Ghoulish Goblin

Did you know the ancient greeks invented cheesecake? It’s true. There’s even a real working recipe that is, allegedly, historically accurate.

https://digventures.com/2015/09/recipe-how-to-make-your-very-own-ancient-greek-cheesecake/

I love that Americans are known for complimenting strangers. I love that we fry everything, and that we do it well. I love 12-foot-high plastic Halloween skeletons in people’s yards and tacky Christmas lights that stay up too long. I love that we are an unabashedly goofy people.

I love bluegrass music. I love stepping. I love that there are always folklorico dancers in my town’s Mardi Gras parade. I love that my town has a Mardi Gras parade, even though most people here aren’t Catholic or French and didn’t grow up with any kind of Carnivale tradition. I love that if "Livin On A Prayer" comes on a pizzeria, at least one person at each table won't be able to stop themselves from singing along. I love that the middle school gym shakes to the rafters when families cheer for THEIR baby finishing eighth grade and that they bring balloons and bouquets and flower garlands to celebrate.

I love the 80 year old couple at our local No Kings protest. I love all the little kids there with their families, too. I love the brass band that always shows up at protests here and plays old union songs and gospel music. I cry like a damn baby every time I hear “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

So are

colostomy bags

Diapers

insulin pumps

Oxygen systems

rollators

hearing aids

compression garments

prosthetics

FREEDOM AIDS

- service animals

- noise cancelling headphones/ear defenders

- wheelchair attachments

- fidgets

IT’S DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH YALL

Content warning: abuse.

Financial abuse

Financial abuse is defined as “behavior that seeks to control a person’s ability to acquire, use, or maintain economic resources, and threatens their self-sufficiency and financial autonomy.”

In abusive relationships, it’s frighteningly common. One study suggests that 99% of domestic violence cases include aspects of financial abuse.

A lot of people wonder why victims of abuse stay with their abuser. It’s an understandable point of confusion to someone on the outside. And there are quite a fucking lot of reasons. (Fear of violence is a strong one—75% of women murdered by their partners are killed after they leave.) But there are also practical complications, which is where many aspects of financial abuse come into play.

This morning I woke up to many questions on my posts about Indigenous knowledge and its relationship with Western science. The questions are all the same, and what I cannot stress enough is that they are all answered in the links I included in the very posts.

I said it churns my stomach that as a non-Native scientist, my knowledge and opinions in my field are continually valued over the expertise of Indigenous people with far more experience than I.

I linked articles and entire bodies of knowledge written by Indigenous people, yet the comments and tags are full of people asking me for answers. So there is what I said, in practice—asking a non-Native person to speak with authority on Indigenous knowledge and scientific methods. Every question I've been asked so far are answered in the material I provided.

"Piss on the poor" jokes aside, Tumblr does very much have a reading problem when reading requires work and falls outside our immediate interests. I'm not saying this as an insult—but as a challenge to fight the instinct to avoid unfamiliar subjects.

Before you ask me—someone who is not Indigenous—any more questions about Indigenous knowledge in environmentalism and integrating Indigenous scientific methodology with Western scientific methodology, I ask you once again to follow these links, and read them.

Don't just like & reblog them and never come back. Don't assume that you already know what they'll say. Don't assume I can summarize them for you. Read them. Think about them. Challenge your biases. Learn something new, and be better for it. I promise you will be glad that you did.

Martin Nakata's Cultural Interface theory (1997, 2002, 2007, 2010), the first Torres Straits Islander man to earn a doctorate

Also, you may like Darryl Reano's 2020 paper, an autoethnographic account of science work as an Indigenous gay male geologist