Oooh and stained glass and blacksmithing! Basically find a list somewhere of old-fashioned and/or endangered crafts and that's my agenda for the year.

I've had this idea for YEARS to combine freeform crochet techniques with Anishinaabe beadwork. I want to learn to quilt (for reference, I can't sew a straight line on a machine). I want to move beyond the most basic leather working and spinning yarn and making baskets. I want to make a broom.

I make things because the process of making feeds my soul, and I give the things I make to others so they can be enjoyed and used. If I *couldn't* do that, I would probably spend a lot more time being bad at stuff and making kinda crap art, experimenting and so on.

Star Trek The Original Series scene. We're in a CORRIDOR! A room door is open, and we see two crewmen spilling out into the hallway in red and blue uniforms. They are otherwise indecipherable tho because they are entirely enveloped in a big cloud of smoke. It's pouring out all around them and into the hallway area, like there's a Phish concert in there. Closed caption reads, "[COUGHING]"

Hotpants für Männer Listen to Hotpants für Männer by Udo West playlist on desktop and mobile.

If I have to have this song stuck in my head, you do too: Hot Pants for Men by Udo West

m.soundcloud.com/udowest/hotp...

I like to imagine that Zohran Mamdani, Socialist African-born Muslim, was literally willed into existence by the collective psychosis of the Tea Party GOP over Obama, like the ectoplasm under NYC in Ghostbusters II

It sounds as satisfying as you imagine when the disc falls into the container, but it's quite a bit slower than you might think (it takes about 10 minutes to finish a CD)

LOOK AT THE COOL TOY I GET TO PLAY WITH AT WORK TODAY

Critically endangered crafts Crafts classified as 'critically endangered' are those at serious risk of no longer being practised. They m include crafts with a shrinking base of craftspeople, crafts with limited training opportunities, crafts wit financial viability, or crafts where there is no mechanism to pass on the skills and knowledge. Arrowsmithing Basketwork furniture making Bell founding Besom broom making MORE ENDANGERED Bow making (musical) Bowed-felt hat making Chain making Clay pipe making Clog making Coiled straw basket making Coppersmithing (objects) Copper wheel engraving Currach making Cut crystal glass making NEW Devon stave basket making Diamond cutting Encaustic tile making Engine turned engraving Fabric pleating Fair Isle chair making Fan making Figurehead carving NEW Flower making (trade and manufacturing) NEW Flute making (concert) Fore-edge painting Frame knitting Glass eye making Glove making MORE ENDANGERED Hat block making Hat plaiting Horse collar making Horsehair weaving Linen beetling NEW Linen damask weaving Maille making Matte painting (filmmaking) NEW Metal thread making Millwrighting Northern Isles basket making Orrery making Paper making (trade and manufacturing) Parchment and vellum making Piano making Pietra dura NEW Plane making Plume making Pointe shoe making Pottery (trade and manufacturing) Quilting (frame NEW | Rake making MORE ENDANGERED Rattan furniture making NEW Saw making Scientific and optical instrument making Scissor making Sieve and riddle making Silk ribbon weaving Silver spinning Spade making Spinning wheel making Straw hat making Sussex trug making Swill basket making Tanning (oak bark) Thatching (Irish vernacular) NEW Thatching (Scottish vernacular) Thatching (Welsh vernacular) NEW + Tinsmithing Wainwrighting Watch face enamelling Watch making Whip making Wooden fishing net making 84.7

new bucket list unlocked for my adhd craft friends:

1980 US presidential electoral map, showing Minnesota as one of very few states that went to Carter

1984 US presidential electoral map, showing Minnesota and DC as the only places to vote for Mondale

Also as a Minnesotan, I'm now legally obligated to share these pictures of the 1980 and 1984 electoral maps, noting that I was not yet alive for either of these and so cannot claim direct credit for being right.

Reagan is honestly usually the right person to blame. I personally find that the Victorians, Henry Kissinger, the prosperity gospel, and Nazis cover about 97% of what's left.

I blame Reagan for everything.

It's no different in the US, possibly/probably even more grim. When I was in library school, one of the student groups we could join basically provided volunteer library services to correctional facilities in the area.

Realistically there are likely several prisons with no librarian already, or with one librarian serving multiple facilities, which might improve the salary math but not the workload. Meanwhile in terms of federal budgets, $2.5 million is what you find between the couch cushions.

Taking it a bit further, I glanced at Wikipedia and counted 45 federal prisons in the country; using the larger cost estimate of $2.5 million, that's a titch over $55,500 per prison per year. That's a pretty small salary for that remarkable breadth and depth of responsibility.

I can only hope to have a life so frictionless that I need to start inventing things to feel victimized like the way MN racists have with the fucking flag

We live in a state with some truly world-class healthcare, but it's *expensive.* HCMC is where all that healthcare excellence goes to make a fucking difference. I think we can do better than letting it fall apart from lack of federal funding. We take care of us.

Dispatches from Minnesota: Hennepin County Medical Center, is an incredibly important hospital in the Twin Cities & for the entire Upper Midwest. They specialize in trauma medicine,and don't turn anybody away if they don't have insurance or can't pay. Its future is at risk because of Trump.

lol yeah that 😅

🫠🙃🫠🙃🫠🙃

FRIENDLY REMINDER that tomorrow is April Fool's Day and that everyone is tired. Maybe hold your pranks, or at a MINIMUM think very carefully about who you might embarrass, shame, or disappoint with your joke.

We are amazing.

We are enough.

We keep us safe.

No Kings Flagship Rally: MN State Capitol YouTube video by No Kings

Dispatches from Minnesota: everywhere you look today, people are showing up with love and community and strength and beauty and anger and tenderness. www.youtube.com/live/KKnRODQ...

Do you ever do the office poll? I like to walk around and ask everyone I can find, and barring someone having new context to add, the most popular answer becomes what it says. Maybe with a little [?] after 😆

To wrap up, a TL;DR: cursive is cool and fun, but easy to do on your own. Classroom time needs to be used carefully, and not everything can be covered. It makes sense for cursive to take a backseat to things that are more necessary and harder to learn outside a classroom. (Fin)

I don't think learning cursive matches well with either of those priorities, but topics that don't get much classroom time (like media literacy education) really do. I'd rather have future generations be better-equipped than I was to understand the media landscape, than to write cursive.

Last point, classroom time is a finite resource and I think it's important to think carefully about how we spend it. I would prioritize things that children and their grown-ups are not equipped to tackle on their own, and that will contribute most to the kids' ability to function in the world

In our current world, it's pretty easy to never, ever need to use cursive beyond a signature and frankly most things you sign don't mean much (e.g. nobody's comparing it to a sample on file or anything). Lost count of my skeets so ? of ?

Secondly, one does not need to be a child to learn a new writing style, especially if it's vaguely close to a style you already know. As someone who has done it a few times, I think it isn't too hard and you can pick it up if/when you have a reason to.

First of all, there is no one kind of cursive. From the founding of the US to today, we have nationally had at least 5 different styles of cursive; other countries have other styles, and human migration, social behavior, and just individual quirks make for a huge amount of variation (2 of ?)