Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this
okay but what about a FEMALE podcast protagonist who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars. could you be normal about her or would the misogyny prevail
The one I tagged is The Silt Verses, starring Sister Carpenter who is one of my favorite protagonists in anything EVER. The Silt Verses is fantasy-horror tragedy set in a world where gods are very present, very active, and very hungry. Human sacrifice is what powers this world and all of society is structured around this fact. In this world of gods and laws and sacrifices and late-stage capitalism, Carpenter is a worshipper of an illegal river god, who she has done so many terrible things in the name of, and who she is losing her faith in. Carpenter is a stubborn survivor, grouchy and standoffish and carrying the weight of so much doubt and pride and regret and she CANNOT catch a break—she’s not the whimpering type but everything else fits her to a T and I love her.
Another one that absolutely fits the bill is The Pasithea Powder, a sci-fi space opera about the aftermath of a devastating space war. Captain Sophie Green is now a war hero, and Dr. Jane Gonzalez is now a war criminal, and they used to be best friends, and they are… not anymore. The story starts with Sophie on a “friendship tour” after her planet lost the war and has to make nice (she is very bad at making nice) and Jane in prison (for the Unethical Science she was doing, the horror when it was revealed which led to her planet losing the war). They are also both wrecked and haunted by the death in the war of Sophie’s boyfriend and Jane’s best friend, who is haunting the narrative more than just about anyone ever. Jane and Sophie are both A MESS and unfortunately they are the only ones who seem to notice or care that Jane’s unethical science is still being used and there is another war brewing on the horizon. Politics, aliens, slowburn F/F with the most disaster bisexuals you have ever seen. REALLY good.
Talking about women who whimper and fuck up and go to prison and try so so so hard and are hurt and sad and angry and everything: NICA STAMATIS HOW COULD I FORGET MY GIRL NICA from Greater Boston. Greater Boston doesn’t really have a protagonist—it is joyously and deliberately a great big ensemble cast—but the Stamatis siblings Leon, Nica, and Dimitri are where it all started. It’s a magical realism/slipstream story, a mosaic of people interacting in this strange and alternate Boston, centering around the political campaign for the Red Line subway to secede and become its own underground train city. I love every character, even the awful ones, but if you want a woman who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death (more metaphorical than literal, but still) and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars (again metaphorical, but oh boy her metaphorical scars) That’s Nica.
Drifting slightly farther from the prompt but women who are complete and total emotional disasters who have decided to bottle that all up until they someday die in space and then it won’t be their problem anymore, I also sing the praises of Nova NoStar from InCo. Nova is an information courier, an InCo, an interstellar messenger/spy-for-hire selling secrets between planets, who lives alone on her spaceship with only her therapy android for company and she is NOT doing her therapy homework Even Slightly. She’s fine. She’s Fine. (She’s not fine.) But when she rescues a boy from getting spaced—a boy who claims to be the prince of a planet that shouldn’t exist—Nova realizes she’s stumbled on the secret of a lifetime. And maybe she might start to make some real friends along the way. She also gets a nasty bloody abdominal gunshot wound along the way and has to let herself get taken care of by her not-yet-exactly-a-friend-but-getting there. if you’re looking for that. Which on this post you probably are.
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.
this is Hannah Fry, Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.
I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding
Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.
I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.
It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.
You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.
It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.
Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.
I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric
I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.
So my bone needle actually came this evening (yay!) and I’ve started trying this for real. It clicks in my brain way easier than crochet does. I’ve gotta work up the muscle memory but I think I can do this.
The downside as a beginner is that undoing mistakes is more time consuming than with knitting or crochet. You’ve gotta like sew your mistakes out backwards. Disadvantages of making a really sturdy fabric I guess.
I like the feel of this bone needle though and don’t think I’ll be trying the wooden or metal ones.
Also I think I’m gonna have to get good at doing Russian joining if I decide to get good at nalbinding because I don’t have wool yarn and the ends won’t felt together if it’s not at least 50% wool. A small price to pay for using big bone needle though.
