Solidarity With Children

Cleaning fountain pens and listening to this banger Death Panel episode with the author of Solidarity With Children. I think a lot about this topic and I still got new ideas.

Great analysis of parallels between disability and childhood, infantilization and adultification in systems of oppression (gender, race, class, disability, etc), adulthood as an anti-utopian project, etc etc

No transcript yet 🙁

Deudles

I think on paper a lot and I often ask people what kinds of diagrams and doodles they use for thinking. You get different answers from people in different fields, and if you ask people in political theory or international relations they will say, “If you like conceptual diagrams you have to read Dan Deudney.”

So at long last I am reading Dan Deudney. (Well, I am looking at the pictures lol.) This is chapter one of Bounding Power and I am in diagram heaven!

Photo of part of a book page (Chapter 1, page 34) showing Figure 1.2, Anarchy, Government, and Anarchy. A simple three panel diagram. Panel 1: multiple dots. Caption: Pre-State Anarchy. Panel 2: multiple dots enclosed in a circle. Caption: Authoritative Government. Panel 3: multiple circles, each enclosing multiple dots. Caption: Anarchic State System.

Oops

Watched 2 movies for horror movie bingo that both satisfied the Time Loops / Time Travel square… Last Night in Soho and Happy Death Day.

I have now watched so many horror movies in a row that these felt like normal mystery/romance films even though one has ghosts and a serial killer and the other is a campus slasher.

Might need to take a T break 😂

New favourite cyberpunk movie lol

So I watched David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds twice in a row because my guy is back to making weird Canadian indie movies instead of Normal Hollywood Features.

Eastern Promises, Dangerous Method, History of Violence, etc… all fine I guess but when The Shrouds opened with a dentist telling the protagonist that grief was rotting his teeth I cheer-screamed out loud. Crimes of the Future was not a fluke? Weird Cronenberg is back, babyyy.

The Shrouds has such intense Cronenberg-y themes about technological intrusions on bodies, exaggerated surveillance, discomfort with non-mediated perception, paranoia and conspiracies, and unreliable information that I would count it as a cyberpunk movie even though it is set in Toronto’s over-50 dating scene and no one wears mirrored sunglasses.

Minor spoiler alert:

In the realm of David Cronenberg’s contributions to sex, The Shrouds’ woman who is sexually aroused by conspiracies is right up there with Dead Ringers’ gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women.

Seeds

Today’s horror movie bingo viewing was Seeds, for the Indigenous Cinema square on my card. I had fun!

I always love to hear language, and this had a lot of Mohawk/Kanien’kéha, some by actual Mohawk speakers, in a modern-day setting.

Great idea to explore Mohawk war and revenge traditions in a horror film, yikes / badass.

Seeds reminded me a bit of Get Out in the way that the worst stuff is kept off-screen to get a PG-13/14a rating, and the ending is reasonably happy. I wonder if Kaniehtiio Horn had similar goals as Jordan Peele around making the film accessible for teens and not re-traumatizing people.

It’s so interesting to feel cared for by a horror movie.

Dark gritty reboot of Cinderella

Watched The Ugly Stepsister to get my Fairy Tale square for horror movie bingo … Body horror Cinderella from the POV of a stepsister is a very good idea and the body horror was real gross (👍️) but I found it surprisingly dull overall.

Beautifully and intentionally made, fantastic lead performance, but very slow paced and suffers from the same problem as most Feminist Horror: its ideas don’t go beyond Feminism 101.

I did enjoy the inversion of some gothic tropes, with the concerns about inheritance and family legacy all from the women’s perspectives, and a father’s corpse secretly rotting in the cellar instead of a mad wife in the attic.

I would pair The Ugly Stepsister with Sexykiller, which is another alternate-POV horror, this time a slasher where the killer is one of the naked college girls from the opening locker room scene. It is more silly on the surface, but explores much stranger and more interesting feminist themes.

Smoke tea 2026

Photo of 3 large mason jars containing different leaves, and one smaller jar containing pale yellow powder. First jar is unlabelled, then "plantain 2023", "anise hyssop 2023", "marshmallow root"

First noticeably smoky day here for a couple of years (lucky us), so I am busting out some smoke tea herbs. Dates on jar lids are not accurate — I moved to a paper inventory.

It has been smoky so often here in the PNW the past 10 years that I grow specific plants just for this purpose, mainly mullein. I guess that is a #ClimateDiary entry

I keep dried plants as whole as possible for storage (less surface area to oxidize or for oils to evaporate), so now I get to witch out with the mortar and pestle to smash them up for tea.

