Social Consciousness In Your Pants

I don't know where to start this post so uh.

The very basics is that we're being evicted from the land that we've been working for the last five+ years to turn into a profitable farm (*mumblemumble generational trauma and family infighting mumble*)

The good news: there's options near by and I'm relatively confident we can qualify for a farm operations loan to secure new land!

The bad news: since goImagine closed, we've had to completely rebuild the store on a new platform and traffic/sale have cratered because no one knows where to find us. That's where you can help!

Please signal boost this post and check out our store!

We have soap, fiber, stickers and BRAND NEW lip balm! Our stuff is made from things we produce right here on our farm, and other ingredients and equipment sourced from local businesses.

Our current goal is to build up $2500 in capital and use that to fund purchases of more supplies and equipment for operation.

Big ticket items include:

A drum carder

New spinning wheel (in case I can't recover my old one)

An electric milker (I'm milking all of our sheep by hand currently!)

More soap molds

Getting the current back log of fleeces to our local mill to become yarn

This winter's supply of hay

And just various other supplies that are in constant need of reordering I have a LOT more planned, so please reblog this post and add our store to your watch list.

THANK YOU!

For your viewing pleasure. There are hundreds of people watching it and just waiting for stuff to get going again. (Currently: work apparently paused due to a thunderstorm. [shrug])

ETA: Apparently Trump's packed board has threatened that if his name comes off they'll strip the center of all funding. Details:

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale is lurking around

This has, understandably, made it difficult to find the time & energy to entertain. Things will get stable again eventually, but until then, if you'd like to help me get through this ridiculously rough time, I'd deeply appreciate the relief it would bring.

Pride Month PSA: these images are all free to use! I always get asked around this time of year so I thought I'd make it clear in writing! Feel free to download, post them around, make them into profile pics, banners etc.