Recipes from Portland's famous but long-closed Rheinlander restaurant. This cookbook was produced in a limited window before Chef Mager's death. All of these fucking slap.
The lentil soup post is yeah beyond amazing. I know lentil soup doesn't seem like it could be that good. You simply don't Know how beloved the rheinlander lentil soup was. This was a famous soup here.
Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!
Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨
A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming,
structured filtering, and curated reference images.
So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.
Pro GenAI websites/Programs:
Facebook
Instagram
X/Twitter (Remember, Grok gives people cancer)
Threads
Pro Writing Aid
Grammarly
Duolingo
Google Docs
Microsoft Word/all Microsoft products Takes from and will feed their machine.
Youtube (taking advantage of people who are hearing impaired. ==;;)
Adobe Products. All of them. If you HAVE to use them (Some businesses require it), save offline because there is a film of at least some privacy protections there, so if you have to sue, you can say it violates US privacy law. Remember, contracts do not circumvent US law.
Corel won't feed the machines, but still uses AI stolen from other artists. Which sucks since Corel Draw is the second best overall for vector programs. (Plus I love Painter, but I bought the offline version to avoid AI). (Canadian company)
Canva Takes and feeds their machine.
Deviant Art Not only supports AI, but put a tool in and said they are going to steal your work if you like it or not for their machine.
Sketchup went Pro-GenAI. The thing is that you can do the same thing in Blender these days with precise measurements.
Autodesk has stated they are Pro-Gen AI here. It is not clear if they will use your models to feed their machine. But be on guard. They make Maya and 3Dmax. You can replace it with Blender.
Neutral ground:
Tumblr (there is a way to opt out [Link] and they don't have an active AI machine.) https://www.tumblr.com/dookins/743519550598987776/heres-how-to-disable-third-parties-like-ai
Etsy allows GenAI, but still has some (minor) restrictions. I'd still be cautious. (Also be cautious of drop shippers). Complaints about too much AI and AI images+patterns made by Ai still exist on the website. They lean slightly more pro-AI, but still won't let it run completely amok, say like Facebook. They won't feed your work into a machine, but also don't ban it through robots.txt.
Bluesky They don't use an AI algorithm except for in the "Discover" section of their website, but while they are anti-GenAI strongly, they don't seem to block the Gen AI bots from entry, so you'd still have to use Nightshade or Glaze (links below). There is no opt-out because they don't need an opt out. (Leaning towards strong position on AI, but I wish they would block GenAI bots).
Searxng- If you super want to screw over Google, in general, and have some tech savvy, you can set up your own search engine through searxng. It's easier on Windows and Linux than it is on a Mac. (Mac you need Docker), but if you're determined on privacy, Searxng adds a layer of privacy. Some of it sometimes uses bits of AI, but most of it doesn't and you can fuss with the settings so it doesn't spit out AI results. At sheer minimum Google will stop spitting out weird videos on Youtube at you because in your private browsing, you searched for the origin of ball bearings while not logged in for a book and Google likes to break privacy laws.
Strong positions against AI:
Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.
LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)
Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.
yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.
Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.
Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.
Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.
Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.
Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.
Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.
Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.
Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)
Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.
Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.
Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)
Discover a world of creativity and craftsmanship through Handmade, an innovative platform connecting passionate artisans with discerning buy
Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.
But you need a pro website...
Look up robots.txt and AI bots: https://www.cyberciti.biz/web-developer/block-openai-bard-bing-ai-crawler-bots-using-robots-txt-file/
Use cloudflare:
Use Nightshade:
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
which will poison the algorithm
Use Glaze:
Take Away:
The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.
Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scrapi
And why not help that along?
I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.
Oh hey, do you know what time it is? It is highly specific resource time!
Today we have the Royal School of Needlework Stitch Bank! There are HUNDREDS of stitch types in the RSN Stitch Bank.
And more added regularly, let’s look at a recent addition
I picked the first one in the 25 recently added Elizabethan stitches, the Elizabethan French Stitch
The stitch bank provides written and photo tutorials as well as a video option to learn to do it yourself. There are examples of the stitch in use, resources, references, everything but a needle and thread!