Photo looking down at a blue bowl of dried herbs, a black mortar and pestle with ground herbs in it, and an empty white teapot with the lid off

Anyway I am not a clinical herbalist but here is my method for formulating herbs (choosing which ones to mix):

  • pick a main one (mullein)
  • add one herb to enhance the action you’re interested in (in this case expectorant, so I am adding plantain as another drawing-out herb that is more soothing/moistening)
  • if needed, add one herb to counterbalance or do something else (anise hyssop to make it taste good, and to have one mildly warming herb against the two mildly cooling ones)

Going to steep one cup and taste it, then maybe adjust and make a big batch for the fam

Lol this tea came out so bland– mullein and plantain teas both taste like brown water, so I suppose it takes more than 1/3 anise hyssop to make it delicious. I like tea with some bitterness and body so I tried adding burdock root– closer. (Never hurts to add a liver tonic anyway.) Little touch of lemon verbena syrup that was in the fridge from making mocktails and this has become quite pleasant 💚

I don’t think it needs the marshmallow root that I pulled out in case it was too astringent. Mullein and plantain are both pretty balanced– tannins plus mucilage

Having had my smoke tea, I am sitting at the stove stirring a pot for dinner and going “ahem” a lot. Expectorant tea doing its thing 💚

Coffee for liver health?

I hold all research about economically important commodities really lightly, but this report does make me curious because Western herbalists talk about coffee and liver health a lot. A warm, bitter, carminative drink every morning? Serious liver tonic.

I wish any other bitter plant was consumed enough to get a 13-year prospective study on 350,000+ people.

Re: @digyoursoul https://universeodon.com/@digyoursoul/116947484891480708

Blackout bingo

Finally watched Maxxxine for horror movie bingo.

Unsurprisingly I loved it even if it isn’t as tight as the rest of the series… And wow, self-aware horror that plays with tropes could get you billions of bingo squares.

These ones were on my card, but I found like 20 others on the big list of options that we add to every year.

  • Accidental Feminist Masterpiece
  • A Scream Queen Screams
  • Fake In-World Horror Movie

Speculative accessibility

Alright, Last Voyage of the Demeter was very boring and bad but I did get some squares on my horror movie bingo card.

  • Speculative Accessibility
  • Workplace Safety Violation
  • In Love With A Monster

Speculative accessibility is my favourite. I always pick that square to put on my horror movie bingo cards.

This terrible movie had a great example– giving frequent blood transfusions to a vampire victim to prevent her from turning

Spoiler alert

Watched Backrooms last night, to kick off a summerween horror movie bingo festival with Simon. Fun!

I would call it more creepy than scary. There should be more movies about the horror of badly designed built environments and furniture, but I think we have enough movies about <spooky voice>your subconscious</>

Scored some bingo squares:

  • Based on a Creepypasta
  • Workplace Safety Violation
  • Doppelgangers
  • A Weird Zone
  • YouTuber Turned Filmmaker

Mending Monday

I’m trying to make Mending Monday a habit instead of letting things pile up, and I have gotten off to a strong start by absolutely butchering this kids anthology 😂

At least the pages are in the right order?

Photo of my pale hand holding a closed handcover book, with the top edge visible to show a section of lumpy and uneven pages where they have been taped back in unevenly

An OT (of course) recently introduced me to phase change cooling clothing and the tech is so interesting!

Unlike water ice packs that take forever to freeze and then are so cold that you can only safely touch them for 10 minutes at a time, some genius made gel packs that freeze at 15C. So you can freeze them in the fridge and then wear them continuously for hours without frostbite.

They are pricey but there aren’t many other options for people who need to be outside in the heat.

One example of PCM/phase change material cooling clothes.

Promotional photo with several people standing in front of a neon sign that says EZ Cool Down: a cosplayer, a person in jeans, someone in motorcycle gear with a helmet, a construction worker, an older woman with a husky dog, a worker in a hi-viz vest, a fursuiter fox, and someone in athletic gear

I love that their product photos go construction worker, road worker, fursuiter.

A warm infusion method

Photo looking down into a speckled black canning pot containing a wire rack and 3 mason jars with old labels on the lids.

Feeling very pleased with my setup for warm-infusing herbal oils today. I find double boilers tedious and messy, and I wanted to do multiple jars at once. Glad I remembered the gadget I keep around specifically for heating up jars in a water bath.

The jars are not full and I’m not trying to seal them, so they are only submerged about halfway in water.

These are chickweed, calendula, and plantain oils, if you want to guess what I’m making.

(It’s the first test salve of my new area of curiosity — itch relief. Bug bites, autoimmune conditions, drug side effects… turns out once you start talking about it, a lot of people have itches. Including me this week, so i figured i could do some testing)