The Magpie's Nest

This type was used mostly by the Sámi, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula. They’re mostly nomadic, and would build these storehouses (Áittit) up off the ground so that bears and wolves couldn’t get into them while they were elsewhere.

The Lumps of Disease

Gentle self-massage of this area (manual lymphatic drainage) is so widely accepted as a management technique for inflamed lymph nodes that research papers literally just say, “MLD is widely accepted as a basic treatment for this symptom.” Normally, this is found in cancer patients, but the discomfort of inflamed lymph nodes can apply across groups.

Cancer patients are particularly known for having a tough time with these “Swollen Glands” and a self-massage to “strip” the swelling can provide relief. Although it is effective outside of cancer care, this knowledge is often siloed within cancer care.

Read some reputable sources and consult a doctor if you have complex symptoms or conditions. This is not medical advice; I am not a doctor and I am not your doctor.

the most basic form of self-massage to alleviate the symptoms is taught below.

"Okay, but that doesn't make her a fortune teller. More like a future event advisor."

None of the following is financial advice (I don't work for you, you don't work for me, you must do your own research) + none of this is a request for aid

I bought my studio.

I'm renovating it.

I typically shove business and money ramblings on @notfinancialadvice but I am in my feelings because I just had a week of Very Large Numbers on what it means to fix it up and build it out.

I have an inborn need to be helpful because I like attention people have helped me along my path to get to where I am and it feels good to give back.

As of writing (early October 2025), markets are (generally) leaning heavily towards buyers because of Every Reason. If you are a buyer, you (probably) have more power to negotaite.

Here are some things I have learned over the last few years in getting here and in general already know:

Mortgage calculators exist and can help you figure out how much you can afford on paper.

Usually, you have to put down 20%. If you cannot, then you may qualify for PMI, which stands for Private Mortgage Insurance. It will add to your monthly output, but it may or may not be worth it, considering what you want and how much you have to get it, etc.

PMI is not permanent. It exists until the balance hits 80%. So if you have 15% down, once you have paid your mortgage enough to lower the balance to 80%, you can request it go away (or wait for it to go away, I would recommend requesting it).

This is stupidly important because the initial down payment is often the biggest crunch one faces.

Another maybe even more stupidly important thing is that you must remember -- look into my beautiful eyes -- you must remember the bank, credit union, lender, etc. works for you.

They are not doing you a favor.

They are working for you.

Do not be afraid to ask questions.

Do not be afraid to walk away.

Do not be afraid.

The same goes for real estate agents.

The same goes for every website you go to that you're looking up house prices I'm not going to give anyone free advertising you know the sites I'm talking about.

"Asking price" is the seller's opening bid.

Your bid is (probably) going to be lower.

If someone says "Yeah you better act fact I've got 3 other people looking at this place, two of them are cash offers."

:)

Okay. That's great!

Keep going to your second choice, and maybe don't do business with the person who said that to you.

Do not let anyone intimidate you into buying property. (Or, really, anything).

Your best bet is to figure out what you want, then start asking people questions. Real estate agents and/or bankers, depending on if you're more focused on "I want to live/work/play HERE" (real estate) or "I can afford X, where can I go?" (banker)

And by "banker" I mean generally speaking. Credit union, etc. If you have an account there, they might be able to help you faster.

Ask questions.

Take notes.

Don't be afraid to ask more questions.

Don't let anyone whom you're about to sign a giant contract over be rude to you or intimidate you or make you feel small. You're literally in control of this.

Don't let anyone tell you that "you have to buy" -- it is a choice, it has implications, positive and negative, equity in something making your life worse is not valuable.

If you don't know where to start?

Start with whomever is closer.

Real estate office or financial institution or website if you prefer doing things online.

It is hard and expensive and you can do it, it's done every day, and I cannot stress this enough: You don't pay for this until everything has come together.

If you spend 3, 6, 12, 18 months figuring it out with someone, that's fine. It takes as long as it takes.

Ask about home inspections (someone who knows their stuff says "this place is falling apart and will ruin you" versus "this place needs work, here is an outline".)

Ask about deals.

Ask about community help and grants.

This is literally me just googling "First time home buyer grants."

They exist.

Help and programs and assistance and all the things are there.

This is going to become especially relevant in the coming years because...

via

...things are becoming, hm, interesting, in the world of money.

And also

to repeat

this is a path

it is not the only path

do what makes sense for you

best of luck

i hope we all make it

I knew what I was getting into when I bought this place. I specifically selected it because it was last renovated somewhere between 35 - 50 years ago and thus was cheap to acquire, the jokes are just part of the processing of things.

in closing:

good luck to you

It's hatred and discrimination specifically targeted towards trans men. It's transandrophobia. They are weaponizing a transmasc persons transition into masculinity and using it as an excuse to commit vile acts. It is transandrophobia.

No one is saying this doesn't happen to trans women too! But we're talking about what is happening in this specific article. Stop hearing what we didn't say.

If they don’t like jokes and teasing, they might like silly noises or yes-and improv.

If they don’t like playing a competitive or narrative game with toys, they might like to take apart a toy, or sort/stack/line toys up, or get buried under toys.

If they don’t like biking or walking a trail in the woods ‘properly,’ they might like to walk along fallen logs, stand in the creek or look under rocks and leaves for creatures.

