The Real World

RATING: RELIABLE

The above is from this article from The Guardian.  The images are from MYA Network. The caption on their website reads:

Source: ‘When a sperm and egg get together, the body creates tissue in order to support the developing pregnancy.  Here are photos of that tissue from 5-9 week pregnancies.  This is called the gestational sac, and it’s like the “house” for the pregnancy. Inside this sac there are cells that have the potential to become a fetus but there is no visible embryo at this stage. We rinsed off the blood and menstrual lining (decidua) for these photographs.’

The published images sparked a lot of debate, leading to the story being picked up by other news outlets. For example:

Source: ‘Last week, the Guardian published images of pregnancy tissue after abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The small size and appearance of the tissue were shocking to many. We have all absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, the pervasive anti-abortion narrative that a pregnancy resembles a tiny baby starting in the earliest weeks. Though an early embryo can be seen under the magnification of ultrasound, it can take months for it to be perceptible to the naked eye.’

Source: ‘People have responded in disbelief, citing the (magnified) images they’ve seen on ultrasounds. […] ”Think of the illustrations on pregnancy and medical websites. The Mayo Clinic, one of the preeminent medical organizations in the country, shows week-by-week illustrations of embryonic and fetal development without any context of scale, like the rulers in the MYA photos.’

As stated in the article, whilst people talk about a ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks, there is no heart developed at this stage - only a group of cells that will become part of the heart.

Source: ‘But what exactly do we mean when we talk about a “fetal heartbeat” at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case. Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.’

It should also be noted that the images show an embryo, not a fetus, until the 9th week.

Source: ‘In human pregnancies, a baby-to-be isn’t considered a fetus until the 9th week after conception, or week 11 after your last menstrual period (LMP).’

The co-founders of the MYA Network responded in a New York Times article.

Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That's value they can borrow against, that's a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that's a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It's probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can't afford to take you to court.

I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who've lived there for generations because they can't keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the "affordable" housing for an entire neighborhood. It's gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that's left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.

If that wasn't bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you've instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future "improvements" that further contribute to the commodification of communities.

Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.

These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can't it's because we're lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

Introduction:

Visible mending is a decorative way to fix up an item. Instead of trying to make your mend as invisible as possible, the idea is to make it part of the garment's design.

Visual mending is not a single technique: it's more of a mindset. If you've got an item you love, it deserves to be mended, and if you're going to put that love into stitches, why not show them off?

That being said, there are some specific techniques that are popular with visible menders. Let's take a look!

Sashiko:

Sashiko is a type of traditional Japanese embroidery that is used to both decorate and reinforce fabric. In visible mending, sashiko is often used to cover up holes with patches or to reinforce thinning fabric. This technique uses a variation on the running stitch.

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Some resources on sashiko:

SashiCo on YouTube: sashiko livestreams and information on the cultural aspect of sashiko.

Written tutorial by Upcycle Stitches.

Free sashiko templates by TheSpruceCrafts.

Fixing jeans with sashiko by Soluna Collective.

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Embroidery:

Regular embroidery is also a popular technique to accentuate your mends. Check out my embroidery 101 post to learn how to get started. You can embroider patches, or use embroidery to hide or accentuate any stitches you've made to fix holes. Embroidery's also a great way to cover up stains.

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Patches:

There are many ways to add patches to a garment. My tutorial on patches is a good place to start if you want to make custom-shaped patches to sew on top of your fabric. You can also sew your patch on the inside of your garment and have it peek out from beneath the hole you're trying to fix. Fun ideas for this are lace or superheroes.

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Darning:

Darning is a technique used to repair holes in fabric by using running stitches to weave extra fabric over the hole as to fill it up again. While traditionally darning is done in an invisible way by using the same colour of thread as your fabric, you can also use contrasting colours to accentuate your fix. Check out this written tutorial on darning by TheSpruceCrafts.

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Conclusion:

Visible mending is a creative way to fix up your clothes and give them some personality at the same time.

You should be proud of the fact that you took the time and learned the necessary skills needed to mend your clothes! Show off what you did!

A fun side effect of wearing these obvious mends is that people will notice them. They'll remember your fixes the next time they're faced with a hole in their wardrobe, and it will make them more likely to try it for themselves.

