Bringing Back Asexy

Starting at the wrist, a strip of fabric is wrapped one by one around the fingers, excluding the thumb, before being wrapped around the four fingers together and tucked in to secure the end.

How to tape up your hands before a fight

How to fell a tree: a diagram illustrates that an initial cut is made, then the remaining cuts are made on the opposing side so that the tree falls away from the cutter. To cut a log for firewood, the edges are cut off the round log to form a rough pentagon, which is then split in half. This firewood can be stacked parallel to each other or in a 'chimney' stack, with alternating perpendicular logs forming a cabin-like column.

A makeshift backpack can be made from a pair of pants by tying the legs shut, threading the string through the belt loops, and tying it off to form a drawstring. The legs then serve as the straps of the 'bag'.

You can heat a small room with a makeshift heater made from a terra-cotta flower pot, bricks, and tea light candles. By lighting the candles (on a fire-proof surface), then placing the flower pot over the candles with the bricks allowing for airflow, heat can collect- not enough for a large room, but will work for a small room. Do not leave unattended.

If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built. French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s.

Let's say you've gone back in time. Nice one. Okay, we're going to assume that you're on earth and you can read English. So far, so good. But how can you build all the amenities of tomorrow when you're stuck in the past?

First, we need some units. But no biggie. The exact speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. Good to know. A meter is defined in terms of light, but if you can't measure it accurately, the length of a pendulum that takes one second to swing from end-to-end will do the trick. Pendulums tend to take the same amount of time to swing regardless of how high you start them off. So don't worry about that. Pretty neat right? Galileo discovered that, but you learned it in high school. But whatever, TAKE THE CREDIT. If you don't have a watch, a second is about how long it takes you to say 'one Mississippi', or 'one one thousand'. And a gram is pretty much the weight of one centimeter of cubed water.

Flight:
The wing took a long time to figure out. Just remember those aerofoils are objects shaped such that air above them progresses faster than air moving beneath them. SLOWER MOVING AIR HAS MORE PRESSURE. So there is a net upwards force. Attach an aerofoil of sufficient size to a machine capable of moving itself forward fast enough and it WILL fly. You can make a plane by attaching two aerofoil to a central body, and flaps at the trailing edge and you can control where it goes.

Technology:
Heat milk to just below its boiling point: it won't curdle, and 99.999% of the bugs in it will be killed. Congratulations! You just invented pasteurization. A moving electric field produces magnetism, and vice versa. Wrap copper wire around an iron core and run electricity through it. And you've got an electromagnet. Don't have any electricity? Put a magnet on a water wheel, and put your copper-wrapped iron beside the wheel. And presto, you're converting mechanical energy into electricity. Don't have magnets? Heat iron to get a very weak one. Look for black grains in beach sands that stick together. Or examine the sites of lightning strikes for magnetic lodestones. Run electricity through tungsten to get the light bulb. Run electricity back and forth along a wire with enough power and you've invented the radio. When a radio wave interacts with a receiving antenna, the exact same electrical change can be recovered. Information can be encoded in two ways: in the charge of the electricity (higher current produces a higher amplitude wave) or in the frequency of the electrical reversals. FM is more resistant to amplitude decay in transit. Send out high frequency waves and measure how and when they bounce back and you've invented radar. Do the same with sound and you have sonar. Mount a magnet so it can move freely, and you've invented the compass. Take the credit. And while you're at it, make sure you name the magnetic poles backwards from what they are now,　because in your time, the North pole is magnetic south, and vise versa. So confusing. Polaris, or the North Star, is just about the brightest one in the sky, and it's near the big dipper. Measure how high it appears to be, and that angle is your latitude. If you can get your hands on Quartz crystals great, run some current through them and they'll change shape. Stop the current and they'll resume their shape, and they'll generate electricity with a very precise frequency as they do so. You can use this to build precision clocks. With these clocks, you can determine longitude, just set your clock to London time, take the difference between London noon and local noon, and that's how far away from the prime meridian you are. Take the credit for that too. If you're in 1714, the British have a 20,000 pound prize up for a simple way to calculate longitude. Other fun inventions: gears, catapults, glasses, kites, thermometers, scissors, circular saws, buttons, forks, paint rollers, the wheel, rudders, CPR, umbrellas, screws.