I looked at some of the tutorials last night and holy shit I'm so impressed! They're SO thorough!
Not only do they have written and video instructions, but there are photo and illustration options for each image AND a "flip view" button so that left handed people can see all the images in reverse!
I am going to jump in and add, as you said they are very detailed in their directions, something that takes a lot of time and money.
If anyone who has enjoyed this resource has the means, I encourage you to adopt or sponsor a stitch to help keep this free to access. I know not everyone has the means to (fair, been there) but if you can, check out their sponsor options
RSN Stitch Bank Progress
And one other resource I have shared before, The Lady's Magazine. Embroidery patterns from 1770-1819. In case anyone wants some historic ideas for using all these new embroidery stitches
There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.
For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.
Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.
They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.
Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.
If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.
If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).
There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!
This is a big reason that I have always loved the Brother Cadfael novels, set in the mid 1100s. Written by Ellis Peters, each book has such a vivid sense of the place and the time period. Many different settings around Shrewsbury are described, along with the people and their various jobs.
I love that kind of world building and would add that many resources were tightly regulated that we don't consider nowadays. Examples are the right to herd your pigs in an oak forest belonging to a specific monastery (saw an example where an altar piece had a carved pig to make sure the claim was known and advertised) or down to which farmers had the right to tree leaves in the fall (shortage of other animal bedding in certain Swiss valleys). The idea of a wilderness in a medieval setting is not what we think.
Forever recommending A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry as an introductory resource for this! The author is a historian of the ancient mediterranean and he has a lengthy two-part blog post on "lonely cities": how fictional cities tend to look in pseudomedieval fantasy versus how real cities actually worked, specifically how they reshaped the land use for many miles around. Part I, part II, or available read aloud on YouTube here.
Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."
This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find
Some people get existential dread from this
Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating
@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally
Source (non Aboriginal)
And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history
Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)
This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.
My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.
The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.
Their oral history also contains stories about hunting prehistoric megafauna too. Native Australians are the oldest existing culture on earth, which is even more amazing considering how hard the british tried to wipe it out.
I actually looked up the story of The Seven Sisters / Pleiades on Wikipedia, the other day, 'cause I woke up from a dream that mentioned how ancient that story was. And I wanted to check how much of that was invented in-dream, and how much I was remembering something I learned while I was awake.
According to that article, some astronomers think that story is not ten thousand years old; they believe it to be a Hundred Thousand years old.
okay this crossed my dash many times and i love love love where it went off to because aboriginal oral storytelling is genuinely one of the coolest things on earth!!!!!! but the original post is bugging me like man what do you mean "This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find"
prehistoric cultures are. right there. just staying in the West Asian area, the Natufian culture, the Kebara culture, the Pre-Pottery cultures of Göbekli Tepe, Taş Tepelar and Çatal Höyük!! just google it, i promise it will blow your mind! the elaborate structures that requiered multiple communities to build and rebuild over generations to serve as places of being together, the wall paintings and carvings of people and animals, of stories in the stone. just because they didn't have written history, doesn't mean they didn't have oral history.
we know the sumerian myths because they wrote them down and then kept copying and copying them, but it's most likely that at the point when they were recorded, these were not original compositions. they were existing stories, passed down orally from before the time of writing. just to take one example: like many cultures, the sumerians and akkadians knew of the pleiades too. they were called sibitti, a group of gods, and though an aetiological myth of them has't been found yet, we know they were represented in art by seven stars.
and just to reiterate. prehistoric people are right there and they are fascinating and just because they didn't have writing, it doesn't mean we don't know about them. that we have yet to find them. there is so much to learn from the way they built their houses and sharpened their tools and gathered resources and harvested food and buried their dead and built community.
I designed the outfit that Gwen wears to prom in Across the Spiderverse!
For her outfit I was asked to bring in some 90s/grunge influence- the idea was that Gwen wouldn't buy a dress off the rack for prom, she would probably throw together her own outfit and customize it herself. Numbers 4 and 6 are closest to the version that ended up in the movie!