If they don’t like hugs and cuddles, they might like to bump shoulders, touch fingers, hand hug, spin around together, or (if they like more intense input) wrestle, push faces together, squeeze each other hard or run into you.

If they don’t like putting on kids’ music in the car or to dance to, they might want to listen to a game or show soundtrack, nature noises, a podcast, binaural beats, house music or metal.

If they don’t like animated movies where sad or scary things happen, they might like younger kids’ gentler shows, or adults’ science and history shows, or live zoo and nature cams.

And so many of them would benefit so much from the adults just slowing down. Not scheduling so much in the day, not rushing them through an activity, not stopping them playing the same song or watching the same bug for an hour, letting them absorb everything their way. Seeing it as a meditation instead of a problem. Joining them there.

Also, I enjoyed Silver and Lead a lot.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

me, an elder fandom veteran, suddenly having anne rice flashbacks:

no.

NO.

starting to rock back and fourth.

you do not understand.

you were born into an age of peace. i was there Gandalf. i was there three thousand years ago. i remember the cease and desists. i remember authors hunting fanfic writers for sport. i remember when every fic opened with a disclaimer because we genuinely thought it might protect us.

we do not charge money for the copyrighted gay wizard stories.

do not tempt fate youngling.

step away from the paywall.

that is how you summon the ancient evils.

and why for a lot of them it doesn’t click that we are descendants of the israelites. because they’re seeing things through a lens of non-levantine christianity: to them, christianity is a religion that reads the bible, so is judaism, and the ancient israelites are characters in that book. basically fictional. who knows what happened to them?

relating that to a real place, then, seems as insane as a bunch of twilight fans going to conquer forks. sure, forks is real, but it’s not that forks. the spiritual jerusalem is not the real jerusalem.

the non-levantine christian relationship to the bible is fundamentally different from ours. for them it is a religious book, that forms the basis of religious belief and practice. for us, it’s that… and it’s also a record of our cultural myths and legends, our understanding of our ancestors’ stories, and our guidebook of who we are as a people. we believe that in order to know who we are we have to know where we came from, and the torah can tell us that.

and perhaps more to the point, the jewish story entwines with the land of israel even after the events of the torah: through mishna and talmud and the kabbalists and the communities that stayed there and the communities that moved there, even before zionism.

and this is why the mass migration of the jewish world to israel/palestine in the 20th century was not just push factors (pogroms, antisemitism, violence, government mandates, no home to go back to) and the pull factors were not just the idea of protection through statehood; it was also that culture and ancestral connection. which the torah anchors, yes, but it wasn’t created out of thin air just by people reading the torah.

and of course, none of this justifies the nakba or the occupation. ancestral connection to a land doesn’t give you the right to displace families from individual parcels of land they own or have been living on for generations.

to come back to those push factors: the reason some people can’t conceptualize the idea that antisemitism was the main driver of the establishment of israel is because, since they’re looking at the whole thing as if it’s christianity, they hear discussion of antisemitism as if it’s evangelical christians talking about how “christians are persecuted” in the US — impossible to take seriously, and not a real problem

if someone said that european or american christians should do a modern crusade because christians are persecuted… well. that’s how zionism looks to a lot of people i think

this is also why people think the “promised to them 3000 years ago” joke is funny. to them they’re dunking on our weird bible cosplay

and for us, while we do have a concept of the spiritual jerusalem, when we talk about jerusalem in liturgy we are still talking about the literal jerusalem. the literal jerusalem hasn’t been replaced by the spiritual one. the law hasn’t been replaced by jesus. jew hasn’t been replaced by “jew and gentile.” the old testament hasn’t been replaced by the new one.

jerusalem in liturgy may sometimes be synechdoche that refers to the messianic age; but that messianic age is still understood to involve temple sacrifices in a literal future jerusalem, traditionally. i can’t tell you how many jews throughout history thought any of these messianic prophecies would come to pass (i can tell you that the majority don’t, nowadays), and i think realistically our ancestors were thinking about the imagined jerusalem of the past and future and not the nitty gritty real one when they prayed these prayers… but it still did mean the real one.

and meanwhile there were jews in the real one. living there, getting kicked out, moving back in, getting kicked out again, and on and on. building a synagogue there. praying at the western wall there.

the crusades, then, were fundamentally a category error. european christians did not have the relationship with the real land of israel that reading the bible made them think they did. thus: a lot of people now believe that jews (in particular, ashkenazi jews) do not have the relationship with the real land of israel that we think we do. and this is why so many of them struggle to understand zionism. to the extent they do understand that there’s more to it than religious fundamentalism, that there are material factors at play too, they tend to see it through the lens of european colonization of the americas and manifest destiny, which fits even less well. but that’s a post for another day.

interestingly, some of the earliest forms of proto-zionism predate jewish proto-zionism by around 300 years. given that, i can understand the way people view all of this in a christian light. but: i don’t think zionism would have formed as a jewish politial ideology nor caught on in the jewish world, and certainly not moved hundreds of thousands of people from their countries of residence, if not for all of these things i discussed in this post: ancestry, self-understanding, founding myths of peoplehood, relationships with the jews already in palestine, and most of all the material conditions of the pogroms, the holocaust, and the expulsion from swana.