The Corkboard

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.

Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.

Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)

Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.

In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.

Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)

Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!

As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.

With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)

They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.

When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.

So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.

...One last note:

We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)

People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.

They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.

In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.

And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.

And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--

Like these silly, silly shoes:

(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)

--or going in a different direction entirely.

So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.

Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?

You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.

So the steps to making leather are as follows:

(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)

The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.

In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.

‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.

It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.

Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.

Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.

Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.

Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.

Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.

Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.

Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.

Shear

Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.

Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.

Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.

This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!

5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:

6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.

7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.

Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.

8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.

Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!

Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.

Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:

This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:

This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!

Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.

Here's one of my Icelandic ewes, Presley:

Icelandics are what's known as a primitive breed, that is, she's very close to the kinda sheep early shepherds would have been keeping. Icelandics and other primitive breeds have this neat ability to shed ( otherwise known as roo) their coats in the spring, unlike modern breeds, like my wensleydale, which MUST be shorn.

You can see looking at Presley's cost that she is not actually pure black. She has steaks of silver, and the tips of her wool are sun bleached to a more brown color. Sun bleaching happens with almost every dark wooled animal. Here's some lambs from a couple years ago. Only about a month old in this pic, but their black coats are already turning brown at the tips (when shorn, the wool nearest the skin is still very dark/black).

Having spun up many, many naturally black fleeces I can tell you: if you want your cloth, yarn, thread, etc to be truly black, it must be dyed. There's too much variance in animal fiber to get a consistent, deep color. White animals similarly are more of a cream color. Here's the fleece of my white ram, Appa.

He has almost no markings and this is about as white as a sheep can be, which isn't very. But crucially, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to bleach a creamy wool to true white than it is to dye a dark wool to true black. A sufficient concentration of ammonia would do it, and you can find that in... Urine!

Hell, urine was the traditional source of ammonia used in the process of fulling woolen cloth (the final step after weaving where the cloth is shrunk and felted), so it would have been pretty readily available (comparatively).

So today I tripped. Fell flat on my face, it was awful but ultimately harmless. My service dog, however, is trained to go get an adult if I have a seizure, and he assumed this was a seizure (were training him to do more to care for me, but we didn’t learn I had epilepsy until a year after we got him)

I went after him after I had dusten off my jeans and my ego, and I found him trying to get the attention of a very annoyed woman. She was swatting him away and telling him to go away. So I feel like I need to make this heads up

If a service dog without a person approaches you, it means the person is down and in need of help

THIS POST IS FAKE. A SERVICE DOG WILL NEVER LEAVE ITS PERSON IN AN EMERGENCY. THEY DO NOT “GO FIND HELP,” THEY SUMMON HELP TO THEM BY BARKING.

OP was a novice pretending to be a dog trainer, claiming to be training service animals. They weren’t. They were a pet owner deluded into thinking all dogs can become service dogs and all owners can train them to become one.

Snopes also says it’s not a hoax–not every service dog gets this training, but some do depending on the disability the dog is helping with.

Dogs are experts in body language, and often times a dog that "always knew" is picking up some sort of body language cue that seems obvious in hindsight. Additionally, pets are often targeted by people who want to abuse the owner, so there's also every likelihood that the dog was being treated poorly by that person well before anything started happening with the owner in the first place.

My pets never liked my sister, who was my primary cause of pain and torment at home. She also did things like mercilessly tease them, hit them, dangle them above pots of boiling water or swing them just short of hitting the wall (in the case of my rodents), scream at them, etc. She did that because she knew it made me upset. Did my animals instinctively know she was a jerk, or did she set that expectation herself?

My sister constantly caused me distress, hit me, hurt me, broke my things, and generally loved making me upset and break down. The animals were in the house to witness this behavior. It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the animals all chose to sleep in my room and would avoid my sister if they could help it. Even the cat disliked her but would happily come sit on my lap or play with me.

Again, this is not exclusive to guardian breeds as I've heard of every breed or mix not liking their owner's abuser- all dogs have teeth and all dogs communicate at least partially through conflict because they are predators.