Health:
Germs spread disease. Fight them with hygiene and antibiotics. Wash to keep yourself and those around you clean. Medical instruments should be cleaned in boiling water. Steam works on things that can't be washed. The best antibiotic is penicillin, the mold penicillium notatum, found on food. It's incredibly effective at stopping infection, and works by preventing other bacteria from making new cell walls and reproducing. It'll usher in a new age of antibiotics, so take the credit. If the penicillium mold in unknown, look for molds on foods that, when viewed under a microscope, look like crazy hands on long stalks. There's your Penecillium. Viruses spread disease. But unlike germs, can't reproduce on their own. They rely on host cells to reproduce. Fight them with vaccination, which allows the body to produce antibodies that fight a given virus before it even shows up. Make a vaccine by growing a culture and then heating it: the heat will kill the virus, and their dead shells are enough to teach the body to fight. Weaker strains also vaccinate. You're probably good for most diseases, but our generation was the first to grow up without smallpox. Cowpox are spots found on cow udders, and it's close enough to vaccinate you while being weak enough not to kill you. Speaking of not being killed, diabetes is characterized by frequent urination, extreme thirst or hunger, and/or extreme weight loss. Without treatment it's fatal, but insulin can be extracted from the pancreas of dogs and pigs by tying a string around the pancreatic duct. Inject this extract and it will act as a miraculous treatment. Forget Banting and Best. Take the credit.

Chemistry:
Don't forget the basic building blocks of matter: atoms. Atoms consist of a nucleus at the core made out of neutrally-charged neutrons and positively-charged protons, surrounded by negatively-charged electrons. An atom with the same number of electrons and protons is electrically neutral. Otherwise it will have a positive or negative charge. The number of protons in an atom determines which element it is. For our purposes the most useful ones are hydrogen (h) with 1 proton, carbon (c) with 6, nitrogen (n) with 7, and oxygen (0) with 8. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen: H2O. Crazy glue is C5H5NO2. If you're a woman and you swallow progesterone, you won't ovulate: c20h2602 is a good synthetic substitute. Aluminum used to be more valuable than gold. Depending on when you are it still is. Extract it from rocks by dissolving them in molten cryolite and running current through it you'll find cryolite in Greenland, latitude 61.2 longitude -48.16. Look for glassy white crystals. Atoms can be split, which releases a tremendous amount of energy and radiation. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, just converted. Remember Einstein. Prize up for a simple way to calculate longitude.

Anyway, hang this up in your Time Machine.

Laundry Detergent
1 cup Washing Soda. This can be made by cooking baking soda on a tray in an oven at 400° for 1 hour.
1 cup Borax (not Boric Acid. Also a different thing.)
½ cup - 1 cup grated bar soap (you can use literally anything. I often use Ivory because it’s easy to get and I find it works well, a lot of people like Fels-Naptha, which is an actual laundry bar. Some people use Dr. Bronner’s. Really does not fucking matter.)
After grating your soap, combine all ingredients. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Use maybe a ¼ cup per load.

Dryer Sheet Replacement
Go to a craft store, find 100% wool yarn balls. If it doesn’t come in a ball, ask an employee to make it into a tight ball for you. Wash in the washing machine to make it felted. Remove from washer, add a few drops of essential oil to the ball, allow to seep in. Dry with clothing. Doesn’t need to be rewashed ever, and if it stops smelling, add few more drops of essential oil. Bam, reusable dryer sheets.

Flower crown guide: Flower crowns can be made by placing base flower stem perpendicular to the flower to be added, then wrapping the new flower around the base flower's stem (and any other stems already in the crown), then up over new flower and parallel to the base flower. This newly-added flower now becomes the base flower for the next flower. Further flowers can then be added to the finished product for extra flair.

