Humor, hopefully. Or not.

Betcha didn't know these 3D Fidget Lotus' once were treasures. A once popular toy enjoyed by those born in the 1900's, survived the test of time as a toy for fidgeting, ornamental piece, and fashion accessory.

It's difficult to find 100% handmade versions of these brilliant multifunctional toys in 2023. Luckily, I've spent the last half decade crafting these to keep this traditional handmade piece alive.

Special Features of Fidget Bloom:

Crafted using high quality tarnish resistant brass wire

Transforms fluidly into dozens of whimsical shapes

Can be worn as a bracelet, hair accessory, and enjoyed as an ornament

Most commonly used as a stim for stimming & regulation

Please consider browsing my Etsy shop. I offer these in 100's of colours (including custom requests), and ship worldwide, including the US, UK, Australia, and more!

My Etsy bestseller listing below:

Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laurete, an icon of the literary world, and an elder in the womanisn movement has died at the age of 88. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, Morrison was an unfailing leader in the push for Black women narratives and wrote such classics as Song of Solomon, Sula, and Beloved, the latter of which earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Much can be said about the transformative power of her works, but I’d rather leave you with her own words right now:

“You can’t fly with regrets of yesterdays on your wings.

You can’t fly if you’re still in love with that ex that’s bad for you. Give that shit up!

You can’t fly if you’re afraid of standing up and taking power. Give that shit up!

You can’t fly if you’re spending the time you should be using to fly on other less important things. Give that shit up!

Focus on flying, if you wanna to fly. Because if you really wanna fly, nothing should be able to stop you. And if you’re not flying, realize something is. And lose that shit!”

Attempts To Ban Access to Safe, Legal Abortion Have Soared to an All Time High

BREAKING: As this post was published, Georgia became the third state this year—after Kentucky and Mississippi—to pass a ban on abortion before many people know they are pregnant. The bill passed by one vote. Georgia is just one of 32 states to introduce abortion bans this year as part of a national strategy to outlaw safe, legal abortion. 

2019 is barely one-fourth behind us, but one fact is clear: anti-abortion politicians have dropped all pretense of wanting anything less than a ban on access to safe, legal abortion.

In state after state, lawmakers have rushed this year to try to ban abortion access—at a point before most people even know they’re pregnant. These new laws run counter to long-standing Supreme Court precedents, and amount to an effort—in the wake of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees to lifetime appointments—to invite the Supreme Court to overturn or eviscerate the finding, in Roe v. Wade, that access to safe and legal abortion is a constitutional right.

Abortion is health care. But with outrageous bill after outrageous bill—from six-week bans to attacks on crucial reproductive health services such as those funded by the Title X program—politicians have signaled an aggressive new phase in their attacks on reproductive rights.

Here’s what you need to know about this expanding attack on reproductive health care.

1. Opponents of safe, legal abortion are mounting a concerted campaign

News accounts have covered the laws advancing in state legislatures one by one—but when one steps back, a troubling pattern emerges. Through March of 2019, state lawmakers in Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi banned access to abortion at six weeks. Four other states—Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee—stand poised to soon follow suit. Politicians have filed proposals for similar bans in eight other states: Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and West Virginia.

2. A “six-week ban on abortion” = a ban on abortion

The rationales offered by politicians in support of six-week bans belie a simple fact: at the six-week point in pregnancy, most people don’t even know they’re pregnant. For those with regular menstrual cycles, such a ban would stop access to safe, legal abortion a mere two weeks after a missed period. These unconstitutional laws would be awful enough if they stopped there—but they don’t. For instance, the six-week ban proposed in Georgia would subject a person to criminal liability for termination of a pregnancy—exposing a mother to the potential risk of criminal charges over a miscarriage. As a Georgia state senator who spoke out against this outrageous ban explained:

In other words, a pregnant woman who suffers a miscarriage could be subjected to criminal investigation, indictment, prosecution long before a jury is asked to determine whether she intentionally did anything to cause the loss. And if you think everything I just said was exaggeration or hyperbole, I read it directly from a Georgia court case where the implications of prosecuting women for seeking abortions was laid out in no uncertain terms.