I don't love the mythologising of animals "just knowing" but yeah there is little to no societal influence pushing dogs to ignore unsafe body language and tone

otoh it's basically like "trust your gut", in that absolutely yes (seriously yes), but heuristics also tend to ping harmless neurodivergent behaviour*, other ethnicities or cultural norms if said dog (or you) has little exposure to them

And the whole plot was this friend of Father Brown telling him about this weird murder where the friend was certain he knew exactly who the killer was because of the dog - how the dog saw the guy, and barked at him, and he ran in terror, supposedly inadvertently confessing his guilt.

And Father Brown chewed him out for the "dogs just KNOW" assumptions that were apparently just as prevalent back then, and gave the alternate explanation - the dog barked at the guy because he didn't like the guy, because the guy was a really high strung, nervous guy and the dog didn't like that anxious energy, and the man ran from the dog because he was scared of being bitten.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

"When I say that this is a sick, twisted, abhorrent piece of work, its creators may take that as a compliment. It’s possible that Blackhurst might print this review and stick it to his refrigerator door."

DID Blackhurst print it up and stick it to his refrigerator door? No idea, I've never been in his house.

We assumed he would give it to my then-boyfriend so he could propose. Nope. Family dinner, Dad's sick as a dog, but comes out in his bathrobe, drops the ring on my plate.

My brother picks it up and starts looking it over, comparing it to his wife's grandmother's ring HE was given to propose with. I'm looking at it like "but, that's mine?" I did make my boyfriend put it on my finger, but long story short, there never was a proposal. We just, weren't engaged, and then we were. Very anti-climactic, and not particularly romantic at all.

I am a social worker. I have worked in community mental health and in home-based healthcare. And it is much, much easier for me to help you when the situation you're in is not yet a full-blown crisis.

"I'm out of money and have been for a while and now I haven't eaten for three days." This is a crisis. A crisis where I'm likely going to have to put you in the car and take you to the nearest food bank--except food banks require appointments now, and the next opening is in four days, so you're staring down the barrel of a week with no food. That's obviously not going to work, so, let's call eight different food banks until we've found one that has an appointment the next day...except it's in the neighboring county and you can't drive. So now I'm calling your doctor to try and brow beat an emergency plan of care update out of him so I can come back the next day and drive you to the food bank. And we haven't even started on the "constantly broke" part of the problem.

"I don't think I have enough food to make it to my next paycheck. I have (xyz) in my house and that will only last until (date)." This is bad, but not a crisis. We have a few days. We make you an appointment at the food bank and contact your brother to make sure you have a ride there. Now we can spend our visit talking about what bills are causing you the most problems and make a jump on a long-term solution, like looping in a community action agency to cover your utilities and getting you an OTC card from Medicaid to cover some of your groceries every month.

"I'm ten months behind on rent, and my landlord said I have a week to get out, or the cops will throw me out. I don't have the money, and if I get evicted, I have nowhere to go." This is a crisis. Every single thing we do here is going to be some version of a Hail Mary. In Michigan, we have the state emergency relief fund for rent issues, but process time is well over one week. There are community action agencies that we can call to assist you with payment, but they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to cover nearly a year of back rent. We can contact legal aid clinics to try and prevent your landlord from evicting you, but they may look at your case and determine that too much "fault" lies with you. Most likely, I'm going to have to put you in touch with homeless shelters and the public housing office.