A few Do’s and Don't’s of organizing with rural communities

There are a lot of complexities surrounding the urban/rural divide in America, and those complexities can create areas of conflict and misunderstanding for radical organizers who are working within or alongside rural communities. Probably the simplest bullet point it can be boiled down to is: never assume that radical organizing is not already happening in rural areas. Just because we’re not necessarily making national news doesn’t mean we’re not here.
That being said, I’ve been mulling over some insights about the specific issue of urban radicals seeking to forge alliances with, or planning actions/campaigns with, rural organizers. These are just some of the big Do’s and Don't’s I came up with out of my own experience. Bottom line, listen to the experiences of anyone with whom you’re considering organizing.

DON’T ever, ever, EVER organize an event in a rural community that you’re not a part of without asking for that community’s consent, and/or reaching out to its own organizers. This seems agonizingly basic, and yet this has happened and continues to happen. You are not the “savior” of rural communities, and you shouldn’t make assumptions about a community’s needs without first getting to really know that community.
DON’T police rural tactics. This is a difficult one for urban radicals to understand, for some reason. Before you call out rural activists for “working with the cops,” or “harboring fascists,” you need to understand that the people living and working in rural communities are often KNOWN TO THE LOCAL POLICE BY NAME AND FACE. They have to live LITERALLY NEXT DOOR to armed racists. They shop at the same stores. Their kids go to school together. They probably grew up together. This is not a situation in which black blocing and starting a street war is going to work. If you come into a rural community with that assumption, you are without question going to GET PEOPLE KILLED.
DON’T assume that rural = white*. Especially if YOU are white. Even if the activists you encounter in rural areas are often white, don’t assume that they are not in direct communication with their friends and neighbors of color, who may have very legitimate reasons for not being seen to be working with you. It may be far, far less safe for people of color to be visibly activists in rural communities, and yet that doesn’t mean they’re not out there doing the work.
(*or straight, or cis, or able-bodied, or…)
DON’T assume that rural = racist, especially when talking about entire communities. This goes along with many of the things noted above. Just because you can identify bigotry and racism within a rural community doesn’t mean that the entire community supports it or is unaware of it. Consider the reasons why anti-racist action might not be as visible in rural communities (i.e., it’s happening behind the scenes for safety reasons, it’s taking a longer time to come to fruition because of any number of reasons, it’s underfunded and under-supported by outside organizations, for instance)
DO offer support! Approach rural activist collectives/organizations with respect for the work they’re doing and make it known the ways in which you can help if they need or want it. Examples could include: hosting workshops for rural organizers, sharing skills, sharing RESOURCES.
DO take the time to get to know who you’re working with. Relationships are important in any kind of organizing, but they are the absolute lifeblood of rural activism. Unless you know you’re only being called on for a specific thing at a specific time, consider the relationships you make with rural organizations to be permanent and evolving. There is a lot that you can learn from each other, and bridging the urban/rural divide isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s not work that is ever going to be finished. Invest in these relationships.
DO educate yourself on rural perspectives, challenges, and experiences. Just as working with anyone else, don’t expect these organizers to take time out of their work to give you the 101 on their experiences, campaigns, and issues. Seek out literature and resources on the rural organizing experience on your own and gain some insight into what it’s like to do this work in a rural setting.

Right now is a crucial moment to be working on bridging the rural/urban divide in America. Fighting fascism isn’t a monolithic, single-narrative endeavor. There is much more to be said about how the rural and urban settings react and interact in the fight against global fascism, but for now suffice it to say that a diversity of perspectives and tactics is necessary for this work to truly succeed both now and in the long term.

