Writer, artist, and former undergrad developmental biology researcher. Somewhere in the process of getting into or being in grad school. Purveyor of the canonical Bad Post about Axolotl, which was based on standard lab technique. As your house is not a lab, please don't actually follow its advice.
You should take some time to read @3liza's post documenting the Phantom Report Bug (which she deserves praise for doing, thank you eliza) and see how fucking broken Tumblr's report tool is.
I also want to reiterate something she is once again correct about: no one files bug reports. I have first hand experience working at Tumblr and I remember having to tell web devs on Staff "i saw a post about someone talking about a bug" and they were unaware because no one followed through to file a bug. I have fixed bugs that I saw people posting about that were in my domain (I'm a mobile dev) but were not in the system.
No this is not an endorsement of "complain about it enough and eventually someone will see it", this is an endorsement of "file a bug report directly to computer companies and people will most likely read it and probably fix it". I mean it this is not a Tumblr-only thing. I've seen this at every company I've worked for. Just fucking file a bug report please I beg you, software gets complicated and the devs are just unaware that there's a bug until you bring it to your attention. And they want to fix the bug! I promise!
WHAT AM I ALWAYS SAYING TO YOU PEOPLE. COMPLAINING GETS THE GOODS. YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO GET MAD UNTIL YOUVE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE PROBLEM TO SOMEONE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO FIX IT
Looking for accurate, truly comprehensive, queer and trans-led sex ed? Start with Scarleteen’s seven must-reads for the first week of Pride.
Scarleteen has been providing accurate, inclusive, joyful, sensitive, trans and queer-led sex, health, and relationships education since 1998. Here, we celebrate Pride 365 days a year, with our thousands of articles written by and for queer and trans folks, rooted in the diversity, joy, and real life experiences of queer and trans communities. Celebrating Pride year-round means not treating queer and trans experiences as a sidebar or a “special topic.” They’re woven into everything we offer, from anatomy and safer sex deep dives to dating advice and content on consent, dysphoria, communication, and mental health. “Queer sex ed for all” isn’t just our tagline, it’s our whole approach.
If you’ve ever wished sex ed talked about things like, “Do asexual people have sex?”, “Could I be intersex?”, “How do I subvert or opt out of crummy gender roles?”, “What’s gender all about?”, "How do I know if I'm queer?" or “Is what I’m feeling something someone else has experienced?” these articles and series are a solid place to start:
Genderpalooza! A Sex & Gender Primer
The Rainbow Connection: Orientation for Everyone
Axis of Autism: Being Autistic, Lesbian and Genderfluid
Unveiling Amatonormativity: Notes From the Books and the Field
Could I Be Intersex?
Just the Basics, Ace: An Asexuality Primer
Hi, Bi Guy (Series)
The seven must-reads are a good on-ramp, and then you can go down whatever rabbit hole you’d like on our website <3 Save this for later, share it with a friend, and tell us, what topic do you wish you had found sooner?
Most Beloved (non-canon) Queer Ship Tournament - Round 3
Which queer ship do you love more?
Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva / Diana of Themyscira (DC)*
Tony Stark x Steve Rogers (MCU)
how dare you make me choose
Voting ended onJun 2
Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate or aggressive language (even if jokingly) will get you blocked instantly!
Re: the last ask, NIH has done some studies on schizophrenia with mouse models (& rats & primates) and some psychiatric medication go through early clinical trials on them. Obviously we can't ask animals themselves what they're experiencing, animal models aren't perfect, psychosis is a symptom/not equivalent to schizophrenia. But observable behavior shows atypical ways animal models react to stimuli, socialize, recognize patterns, process memories, etc. compared to control animals. That seems to imply they experience some level of altered reality, whatever that might look like to a mouse, and mirrors symptoms in humans experiencing untreated schizophrenia.
Yeah, there's a little research out there but it faces a lot of issues, the first of which is communication, but also the understanding that anything you study in one animal doesn't necessarily hold true in any others, even very similar ones. It's why there was a whole Twitter account pointing out that they found X, IN MICE, but that they haven't found it in humans. They may have found some evidence IN MICE of some psychological conditions or at least some symptoms, but does that translate to cats? To birds? To horses? To lizards? To snails? To crabs? To sharks? Their brains all work differently, some of them don't even have what we would call brains. Which is what makes it hard to generalize if "animals" experience something vs "does this species experience X?"
So, it's going to be very very difficult to get a satisfactory answer to "do animals experience psychosis" because "animals" is so broad.
We can also infer that when you give an animal a drug that can cause psychosis in humans and the result is clear abnormal behavior, that animal is experiencing psychotic symptoms - but! That doesn't actually tell us anything about whether that species has syndromes that cause psychosis, because that depends on whether the chemical state the drug induces is even POSSIBLE under other circumstances!
It's so GREEN and SUNNY that my phone camera has trouble handling the saturation!
In other news, I took the knee on a test walk (how could I not? Just LOOK at how pretty the weather is!), and it's holding up pretty well! Went to my regular mall coffee shop, as it turns out I did in fact have enough points for a free ice latte. Extra treat! Also luckily there's this short cut that also happens to be a super pretty scenery path through a forest, which was extra convenient. I'll probably take a bus home to not push my luck with the knee, but I just felt like celebrating just a tiny bit.
Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.
i must stress that he's never seen the original comic. My mother simply showed him the shorthand symbol and he memorized it. As far as he is aware this is just a fucking hieroglyph that deals instant psychic damage to everyone under the age of 30
I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.
i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.
so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:
pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)
extras in comedy sketch shows
esports players
real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks
70s baseball players
athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type
ska, jazz, and blues musicians
firefighters
improv troupes
for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date
state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)
people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)
and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design
Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.
Also, consider the Classic option: sit at a table in a cafe and sketch people while you nurse a beverage, a piece of advice as old as the concept of cafes! (Benches at the local mall etc. also work well.)
