted about 3.4 million years. (It only ended between 6000 and 4000 years ago) and Homo Sapiens hit the scene about 300,000 years ago.

So yeah, we did just kinda freebleed (assuming we did bleed) for possibly most of human history. We were also naked for a good bit of it (estimated 90,000 years between hairlessness and clothing).

Later in history, when we did have periods, we had a couple of ways of dealing with it, depending on environment and culture.

If you did have something soft around like (animal) hair, plant fiber, possibly moss, leftovers from making clothing (rags), etc., you could turn that into some sort of soaking device, either to be worn or to clean yourself off. These would most likely be made and used as needed, so there's a lot variety across human history.

I think theres a bit of a modern standard applied in the rant above because we treat menstruation very differently today, with our secret disposable pads and tampons that can stay there for hours and soak up soooo much liquid that you can wear them for hours without staining your clothes. If you were freebleeding in very early times, you could just wipe that shit off. Depending on your culture that would've been a super normal thing to do, or, if there was stigma around menstruation, you may have been isolated, so nobody was looking anyway. But also. Back in the olden times, you did stain your clothes. You'd clean them if possible but they definitely get dirty when you live a hunter gatherer lifestyle instead of an office job. Blood on your clothes didn't make them non-functional. You clean as best you can and put them back on. They're valuable for their functionality, first and foremost.

As we developed new technologies, our options expanded. Ancient Egypt saw the use of papyrus, in Ancient China they may have used absorbent paper, and in Ancient Greece they apparently wrapped lint around a small stick to fashion a tampon. When cloth became somewhat widely available, that was a popular and reusable choice. Specifically made pads if you could afford it (you couldnt) or, ykno, rags you scraped together.

Yeah I've never really understood the 'oh cats are so picky lol they refuse perfectly good food' deal.

Like damn, the little guy who is fully reliant on you for every aspect of their survival and eats basically the same damn thing every single day doesn't like it anymore because the recipe changed? Should we call the press?

Honestly IME it's been pretty straightforward- new brand makes them puke? Not useful for sustenance, throw it out. The brand he's always fine with it suddenly unacceptable? Either somethings wrong with it or the formula is different and he doesn't feel safe. Not useful, throw it out. Recall announcement? Company revealed to be unsafe? Dangerous ingredients? That' not NUTRITION, why would I buy it?

What's the alternative, anyways? STARVE him until he eats it?? He's my SON

I had a Kakashi bookmark so we held it up against the screen as a joke but the static actually cleared up. Mystified, we tried different bookmarks and objects with the same plastic material but nothing else worked, only the Kakashi bookmark.

We ended up taping it to the corner of the screen and it stayed there for 11 years until we moved out. When I was older people would be like “can you move the bookmark off the screen” bc it did sort of block a bit of the view but I would demonstrate the static issue and everyone was always just like “huh. what the hell?? well…alright.”

So naturally a regular apartment for regular jobs in the 2010s has a computer. Said Computer had broken. Technicians were called. They tried all day, but couldn't fix it. They'd come back the next day.

In the middle of the night, my friend goes to the bathroom and passes the computer room. The 80-something year old nun, who barely knows what a computer even is, is in there.

She stands before the monitor (which, to her, is the computer), sprinkling holy water and declaring that the power of the lord shall compel it. Repeatedly and with the unwavering faith only a very elderly nun could have. The power of the lord shall compel it, as that is what the power of the lord does.

The next day it was fixed.

Chewing sticks are basically sticks from specific trees that you strip some of the bark off, chew to loosen up the inner fibers, and then brush your teeth with said fibers. You cut off the fibers every other day and strip off more bark so the sticks also force you to keep replacing your toothbrush a bit better than normal ones do because you’re literally whittling them down to nothing over time.

No toothpaste required because the sticks naturally have fluoride in them and being, you know, sticks, they’re biodegradable by nature. So no plastic from the toothpaste because there is no toothpaste and no plastic from the stick because it’s a stick.

Some brands sell them wrapped in plastic but you know, not all of them do that. And you can get a reusable container to put them in when you’re not using them.

But because zero waste people are super into finding complicated ways to reduce plastic usage I was surprised I’ve never heard of these things being discussed in the zero waste YouTube channels I’ve watched. They talk about like bamboo toothbrushes and refillable toothpaste and whatnot. Not chewing sticks.

I’m using them because I can just keep one in my pocket in its little container and they’re super stiff and my gums need strengthening according to my hygienist. (Note if you decide to use these things your gums might bleed the first few times because the fibers are so stiff)

Only real downside I can find is the bristles pointing forward, not sideways, so it's probably difficult to reach all areas properly, especially if you've never done it before.