Here are the stores I know of so far where stim toys and stim jewelry are made and/or sold by autistic people. I invite people to add any others they may know of and I’ll update the list.
Stimtastic – link Details: Sells a wide variety of stimmy things. Donates 10% of profits to autistic orgs or to autistic individuals. They have a program for free or subsidized weighted blankets for autistic people who cannot otherwise afford them: link.
Ruthdoodle – link Details: Sells chewable jewelry and monthly sensory boxes (and usually has one giveaway on tumblr too!). Also sells autistic pride jewelry and buttons.
(Bonus: Here are a few ADHDer-owned stores for fidget toys Fidgetopia – link Fidgetland – link Details: Donates some of profits to an org supporting autistic/adhd-er kids. I don’t know how good this org is though.)
this is what your african black soap should look like, not a literal black bar of soap
Yep
Oh really?? Did not know
If it’s black it means they dyed it…
Where to get this from?
I buy mine online from Coastal Scents blacktinabelcher . They have a 25% off all their natural products going on now.
Had no idea. Good look on that name drop doe.
Yeah this is true. When my family goes to Ghana this is exactly what it looks like and it smells like cake. This looks more like the black soap I’m familiar with.
Don’t let the white people play y’all!
If you make it at home it doesn’t come out black either
I get mine from here. They sell 3 bars for $4, plus they’re shaped like hearts. Great hair blog too for any naturalistas
You can also buy it on Amazon for around $5-$7 just type in “authentic African black soap” I usually get the ones imported from Ghana to ensure its authenticity.
I’ve seen several rec lists for books with LGBTQ+ content going around on tumblr, but what about indie games? So here’s a list of LGBT-friendly games that I find cool. I’ll update it as I find and play new ones! The genre classification is tentative as some don’t perfectly fit one genre or another.
Some of these are free but their developers accept donations. Do feel free to reblog or to message me with your favourite queer indie games, I’ll add them to the list.
Alright, time to talk about my belt (the green one), with step by step pictures of how I made it! Hurray. I decided that I need a beautiful belt to go with my 14th-century kit, which I’ll be taking to Winterfest, Abbey Festival, Pennsic, Bicolline and beyond over the next few months.
The rest of my garb is still in development, but it’s going to be knightly yet still feminine, made from linen, wool and silk in the colours blue, green, brown and mustard. My costume is deeply rooted in historical 14th-century references, whilst remaining a bit fantasy because it’s mostly men’s clothing with ladylike adjustments. Alas, women were rarely knights, and I’m basically never caught in a dress. Oh well.
So, the planning stages – basically, I sketched it out. A lot. The picture below is one of the better looking ones that I actually coloured. I decided early on that I was going to use hardware from Make Your Own Medieval because they’re a local company and I really appreciate what they’re doing. On top of that, my boyfriend ordered some stuff from them previously to make his Viking pouch and it was awesome, so there was a bit of initial trust there.
In my concept sketches I experimented with two sizes of belt: 15mm and 25mm. Whilst the 25mm was a little bit heavier and knightly, the 15mm looked better on my slim figure. On top of that, it ended up looking a little bit more ladylike and the aesthetic seemed to work.
An intelligent person would now cut out a paper/ fabric strip and do a measured mock up to figure out exactly how many belt fittings they need. Alas, I am an impatient person, so I kind of just took an educated guess about how many I needed. I was lucky enough to be basically spot on, with a few extras for when I inevitably screwed up the riveting process.
Okay. So I got my 3mm veg tanned leather and some green leather dye from my local leather supplier and waited for my buckles and fittings to arrive in the mail.
First, I cut the belt. I squared off the edge of the leather all nice and then cut the 15mm belt with a belt cutter. Super satisfying feeling. For seriously.
Next, I bevelled the edges. This is done with a bevelling tool that cuts away the leather to put a chamfer on the edge. In english, it puts an angle on the edge instead of just leaving it square and it adds a much more professional finish.
After this came the dye. I chose to just use a store purchased dye instead of making a dye myself. Whilst that’s something I’d like to try eventually, today wasn’t the day for that. The stuff I bought went on really really dark and I was a bit unimpressed, but it eventually lightened up. After two coats of dye I rubbed it down with a cloth to get off any excess. If you’re going to dye leather, WEAR GLOVES! Remember that it is a special product made especially to dye skin, so it’ll do a great job of giving you some colourful hands. I applied it with the supplied wool swab that came in the dye pack.