As a non-binary trans masc person, it’s terrifying to even step out of the house and I’m not even publicly out yet. The amount of trans and homophobia around England is insane and terrifying: it’s to the point where everyday I’m reading the news and another LGBTQ-related attack is somewhere on the front page. Another transgender person has been murdered in cold blood or another lesbian couple has been beaten up on the tube in London. As someone who has been constantly penalised and put down for trying to be who I am, as well as outted against my will, it’s scary to read these things everyday. It was heart breaking to watch GMB every morning and see Piers Morgan invalidating my gender through an argument with someone who was trying his best to defend me. It was cringe-worthy hearing the comments coming from my own “friend”‘s mouth when I tried to come out.

JKR was a perfect example of just the power of the hate in this country: her voice - and her supporters voices - were so loud that they got the government to backtrack on their plans to allow me to change my legal gender easier. Because it invalidated sexual assault survivors and their hardships. I was sexually assaulted when I was 8: and again when I was 11. Believe me when I tell you, letting a transgender woman use the fucking woman’s bathroom is NOT invalidating your assault. That sounds like a you problem, not theirs.

The government is actively enabling the persistent LGBTQ hate in this country. In the last four months there have been several online petitions which they have HAD to look at due to 100k+ signatures. Each time their only was response was “No, we support you, but no. Too much work.” If you refuse to recognise me as existing- to recognise that I am a law abiding person who deserves to be able to legally be me- then you are not supporting me.

The NHS has a wait time of anywhere from two years to ten years for gender clinic appointments: just to get put on hormone medication, you could be waiting up to 7 years for one appointment. Unless you go private that is. Not only is private extremely expensive, but the NHS practitioners have every right to DENY your referral / diagnosis because it wasn’t done by an NHS professional. So even if you do go private, there’s no guarantee. A lot of transgender people are resorting to illegally obtaining hormone drugs from dealers. We’re that desperate.

It’s gotten so bad that OTHER COUNTRIES are acknowledging that it’s unsafe to live here. Two years ago a British transgender women sook asylum in New Zealand based purely off of her gender identity and WAS SUCCESSFUL. Portugal also accepts asylum seekers based off of gender identity. That is how bad it is here. Transgender people are dying everyday. This is how bad it is.

windows 10 is garbage so every time i boot up the computer i have to run command prompt and enter

net.exe stop “Windows Search”

after

I'm happy to hear my post on visible mending has inspired you!

Mending knee holes in pants:

There are multiple methods you could use to fix holes in the knees of pants, depending on the type of hole.

Simple rips:

If it's a simple rip (no missing fabric or damaged edges), you could use a ladder stitch to close the rip. You'll still see a line where the rip sat, but at least it'll be closed. If the look bothers you, you can always add some embroidery to hide the seam. You don't need amazing embroidery skills to do this: there's a lot you can do with a basic straight stitch or running stitch.

If you have a sewing machine and some fusible interfacing handy, you could also try this invisible denim repair method by Goheen Designs.

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Holes:

If we're talking actual holes, as in missing or damaged fabric, a ladder stitch won't suffice. You'll need to add extra fabric to replace that's been lost.

Take a look at this tutorial by Wren Bird Arts on how to patch up a hole from the inside of your garment. She explains how to do this both by hand and by machine.

The only stitch you need to know to follow this tutorial by hand is the running stitch, although I would also recommend a blanket stitch or whipstitch to finish off your raw edges. By reinforcing these edges, you'll prevent the fabric from unravelling. This will make your mend last longer.

If you decide to use this method, you'll need to find fabric that matches your pants if you don't want to draw attention to your fix. You could also go the opposite route and use a contrasting fabric or even a bit of lace to make your mend a design element rather than just a fix.

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Sashiko, a type of traditional Japanese embroidery, is another method you could try. Check out this sashiko tutorial by Soluna Collective, or take a look at the links on sashiko in my visible mending post.

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If you want to get really creative with patching, you could also make custom patches in any shape or fabric you want. Sew them on with a backstitch and finish off the edges with a whipstitch or blanket stitch.

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You also could try darning, which means weaving extra fabric over the hole. Tumblr-user Delicatefury does a great job at explaining how to do this. You'll need an embroidery hoop and embroidery floss (or something similar) for this. Darning can be tricky, so if you've never done it before, practice on fabric scraps first to get the hang of it before you start working on your pants.

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Conclusion:

There are plenty of ways to fix up holes at the knees of a pair of pants. Have fun with it!

If you're scared of putting that first stitch into your pants, remember that you probably won't really wear them anyway until you've fixed the thing that bothers you about them. So even if you mess up, you won't have lost much. Plus, most mends can be undone or covered up if you don't like the final result, so you can always start over. :)

If you're looking for inspiration, check out Pinterest or take a look at the following fixes:

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