3. Efforts to restrict or ban abortion are spreading quickly

Here’s a startling statistic: since January 1, 2019, lawmakers have proposed more than 250 separate restrictions on abortion in state legislatures across the country.

The six-week bans moving through states are part of this wave of anti-reproductive health legislation. The rate at which such unconstitutional bans have spread this year is without precedent:

Prior to this year, six-week bans were rarely enacted, as antiabortion activists and politicians publicly focused their efforts on other restrictions, like targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws, that severely undermine access but are designed not to appear to be frontal assaults on abortion rights.

4. Low-income people and people of color are among those disproportionately affected

States where unconstitutional bans have advanced in 2019 are among those with the nation’s largest populations of people of color.

In Georgia, the nation’s eighth-largest state, nearly 10% of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino—and a full 32% identifies as Black.

In Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state, 13% of the population identifies as Black.

In Mississippi, 38% of people identify as Black.

Median household incomes in those states — Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio — fall below the national average. All three of them report higher poverty rates than the nation as a whole. Georgia and Mississippi have refused the federal Medicaid expansion funds offered under the Affordable Care Act—and both states have among the nation’s highest percentages of residents living without health insurance.

People in these states often already have to travel hundreds of miles, cross state lines, and wait for weeks to get an abortion—if they can access services at all. For many women, these barriers effectively ban abortion, and women of color—who already face significant barriers to health care and attacks on their bodily autonomy—bear the brunt of it.

This in part explains why these unconstitutional bans feel so infuriating and needless: in the states attempting to enact them, maternal health outcomes rank among the nation’s worst. Mississippi has the nation’s worst infant mortality rate, and Georgia has the nation’s worst maternal mortality rate. In both states—as in the country as a whole—African-Americans face a disproportionate share of the consequences of those public-health failures.

5. The goal: Permitting every state to ban abortion

The logic behind the rush to enact these unconstitutional abortion bans is simple: with senators confirming judges with views hostile to reproductive health and rights to the federal courts—including the Supreme Court—Roe v. Wade is at risk like never before.

Trump has installed more federal appeals court judges in his first two years than any other president—and has installed as many Supreme Court justices in two years as President Obama installed in eight.

Trump promised as a candidate to choose judges who would “automatically” overturn Roe, and has worked since to keep that promise. Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh has already acted to restrict access to abortion during his brief tenure on the Supreme Court—writing to say that courts should let a state proceed with abortion restrictions that that were ruled unconstitutional just a few short years ago.

That explains why a state like Mississippi, which courts blocked from enforcing an unconstitutional 15-week ban in 2018, would advance an even more stringent ban on safe, legal abortion a year later. Anti-abortion politicians believe that Trump’s judicial nominees may overturn Roe v. Wade—and intend to test just how far judges will let them go to restrict people’s ability to access their constitutional right.

There have been more than 250 abortion restrictions introduced in this country since January.

Pair those with the effort to undermine Title X—the nation’s only program dedicated to affordable reproductive health care—by gagging doctors from referring patients to abortion services, and the pattern is undeniable. Even as seven in 10 Americans consistently say they favor abortion access, opponents of safe, legal abortion think they can achieve a ban on abortion nationwide within the next few years.

But this… This is something else.

The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.

ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)

this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)

“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)

‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)

and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)

which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)

well i added my contribution : )

trans person: i like gender tho

Okay, so while I’m normally pretty bad about admitting where my knowledge is lacking, I’ve gotta ante up here, and say that I had to look this one up, because I honestly didn’t know. 

The flip side of that is that, having read up on the differences, I have to say that this question is deceptively simple, which means that the answer is FASCINATING. Seriously, it’s pushing all of my interest buttons: historical, etymological (so to speak), scientific, and musical.