Next up I finished the edges, which, IMO, is one of the most important parts of any kind of leather working. Sealing the edges is what makes your work look professional and will help it stand the test of time. A correctly sealed edge will look at nice and glassy, instead of raw and fuzzy. Basically, you apply a bit of moisture (in this case, I dabbed a cloth into water and lightly wet the edges) before going to town on it with a burnishing tool. It’s a funky looking piece of wood that, with the help of a bit of friction, turn the hairy fibres into a smooth edge. Think of it like felting. My friend is smart has one that he attached to a drill press – we, unfortunately, do not.
Take the look at the difference, the one on the left has been roughly finished, ideally, I’d put a bit more into it. But you can see the one on the right is still raw and fuzzy.
Finally, I took some leather paint and carefully painted the edges with a slightly darker green. Looking fab.
I’m a few hours in at this point, so I took a break for dinner, stopped drinking coffee and start drinking wine. The leather was pretty upset/ dried out from being dyed/ abused, so I rubbed some dubbin in to get rid of more excess dye and sorted it up again.
Now it’s time to put the buckles on! I punched the allotted holes and hammered them in. Again, I got these beautiful pieces of hardware from Make Your Own Medieval.
After the buckles, I used math to figure out where to place all of the fittings. I had two types – some little rectangle ones which I used sparingly, and these gorgeous little flowers that I put along the whole belt.
I punched a billion holes and hammered in the little flowers. They were an absolute jerk – very finicky. Some of them ended up a little wonky but were alright for the most part. Oh well, it means my belt has character.
I let my boyfriend do a few and he put the central one in crooked. He’s supposed to be the industrial designer here?
Ahh, yes. She is a thing of beauty. However, I still felt I was missing something. I pondered on it for the rest of the evening before I decided to engrave some foxes and acorns – both on my character’s coat of arms – into the front of the belt. After that I painted them with leather paint and oulined them in gold paint so that they would stand out next to the gold flowers.
Up close it looks a bit meh, but from a slight distance its pretty swell. And that’s pretty much it! I’m super happy with how it turned out! Let me know if you have any questions – I’m by no means an expert, but I think that this belt is pretty cute.
Oh hey it’s back on my dash perfect! I was just thinking of this the other day!
OHOHOHO wow the Korean alphabet is awesome. The people who designed it were geniuses and were obviously incredibly schooled in the morphology and phonology of their language. HNNGGG
wow
여러분 모두 한국어 쓰세요 한국어 좋음
한국어, 한글은 보면 맨날쓰는거지만 볼수록,쓸수록 예뻐요..참으로 곱구나’3’♥
ㅇ어머 (감동
짱 이쁜 한국어 쓰세요 여러분
굳
신기하게 가르치는군요 보고 신기했다
FUN FACT!
IT WASN’T JUST ANY OLD DUDE WHO DECIDED, “HEY I WANT TO CREATE A KOREAN ALPHABET.”
IT WAS KING SEJONG, WHO ORDERED HIS ROYAL SCHOLARS TO CREATE THIS ALPHABET SO READING AND WRITING COULD BE ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE, EVEN THE PEASANTS. IT WAS PURPOSELY DESIGNED TO BE EASY TO LEARN.
SO SHOUT OUT TO KING SEJONG, WHO REALIZED BEFORE MANY OTHERS THE IMPORTANCE OF UNIVERSAL LITERACY.
In linguistics, a filler is a sound or word that is spoken in conversation by one participant to signal to others that he/she has paused to think but is not yet finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig, which refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown.
In Arabic, يعني yaʿni (“I mean”) and وﷲ wallāh(i) (“by God”) are common fillers.[2][3][4]
In American Sign Language, UM can be signed with open-8 held at chin, palm in, eyebrows down (similar to FAVORITE); or bilateral symmetric bent-V, palm out, repeated axial rotation of wrist (similar to QUOTE).
In Catalan, eh /ə/, doncs (“so”), llavors (“therefore”), and o sigui (“it means”) are common fillers.
In Czech, tak or takže (“so”), prostě (“simply”), jako (“like”) are used as fillers. Čili (“or”) and že (“that”, a conjunction) might also be others. A person who says jako and prostě as fillers might sound a bit simple-minded to others.[5]
In Dutch, eh, ehm, and dus are some of the more common fillers.
In Esperanto, do (“therefore”) is the most common filler.
In Filipino, ah, eh, ay, and ano are the most common fillers.
In Finnish, niinku (“like”), tota, and öö are the most common fillers.
