I’ve got another quick and easy tarot trick for y’all! The featured card for this one is The Hermit because I always associate it with taking time to care for yourself. 1. Find The Hermit in your deck. 2. The card below is what’s stressing or draining you. 3. The card above is something you can do for yourself.
I just realised that our parents LITERALLY NEVER showed the slightest bit of interest in any of our hobbies or interests except when we picked up their hobbies or it was for school. Everything else was always, automatically annoying, bothersome and a waste of time and silly.
10 years later we still feel convinced that what we like will only ever be annoying and bothersome to others.
What’s fucked me up is that I’ve only recently realized that I actually isolate myself by hiding my hobbies and interests from pretty much everyone I know in real life in order to avoid potential ridicule.
Like, oh shit, that pattern of behavior…where I only share my interests with folks online…that comes right from feeling like there was no one else I could share my interests with back when I was a teenager.
Reading this helped me realize that I did the same thing for the longest time. Tbh I still do it. I’m still afraid to talk too much about the stuff I’m interested in to people that I love and trust. This is one of the hallmarks of childhood emotional neglect that can impact your relationships for decades if you’re unaware of this behavior and where it comes from.
It’s good for threads like these to exist so that it can assure other people with similar family household atmospheres that this is not normal. That they’re allowed to feel hurt over their harmless hobbies being harshly invalidated.
A reminder to open up
I have a couple stories about this. For reference, my favorite hobbies are geology(minerology and gemology specifically), jewelry making, and chainmail making.
I went into a geology store with my family and walked around, showing them random rocks and telling them what they were and some random facts. Eventually the woman behind the counter came up to me and she tells me I know a lot about rocks and gems and asks where I learned all of it. I completely froze up and I couldn’t answer at first. I’ve never had anyone ask that and it was awkward and embarrassing to have someone actually interested in my hobby. But eventually I tell her I’m entirely self taught and learned from books. She told me it was impressive. The professional geologist running the store told me it was impressive. I have to keep reminding myself that because my interests get put down all the time and I get told to “find a real hobby”.
More recently, I went to a renaissance fair in my area. I met a man and his apprentice who make chainmail. While I was browsing he started talking to me and I told him I awkwardly tell him I make small chainmail stuff but have only worked with smaller gauge. When I said I wanted to work with bigger gauge wire, he came around the counter and showed me his tools and how to make a chainmail ball and even told me the best way to find cheap wire. I also met many people who made wire jewelry and they were impressed with the crown I made from wire. I still feel bad for talking to them about my hobbies! I still feel like I wasted their time and annoyed them with how much I talked about it!
It’s not normal. My partner had something similar happen to them too. I only recently found out they like blacksmithing and built themself a makeshift smithing pit in their backyard. They seemed really awkward when we met the blacksmiths at the renaissance fair, but they were paying close attention to me asking questions about the tools for my brother. After I mentioned I would like to try it too, they started telling me about what they used to make the pit in their backyard. You shouldn’t be afraid to share your hobbies or interests.
Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D
If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!
OMFG EVERYONE PLEASE DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH IT RIGHT NOW O_O
HOLY HELL
Not only is this fascinating, there are a lot of images from art history here. It just goes to show that what you can learn from the past isn’t limited to facts you can know, but things you can do.
Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn’t a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.
In 2012, Lars Andersen released his video, “Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery”, where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.
Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).
The time benchmark he was trying to achieve, according to the video, was the expectation of the speed at which “Saracen” archers were expected to shoot. In fact, most of the source material as far as I can see isn’t European.
A lot of the techniques described are also used in Mongolian Archery, which requires being able to shoot from horseback, and is traditionally practiced by men and women. You can see a video here.
Holy shit I want that in my book but who wouldn’t call it unrealistic???
I like the implication that the Chinese have mastered every human language and are only confounded by the speech of the undead.
The company I work for uses a slightly obscure program called GhostScript to produce certain reports, so now I’m picturing it as the Chinese saying ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak weird old computer program.”
Don’t let the news get you down. Let these earrings, inspired by French revolution era earrings, galvanize you for another day and another fight, all while making it clear where you stand.
These are also pretty great for Halloween.
Each pair is individually made with a LAZOR in Walnut plywood, with surgical steel earwires, dark red Swarovski crystal drops, and our always fine attention to detail.
Variously Backup 