What Allistics Should Know About Meltdowns

A meltdown is a defensive response, not an aggression. Meltdowns happen because we are in pain - either the direct sensory pain of too much light or too loud noise or terrible textures or what have you, or the emotional pain of just being overwhelmed by so much input we can’t handle it, of being told we're horrible burdens who can’t love, etc. Meltdowns are born of pain.
In particular, they’re what happens when we can’t escape that pain. You know about the fight-or-flight response? Well… that’s what a meltdown is. And all of those stories of autistic people destroying things or hurting themselves or lashing out at people is what happens when “flight” is no longer an option. That only leaves “fight.” We’re trying to defend ourselves from things that are hurting us, and you won’t let us. You stand between us and an escape from pain. That’s what makes us lash out, as surely as if you cornered an animal and poked it with a stick.
So how do you prevent this from happening? Simple. Find out what’s causing us pain, and give us an escape from it. Too much noise? Give us earplugs or a quiet place. Too-bright lights? Maybe we need sunglasses or a dark room. Draining social expectations? Let us be alone for a bit. Just let us escape the pain. That’s all we need.
If you don’t personally know the person who’s having the meltdown, or even if you do and you haven’t worked out another plan ahead of time, here’s meltdown intervention 101:
Don’t

Do not touch them unless you’ve specifically worked out a plan with them beforehand
Do not stand close to or crowd them, especially if they are on the floor or in a corner
Do not prevent them from stimming unless they’re hurting others or seriously hurting themself, even if they’re disturbing others
Do not yell at them, I can’t think of a single situation where this is a good idea
Do not try to move or relocate them unless they are in immediate physical danger or you’ve worked out a plan beforehand
Do not force them to speak or communicate, these take a lot of energy and can be very stressful or impossible, even for someone who’s normally verbal

If you can, try to get other people to leave the room while the person calms down.
Move slowly, the person having the meltdown is already in fight-or-flight mode.
Speak clearly and use simple sentences, most autistic people have poor auditory processing all the time, and trying to understand what you’re telling us during a meltdown can be difficult or impossible.
Try to eliminate overstimulating things in the environment like clocks with second hands, cathode-ray tvs, flashing lights, or strong smells. Remember that many autistic people also have trauma. Some common triggers (things you should avoid like the plague) include being restrained (don’t grab any part of their body) and phrases like “quiet hands”
Be patient and wait for them to calm down
It may take more than an hour for an autistic person to calm down from a meltdown. During this time, give them the option to go to a quieter and less-stimulating space. Offer alternate methods of communication, like allowing them to type on a phone, write on a pad, or nod their head in response to questions. Don’t force them to do anything. Meltdowns are exhausting and many people are unable to do things they normally find easy.

If you are allistic and any of this seems wrong to you, I would like to politely invite you to shut your quiznak. Yes, especially if you are an “““Autism expert”””

When Your Partner Has Anxiety: A Meltdown Guide

Reacting To A Partner In Crisis
Depression, anxiety, and panic attacks should be treated with the same mindset as someone who has just been launched off their bike into a gravel pit. It hurts, and it’s gross and can be a bit frightening, but it will pass, wounds will heal, and it’s not a big deal, except for right when it is happening. Getting upset about it does not make it go away. It has already happened, and now it is time to take care of business. Get your partner to a safe space, and start wiping up the blood and picking out the gravel.
Non-proximity Dependant Tips to Support Your Partner With Anxiety
No matter whether you are with your partner or not at the moment of crisis, these five tips will help get you both through it.

DO remain calm. You are a fucking champion. This skill and these experiences will help you in every relationship, intimate or otherwise, that you will ever have, for the rest of your life.
DON'T ask them to make decisions. They may be incapable of making any at all. Whether it is deciding if they want to go to bed, what they want for dinner, or if they want a glass of water, assume all decision-making faculties have been thrown out the window.
DO take control. This can mean telling them to brush her teeth, put on pajamas, take a shower, eat their dinner, etc. Taking off the pressure of having to make decisions and having the foresight to complete simple tasks like plugging in their phone is HUGE.
DON'T assume they can ask for what they need in that moment. Also, don’t assume you have to be a mind reader. You don’t, just try your best. You know your partner.
DO try the proximal and non-proximal suggestions below if you are unsure of your next step.