In French, euh /ø/ is most common; other words used as fillers include quoi (“what”), bah, ben (“well”), tu vois (“you see”), and eh bien (roughly “well”, as in “Well, I’m not sure”). Outside of France, other expressions are tu sais (“you know”), t’sais’veux dire? (“you know what I mean?”), or allez une fois (“go one time”). Additional filler words include genre (“kind”), comme (“like”), and style (“style”; “kind”)
In German, a more extensive series of filler words, called modal particles, exists, which actually do give the sentence some meaning. More traditional filler words are äh /ɛː/, hm, so /zoː/, tja, and eigentlich (“actually”)
In Hebrew, eh is the most common filler. Em is also quite common.
In Hindi, matlab (“it means”) and “Mah” are fillers.
In Hungarian, common filler words include hát (well…) and asszongya (a variant of azt mondja, which means “it says here…”).
In Icelandic, a common filler is hérna (“here”). Þúst, a contraction of þú veist (“you know”), is popular among younger speakers.
In Mandarin Chinese, speakers often say 这个 zhège/zhèige (“this”) or 那个 nàge/nèige (“that”). Another common filler is 就 jìu (“just/precisely”).
In Norwegian, common fillers are øh, altså, på en måte (“in a way”), ikke sant (literally “not true?”, “no kidding”, or “exactly”), vel (“well”), and liksom (“like”). In Bergen, sant (“true”) is often used instead of ikke sant. In the Trøndelag region, skjø’ (“see?” or “understand?”) is also a common filler.
In Persian, bebin (“you see”), چیز “chiz” (“thing”), and مثلا masalan (“for instance”) are commonly-used filler words. As well as in Arabic and Urdu, يعني yaʿni (“I mean”) is also used in Persian. Also, eh is a common filler in Persian.
In Portuguese, tipo (“like”) is the most common filler.
In Romanian, deci /detʃʲ/ (“therefore”) is common, especially in school, and ă /ə/ is also very common (can be lengthened according to the pause in speech, rendered in writing as ăăă), whereas păi /pəj/ is widely used by almost anyone.
In Russian, fillers are called слова-паразиты (“vermin words”); the most common are Э-э (“eh”), это (“this”), того (“that”), ну (“well”), значит (“it means”), так (“so”), как его (“what’s it [called]”), типа (“like”), and как бы (“[just] like”).
In Serbian, znači (“means”) and ovaj (“this”) are common fillers.
In Slovak, oné (“that”), tento (“this”), proste (“simply”), or akože are used as fillers. The Hungarian izé (or izí in its Slovak pronunciation) can also be heard, especially in parts of the country with a large Hungarian population. Ta is a filler typical of Eastern Slovak and one of the most parodied features.
In Slovene, pač (“but”, although it has lost that meaning in colloquial, and it is used as a means of explanation), a ne? (“right?”), and no (“well”) are some of the fillers common in central Slovenia, including Ljubljana.
In Spanish, fillers are called muletillas. Some of the most common in American Spanish are e /e/, este (“this”), and o sea (roughly means “I mean”).[6], in Spain the previous fillers are also used, but ¿Vale? (“right?”) and ¿no? are very common too.
In Swedish, fillers are called utfyllningsord; some of the most common are öhm, ja (“yes”), ba (comes from “bara”, which means “just”), asså or alltså (“therefore”, “thus”), va (comes from “vad”, which means “what”), and liksom and typ (both similar to the English “like”).
In Urdu, yani (“meaning…”), falan falan (“this and that”; “blah blah”), umm, and aaa are also common fillers.
In Telugu, ikkada entante (“Whats here is…”) and tarwatha (“then…”) are common and there are numerous like this.
In Tamil, paatheenga-na (“if you see…”) and apparam (“then…”) are common.
In Turkish, yani (“meaning…”), şey (“thing”), “işte” (“that is”), and falan (“as such”, “so on”) are common fillers.
In Welsh, de or ynde is used as a filler (loosely the equivalent of “You know?” or “Isn’t it?”). Ym… and Y… are used similarly to the English “um…”.
Remember that this stuff is really important for fluency of speech. I’ve encountered a bad attitude among language teachers before: “we don’t teach filler words, because that’s not “normative” vocabulary, and it encourages students to sound unsure.” But that’s so, so wrong.
All people use filler words in conversation and even in formal settings. It’s a way to keep the flow of speech when the train of thought pauses; it holds the audience’s attention and actually helps maintain clarity of thought. What’s more, these words are instrumental for language learners, who need to pause more often in their speech than native speakers. Allowing them to pause without breaking into their language (saying a filler word in their language) or completely breaking the flow of their speech allows them to gain fluency faster.
My high school Japanese teacher did it right: “etto” and “anou” were in the second lesson. Teach filler words, people!! And if you’re studying a language and don’t know them, look at this list!! It has a lot!
valerian house archive 