Shenanigans and Fuckery

Like, when you wanna say mean shit about yourself either internally or externally, work to learn how to step back a moment and remind yourself that what you are doing is a form of self-harm and not a fair or legitimate judgement on you as a person, and furthermore is not productive to your survival or well-being.

Even if you fuck something up, you can resolve to do better in the future, you can tell yourself that you’re going to make this a learning experience, and even if you’ve made the same mistake 50 times already, telling yourself you’ll get it right someday if you just keep trying will always do you better than calling yourself an idiot and beating yourself up for not being able to get it right.

And… Actually it worked. It didn’t work just in the server either, multiple people admitted they caught themselves doing it in real life, and put themselves through saying the nice things to themselves about themselves. And you know, the server is a lovely place to be, these days. Watching people be kind to themselves had a great influence. Not being constantly exposed to people you like saying mean things about themselves actually makes it more pleasant to be there. More people voluntarily praise each other and themselves, and creativity and community remain plentiful. It’s contagious.

I stopped being mean to myself after seeing a post here which communicated the harm it can do, when you say something mean about yourself and then people who like or may look up to you hear it. When you’re a writer or something and you say you’re bad or that something you made is crap, any reader or writer or other creative doing the same thing as you that thinks you’re better at it than they are is being told (in their minds) that they’re worse and their creation is worse crap. That’s not a message I ever want to send, that is not a cruelty I ever intended to inflict even unwittingly. So I stopped.

• getting special exemption from the Honduran government to allow divers access to harpoons and spears which are otherwise illegal in fishing

• public campaign to teach people how to prepare and eat lionfish (apparently they are very tasty once the poisonous spines are removed) (but watch out)

• holding lionfish combination hunting competition and cookout (reportedly they killed and cooked 1,700 in a day) (someone killed 60 of them with a rubber band spear gun???)

• most recently and apparently out of desperation, the divers in charge of culling the lionfish in the Roatan Marine Park just started. feeding the lionfish they killed to sharks. bc what else are you gonna do with it

• the sharks don’t seem to notice or be affected by the poison and begin hanging out with the divers

• the sharks then were seen hunting and killing the lionfish on their own

New little webtoy. Never wonder again how you spread 14 increases evenly over 118 stitches. It's never been easier.

I've been messing around with google sheets for a while to do knitting math for me, but now i actually used a braincell to remember how javascript works and turned my current calculators into a website. So now you can have calculators too. And you don't even need to know javascript, lucky you!

find my calculators here: https://dunes-knitting-math.neocities.org/

My therapist said that the difference between Shame and Guilt is that Guilt is what we Do, and Shame is what we Are.

She said that if we are experiencing pervasive Shame, we need to identify what part of us we believe is Shameful and figure out *why* we believe that.

Once we find the shameful thing, we decide if it’s rational- something we don’t like about ourselves and would be better off changing- or if it’s irrational- something we have been taught to believe that isn’t helpful or useful.

If it’s irrational, we identify where it came from, and reconsider the circumstances by which we learned it until we come to a kinder, more productive conclusion.

This conclusion could involve Guilt, but because Guilt is from Actions instead of Identity, we can let it go by choosing to act differently in the future.