"I'm two months behind on rent and I don't think I'll be able to pay next month either." This is bad, but not a crisis. This is solvable. We have time to apply for SER, or put you in contact with community action agencies. We have time to review your finances and see if you qualify for a public housing wait list or other forms of ongoing rental assistance. We have time to talk about a million possible adjustments to try and ease the burden of your rent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my elderly parent who has dementia and is emotionally volatile and fully dependent on me. I have not slept through the night in weeks and I have not had an actual break for over a year. I am having screaming meltdowns multiple times a week and I am threatening self-harm unless someone comes to collect my parent and take over all caregiver duties." This is a crisis. This is a crisis where the ethical code of my profession demands that I call 911 and report the conversation to them. They will likely come to the house and interview you. If they determine your threats were serious, they will have you forcibly committed to a psych ward. Your parent will either be dumped into a random hospital or rehab center, or left in the house on their own. Upon release from your psych hold, you will be expected to resume caregiving duties as though nothing happened. Except, now, adult protective services is actively investigating you, because it was determined you may be an ongoing danger to your parent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my demented parent, and I have not had a break in a couple of weeks, and I feel angry and weepy most of the time." This is bad, but not a crisis. We can get you in touch with volunteer groups for respite, and apply for state funded programs to get more day-to-day help, and talk about long-term planning for when the dementia symptoms get worse. We can get you the phone numbers for crisis lines and enroll you in a support group.

I spent the first decade of my adult life telling people I'm experiencing severe depression and I'm suicidal right now. I was told no you're not. Sometimes I got a single conversation and it was supposed to fix it. It literally took protective services taking my children away before I was able to access any sort of mental help.

And that has been a permanent blot on my record, because obviously someone who is so worthless that their children are removed from neglect doesn't deserve help.

They are heavy and fist-sized.

The proteins that cause allergic reactions to tree nuts are in the kernal.

It is not a difficult mechanical process to screen out fist-sized objects from wheat.

Further, wheat is harvested in June or July (winter wheat) or in August (spring wheat)

Walnuts are harvested from September through November.

There is functionally no danger of cross contamination.

It's a really reasonable thing to be concerned about from a celiac direction. Maybe not for nut allergies, but. Gluten is fucking insidious. It gets in everything, sticks to everything - its stickiness is what makes it useful, after all! - and it's impossible to clean out of a lot of stuff once it's been contaminated. I had to give away my Kitchenaid mixer when I was diagnosed bc it was functionally impossible for me to clean it enough that it would be safe. So... yeah.

Throw walnuts at me if you must, but please not the ones from those fields. It's not worth the risk of spending 3 days glued to the toilet with my joints swollen up and aching while my cancer risk skyrockets.

To be clear, I think this is a great idea. I just want walnuts grown this way labeled so that I, personally, can avoid them. 2% of the population has celiac, and the "safe amount" of gluten for us to ingest is 0 parts per million. There are much smaller changes at 10ppm and below, but it ain't "safe." Even if a celiac doesn't feel ill when they ingest gluten, it's still doing cumulative damage to their body. I'm only an outlier within celiac patients bc I actually feel sick at tiny tiny levels.

Most "certified gluten free" foods test at 20 parts per million, which is hilariously high and every celiac I personally know still feels sick if there's 19ppm in their food, but that's all we could get out of the food industry. It's better than it was, when "gluten free" had zero legal meaning.

and I start the consultation already miserable as fuck and I give the kid some pen and paper so I can maybe communicate and see what's on his mind

and then I go WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND I KNOW THOSE MONSTERS

the mom looked at me as if her son and I belonged at the same satanic cult and that's why I knew the names of the demons in his head

so they decided to highkey just appoint all of them to my day and it took me almost a month to realize that the fact that I kept arriving and finding that all of today’s appointments were autistic children was Not A Coincidence 

anyway this one time there was a kid who was really into christianity but it was like, specifically angels 

so I’m trying to start up a conversation with him and I ask what he’s reading and he goes “do you know what a nephilim is”

and like for one hellish second my soul is suckerpunched out of my body and thrown straight into supernatural-fanfic-on-wattpad hell, and then I reassume control of my flesh prison, ignoring the mental edits of Dean and Castiel making out, and go “Aren’t those the guys who are half human and half angel?”

and the kid was so fucking happy but the mom was staring at me like ‘why are you privy to this bit of occult jesus lore’

and my heathen lesbian of a self just looks at her and goes 

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

It no longer matters (most of the time) that you can't read cues, as long as you assume that the default is "If you're weird you're rude. On purpose, no matter what you think you're doing."

You no longer expect that YOU get to be liked or loved, your highest realistic hopes are "competent enough to be invisible."

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