Very good to know. Also, my 2 cents is that American is always awful.

Is your cat sprouting a second cat in the back? Or sitting on your missing kitten? I need more photos of this creature.

That's Ghost Pepper, his brain is full of fluff.

IT'S ALSO USEFUL IF YOU HAVE TMJ DISORDER

in both cases: always start on the lowest setting and wrapped in something soft!! if it hurts, stop!!

But, re: sinuses: look up a diagram of where they are, and when a spot feels particularly good or is particularly congested, hold it there longer. Definitely keep tissues handy for when it drains. Also it can help if your sinuses hurt like fuck but aren't actually congested (which happened when I had covid), but the effect doesn't last long.

Re: TMJ disorder: You can just push it against the joint, obviously; if your vibe has a small contact point you can REALLY dig in there (but again: stop if it hurts). But don't forget the whole area around the joint, around your ears, and up your scalp. There's a lot of muscles that tighten when your jaw is tight/stiff/in pain. Be especially careful when on a spot that's just skin over a bone without a lot of padding.

vibrators can also help if you have restless legs syndrome! Especially ones with fancy pulse patterns. When my RLS is severe I tuck them behind my knees or wherever & can finally lie still & sleep. You might need to wrap them in fabric to avoid skin irritation ymmv. There was even a paper published somewhere called "counter stimulatory devices for RLS" that was hilariously vague about saying the word "vibrator"

Once again adding also useful if you have dystonia or any kind of muscle spasticity. I have cervical dystonia (neck spasms) and dystonia in my left leg that's essentially like persistent Charley horse cramps from my neuromuscular issues and bought a Hitachi expressly for this purpose lol

A vibrator has been recommended to me to unblock clogged milk ducts for anyone that may apply to

I learned about the sinus thing and immediately bought a vibrator for that purpose. And yes, it DOES help with sinus headaches. 

I use mine to cum as well

I love my wife. my boss though? that ball and chain??

do you understand my vision

Oh this is too fun

Bestie, your brain, your VISION, ahead of your time

Fully believable. I’m a free diver, not a scuba diver, but I can tell you right now that things just feel weird that deep down. The first time I dove to 60 feet I was in a pretty tight crevice we call “Devil’s Ear”, and when I looked back up I could only barely see the surface. 60 feet down on a free dive was majorly pushing my limits of a breath hold, and I knew it was a “get down there and back up right away” sort of exercise, but once I got to the bottom and looked up I was pretty sure I could and should just hang out down there for a little while. I didn’t even swim back up so much as couples myself up by the rocks around me. It felt very dreamlike.

Same area, a day later, I’m diving into the mouth of an underwater cave. This cave is only about 35ft down, and there are two openings with a sort of stone pillar between them. I was only intending on swimming in, around the pillar, and back out. I was wearing a fabric tail with a modified monofin at this point, and had done the dive already twice that day. On the third go, in the middle of the round about with the cave ceiling above me, my fin got caught on a rock, pulled away from my feet, and the fabric of the tail wrapped around my legs like a vice. My legs were a useless weight at that point. But until I got to about 10ft deep I was completely calm. I felt no rush pulling myself out of the cave, or fear or drowning (which I very nearly did. At 10 ft I realized I was almost out of breath and a friend saw me and dove down to grab me at that point).

All this to say, deep-dive drowning seems like a pretty choice way to go and shit gets WEIRD in the brain when you return to Fish territory.

I’ve never been down to those depths before, but I have gone scuba diving in Mexico whilst on vacation.

We were only about 30 feet down. My uncle and cousins had all been scuba certified, but his wife and I were brand new to the sport. I’d always wanted to try, but my aunt was wary. We practiced in the pool at the resort before we ever touched ocean, but once we got out, it was incredible. I’d been 35 feet down in the same cave system as @cipher-the-sidhe mentioned, and was quite comfortable at that depth. My auntie, however, realized she had thalassophobia, AS SHE WAS DIVING DOWN TO MEET OUR FAMILY ON THE OCEAN FLOOR. The diving instructor held her hand on both dives we went on that day, the ENTIRE time we dove.

At one point however, we look around, and my cousin Rhiannon is nowhere to be found. She’s just vanished in open water. This area isn’t known for big fish or predators bigger than barracuda, but still, it was strange. We swim around a bit, looking for her, and we come upon this deeper section, maybe only another 15 feet deeper.

She was Stock still, not using her fins, just floating in the water. She was breathing with the ventilator, but that was the only clue that she was okay. The instructor handed my aunt to my uncle, and he and I swim over, and she’s got this expression like she has no idea who I am, or why I’m disturbing her. I just grabbed her hand and pulled her up from the deep spot to where our family is, and she’s fine the rest of the dive.

We get back on the boat and I ask her what happened. She said “I felt like I became water. Like I was part of the ocean as much as a thing could be, and when you found me, it was just the most devastating feeling of loss, cause I knew that would never happen again.”

My auntie refuses to dive ever again. Meanwhile I want to dive some more, but don’t have the money for the hobby.

“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)

In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.

If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.

Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:

“Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.”

Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach by Joan Kuyek is another great book that talks about this. Since it is (surprise) about community organizing it's more about groups working effectively together to achieve a common goal, rather than generalized conflict resolution, but it does have an entire chapter that's just about working together with other people. It has great advice about how not everyone needs to get along and about the importance of not making "be nice to each other" (vs. "respect other people's feelings") a spoken or unspoken rule, as well as tips like these for when "let's all just get along" truly does not work:

As an organizer I may really dislike some members of the group and it affects my ability to work with them. If I am serious about helping the group succeed, I need to have someone else in the group work with those people. My personal likes and dislikes are not as important as the work.

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There are some people who are so dysfunctional in groups that people begin to think they are police or company agents. In fact, it doesn't matter if they are or not, the effect is the same. If there is someone in a group that is consistently bullying, dogmatic, disruptive, and/or damaging to group process, then that person should be asked to leave. It does no one any good to keep pretending. It might work to send a few people to talk privately with the person about their behaviour.

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In social change groups, there is often a "lone ranger"—someone who has been carrying the issue by themselves, often for decades, and does not really want anyone else to take on leadership. This person may have developed all sorts of passive-aggressive techniques for discouraging others from getting involved. Examples include forgetting to let people know about meetings or setting them at inappropriate times; downloading overly technical information that intimidates others; expecting too much from group members. Although the group may be grateful for the leader's dedication, they have to find ways to dilute their power. If this can't be done subtly, then the group (together) will need to confront them, perhaps with the assistance of a mediator.

I wanted to bring these quotes up because while it's extremely important to be able to work with people you personally don't click with or are irritated by, conflict resolution also requires being able to set/enforce/maintain boundaries. If you can't work with someone, don't force yourself to; that's going to compromise the work, and it's a good place for someone else to step in. If someone's being a cop (whether or not you suspect them of actually being a cop), get rid of them. If someone's sabotaging the work because of their ego, find ways to reduce their power in the group. Pretending we all get along when we don't is a huge problem in social movements.

I also like that Kuyek suggests a mediator in that last quote. There are people who specialize in conflict resolution! You don't have to invent this stuff from scratch, you can hire a mediator to, you know, mediate a conflict.

Losing it over some of y'all's tags btw Here's my favorites

and lastly.

good night