According to my reading, round backs are a characteristic of the violin family, whereas flat backs belong to the viol family. Yes, despite the names, these are two entirely different families here (I’ve been planning on doing more research into their ancestry, but that’s for another day). You see, the contrabass was never exactly standardized, it was pretty much just whatever that particular luthier wanted to do. To this day, you can hear instrument people talking about “gamba corners” or “violin corners” on basses, which is mostly a throwback to original ideas about design. Heck, there’s even a cornerless bass, which is just weird to look at: (in order- gamba, violin, cornerless)

(source)

Fun fact: as contrabasses gained popularity over bass viols, some owners of the latter decided to “convert” their instruments by switching out the flat back for a rounded one. But that’s neither here nor there…

Okay, so basic lesson in the construction of each of these backs, starting with the round

Round backs for basses are carved out of wood, since trying to get a significant curve out of hardwood is difficult unless you’re working with some SUPER thin material. You can get the wood to bend, but not really curve. Thus, they actually require a lot more wood than you would think to construct.

(source)

Here’s how they bend the uncarved back for a round back bass.

Flat backs, on the other hand, are as the name suggests. Other than purfling and other details, no wood needs to be removed. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because of their structural weakness compared with a round back, flat backs have to have braces installed in order to keep from breaking with every shift in the weather. Even so, significant changes do happen as heat and humidity change with the seasons, such that it is recommended that flat back bass owners use a different soundpost in summer and winter. 

(source)

Here is a flat back bass in the process of receiving new braces. The center one, as you can see, is finished, and the top and bottom ones are not. 

In addition to providing structural support, braces on a flat back also lend themselves to sound transfer. For one, the center brace is where one end of the soundpost rests, and the stiffer wood carries sound more quickly than that of the top, or a rounded back. Thus, flat backs tend to have the reputation of a “punchier” sound, with more immediate response, especially on the pizzicato.

Round backs, conversely, have a deeper, more warm sound, due to larger air volume. They are less susceptible to dampening than flat backs in case you are a person who plays with a stool, and less likely to be need extensive repairs done. 

Second fun fact: there is, honest to goodness, an academic paper on the tonal differences between flat and round backed basses. It’s pretty jargon heavy, so I’ll just provide you with the diagrams that caught my eye.

They got these lines using something called a Polytec laser vibrometer, which I have to guess uses lasers to measure how much something vibrates. In any case, it’s super cool, and if you can sift through the dry, experimental language, it’s an interesting read. 

Less academic, but still interesting is this two part blog post about flat versus round back basses. It’s a much easier read, and is pretty concise in getting the point across.

I haven’t seen this done yet, so I thought I would put together a list of operas you can watch for free on Youtube. Feel free to add!

Baroque

Handel -Rinaldo -Ariodante -Serse

Purcell -The Fairy Queen -Dido and Aneas

Classical

Hadyn -Orfeo ed Euridice 

W.A. Mozart -Don Giovanni -Die Zauberflote -Idomeneo  -The Marriage of Figaro -Cosi Fan Tutte

Donizetti -Lucia Di Lammermoor

Romantic period

Rossini -The Barber of Seville -William Tell -Otello -Cinderella

Verdi -Aida -La Traviata  -Il Trovatore

Boito -Mephistofele

Wagner -Lohengrin -Das Rheingold -The Valkyrie -Siegfried -Gotterdammerung -Tannhauser -Tristan and Isolde

Gounod -Faust

Bizet -Carmen

Tchaikovsky -Pikovaya Dama -Eugene Onegin -Mazeppa

Puccini -Madama Butterfly -Tosca -Edgar -Turandot -La Boheme -Suor Angelica

Strauss -Elektra

20th Century

Stravinsky -The Nightingale  -Oedipus Rex

Prokofiev -War and Peace -Betrothal in a Monastery -The Gambler -For the Love of Three Oranges

Shostakovich -The Nose (part 1/ part 2) -Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (part 1/ part 2/ part 3) -Katerina Izmailova (film adaption of Lady Macbeth)

Britten -Peter Grimes -The Rape of Lucretia  -Albert Herring

Calm Harm can be tailored to your needs and will provide strategies to help you get past those crucial moments of wanting to harm.

It’s also totally FREE.