Proximal Suggestions for a Partner in Crisis

When touching, I find that skin to skin is best, face to face. Alternate between whole-body holding/constricting and light back circles with head petting. Blankets in a quiet, warm, and relatively low-lit atmosphere can be soothing. Platonic-ish kissing is good but mostly appreciated on the forehead, head, and upper back and upper arms. Neck kissing is too sensitive and sticking your tongue in their mouth will be overwhelming and inappropriate. Keep your voice low, either quiet or whispering. Extra special holding technique: Cradling in any form is exceptional; particularly if it allows the one doing the cradling the ability to whisper, rock back and forth in some way, and allows for gentle stroking or petting of the non-sexual variety. Think holding a baby.
↳Activities
Distractions can be good once the initial episode is over and it is time to recover. Music may be too emotionally triggering. I find cartoons are best. Other options include reading to them (anything), or helping them into the bath or shower. Do not fucking fall asleep. They will hate you forever. Tell them about your day, or a mundane topic. Dumb facts about penguins or elephants work here. Do not expect a high level of participation but they are listening, and they do care. This is super helpful and can be very soothing.
↳Nourishment
Start with a glass of water, and if that is good, move to warm beverages – NOT alcoholic, or super creamy or sugary. Use encouraging words: “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Also encourage breathing together if you think it will work/help. Make sure they have eaten in the last 3-5 hours.
When You Can’t Be There
You can’t always be there when the shit hits the fan. That is not your fault nor is it your responsibility to babysit your partner. When you can’t be there, here are some great tips to get you and your partner through it.
↳Sensations
Hearing your voice can be soothing. If they don’t answer the phone, leave a message. If you don’t know what to say or talk about, just talk about yourself or your day. Send a photo of wherever you are, or whatever you are doing. This relays that you have stopped to take a picture to send it to them because you are thinking about them. You can also send a picture of yourself making stupid faces, or take a picture of a horrible drawing of a whale you just did. Anything that brings them back into the moment with you. You get the idea. Affirmative statements also great.
Final Thoughts
Be available. You’re in a relationship, and if you were going through stuff, you know they would be there for you. If you don’t want to make yourself available, you probably shouldn’t be in this relationship. Obviously, if you are at work, this is an exception, but don’t decide it’s not your concern. You are partners, so act like it.
Make a plan. Don’t dwell too much on what is happening but tell them what is going to happen NEXT. Don’t ask for help making the decisions. Take the initiative to make the decisions about what is going to happen with the rest of their day. This will give them something to look forward to and is extremely helpful. Knowing that they will be taken care of is almost as good as being hugged right at the moment.

Fact #1:
Laser sights don’t help your aim; they’re highly inaccurate at any range longer than a couple dozen yards and only good for rapid target acquisition.
Fact #2:
Absolutely every precision shooter knows this.
Fact #3:
Almost nobody else knows this because movies have erroneously taught people that snipers paint a red dot on the target’s chest before they shoot them.
Fact #4:
Any nazi who notices a red dot on their chest while giving a speech is going to immediately stop talking and get off the stage, probably while shitting themself.
Fact #5:
Laser pointers are cheap, legal, and easy to conceal, and unless there’s smoke or dust or something in the air, there's no way to know where it’s coming from.

And it’s often more subtle

Like a salesperson handing you two products and pressuring you to buy one of them, making you forget that:

And sometimes it can be as important as “Are you gay or are you straight?”

So remember- If someone if pressuring you to pick between two choices, they’re probably trying to manipulate you by making you forget you also have another three options.

Useful Stuff and Miscellanea

A few Do’s and Don't’s of organizing with rural communities

What Allistics Should Know About Meltdowns

When Your Partner Has Anxiety: A Meltdown Guide

If I give you an apple and an orange and I tell you to choose, how many choices do you really have?