esteoli

1) don't use speedball or other water based inks. They suck, they're always patchy, they dry too fast on the block. I use Caligo Safe Wash bc it's water soluble so I don't need to use oil for clean up, but other oil based inks will work well too.

2) if you're still getting patchy prints, dampen your paper. I like heavy paper, and it def needs to be damp to print well. I just throw a towel down, use a mister bottle (spray up in the air over the paper, not at the paper) then put the towel over and blot. I'll spritz again if needed through the printing process.

3) Everyone has their own registration system but I like to make a jig out of cardboard (free) where the lino sits in a hole cut out of it, and use a little cardboard L-shaped "bumper" to line up the upper left corner of the paper.

4) Edges--i hate getting chatter on my borders, but cutting right at the edge makes it hard to ink, gets ink on fingers, jig ect. Trial and error have shown me a 1/8" border cut at a downward 45ish° angle is the best solution

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

One thing I'd like to add- not only are these fictitious bills a scam, we're not even the people they're trying to scam. Like, yes, it's a great side benefit to the assclowns who write these scam bills that anyone who isn't a cishet WASP gets to run scared, but these scam bills are about money.

Everyone involved in the creation of a Scary Squant Bill knows that it's never, ever, ever going to become law. These bills are designed to die in committee, die when transferring between the House and Senate, or get vetoed by the President (assuming they're a Democrat). If they're not 100% fictitious, they're usually badly written, vague, impossible to enforce, and just... Bad Law. Because they're not designed to be law, they're designed to showboat.

The thing these bills are intended to do is give new right-wing Congresspeople, or Congresspeople in contested districts, a Legislative Accomplishment. When election time rolls around, the fascist scumbag can go to the people who voted for them and go "look, I tried to write the Scary Squant Bill you all wanted, and then the mean evil left-wing villain of the week stopped us! You need to vote for us and give us money so we can pass the Squant Bill!"

And then they get their votes and their money and repeat the entire process until we kick them out.

You notice how every recent anti-trans bill that has actually made it to a court has been shot down? Even in, like, Alabama? Even when it gets in front of a conservative judge appointed by Trump who is completely politically in support of it? Most of these """laws""" are so bad that if you care about the law for its own sake, at all, you have a professional duty to send them back to the hell they came from, even if you're a flaming bigot.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.